GMU Econ alum Patrick Newman’s letter in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:
“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” John Godfrey Saxe’s quip certainly applies to the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, legislation meant to clean up Chicago’s meat-packing industry (“‘The Jungle’ Is a Cautionary Tale for DOGE” by Peggy Noonan, Declarations, March 15).
In reality, the Beef Trust improved sanitation in slaughterhouses. It replaced wooden cattle pens with brick structures, revamped sewage systems, minimized dust through electrical power and reduced waste in the Chicago River by making by-products from carcasses. Canned meat products and preservatives decreased spoilage, bacterial contamination and monotonous diets. The Beef Trust likewise reduced prices for ordinary Americans.
These innovations incurred the wrath of smaller butchers, cattle ranchers and reformers like Upton Sinclair. He was an avowed socialist who wanted to write a sensationalist book on wage slavery. The official report by the Bureau of Animal Industry noted that he engaged in “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact.” The law encouraged industry consolidation in the Beef Trust by, among other things, imposing new costly sanitary requirements on smaller competitors
Contrary to popular history, the saga of the Beef Trust is a great example of how free-market capitalism improves the lives of ordinary Americans while government intervention makes things worse.
Prof. Patrick Newman
University of Tampa
Also excellent is this letter-to-the-editor of the Wall Street Journal by Jon Jewett:
Ms. Noonan points to air-traffic controllers as the pre-eminent example of government employees we couldn’t do without. This is an odd choice given that other countries, including Canada, the U.K. and Germany, have successfully privatized their air-traffic-control systems. If Washington can manage to shift air-traffic controllers from the public to the private sector, it will be doing a service to the nation.
George Will argues that “Congress needs a Supreme Court jolt to rein in a rampant presidency.” A slice:
Today, Congress is evidently unembarrassed about being mostly a spectator in the bleachers at the game of government. And it probably regrets the court’s major questions doctrine, which is: If Congress intends to authorize executive agencies to make decisions with large economic and political consequences, it must clearly say so. The court can further discomfit Congress, constructively, by curbing its power to delegate its core powers.
Arnold Kling writes that we Americans have a gambling problem.
Pierre Lemieux reminds us of the importance of the rule of law.
Bob Graboyes reflects on the loss of privacy.
My Mercatus Center colleague Paul Dragos Aligica reviews Vikash Yadav’s book about F.A. Hayek, Liberalism’s Last Man. Two slices:
Indeed, Yadav puts his finger on one of the most curious episodes of recent intellectual history. For more than three decades, the epistemic community of libertarians and classical liberals had almost no reaction to the emergence, expansion, and then explosion of an entire literature dedicated to an ideological critique of a dogmatic and extravagant nature, targeting a cartoonish straw man called “neoliberalism.” They left unanswered an almost unmatched assault on the principles, theories, and values of a classical liberal nature. The situation became even more bizarre as the largest part of this literature escalated to unprecedented levels of sloppy scholarship, was more denunciatory than analytical or empirical, and, in some cases, bordered on conspiracy theory. It was only very late in the game, after the outlandish abuses featured in works such as Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains (2017, New York: Viking), that a timid reaction started to emerge, mostly in a defensive mood.
…..
Yadav’s vision is one of a universal civilization. He is convinced that Eurocentric Western liberalism is exhausted. The future of “meritocratic liberal capitalism” is global, based on a fusion that transcends its European and Western roots. He thinks in terms of what V. S. Naipaul called in his famous Manhattan Institute lecture “our universal civilization.” [Erwin] Dekker’s book provides the foundation for understanding the roots of this way of thinking in the Austrian tradition and the way that tradition contributes to its defense and growth. Both Dekker’s and Yadav’s works are significant contributions to the emergence of this classical liberal revival at the global level. Such contributions have been long overdue and should be applauded and emulated. Not only are they based on the letter and textual analysis of the Austrian and Hayekian writings, but they also reflect their spirit and aspirations in a profound and fertile way.
