Megan McArdle is correct: “Abandoning DEI won’t fix academia’s left-leaning problem.” A slice:
But conservatives who are giddy about such victories should note that this is a very limited win. After all the diversity offices are renamed and the diversity statements withdrawn, academia will remain near-monolithically left. This is a problem for conservatives on campus and an even bigger problem for society, because it takes a lot of scholarly expertise to maintain a modern industrial economy. Scholarship that excludes half the available ideas isn’t up to the job — if only because such lopsided expertise can’t command the public trust.
That problem can’t be cured, however, by forcing academia to abandon the most overt and annoying manifestations of its political skew. Nor can the right simply demand that academia hire more conservatives, because in most disciplines there aren’t enough conservative PhDs to staff ideologically balanced campuses, or even provide otherwise left-leaning campuses a vibrant conservative counterweight.
Getting to that point means rebuilding a pipeline of right-leaning academics that will have to start with graduate students and spit out full professors 20 years later.
As for those who are appalled by any strings on federal money, what did they expect after events of recent decades? American universities were once widely respected as citadels of learning that were the best in the world. Taxpayers were content to leave them alone, even as the schools became ever more dependent on federal dollars.
But over time too many universities have become intellectual monocultures that refuse to allow alternative points of view. The public saw conservative speakers shouted down on campus, if they were invited at all. Leftist critical theory and anti-Western, anti-American views often dominate curricula.
Then last spring the schools erupted into a display of antisemitism that presidents and trustees seemed unable or unwilling to control or discipline. Traditional liberal elites shrank under pressure from the left. Americans can’t be expected to hand a blank financial check to schools that promote values that are inimical to their own.
My former GMU Econ colleague William Shughart explains that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should be eliminated. Three slices:
“Government” and “efficiency” should never appear in the same sentence, a truth that I frequently reiterate to my students. The reason is that the public sector is institutionally incapable of functioning cost-effectively. Unlike the private sector, the government does not face a profit-and-loss bottom line that incentivizes allocating the scarce resources under its control to their highest-valued uses. Politicians and bureaucrats, by and large, cannot capture any personal benefits, nor do they bear any personal costs for their budgetary profligacy and unsound policymaking because they spend other people’s (the taxpayers’) money rather than their own.
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American exceptionalism in the realm of antitrust law enforcement is a historical conceit of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressive Era. The Sherman Act—the planet’s first competition statute—was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Harrison in 1890. It declared restraints of trade to be illegal (Sec. 1) and attempts to monopolize commerce to be felonies (Sec. 2). The new law, which was opposed by many economists of the time—because of its doubtful constitutionality and anticipated ineffectiveness in restraining supposed monopoly power—quickly faced strong headwinds in the federal courts.
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Scholarly research has cast doubt on the effectiveness of many of the FTC’s consumer protection rules. For instance, the Commission has been “uncompromising” in refusing to permit sellers to condition product warranties on buyers’ purchases of brand-name complementary inputs, such as replacement parts and maintenance services. Furthermore, enforcement of the Magnuson-Moss Act has not led to improved clarity in warranties. The Commission’s Funeral Rule, which mandated itemized pricing of funeral goods and services previously sold as single-priced packages, resulted in consumers spending more to inter their loved ones than they had spent beforehand. The FTC’s ad substantiation doctrine, which requires sellers to validate factual claims about product features and performance before making them, has led, among other things, to less informative advertising messages. Additionally, since reputational capital is a seller’s most valuable asset, markets punish false or misleading advertising claims more severely than any fine the Commission can impose, which, in practice, have been regressive, disproportionately burdening small sellers. Worse still, blind faith in the FTC’s rules and regulatory effectiveness may undermine consumers’ diligence in gathering pre-purchase information.
Decrying over-active antitrust interventions, Mark Jamison writes that
a last-minute lawsuit to block a proposed merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks? This lawsuit, filed just nine days after Trump’s inauguration and before his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was confirmed, has all the hallmarks of a rushed effort by Biden’s holdovers to impose their will on a vital sector of the economy.
