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David Henderson and Charley Hooper rightly criticize what the Justice Department describes as its “criminal investigation into consulting firm McKinsey related to its past role in advising some of the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers on how to boost sales.”

Glenn Loury exposes “the spiritual blind spot of ‘The Bell Curve.'” (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:

My point here extends far beyond concerns about how we talk about racial differences in IQ. As I’ve argued elsewhere, social science deludes itself when it believes its mechanistic understanding of human subjectivity captures the whole picture. To confidently forecast the future of human development from a series of statistical snapshots is, knowingly or not, to denigrate what makes us human in the first place: our minds, our souls, our free will, our capacity to make and remake our lives as we will. Thinking productively about such things is not solely the province of social science. Treating such matters of the human spirit as mere epiphenomena of material social processes betrays a kind of disciplinary arrogance. It risks opening the door to an unjustified pessimism about the future of human development.

Mike Munger is correct in his assessment of Joseph Stiglitz (and of Paul Krugman). Three slices:

This notion of “emergent order,” or “spontaneous order,” with its web of binding agreements and organized social structures, lies at the very heart of the argument for capitalism. The need for such order has been recognized since (at least) the Scottish Enlightenment, when David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart laid out the intellectual foundations of a system of propriety and property rights that create a context where commercial activity creates wealth and elaborates the division of labor.

What does any of this have to do with Joseph Stiglitz’s book, The Road to Freedom? Almost nothing, it seems, and that’s a big problem. Stiglitz wants to argue — actually, it’s simply an unsupported assertion — that no one who advocates for commerce and markets ever thought about the problem of rules.

Such a claim would hardly be surprising among the superficial polemicists — Naomi Klein, Zephyr Teachout, or Thomas Friedman, for example — who make no pretense of being intellectually serious. When otherwise competent and able scholars ignore the tradition of emergent order, however, it is harder to explain. I am thinking, in particular, of two Nobel prize-winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz (2001 prize), and Paul Krugman (2008). Let me be clear at the outset: both Stiglitz and Krugman far exceed me in intellect, and in ability as economists. When I read their work as professionals, I am consistently impressed, and informed. Stiglitz’s work on public finance and asymmetric information, and Krugman’s work on international trade and regulation, are insightful and of considerable importance in the discipline.

Neither Krugman nor Stiglitz is doing this for the money, at this point in their careers; instead, they are proving Adam Smith’s famous claim that celebrities, once they have tasted fame, become addicted and are willing to commit increasingly egregious intellectual indignities to retain the favor of the frivolous.

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It is Stiglitz and his apostles who want an unfettering…of the state apparatus of coercion! Rule of law, property rights, and a presumption in favor of consumer welfare in antitrust are all impediments to the shamans leading us to a better world. The constitution must be suspended; the ability of corporations to defend themselves using campaign spending must be curtailed, and information that contradicts the “scientific” claims of the shamans must be censored, again for the common good. All of the constitutional fetters that prevent the expansion of regulations, and the powers of the administrative state, must be swept away.

After achieving what he calls “progressive capitalism” revolution in which the state is unfettered, Stiglitz imagines that prosperity will be restored, on a broad scale. To be clear, he himself defines “progressive capitalism” as “rejuvenated social democracy,” a breathtaking change in direction from commercial society to a system where decisions of allocation and income are made by political majorities, filtered through an unelected elite. The road to this new system has three animating factors: the refocusing on a “liberal education,” the unfettering of the power of majorities to redistribute income and property, and the abandonment of the myth of “American exceptionalism.”

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But for Stiglitz, there is only one, homogeneous, unwashed and uneducated “The Right,” and it makes sense to lump together the opposition to education, the support of gender segregation, and a rock-ribbed advocacy of commerce. It is hard to take seriously such a superficial and tendentious screed.

John Stossel rightly warns of growing U.S. government indebtedness.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins explains about covid that “its superfast spread told us early the virus was unstoppable and likely lab-modified.” A slice:

Test, trace and quarantine was absurd and worthless when 90% of infections went unreported. Mask mandates undoubtedly caused some vulnerable people to die because they believed a mask would protect them.

These steps were a political show as the virus made its inevitable way through the population, while politicians competed to suggest how valiantly they were trying to stop it.

It was a hand-waving show, unbelievably expensive and wasteful. And lacking was corrective reporting from our press. The essence of our folly was a fetishizing by the news media of a pathologically stupid “confirmed case count,” which made the virus seem more deadly, rare and stoppable than it was, justifying a tone of media blame against any politician who seemed insufficiently committed to stopping it.

George Will remembers the great Willie Mays. A slice: