David Henderson exposes “a flawed case for centrally planned health insurance.” A slice:
Also, after reading every page, including every one of the authors’ extensive (and impressive) footnotes, I could find no mention, other than one sentence, of government restrictions that make the supply of health care less than otherwise and prices higher than otherwise. Three such are certificate of need (CON) laws at the state level, federal restrictions on immigration of doctors, and restrictions that prevent non-doctors from doing things that are now done only by doctors.
Pierre Lemieux isn’t duped by the insulting language used by U.S. “Trade Representative” Katherine Tai; it’s language that insults the intelligence of every truly adult person.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board reports on some “industrial policy follies.” Two slices:
Bidenomics is fast becoming a study in the contortions of industrial policy. Consider the Commerce Department’s decision late last week to slap tariffs on solar imports from Southeast Asia, raising the costs of U.S. solar-energy projects that the White House says are the vital future of U.S. energy.
…..
The solar follies reveal the contradictions of the Biden Administration’s industrial policy. Its labor, climate and anti-China agendas conflict in their combination of subsidies, mandates, bans and taxes. Subsidies lead to tariffs, which lead to more subsidies as government becomes the allocator of capital and decides which companies win or lose. The biggest losers, as usual, will be American taxpayers.
Legislation in Congress is far from the only risk to the dynamism of America’s high‐tech industries: Anti‐trust proceedings at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could also undermine consumer‐benefitting innovation. Take, for instance, the FTC’s planned comprehensive antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, which will challenge a wide range of Amazon’s business practices. Amazon is on the forefront of making investments to provide consumers with improved and more affordable goods and services. Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014 to enhance its streaming services market and Whole Foods in 2014 to expand its product range to include organic and fresh products. More recently, the company also announced the launch of Bedrock, which will provide cutting‐edge language models to compete with OpenAI and Google. Amazon is also on the path to power its operations with renewable energy by 2025. A concerted push to break‐up Amazon could undermine these efforts and investments—again, to the detriment of the American economy and American consumers.
Eric Boehm decries the nanny state, drunk as it is with hubris.
Jennifer Sey tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
If you are on the side of government censorship, you aren’t the resistance.
