Liberals are supposed to believe that the freedom to dissent is an essential part of a functioning democracy. More points of view lead to a better grasp of complex problems. Liberals believe that the price of that freedom is the tolerance of ideas we may find self-evidently wrong, or even odious.
Some of us viscerally remember when American liberalism was defined by the American Civil Liberties Union’s courageous defense of Nazis marching in Skokie, Ill. Real liberalism says you can’t discredit an argument without recognizing its right to be heard.
Richard Morrison reviews Carlos Ball’s The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went From LGBTQ Adversary to Ally.
Holman Jenkins is rightly critical of Joe Biden’s climate “plan.” Here’s Jenkins’s opening paragraph:
A Joe Biden presidency would guarantee one thing. We might be finished with Donald Trump, but we’ll still have the problem that gave us Mr. Trump. I’ll borrow a term from an analyst of the European Union: sophisticated state failure.
James Bovard is not fooled by sham bailout stats; he sees the lockdown’s tyranny. A slice:
But the Trump team’s data is farcically inaccurate. Last month, the Small Business Administration, which administers the PPP, told the Associated Press that it was “too consumed by the urgent effort of helping small businesses through the economic downturn to provide” data on where the loans went. But the SBA has now specified how many jobs were retained for each PPP loan. While Congress slumbers, the Washington Post speedily crunched the numbers.
PPP loans – a.k.a. “Magic Beans” – are so effective that they saved more jobs than the total number of employees in at least 15 industries. Landscape architecture firms “retained 114,000 jobs — more than three times the number of people who worked in that sector in 2019,” the Post reported. The SBA also claimed that the PPP loans “preserved tens of thousands more jobs than are known to exist in other industry sectors,” including specialty food stores, cattle ranching, performing arts companies, corn and wheat farming, and fishing.
Logan Kolas identifies five problems with Joe Biden’s supply-chain “plan.” A slice:
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1. A President Joe Biden does not need to “rebuild manufacturing in the U.S.”
The myth that never dies. Worse, it continues to buttress poorly conceived campaign proposals such as Biden’s new supply chain plan. The United States manufacturing sector is not dead. Just last year, before being devasted by the pandemic, U.S. manufacturing output set a record high. And the sector once again proved itself an attractive destination for investment in 2018 when FDI stock in American manufacturing rose by 10% to $1.77 trillion. Decline in American manufacturing employment, however, has long been a story of American progress, as the sector has stayed competitive by learning how to do more with less. Using the decline in employment to tell a story of sectoral decline, not progress, is a mistake – and it’s a mistake that permeates the rest of the proposal.
Here’s David Henderson on Walter Block’s defense of his – Walter’s – academic freedom.
Gene Healy dives into the power of the U.S. president to pardon.
