Tweet [1]
Kevin Williamson is rightly and eloquently critical of Joe Biden’s Trumpian economic nationalism [2]. A slice:
In a sane world, the infrastructure to-do list would precede the dollar figure: If the federal government needs to do x, y, and z (and there is much that does need doing), then the federal government should bid out those projects and ask Congress for funding. We do things the opposite way: Biden is following the longstanding Washington convention of putting a few hundred billion dollars on the table and then basically asking who wants it. Rest assured that Washington will find some way to spend the money. We pass a big federal highway bill every couple of years, and the highways continue to decay. And we do big infrastructure bills from time to time, too: President Trump wants a $1 trillion election-year bill that probably is not going to pass. Barack Obama signed an $800 billion stimulus-and-infrastructure bill into law in 2009, with no evident effect on federal infrastructure. A $305 billion infrastructure bill was passed in 2015. Finding somebody to soak up the money isn’t a problem — but actually improving infrastructure in an economically efficient way is more difficult.
And here’s Eric Boehm on Biden’s intelligence-insulting “Buy American” idiocy [3].
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan wonders what happened to “Progressives'” attitude toward firing? [4] (I’m delighted that Bryan, in this essay, drew an analogy very similar to one that I drew many years ago [5].)
Also from Bryan Caplan is this lesson in identifying category errors [6].
Art Carden justifiably praises [7] the excellent new The Essential Joseph Schumpeter, written by Russell Sobel and Jason Clemens [8].
The first guy ever to commit a crime [9].
I don’t believe the risk of teaching in person is an unreasonable one. In my opinion, Georgetown University is exercising an unreasonable amount of care to protect its students, faculty and staff against the virus. As a torts professor, I teach my students that we all have a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect others against harm from our actions. Reasonable care consists of taking precautions to avoid harm whenever “there is some real likelihood of damage” that would be apparent to “a reasonably prudent mind.” An unreasonable level of care would be to expend resources on additional precautions that do little or nothing to further increase safety.
My observations of Georgetown’s preparations for the fall semester indicate that the university is taking not only all reasonable precautions, but also several unreasonable ones that will cause inconvenience without significantly improving safety—for instance, requiring professors to wear masks while teaching, even if they’re on a podium far from any student.