Addressing the Covid content, Mr Zuckerberg wrote: “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire.
“We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
Mr Zuckerberg said he and Meta would be ready to “push back” if something similar happened in the future.
His letter was addressed to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House judiciary committee, which has been investigating content moderation on online platforms.
David Inserra decries the arrest of Pavel Durov. A slice:
So let us be clear, the French arresting the Telegram CEO for merely creating a communication platform threatens Americans’ speech. If Americans are using Telegram but then the strength of Telegram’s security is weakened in response to what France is doing, then Americans are worse off. Their speech is less secure and chilled. While consumers can switch to other products, there is little stopping France from arresting or threatening the CEOs of Signal or even Meta’s WhatsApp and Messenger. Going back to the UK, what stops the current government from invoking the Online Safety Bill amid riots and unrest to clamp down on all encrypted tools that they believe are being used to “incite hatred” or spread misinformation?
Just as there is a global market for cell phones and wheat, there is also a global market for law. That may seem strange to many people, since they don’t think about buying law the same way they think about buying goods and other types of services, but law is as much the subject of a global market as those are.
Another slice:
Having IFCs in the world economy makes Americans’ lives better in three important ways. First, IFCs lower transaction costs and so enable transactions that would not otherwise occur that, in turn, make our economy more productive. Everything from health care to goods carried by trucks is cheaper because of IFCs just through their impact on insurance costs. They also lower the cost of investment vehicles that funnel billions of dollars into US businesses through IFC entities, creating jobs and economic growth in the United States. And many Americans’ pensions are invested in funds housed in an IFC and so the pensions earn higher returns as a result. Their retirement is thus made more secure because of IFCs’ existence.
Second, the competition from IFCs pushes US jurisdictions to improve their legal systems. Vermont is a significant competitor in the captive insurance market because it responded to competition from IFCs. More than a dozen other states have followed Vermont’s lead and entered the captive market. New Hampshire and Wyoming have adopted private foundation laws based on IFC laws, which they hope will bring estate-planning business to their economies. Ohio revamped its trust law in hopes of luring Americans who are considering offshore trusts to use it instead, thus boosting the local economy. The improved and innovative laws created as a result of this competition are available to, and improve the legal environment for, all Americans, not just those who make direct use of IFCs.
Third, IFCs enable economic growth around the world, helping developing countries improve their economies. This directly benefits the people in those developing countries: economist Edward Miguel noted that “the correlation between low per capita incomes and higher propensities for internal war is one of the most robust empirical relationships in the economic literature.” But growth in developing countries also benefits Americans by building a more prosperous, and so more peaceful, world.
There is a reason Europe’s more generous welfare states don’t try to fund their spending by taxing a tiny handful of extremely rich people.According to the Progressive Policy Institute, “the United States actually imposes slightly higher taxes on the incomes of households in the top 1% of the income distribution than most European countries do.” The Europeans would also love to shift more of that burden to the wealthy, but experiments with things such as wealth taxes have largely failed, and their governments have clearly concluded that big welfare states can be funded only with a big, broad tax base that includes the middle class.
Henry Olsen’s main argument is that, while Reagan is associated with pro-free-market, small-government policies, he was not consistent about them and was willing to make pragmatic departures. Don’t I know it. This is one of the reasons I’ve always been more reserved in my admiration for Reagan. Republicans used to venerate Reagan while railing against the compromises of the weak-kneed Republican “establishment”—even though both made many of the same compromises.
But if Reagan wasn’t consistent, he still set a clear overall direction and ideal for U.S. policy: unleashing private enterprise and free markets as the alternative to failed Big Government interventions. Olsen talks about Reagan standing for “faith, family and community.” But he conspicuously doesn’t mention “freedom,” and especially economic freedom. But Reagan couldn’t stop talking about it.
The area where we see this most sharply is on trade. Reagan imposed a few tariffs in response to political pressure. But he famously declared, “There are no winners in a trade war,” and denounced protectionism as a “no-growth policy” that “costs consumers billions of dollars, damages the overall economy, and destroys jobs.” This is a case he made again and again, giving speeches on “the folly of protectionism.” When he did impose tariffs, he defended them only as an unfortunate retaliatory measure intended to lead to negotiations for greater trade freedom by convincing our partners to lower their barriers, too.
By contrast, Donald Trump confidently declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” an assertion he ultimately disproved by losing a number of these so-called wars, most famously with China. Meanwhile, Trump is promising a much bigger trade war in his second term, with massively expanded tariffs.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Corey DeAngelis and Dean McGee rightly criticize “the legally dubious campaign against Kentucky school choice.” Here’s their conclusion:
The illegality—and immorality—of using public resources intended for education to lobby against expanded educational opportunities is obvious, and all efforts should be made to put an end to it statewide. The future of education in Kentucky may hang in the balance.
