1. Orban is an illiberal thug, and should be ostracized to the extent that peaceable means permit. His flirtations with the Maduro regime makes this an unambiguous reality, in addition to years of colluding with Putin, Xi, and other autocratic regimes.
2. I wish the Biden admin would apply a similar standard to Maduro, Lula and other leftist thugs to the extent that they too can be peaceably ostracized. He won’t though (beyond soft condemnation) because his and Harris’s left wing base supports them, whether overtly or quietly. That they cater to this crowd is unforgivable.
3. Trump’s active courting of Orban and similar types is unforgivable in its own right.
4. No matter who wins in November, liberal democracy will lose.
Here’s Mike Munger on Alfred Marshall’s scissors. A slice:
The most fundamental problem, though, is the naïve equating of price changes with costchanges. The logic seems to be that the only legitimate change in prices must come from and be proportional to, changes in cost.
There is no economic basis for such a rule. Cost and price may move together over longer periods of time, but in any period of a few months the price is mostly determined by consumers. This conclusion is not ideological, it’s not controversial, and it dates to one of the giants of economic theory: Alfred Marshall.
In his landmark monograph, Principles of Economics (first published in 1890), Marshall defined, and limited, the role of costs in determining final price (Book V, Chapter 3, Section 7):
[I am] chiefly occupied with interpreting and limiting this doctrine that the value of a thing tends in the long run to correspond to its cost of production…
We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility or cost of production…[W]hen a thing already made has to be sold, the price which people will be willing to pay for it will be governed by their desire to have it, together with the amount they can afford to spend on it. Their desire to have it depends partly on the chance that, if they do not buy it, they will be able to get another thing like it at as low a price.
The “scissors” analogy is quite clear, since the classic “supply and demand” graph in introductory economics even looks like two scissors blades. If you know only “supply” (the schedule of amounts offered for sale at different prices) or only “demand” (the quantities purchased by consumers at different prices), you have no way of predicting the price at any point in time. Marshall’s insight is timeless: in the short run, consumers are generally buying from other consumers, not from producers.
Yet there are already signs that this government-driven investment is a mistake. Auto makers are scaling back electric-vehicle production, which may lead to under-utilized factories. Some green startups are struggling to stay in business, such as Lordstown and Fisker.
The Institute for Supply Management’s purchasing managers index shows the manufacturing industry as a whole has been in almost continuous contraction since autumn 2022, right after Mr. Biden signed the IRA and Chips Act.
Meanwhile, investment in new industrial equipment has been notably weaker under Mr. Biden than Donald Trump. This suggests fewer manufacturers are refurbishing existing plants and investing in technology that will make them more globally competitive.
John Tatum understandably isn’t buying Biden’s and Harris’s “magical labor market claims.” A slice:
To give the Biden Administration’s credit for any success in increasing jobs requires proponents to blatantly misrepresent facts. Most notably, they claim to have added nearly 16 million jobs to the economy, more than any earlier president in one term. It’s true, but it takes credit for the return of about 9.4 million jobs for people who lost their jobs due to COVID-19 precautions and had not yet returned to work at the time Biden took office. Taking credit for the recovery of a large part of the COVID-related, record loss of 21.9 million jobs, far overstates Biden’s contribution and the effectiveness of his policy efforts. In fact, since the COVID recovery ended in June 2022, the Biden Administration witnessed the creation of 6.3 million new jobs, only about 40 percent of the Administration’s claim. In contrast, the previous administration oversaw growth of 6.7 million jobs before COVID hit.
Trump dodged Nick Gillespie’s sensible question about government debt.
AEI’s James Pethokoukis is correct: “Illegal immigrants aren’t the same as home invaders.”
