Samuel Gregg writes about Tocqueville’s economic mind. A slice:
Economic topics were on Tocqueville’s mind from the moment he stepped ashore in America. For one thing, he immediately noticed how frantically Americans pursued wealth. In a May 28 letter to his brother Edouard, Tocqueville wrote, “The profound passion, the only one which profoundly stirs the human heart, the passion of all the days, is the acquisition of riches.” Americans, he added, were “a race of merchants.”
Tocqueville was initially repelled by what struck him as base materialism, but wider mixing with Americans quickly brought home to him that plenty of them had non-economic interests. However, Tocqueville was also driven beyond superficial impressions by his determination to study the facts closely to discover what was really going on beneath the surface of a society in which economic dynamism played such an oversized part. This would lead Tocqueville to arrive at intuitions about economic life as relevant today as in his own time.
Although Tocqueville once expressed a desire in an 1834 letter to his cousin Louis de Kergorlay to author a book about political economy, Tocqueville never penned such a text. He was, however, extremely well-versed in economic thought. Tocqueville knew two of the most influential economic thinkers of his time—John Stuart Mill and Nassau William Senior—and regularly corresponded with them. But the economist who exerted the most influence on Tocqueville’s thought was his fellow Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Say.
Tocqueville read Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique pratiquetwice—the second time while enroute to America. Besides exposing Tocqueville to key ideas expressed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Say stressed a point that Tocqueville never forgot: that while the economy can be studied on its own terms, one should never forget that it is embedded in society.
Even as Mr. Biden’s failures turned the public against immigration, Gallup this summer said 81% of Americans want a path to citizenship for those “brought to the U.S. illegally as children.” That included 64% of Republicans.
GMU Econ PhD candidate Zixuan Ma warns of “the enormous costs of mass deportation.” Two slices:
Trump has frequently discussed the dangers posed by illegal immigrants, but data tell a different story. According to research by the Cato Institute using Texas data from 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000 illegal immigrants while the native-born American criminal conviction rate was 1,422 per 100,000. This means the illegal immigrant conviction rate was 45 percent below that of native-born Americans. Given the high personal cost of deportation, illegal immigrants are strongly incentivized to avoid the attention of law enforcement. By randomly deporting illegal immigrants, the US government would likely raise the rate of crime.
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The GDP of the US would likewise be impacted. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates (PDF) that the US GDP would be 6 percent below long-run baseline if 7.5 million are removed. In 2013, the Bipartisan Policy Center projected a 5.7 percent reduction in if all illegal immigrants were removed. Both scenarios would noticeably undermine US competitiveness, in an era when the US is trying to confront China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea on the world stage.
Leaving aside moral and legal reasons, the economic case against mass deportation is and has long been strong. There are many ways to fix America’s broken immigration system, but mass deportation is not one of them.
Arnold Kling has no rosy notions about the real mission of the Federal Reserve. Two slices:
The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. Very shortly thereafter, the United States for the first time become involved in a European war, initially as a lender to the Allies, subsequently as a co-belligerent. Coincidence? Not entirely.
We are treated to such quaint myths about the purpose of a central bank. “It controls the money supply to steer the economy away from high inflation or high unemployment.” “It is the lender of last resort.”
The real purpose of a central bank is to enable the government to borrow money at a low interest rate.
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In its twentieth-century incarnation, an effective central bank enables the welfare-warfare state. Nowhere is it more effective than in the United States.
Excellent news! “Texas Clinches a School-Choice Majority.”
Michael Strain identifies five reasons why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. A slice:
The Democrats’ focus on identity politics was a problem before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s death, but it has supercharged since then. People see themselves primarily as individuals, not as members of a demographic group. They don’t like being treated as members of a group rather than as individuals.
Recently, Democrats shook their fists and bellowed to the Heavens about the need to expand the Supreme Court, abolish the filibuster, override state abortion laws via federal legislation, and choose presidents by popular vote. All to save Our Democracy. So far as I can tell, all such talk has ceased—as if there were a great disturbance on the Left, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. It’s never wise to seek powers that you would fear in the hands of your adversaries.
Congratulations to newly minted GMU Econ PhD Sebastian Rodriguez!
