Jonathan Haidt recommends my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein’s new book, Smithian Morals.
Brian Balfour decries the protectionism that infects the Orwellian-named “Inflation Reduction Act.” Here’s his conclusion:
Protectionist measures such as the one included in the Inflation Reduction Act give the appearance of “protecting American jobs.” In reality, however, the only jobs protected are those in the politically favored companies whose inefficiencies are protected from competition at the expense of other domestic jobs lost and higher prices on consumers.
Colin Grabow warns of the dangers that the cronyist Jones Act poses to New Englanders during winter. A slice:
Passed in 1920, the Jones Act restricts domestic shipping to vessels that are U.S.-flagged, built, owned, and crewed. But such ships are significantly more costly to build and operate than their international counterparts. They’re few in number too. Of the thousands of tanker ships that ply the high seas the U.S. Maritime Administration lists just 56 that comply with the law, only a subset of which can move fuel to New England (eleven of the 56 are large tankers designed for the transportation of Alaskan crude oil, one is dedicated to transporting molten sulfur, one was recently chartered by the U.S. military making it unavailable for commercial use, and another has been scrapped). The added expense and difficulty of utilizing such vessels has such distorting effects that it can make more sense to ship U.S. fuels abroad than to other parts of the United States.
Emma Camp is rightly critical of the return of restrictions on imported baby formula.
Under Joe Biden, however, this trend has been broken. The president has called for banning some types of charter schools outright, increasing regulations for others, and giving school boards dominated by union allies more power to block their expansion. Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced new rules that make it far more difficult for charter operators to receive funding from the Charter Schools Program.
Claims of “insufficient information” and “it was an honest mistake, guv’nor” are always made by those responsible for policies that do massive harm in the name of protecting people from greater harm, when it finally becomes obvious to everyone that their “preventative treatment” was much worse than the “disease” of which anyone was at risk.
[DBx: See today’s “Bonus Quotation of the Day.”]
Justin Hart writes about government conspiring with technology companies to suppress speech.
Writing at Spiked, Heather Mac Donald decries “the New York Times‘ shameless covid contortions.” Two slices:
The New York Times has just discovered that some Americans are no longer wearing masks. Welcome to life in the mainstream-media bubble.
The Times sent its reporters last week across Los Angeles County to assess the state of Covid precautions. Los Angeles is at the epicentre of a national movement among blue-state health officials and their press allies to scare the public back into Covid submissiveness. The director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health, Barbara Ferrer, has proclaimed: ‘This is the time for everyone to put their mask back on right now… We need to get the mask back on.’ If residents insist on holding a Christmas party, it should be held outside and guests should be tested before arrival, according to Ferrer. The Los Angeles Times has been backing up her campaign, with recent headlines like: ‘Dangerous weeks ahead in LA County as coronavirus suddenly surges.’ ‘Dangerous’ here equates to around a dozen Covid deaths per day in a county of nearly 10million people. LA County, like other jurisdictions, does not distinguish deaths with Covid from deaths from Covid, making even that small tally a likely exaggeration.
…..
Just as it did at the height of the Covid pandemic, the New York Times trots out its usual phalanx of ‘health experts’ to rebuke those members of the public who are insufficiently fearful. Readers who hoped that they had heard the last of Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, will have likely underestimated the tenacity of both the New York Times and its safetyist sources.
In his latest NYT appearance, Osterholm complains that seven of his acquaintances have contracted Covid in the past two weeks. ‘Why?’, he asks rhetorically. ‘Because they think it’s over’, he answers. ‘What they’re trying to do is move into a post-Covid world. And unfortunately, that world isn’t ready for us yet.’ That post-Covid world will never be ready for us, in the eyes of Osterholm and his colleagues. The virus, he ‘warned’, in the Times’s paraphrase, ‘is still in the driver’s seat’ – and perhaps it always will be.
Did the Times ask Osterholm how sick his seven acquaintances became? It would appear not. One may surmise with a high degree of confidence that their illness would have been manageable and temporary. But Osterholm and the Timescontinue to obey the rule of all safetyist Covid reporting: flog the case count and ignore the mildness of the cases.
Allison Pearson tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Reading about the despicable censorship of the great @DrJBhattacharya by Twitter (@jackdorsey version), I’m reminded that Tory MP @NeilDotObrien set up a McCarthyite website in the UK to harass journalists challenging the lockdown narrative.
Shameful.
