Some Americans may be surprised to learn (or perhaps not, given trillion-dollar budget deficits) that a federal law requires the government to pay inflated prices for many of the products it buys. Passed in 1933, the Buy American Act (BAA) grants, with some exceptions, a significant price preference to US-produced goods and materials in federal procurements. By tilting the playing field against less expensive imported products, the law means the government must spend more money, and purchase fewer goods, or some combination thereof.
While government has never been a byword for efficiency, such protectionism makes it even less so.
Capital has been fleeing the country. On June 1 it cost 16.95 pesos to buy a U.S. dollar. Now it costs 19.7 pesos. The carry trade, which captures the interest-rate spread between the two countries, is one reason the peso has held up during the López Obrador government. But that alone can’t support the currency. Ms. Sheinbaum’s first budget is due Nov. 15 and she will be under pressure from financial markets to bring the 6% budget deficit down to 3% or 3.5%.
Increasing uncertainty about property rights may be her bigger challenge. Last week AMLO effectively expropriated the American-owned Vulcan Materials quarry and port in the state of Quintana Roo by declaring its investment a natural protected area. The Alabama company bought the land in the 1980s and 1990s and built the only deepwater port on the Yucatán Peninsula. It operated for decades without trouble and in full compliance with regulations. It even won recognition for its environmental record.
But then Mr. López Obrador set his sights on the property. He didn’t want to pay the company for its multibillion-dollar operation. So in May 2022 Mexico suspended Vulcan’s permit for the Sac Tun limestone quarry and for the port. That was an indirect expropriation. Now the government has declared the property permanently unusable for the company.
Mr. [Rob]Bonta [California’s Attorney General] garnered headlines last week by suing Exxon Mobil in what amounts to a declaration of war on the U.S. plastics and petrochemical industries, along with the tens of thousands of workers they employ in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“For decades, Exxon Mobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Mr. Bonta declared. His lawsuit accuses the company of creating a “public nuisance” by producing plastics from oil and gas feedstock.
Ms. Harris has walked back her pledge in 2019 to ban plastic straws. But the California lawsuit underscores that progressive elites really do want to banish fossil fuels as well as the plastics and jobs that flow from their production.
The gist of Mr. Bonta’s 147-page lawsuit is that Exxon duped the public by promoting recycling even though the process isn’t economical, because it costs more than producing so-called virgin plastic. The company’s alleged deception supposedly caused California lawmakers in 1989 to pass legislation forcing cities to set up recycling programs “that required mandatory participation by all residents.”
In other words, it is Exxon’s fault that Californians must place plastic waste into separate trash containers even though most of it doesn’t actually get recycled. Mr. Bonta claims that Exxon has “wrongly convinced consumers that plastics separated for recycling would actually be recycled,” though, notably, the state hasn’t repealed that law.
Andrew Stuttaford decries progressives’ ever-increasing authoritarian hostility to free speech.
Tad DeHaven gives us the gist of Kamala Harris’s policy book.
Zoe Strimpel is correct: “Progressives have destroyed the great cities of coastal America.” A slice:
Much of this nonchalant criminality is down to woke officials, especially [Manhattan] public prosecutor Alvin Bragg. Bragg has himself admitted to being frightened on public transport, but it’s thanks to his lax bail laws that so many of the system’s criminals run free despite previous arrests.
Predictably, Bragg dropped criminal charges in June against the anti-Israel protesters who had been arrested after storming a Columbia campus hall and barricading themselves in.
Jason Brennan, at his Facebook page, suggests this classroom exercise: (HT David Henderson)
Try this as a 2-part writing exercise in your classes:
Part 1: Write a very mundane, trivial, platitudinous statement on the board, such as “Sometimes, things change”. Ask the students to rewrite the sentence, but to compete in making it as long-winded and as high-falutin’ as they can. They will all succeed, but they will likely produce a horrible paragraph that reads like typical academic writing.
Part 2: Give them a complicated paragraph, and ask them to rewrite it in a way an 8th-grader can understand. Half won’t be able to do it.
For me, this helps sell the idea that bad writing that sounds fancy is easy, but writing that is rigorous yet engaging and clear is hard. It also helps them realize many of their professors are faking it.
