George Will has some questions for Harris and Trump. Two slices:
For him: JD Vance says “a million cheap knock-off toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” Do you, too, believe that no cumulative consumer benefits can compensate for any churnings of U.S. employment?
For her: Your party’s platform, which is longer than Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” begins with a bromide (“Our nation is at an inflection point”) and leaves no banality unemployed. (Small businesses are “the glue of our communities”; farmers are “the backbone of our country.”) Even worse, 26 times the platform boasts about “cracking down” (or some permutation of that phrase) on this or that. Doesn’t your party’s enjoyment of punishing make it sound like a dominatrix?
For him: Aggregate 2022 revenue of Fortune 500 U.S. companies equaled more than one-third of global gross domestic product, yet your party’s platform insists “we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE.” Elaborate.
For her: Your party’s platform accuses your opponent of “stacking the Court” by appointing judges that please his party. Are you vowing not to do likewise? Do you support progressives’ plan to pack the Supreme Court by legislating term limits to force the retirement of three conservative justices?
…..
For both: A joke perennially pertinent in Washington concerns an economist and a normal person falling into a deep pit with sides too steep to climb. The normal person exclaims, “We’re trapped!” The economist placidly replies, “Don’t worry, we will simply assume a ladder.” What do each of you assume — torrid economic growth forever, 20 million elderly Americans moving to Australia, whatever — to justify your shared promise not to alter Social Security and Medicare, which are driving the nation off a fiscal cliff as their trust funds disappear?
We introduce W.H. Hutt’s under-appreciated economic insights. Hutt’s contributions include widelyregarded and heralded contributions to the analysis of labor institutions, macroeconomics, and constitutional political economy, but there remains much to be learned from studying Hutt’s work and incorporating his insights into modern analysis.
[DBx: I’m delighted that serious scholars are working on Hutt, for a gaggle of poorly informed individuals are now tendentiously struggling to portray Hutt (1899-1988) as that which he most certainly was not: a racist.]
If free speech is a measure of a modern liberal democracy, Brazil is in trouble. A crackdown on expression and the denial of due process for those who contradict the state’s version of the truth dates back to 2020. Now it’s getting worse.
The latest example is Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes’s Sept. 1 shutdown of Elon Musk’s X social-media site (formerly Twitter). As part of the court’s order, anyone caught using a virtual private network to evade the ban is subject to a fine of 50,000 reais (nearly $9,000) a day. Judge de Moraes also announced a freeze of the financial accounts of Starlink, the satellite system belonging to Mr. Musk’s SpaceX. Starlink is used by internet providers that serve millions of Brazilians.
Judge de Moraes has nothing against X per se. His beef is with social-media influencers whose use of irreverence and derision as rhetorical weapons against the ruling establishment makes them popular on the right side of Brazilian politics.
Swiftian satire is loads of fun if you’re the forgotten man, powerless against a notoriously corrupt system. But Judge de Moraes calls these nonconformists purveyors of disinformation and a threat to democracy. He considers it his job to gag them.
This has put him at odds with Mr. Musk, who isn’t involved in Brazilian politics but has a commitment to free speech. Other platforms have obeyed the court’s instructions to block antiestablishment opinion makers. Mr. Musk refuses to comply on grounds that doing so would violate Brazil’s constitution, which in Articles 5 and 220 explicitly protects speech.
Summer ain’t over in California until the lights go out. A one-hour power outage kicked off my Labor Day weekend. My sister, who lives 15 minutes away, had it worse: Her home lost electricity for nearly a day. On Friday folks across the state lost power with nearly 130 outages in the city of Los Angeles alone.
Such is life in California. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass blamed Friday’s outages on “extreme heat.” The real culprit: the state’s climate policies. As the Golden State plunges into darkness, the rest of the country could follow.
Democrats in Sacramento last year scrambled to keep open the state’s only active nuclear plant and several aging natural-gas plants to prevent power shortages. But their drive to power all things with green energy is straining the grid and people’s pocketbooks to a breaking point.
