Ryan Bourne is no fan of Joseph Stiglitz’s book The Road to Freedom. A slice:
But in declaring that perfect markets don’t exist, Stiglitz tilts at windmills. No real-world market is perfect. The logical leap is to assume that they are perfectible by governments, staffed by the same fallible humans who operate in the private sector. What we surely need in the messy real world is to weigh the costs and benefits of policies, on the margin, drawing on the experience of how government actually functions. Yet statistical claims appear, on average, just once every eight pages in this text — an extremely low figure for an economics book.
“In his focus on market failure,” as development economist William Easterly, a fellow former World Bank employee, has said of Stiglitz, “Joe often misses the bigger problem — the need to roll back the disastrous distortions of markets by government — such as government-induced hyperinflation, negative real interest rates, severe price controls, and punitive taxes on exports.”
Michael Lucchese warns of the dangers that would be unleashed if the Senate filibuster is killed.
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman asks if the striking dockworkers are price-gouging. A slice:
It’s almost as if “price gouging” is just an undefined term Ms. Harris will use arbitrarily to attack businesses and blame them for Washington-created inflation.
John McCormack, in this long piece at The Dispatch, asks what happened to Tucker Carlson.
The economy and rising cost of living are priorities for voters, and they consistently give Mr. Trump the advantage over Ms. Harris on both issues. Anyone else in Mr. Trump’s position would keep his campaign pitch short and simple: Are you better off? It would be the central message of every rally, every campaign stop, every interview.
Unfortunately for Republicans, Mr. Trump would rather spend his time insulting Ms. Harris’s intelligence when he isn’t spreading lies about stolen elections or rumors about migrants eating household pets. The upshot is that national surveys show the vice president with a slight lead, and polling in battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome has the candidates essentially tied.
While Mr. Trump perfects his woe-is-me shtick and remains distracted by peripheral issues that play mostly to the MAGA crowd, Ms. Harris has had time to redefine herself among the small group of swing voters who say they haven’t made up their minds. Even though Ms. Harris is Mr. Biden’s No. 2 and inextricably linked to the administration’s poor record, Mr. Trump has allowed her to run as the candidate better suited to move the country in a new direction.
Reason‘s Christian Britschgi is impressed with neither J.D. Vance nor Tim Walz.
Donald Trump is a thoroughly despicable man, a narcissist, and abject liar devoid of dignity and incapable of consistent behavior worthy of the presidency. Even now when a George Costanza-type “opposite” suppression of his instincts would advance his political interests, Trump has opted not to focus on Harris’ policy absurdities and reversals, instead criticizing Harris’ crowd size estimates, ethnic background, and other personal attributes more appropriate for a junior high school lunchroom setting.
…..
Kamala Harris is a supreme lightweight who has never thought about policy issues in a serious way, who does not know how to do so, and whose instincts are profoundly misguided. Anyone who can believe that price controls will improve economic outcomes can believe anything. But in terms of domestic policies, as president she would prove profoundly ineffective, as the likelihood of a GOP takeover of the Senate this year is very high, and the major questions doctrine as decided by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v EPA will impose real limits on regulatory policy as a circumvention of Congress. Moreover, Harris would be a poor bet for reelection in 2028 precisely because of the silliness of her thinking, the perverse results of her policy preferences, and the incoherence of her rhetoric. The comedy potential of a future debate between, say, Senator Tom Cotton and Harris is a harbinger of her reelection prospects.
