Jon Miltimore warns of the dangers signaled by the French government’s arrest of Pavel Durov. A slice:
Fortunately for Americans — and unfortunately for federal lawmakers — the First Amendment and decades of court precedents make it much more difficult to suppress speech in the US than in Europe. Because of this, the Censorship Industrial Complex (to borrow a term from Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi) has had to get creative.
Lacking the constitutional authority to censor Americans directly, powers in Washington have, in recent years, outsourced censorship to others. In 2022, the Twitter Files exposed for the first time the government’s sprawling censorship apparatus, which involved government officials leaning heavily on social media companies to get them to do the dirty work of censoring problematic information (sometimes, even when the information was true).
Indeed, just days after Durov’s arrest, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee that the White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19, including humor and satire.”
The trouble is, much recent evidence suggests that giving people cash doesn’t actually solve their problems — at least not in the way it’s intended.
For instance, when economists Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin partnered with Undue Medical Debt to study the effect of debt forgiveness on its recipients, they found no improvement in utilization of health care, no relief from financial distress and no improvement in overall mental health. In fact, the most indebted people appeared to become more distressed, not less, after their debt was forgiven. Another group of researchers looked at the effect of unconditionally granting people one-time cash grants of up to $2,000 (two months’ worth of household income, on average) and found that, while the recipients’ consumption increased, they experienced no improvement in their financial health, their psychological well-being, their cognitive capacity or their physical condition.
In a peer-reviewed study published last month in the journal Science, an international team of climate researchers and econometricians analyzed more than 1,500 climate policies enacted in 41 countries between 1998 and 2022. Their conclusion: “We identified 63 successful policy interventions with total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tons” of carbon dioxide.
In other words, roughly 96 percent of government policies aimed at reducing emissions were largely unsuccessful. And the 4 percent that did have a measurable impact managed to reduce greenhouse gases by a global total of, at most, 1.8 billion metric tons. That amounts to just over two-tenths of 1 percent (0.23 percent) of the 778 billion metric tons of CO2 emitted by those nations in the first two decades of this century. The emissions cuts required to reach the targets specified in the 2015 Paris Agreement — a reduction the United Nations calculates at 23 billion metric tons per year by 2030 — remain far, far out of reach.
David Rose explains the far greater importance of “moral don’ts” compared to “moral dos.” A slice:
What really matters for trust is not what you do, but what you don’t do. But since inactions are not observed, they cannot be rewarded with social approval. Just imagine the reaction you’d get by bragging about the lies you didn’t tell, the property you didn’t steal, and the people you didn’t murder.
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger is correct:
A gripe among Republicans is that other than price controls on food, Ms. Harris is hiding her intentions behind a smile. That isn’t true. There is nothing hidden about her plan to govern as a familiar spend-and-tax Democrat.
Reason‘s Eric Boehm pleads with both American political parties: “Leave U.S. Steel Alone.”
Andrew Stuttaford reports on Javier Milei tackling tariffs. A slice:
As an economist, he is no fan of tariffs (to be clear, it is not only “market fundamentalists,” who share that view). As an Argentinian economist, he knows the role that tariffs played in supporting the turn to industrial policy in mid-century Argentina.
That shift was an understandable enough response to the economic turn inward of so many countries in the Depression years, but it took an an increasingly ideological tone after Juan Perón adopted the autarkic approach associated with the fascist social and economic theory to which his government owed a great debt. The interlinked combination of high tariffs and import substitution was a legacy that lingered in Argentina, with catastrophic results. Industrial policy is what it is. Senator Hawley will doubtless be glad to know that Perón drew a great deal of support from organized labor.
Economic historians have told and tested a great many tales of how the world got rich — or specifically, how innovation surged in about 1760 in England, then elsewhere, and never let up. In the last few decades, Deirdre McCloskey has promoted a compelling, qualitative origin story broadly subversive to these.
McCloskey’s story is one of ideas and perspectives. Before institutional protections could arise, England had to first find a way to overcome strong moral prejudices against profiteering lifestyles. England somehow did. The damnable pursuit of wealth — when squinting just right — became the courageous spirit of commerce by about 1700.
McCloskey’s epic effort is remarkable, but her “somehow” remains hazy. Dan Klein has admirably stepped up and suggested it may be found in Hugo Grotius’s philosophy of 1625. Grotius helped establish that commerce only had to be honest — not virtuous — to be acceptable. “Having a go” broke wide open.
I would like to suggest a different origin. Instead of philosophical tomes, it may have been salacious plays and vulgar urban dictionaries — a pop culture from the same era which derived from slumming it around London’s hawkers, slop sellers, and bunters.
