Juliette Sellgren talks about F.A. Hayek with the unparalleled Hayek scholar, Bruce Caldwell.
Deirdre McCloskey identifies “the most dangerous female economist in the world.” Two slices:
Decades ago, unlike many of my beloved colleagues in modern economics, I stopped believing that I was so smart that I could socially engineer other people’s lives.
By contrast, the most fashionable female economist in the world nowadays, Mariana Mazzucato (b. 1968), believes that she can govern innovation by the sheer, hopeful application of ‘contemplation’, or by telling lovely fairy tales about what has caused innovations.
And, unlike her, I stopped wanting to use the state to coerce people. I follow the liberal motto of my Midwestern grandmother, born in the 1890s: ‘Do anything you want, but don’t scare the horses’. Professor Mazzucato dearly wants to stop you from doing what you want, and has no worry at all about scaring the horses. For their own good, you see – you and the horses. It’s the statist tradition from Hobbes, Rousseau, Comte and the New Liberals of the 1880s and the Keynesians of the 1930s, adopted nowadays without much reflection by most economists. Thus the great Paul Samuelson – my mother’s longtime mixed doubles tennis partner, you need to know – and his prize student, also a Nobel winner, Joseph Stiglitz. Both, you also need to know, were raised in Gary, Indiana. Imagine two Nobel winners from Sculthorpe. Both fiercely statist and anti-liberal, in Mazzucato style, with added maths.
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Her elegant and self-confident and economically primitive books, such as one reviving the labour theory of value, inspire in my own country Senator Elizabeth Warren from the Left and Senator Marco Rubio from the Right. The senators recommend therefore a Mazzucatian ‘industrial policy’. Let us have arts graduates in governmental offices arrange for innovations. The European Commission under Mario Draghi is about to spend 800 billion euros every year choosing winners from Brussels. Don’t just stand here. Do stuff. Allow things to happen. A century ago, the American journalist and wit H. L. Mencken saw that ‘the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary’.
A few years ago, Alberto Mingardi and I catalogued Mazzucato’s economic and historical errors in some detail. Read ‘em and weep. They’re coming.
Edward Short admires Joseph Epstein.
Ms. Harris has adopted the Biden spending agenda and more. Mr. Trump is no fiscal conservative, but on deficits and inflation his first-term record is far superior to the four years of Biden-Harris.
The often-asked, often-fumbled question of what Harris would do differently from Biden as president raises the same insoluble political problems that immigration does. Her most specific response came on “The View,” where she initially said she couldn’t think of anything she would change and then said she would put a Republican in her Cabinet because she does not “feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.” Luckily for her, nobody to date has asked whether she meant to imply that Biden suffers under that burden of pride.
What, meanwhile, is Harris supposed to say to Baier’s question of when she noticed Biden’s decline? A vigorous defense of Biden’s health would lower her credibility with a public that largely agrees with Baier’s premise that the president has lost a step. But there’s no way to acknowledge Biden’s diminished statewithout angering Biden, his family, aides and die-hard supporters, all of whom she needs — or without making herself look complicit in hiding the truth for months or years.
Any sitting vice president who runs for president faces some of these challenges. You have to be your own person and distance yourself from unpopular aspects of the incumbent. At the same time, you have to keep your party unified and avoid accusations of disloyalty and opportunism. That might be why only one vice president, George H.W. Bush, has run for president successfully since 1837. Unfortunately for Harris, Joe Biden is no Ronald Reagan.
Bob Graboyes describes Kamala Harris’s “Oakland problem.” A slice:
There are two curious asymmetries to the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. First (at least among people I encounter) Trump supporters know his behemothic shortcomings well, whereas Harris voters seem barely cognizant of her gaping deficiencies. Second, though this is a coin-toss election, Trump supporters are mostly leaving me alone, whereas Harris supporters—friends, readers, total strangers—are hysterically imploring me to see things their way, insisting that I must, MUST!! scurry to the polls and vote for her. Wondering why Harris can’t get her message across, they emit waves of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression (no acceptance, yet).
“Trump tariffs would increase laptop prices by $350+, other electronics by as much as 40%.”
GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert writes about Biden, labor unions, and labor legislation.