HPE and Juniper announced their plans to merge on January 9, 2024, with the goal of strengthening their AI-driven networking products and integrating complementary product lines where they did not compete. Customers of the market leader, Cisco, which dominates about 40% of the sector, saw the merger as a welcome competitive challenge to Cisco—a sign that the deal could benefit customers by injecting more innovation and price competition into the market.
Yet, despite a year of review with no known customer complaints, the Justice Department sued to block the deal. This move came six months after European Union and UK regulators—who are often skeptical of U.S. tech mergers—gave the merger their blessing. The UK Competition and Markets Authority concluded that the merger “does not give rise to a realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of competition,” while the European Commission determined that HPE and Juniper “are not each other’s closest competitors” and that the combined firm would still face strong competition from a “wide range of competitors.”
The DOJ’s justification? A vague claim that HPE and Juniper’s union would “increase concentration in an already concentrated market.” This argument is both misleading and economically illiterate. The networking technology sector is evolving at breakneck speed, with the imminent launch of 6G, AI-powered infrastructure, and new computing-networking synergies rendering yesterday’s market structures irrelevant. The notion that a merger today would lead to harmful consolidation ignores the rapid innovation cycles that constantly reshape competition, often coming from unexpected directions.
In reality, the DOJ’s case primarily benefits Cisco. And while Cisco may enjoy this regulatory gift, a real concern should be American firms’ abilities to compete against Chinese tech giants like Huawei and H3C. Both firms stand to gain if the DOJ’s lawsuit succeeds in stifling U.S. competitors.
Jack Nicastro reveals the damage likely to be done by the E.U.’s officious assault on U.S. tech companies. Here’s his conclusion:
Expropriating billions of dollars from American businesses is injurious and capricious. Citizens of the E.U. benefit from the American technology sector; siphoning capital from U.S. tech firms leaves them with less to commit to research and development, stymieing further innovation. The E.U. should stop penalizing American firms that outcompete their European counterparts.
In my book, I document George Washington’s amazing entrepreneurship and innovation. Starting out from a background that was humble compared to the other Founders and lacking resources for a college education, Washington became an apprentice surveyor for the neighboring Fairfax family at 16. He quickly built a lucrative freelance surveying practice and speculated in real estate by purchasing or asking for compensation in some of the undeveloped land he surveyed.
Decades later—after he acquired Mount Vernon due to the untimely deaths of his older brother Lawrence and Lawrence’s family—Washington abandoned tobacco as the farm’s cash crop, diversified into wheat and dozens of other crops, and built a grist mill to sift flour that he would export throughout the colonies and to the West Indies and Great Britain. Washington would put his name on these bags of flour, essentially trademarking the flour with the “G. Washington” imprint on the bags to differentiate it from his competitors, pioneering the practice of branding that we have today. In addition, he turned Mount Vernon into what historian Harlow Giles Unger called in his book, The Unexpected George Washington, “a vast agro-industrial enterprise” that included a blacksmith shop to make tools such as horseshoes and nails and a mini textile factory to make clothing, the latter of which was run largely by Martha Washington. Mount Vernon, by the way, has rebuilt the grist mill and whiskey distillery that Washington placed near the grist mill after he was president.
But these very ventures got Washington pulled into the vortex of regulation the British Parliament foisted upon the American colonies. The red tape stemmed especially from mercantilist trade policies. The Navigation Act of 1651 gave Great Britiain complete control of trade routes for the colonies, which meant that colonists officially could only export and import goods with the mother country.
With limited trade routes and heavy shipping costs for goods from Britain, colonists began to make their own things as well as grow things, just as Washington did with his enterprises at Mount Vernon. The Industrial Revolution that began taking hold in Great Britain during the eighteenth century was also coming to the colonies on a small-scale basis due to the efforts of individual entrepreneurs like Washington.
But Parliament saw colonial manufacturing upstarts like the enterprises at Mount Vernon as a threat to British manufacturers, despite how small the former were in comparison. Parliament passed laws such as the Iron Act, Hat Act, and Wool Act to sharply restrict or ban colonial entrepreneurs from making everything from nails and horseshoes to hats and wool carpets.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Bob Ewing about personal success.
