David Henderson adds his clear voice to the critical assessments of Michael Lind’s recent uninformed attempt to portray libertarian opponents of minimum wages as scoundrels. Here’s David’s conclusion:
Lind generously throws around the word “lies” to refer to thoughts of people who disagree with him. I won’t reciprocate. But I will say that Michael Lind is very confused and that if you don’t notice his rhetorical switch, you will be too.
J.D. Tuccille argues that “Biden’s industrial policy promises a return to the 1970s.” A slice:
Industrial policy, by which governments guided, dominated, and usually mismanaged economic activity, was popular even in democratic countries up until around 1980, as Alberto Mingardi, director general of Italy’s free-market Istituto Bruno Leoni, recently pointed out.
“Industrial policy used to look so 1970s,” he wrote. In Italy, “government aid was generously showered on private business so that they would invest in ‘depressed areas,’ thereby ‘supporting communities’—to use more contemporary jargon—to create (manufacturing) jobs… The result wasn’t pretty. Private companies eagerly cashed in the subsidies, building what were later called ‘cathedrals in the desert’: big factories that were soon of no use, because when and if the subsidies expired, those businesses exited the south as speedily as they went in.”
Decades have since passed. That’s enough time for policymakers to forget—or never learn—that statist ideas have been tried and have failed.
“In recent years the notion of an ‘industrial policy’ has been revived, and it is now alive and kicking,” added Mingardi. “The Biden Administration’s ‘Chips Act’ is a clear case in point: industrial policy is evoked in order to answer a temporary shortage of supply, something even the most interventionist economist used to assume the market could manage by itself.”
Russ Roberts talks with Mike Munger about the perfect versus the good.
Here’s George Will on modes of dress. A slice:
[Jonathan] Clarke, who confesses a “slightly antique sense of propriety,” writes “few things are more heartening than to see a man or woman of advanced age very well dressed.” Such muted rebellion against what Clarke calls the “dubious new catechism of perpetual leisure” is not, as some might censoriously insist, the sin of asserting “privilege” in violation of the ethic of “inclusiveness.” Rather, it is a way to quietly assert that attention to one’s presentation is a form of respect for those to whom one is presented. And it is a way to acknowledge this: Because not all occasions are created equal, not all ways of dressing are equally appropriate.
The separation of powers is an animating principle of our nation’s founding documents. As the Constitution outlines, the U.S. has three distinct and coequal branches of government: a legislature that passes laws, an executive branch that implements them, and a judiciary that interprets them. This built-in division is meant to restrain government overreach and prevent abuses of power. The president and members of Congress regularly stand for election to ensure the government is accountable to the governed, and the judiciary serves in good behavior to ensure that justice is dispensed impartially.
While this sounds nice in theory, the federal government typically doesn’t honor it in practice. Congress has delegated much of its lawmaking authority to the executive branch since the 1930s. Federal agencies now issue regulations that have the force and effect of the law. “Administrative judges”—executive-branch employees—routinely preside over trial-like proceedings without juries, letting agencies act as both prosecutor and judge.
Under the Supreme Court’s Chevron doctrine, courts generally defer to the executive branch’s interpretation of the law—both in regulatory and enforcement proceedings. Many of the Constitution’s checks and balances, from the separation of powers to the right to jury trial, have fallen by the wayside.
Also writing in the Wall Street Journal is Charley Hooper, explaining “how the FDA helped fuel the opiod crisis.” Here’s his conclusion:
Toradol IV/IM is well-established, relatively safe and works about as well as morphine to reduce pain. It’s also nonaddictive and abuse-proof because it doesn’t provide an opioid “high.” What we really need is an oral formulation with the proper dose for use at home, at work and while traveling. Such a drug could help alleviate the opioid crisis.
If [FDA commissioner] Mr. [Robert] Califf is serious about doing everything to bring beneficial drugs to market, here is a perfect place to start.
Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley is correct: “The lockdowns are over but the damage goes on.” Two slices:
Developing countries are seeing a resurgence of deadlier infectious diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, measles and polio. In the U.S., young people are experiencing persistent problems that were aggravated by lockdowns including increased deaths, mental illness, drug overdoses and a detachment from the workforce. Call the phenomenon “long Covid lockdowns.”
Officials are trying to absolve themselves of responsibility for the post-Covid malaise by disclaiming the lockdowns. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” Anthony Fauci told the New York Times Magazine’s David Wallace-Wells last month. “Never. I never did.”
Dr. Fauci added: “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly.”
Is memory loss a long Covid symptom? Dr. Fauci told the American Society for Microbiology in August 2020: “We’d better be careful when we say, ‘Young people who don’t wind up in the hospital are fine, let them get infected, it’s OK.’ No, it’s not OK.” He added that young people “do get sick and symptomatic enough to be in bed for a week or two or three and then get better, they clear the virus—they have residual symptoms for weeks and sometimes months.” He repeated this ad nauseam to justify shutdowns even though he knew young people were at low risk of severe illness.
Dr. Fauci’s attempt to rewrite pandemic history recalls the classic “Seinfeld” episode in which George Costanza overreacts to a kitchen grease fire at a birthday party and mows down guests as he rushes to escape. “I was trying to lead the way. We needed a leader!” George cries in self-defense. “I was not leaving anyone behind!” The rush by Dr. Fauci and other public-health officials to shut down the economy has left hundreds of thousands of young Americans behind.
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The Trilliant analysis also found an increase in healthcare visits for anxiety disorders (48%), alcohol and substance use (27%) and depression (24%) between the first three months of 2019 and the same period in 2022. None of this is surprising, but it goes a long way in explaining why deaths among young people remain elevated even as Covid deaths have plunge.
Houman David Hemmati tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
COVID lockdowns caused far more harm than good and their effects will last for decades.
