George Will decries the Leninism that’s at the heart of Xi’s reign in China. A slice:
Such a state has, however, two incurable defects: All policies are subordinate to the primary objective of maintaining the party’s dominance. And the party incubates society’s elites, who insinuate themselves everywhere into allocating wealth and opportunity. Absent market signals, this produces cascading inefficiencies in the allocation of society’s human and material resources.
With Leninist ham-handedness, Beijing recently highlighted its economic disarray by suppressing data confirming it. Having reported a youth unemployment rate of 21.3 percent in June — or misreported what might have been above 30 percent — Beijing released no data about youth unemployment in July, thereby fueling speculation about how much worse it now is.
China is misleadingly said to have a “hybrid” economy of government planning leavened and disciplined by market forces. This suggests more orderliness than actually exists. Market forces are casually disregarded by the CCP’s innumerable tentacles. China’s “industrial policy” — pervasive government entanglement with private-sector enterprises — is a road to private-sector serfdom.
Under the Leninist brutality of dictator Xi Jinping’s “zero-covid” policy, a single covid-19 case could cause the lockdown of a city of millions, with devastating economic consequences. But most devastating is Leninist economic normality in a party-state.
Eric Boehm asks: “Is a government shutdown better than more reckless borrowing?”
The labor market has been resilient, but it has recently shown signs of softening. The overtime rule will increase costs and uncertainty for employers amid the Administration’s regulatory blitz, which includes a separate DOL proposal that would reclassify millions of independent contractors as employees. Many of them would be entitled to overtime.
If finalized, the overtime rule is certain to draw a legal challenge, not least because the Senate hasn’t confirmed Ms. Su as secretary. The Biden Administration argues that Ms. Su can serve indefinitely as acting secretary under the DOL successor statute even if the Senate won’t confirm her. But our legal sources say this snubs the Senate’s constitutional advice and consent power.
Art Carden points to three policies that are nearly impossible to square with the belief that today’s government, as a whole, is a rational actor. Here’s his conclusion:
To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, today’s political problems are often yesterday’s political “solutions.” These are just three examples in one day where we can see how policies enacted to fix one problem lead to still other problems, which will then require other policies to fix, and so on, until we’re crushed by a giant snowball of well-intended “solutions” and their unintended consequences. Instead of asking them to fix the world, would it be too much to ask politicians to stop wrecking in the first place?
Allison Schrager explains that “the Biden administration’s plan to limit Medicare drug prices may cost us all more in the long run.” [DBx: I would replace “may” with “will.”]
“Teachers union chief calls private schools ‘fascist’ but sends her son to one.”
A Washington Post headline: “5th Circuit finds Biden White House, CDC likely violated First Amendment.” A slice from the report:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Friday ruled that the Biden White House, top government health officials and the FBI likely violated the First Amendment by improperly influencing tech companies’ decisions to remove or suppress posts on the coronavirus and elections.
