Tweet [1]
Scott Winship writes consistently, and informatively, with wisdom [2].
Laura Williams applauds the miracle of the 99¢ pineapple [3]. Here’s her conclusion:
Pineapples were once a supreme luxury item, which (through a combination of industrial process improvement, specialization, and relocation to regions with marginal advantages in pineapple growing) have become accessible to almost everyone. When past centuries’ most-iconic luxuries become commonplace and affordable, we always have specialization and market innovations to thank.
David Henderson: “When is income not income? When the Washington state Supreme Court says it’s not.” [4]
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins rightly warns of the lawless administrative state [5]. A slice:
But antitrust enforcers get no attention if they don’t block deals—no press, no prestige, no bump in resources. Their leaders don’t get their tickets punched. Parents, let your children know: When opportunists smell advantage, opportunists will be seen diving in head first. After the Trump administration’s AT&T-Time Warner folly, I speculated trustbusting would hit rock bottom [6] when Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission attacked Microsoft-Activision purely on big-tech animus. Rock bottom turns out to be deeper than I suspected. Ms. Khan has been caught [7] playing footsie with the Brits to sandbag two U.S. companies because she feared U.S. law might not let her sandbag them.
Matthew Lau makes the case for school choice in Canada [9]. A slice:
Moreover, the case for school choice, as Milton Friedman said [10], does not assume that private schools are better than public schools, but simply that competition is better than monopoly. Whether in schools or anything else, diversity [11] is better than an imposed monolithic conformity. And as in the United States, in Canada the consequences of political mismanagement, overly powerful teachers’ unions, and education bureaucrats run amok provide plenty of strong evidence of the value of divergence from the government monopoly.
“Immigration Should Be as Easy for Everyone As It Is for NBA Players [12].”
Even Stephen Gillers, a left-wing judicial-ethics expert often quoted in these sorts of stories, stated [14] that “before the recent amendments, the situation was sufficiently vague to give Thomas a basis to claim that reporting was not required.”
Moreover, there is a video [15] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse helpfully posted recently on Twitter of an exchange he had with a Senate Judiciary Committee witness at a hearing last year on this issue. In the hearing, both Whitehouse and witness agreed with Justice Thomas’s interpretation. Senator Whitehouse asked Kedric Payne, of the far-left Campaign Legal Center, if he agreed that a justice wouldn’t have to disclose a “free vacation” under the then-current personal-hospitality rule. Payne agreed because “the way that rule is interpreted is not clear by the courts and it could be used in that way.”
Senator Whitehouse and Kedric Payne do not like the way this rule was implemented. But that is immaterial to the conclusion that Justice Thomas had no obligation to disclose these innocuous trips. The simple fact is that this was permissible.
Spiked‘s Tom Slater is correct: Biden is a willing tool of the woke [16]. A slice:
And yet he has effectively become America’s first woke president. He doesn’t just genuflect to identitarian narratives, as Barack Obama was wont to do later on in his presidency, following the first blush of Black Lives Matter. Biden has put them at the centre of governance.
There are those who will say it’s ridiculous to suggest that Biden, an octogenarian machine politician who wasn’t even particularly socially liberal for much of his career, is now some sort of leftist ideologue. But such people are letting the old political labels obscure the new and sinister things that are taking place.
Wokeness – though it might have first germinated among sections of the left – has never been progressive in the slightest. It wants to rehabilitate racial categories. It wants to rip up sex-based rights. It relies on coercion and censorship to defeat its opponents. It cannot compute class politics. Indeed, its obsession with race only pits working-class people against one another.
Vinay Prasad justly criticizes Anthony Fauci and Randi Weingarten each for denying any responsibility for calamitous policies that they endorsed [17]. Two slices:
Fauci’s next claim is that he always wanted school reopened. This is contradicted by a detailed timeline of his position on schools, which was consistently to fearmonger about kids and keep them closed [18].
…..
Randi claims she just wanted to open schools safety, but the problem is you didn’t need 750 billion dollars and hepa filtration to open safely. Even masks were unnecessary. Ultimately, schools reopened and ~100% of kids got COVID anyway, the vast majority did fine, most did not have the vaccine beforehand, and there is no reliable evidence the vax lowered the risk of severe disease for kids. All you needed to reopen were teachers with courage, sadly Randi and Tony sapped that away from them with constant inaccurate rhetoric.