Tweet [1]
Steve Davies asks if we truly are entering a “post-liberal” era [2]. A slice:
On the left there are two tendencies that are increasingly in bitter conflict with each other as well as with both actual liberal ideas and the current style of politics. The first is a revival of classical socialism and even Marxism, as found in publications such as Jacobin magazine. The second is what is commonly described as the Social Justice Warrior left, a kind of politics that derives ultimately from post-modernism and combines a radically subjectivist idea of identity with a tribalistic notion of social life and a highly intolerant view of public discourse.
Richard Ebeling is correct: there will be no recovery without production [3].
Lee Edwards makes the case for capitalism [4] (although I’m less sure than he is that Trump knows enough about what socialism is to really oppose it – or what capitalism is to support it).
My Mercatus Center colleague – and GMU Econ alum Rosolino Candela – reviews Mary Morgan’s The World in a Model [5]. A slice:
Thus, markets will always be imperfect, but that is precisely why markets exist in the first place! Markets never conform to the “ideal” of perfect competition, but this is completely irrelevant, since under such state of affairs, markets are unnecessary and redundant, since all resources are already perfectly allocated to their most valued uses. Market processes exist precisely because to generate the information necessary to better coordinate the plans and purposes of individuals in a peaceful and productive manner. The entrepreneurial lure for profit and the discipline of loss is what guides such imperfect processes in a tendency towards the creation of more complete information between buyers and sellers.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Alberto Mingardi reports on Italy’s calamitous use of price controls. [6] Here’s his conclusion:
What about masks? The Italian government is preparing to make them itself, as if to ensure the economic damage will be properly spread across Italian taxpayers. Far from learning the lesson, the government has suggested it will repeat its price-fixing mistakes by setting the price of N95 masks. The results won’t be any better.