David Henderson reviews Diane Coyle’s new book, Cogs and Monsters. A slice:
One of the biggest surprises I noticed in her view of economics is her statement, “Competition is quite a tender plant.” She explains, “The more successful, the larger, the more profitable and powerful the incumbents, the harder it is to maintain competition.” Actually, something closer to the opposite is the case. The more profitable the incumbents are, the greater is the incentive for new competitors to enter the industry. As I put it to my students the first day of class, competition is a hardy weed, not a delicate flower. That’s why so many competitors lobby various governments to limit competition, whether by licensing, high tariffs, or stingy import quotas: without such government restrictions, those firms would face tougher competition.
Chris Edwards decries American politicians’ addiction to debt.
Sam Staley reviews the movie Free Guy.
The tyranny of the woke is ever-more evident in the Biden administration.
Although Madison quickly became, with his boon companion Thomas Jefferson, a creator of what is now the world’s oldest political party, he could not have anticipated what would now appall him: the common attitude in Congress that members are mere spear carriers in a presidential opera.
In 2018, a congressman said in defense of a fellow Republican, a committee chairman accused of excessive subservience to the president: “You have to keep in mind who he works for. He works for the president and answers to the president.” Such thinking is the principal reason modern presidents are so rampant, and the one reason the Congressional Progressive Caucus is, despite its ideological intoxication, somewhat wholesome.
If the caucus accepts this compliment, it should send a similar salute across the barricades to the two Democratic senators the caucus currently despises. There is an adjective to describe West Virginia’s Joe Manchin III and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema as they resist pressures to buckle — pressures from Biden, the other side of the Capitol, and the great and the good in the media. The adjective is: senatorial.
