The federal government is about to upend how regulations are imposed on businesses and citizens. The White House Office of Management and Budget is quietly proposing to phase out from federal regulatory analysis one of the most important concepts in economics: opportunity cost.
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Disregarding opportunity cost is antithetical to sound economic reasoning. Yet the comments submitted to OMB on its proposal reveal that many economists at elite institutions around the country applaud OMB’s approach, presumably because it will make it easier to justify expensive rules. This is a disturbing sign of how far academic economists have wandered from their roots and also how political the profession has become.
To truly modernize regulation, OMB must take into account opportunity cost and ignore the economists of the day who have forgotten a core concept of their discipline.
George Will decries the coarseness of Trump and DeSantis. A slice:
Inhibitions on verbal coarseness perish in contemporary American culture, which Twitter shapes and reflects. Polls indicate that since the DeSantis campaign’s stumbling start in a technologically botched Twitter event, his public exposure has coincided with a widening of the gap between his support among Republicans and Trump’s. This is probably not coincidental.
Jonah Goldberg writes thoughtfully about Jack Smith’s indictments of Donald Trump.
David Henderson ponders the White House’s gender pay gap.
I always enjoy being a guest on Amy Jacobson’s and Dan Proft’s “Chicago’s Morning Answer.”
Jacob Howland describes modern-day American government as “a zombie state.” A slice:
The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.
This drama of political decadence defies easy categorisation. Aristotle wrote that tragedy depicts people who are better, and comedy worse, than us spectators. Biden and Trump are certainly worse than those who voted them into office, but they are not remotely funny. Their antics are repellent and their goofiness unlovable. Observing them and the choral leaders that follow in their train — jerky puppets like Rudy Giuliani sweating hair-dye, or Anthony Fauci claiming to be science itself — Americans feel only shame and dread, without the cathartic release of laughter or tears.
AEI’s Desmond Lachman understandably is not bullish on China’s economy.
Michael Shellenberger tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The media say Biden didn’t violate the First Amendment by demanding social media censorship. But the evidence presented in yesterday’s federal circuit hearing plainly shows that he did. If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, we may soon win a massive free speech victory.
