My colleague Bryan Caplan is always insightful. Two slices:
In my eyes, every election is a trainwreck. Two proudly irrational tribes rally behind two self-congratulatory demagogic mediocrities as if they were the Second Coming. Listening to any “serious” candidate speak is torture. It’s like sitting in on the class presentations of C students, knowing that one of these C students will, on the basis of their half-baked words, become the most powerful person on Earth. What a disgraceful system.
You can tell me “One of these candidates must be the lesser evil” from dawn to dusk. But I just can’t stop thinking, “They all make my flesh crawl — and if you don’t feel the same way, there is something very wrong with you.”
…..
I, in contrast, hold politicians and voters to an eminently reasonable standard: Don’t advocate government action until you credibly show that, despite all the free market’s merits, you know how to do better.
Brian Albrecht makes clear that “economics still matters for policy.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a raving conspiracist with a dangerously loose grip on reality. Maybe that makes him an ideal match for Donald Trump, but that is not the question before the Senate. The question before the Senate is whether he should run the Department of Health and Human Services, and the answer — even after accounting for some due deference to the president’s preferences — is that he very obviously should not.
Amity Shlaes explains “the economic consequences of populism.” A slice:
Historian Robert Higgs has developed a useful thesis to explain this lost decade [of the 1930s]: “regime uncertainty,” the notion that an erratic, aggressive government can terrify businesses into slowdown. The same theme was taken up by the chief economist of Chase Bank, Benjamin Anderson in a 1945 book, Economics and the Public Welfare. Though individual policies promulgated during the Depression may have differed, Anderson noted, there was one commonality: authorities’ arrogance. “Preceding chapters,” concluded Anderson at the end of his section on the Great Depression, “have explained the Great Depression of 1930–1939 as due to the efforts of governments, and very especially of the Government of the United States, to play God.” When playing God failed, Anderson noted, our government had determined that “far from retiring from the role of God,” it “must play God yet more vigorously.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson is taking his city on a progressive kamikaze course, and Chicago’s Democratic political establishment may be tiring of the spectacle.
On Thursday the City Council met in special session to block the mayor’s plan to use a $300 million property tax increase to balance the city’s budget. The vote was unanimous, 50-0, so is Mr. Johnson getting the message yet?
Also rightly critical of Chicago’s current mayor is C. Jarrett Dieterle.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Sarah Skwire about grief and Adam Smith.
Harold Black ponders the draining of the swamp.
Bill Shughart investigates “why pollsters misjudged the 2024 election.”
Nonetheless, what I was really struck by was the contrast between the chancellor’s insistence that “the key test for regulation is whether it will make our economy more dynamic and more competitive” and something else I saw the same day – Paul Goodman’s quietly-damning Twitter thread about the Football Governance Bill working its way through Parliament.
Here you have an undeniably dynamic and competitive industry – perhaps the one remaining area in which England really leads the world. And what does government do? It sets up a wholly unnecessary, utterly ill-conceived regulator to issue operating licenses, determine revenue distribution, require consultation on ticket prices, and mandate diversity, equality, and inclusion plans. (Let’s not forget that the Conservatives started it.)
