Also criticizing Carlson is Charles Cooke.
GMU Econ alum Alex Salter exposes the false promise of tariffs.
George Will is not amused by Biden’s dishwasher regulations. Three slices:
Industrial policy — government planning the billions of variables generated by hundreds of millions of people making economic choices — provides something there is never enough of: comic relief. And when industrial policy mates with climate policy, there is surplus merriment.
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The Energy Department’s busy beavers, with their unsleeping search for reasons to boss us around for our own good, decided that dishwashers use too much water and energy, there presumably being a shortage of the former and a stigma attached to using the latter. So, in 2012 the department issued regulations so annoying to consumers, the Trump administration relaxed them. That was sufficient reason for the Biden administration, on its first day, to order a reversal of the reversal.
This issue was catnip for the admirable Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was founded 40 years ago to be a nuisance to government that makes a nuisance of itself. CEI’s prodding in 2018produced the Energy Department’s 2020 ruling permitting dishwashers that were better (for the reasons, read on) at washing dishes than were machines that complied with the 2012 regulations.
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Imagine how many government undertakings — in industrial policy, climate policy and elsewhere — might perish if held to the reasonable requirement of connecting facts and choices in non-arbitrary, non-capricious ways.
The Washington Examiner’s Jon Miltimore, noting the probability that many people respond to low-flow shower heads by taking longer showers, recalls the “Seinfeld” episode in which Jerry, Newman and Kramer are distraught and disheveled because they cannot get properly cleaned using the government’s preferred shower heads. Kramer (“There’s no pressure; I can’t get the shampoo out of my hair!”) solves the problem by buying on the black market a shower head made before the ascendancy of the climate scolds.
The Energy Department, whose Loan Programs Office has dispensed hundreds of millions of disappearing dollars in bad investments, has a lengthening menu of mischief. The implementing regulations are produced by people who went to law school to be qualified to write such annoyances. Amazing.
Juliette Sellgren talks with the great high-school economics educator Alice Temnick.
Vance Ginn is correct: “Americans can’t afford Bidenomics.” A slice:
We haven’t seen an agenda of this magnitude since LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s or possibly since FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. Both were damaging, as the Great Society dramatically expanded the size and scope of government, contributing to the Great Inflation in the 1970s, and the New Deal contributed to a longer and harsher Great Depression.
