My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein decries the governmentalization of social affairs. A slice:
We limit governmentalization by upholding liberal principles. Governmentalization is a cancer, and liberal principles shrink it. The medicine does not bring on euphoric sensations, it simply reduces the evil. In other metaphors, governmentalization is pollution, poison, a plague of locusts. Liberal principles are the abatement, the antidote, the pesticide.
We don’t expect pesticides to make us virtuous or happy. We expect them to keep locusts away.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries what it calls Biden’s “climate trade war.” A slice:
The biggest winner of Mr. Biden’s climate protectionism may be GM, whose joint venture with LG Energy Solution this summer received a $2.5 billion federal loan guarantee to build three U.S. battery factories. RBC Capital Markets has estimated that GM could pocket $3 billion from the battery tax credit in 2025. GM recently projected the IRA tax credits will add $3,500 to $5,500 in profit to each EV.
Yesterday, Timothy Sandefur wished happy birthday to the late, great Rose Wilder Lane. A slice:
As I detail in my new book, Freedom’s Furies, this and other discoveries helped make Lane—along with her friend and mentor Isabel Paterson, and another of Paterson’s admirers, Ayn Rand—one of a trio of women who would help revolutionize Americans’ conception of liberty in the age of the Depression and World War II. In 1943, all three of them published books—Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, Paterson’s The God of the Machine, and Rand’s The Fountainhead—that helped spark the modern liberty movement. The journalist William F. Buckley later called them “the three furies of modern libertarianism.”
Pierre Lemieux explains that “industrial policy is attenuated central planning.”
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board is wise to Trump. Here’s the Board’s conclusion:
Truth in advertising, though. Mr. Trump is giving Republicans a taste of what they’re in for if they nominate him again in 2024. His presidential campaign is less than a month old. Already Mr. Trump has dined with anti-Semites and a white nationalist, while calling for himself to be reinstated as President, even if this requires the “termination” of whatever in the Constitution stands in the way. What he’ll really terminate is the GOP.
Also sick of Trump is National Review‘s Charles Cooke. Here’s his conclusion:
As there should be, there is a limited supply of political energy in this country, and for some reason, the American Right has decided to spend an inordinate amount of it defending a man who is now serving nothing except for his own boredom and his own ego. At some point, conservative-leaning voters are going to notice that all Trump cares about now is the pretense that he won the election of 2020, and that, in order to push that idea, he will happily destroy anything and everything that gets in his way. Until then, I must ask: Are you not tired of this crap?
GMU Econ PhD candidate (and my former undergraduate student) Matthew Owens, along with my colleague Chris Coyne, survey, in a new paper, the history of classical liberals on war and imperialism. Here’s the abstract:
This paper surveys the views of twenty key British and non-British figures in the classical liberal tradition on the issues of war, imperialism, and alternative paths to peace. These ideas are important both for purely historical reasons, and because they are relevant to contemporary conversations about the complexities and nuances of foreign relations. We identify common themes across these thinkers while noting that there is no single classical liberal position on these issues. In addition to identifying commonalities, we also summarize tensions and contradictions, both within the work of individual figures and across the thinkers surveyed. We include two appendices consisting of tables summarizing the views of each of the thinkers discussed throughout the survey.
Ken Green puts the risk of covid in perspective.
Justin Hart reviews newly released evidence that Fauci is a liar.
According to Macmillan Cancer Support, around 30,000 fewer people in England started cancer treatment between March and August 2020 than in the same period in 2019. Two years on, the UK is counting the tragic cost in additional deaths and a health service struggling to catch up. As the country with one of the worst records in cancer survival in Europe before Covid, the UK now lags yet further behind.
