George Will eloquently defends economic competition, creative destruction, and free trade. Two slices:
Today, the president’s long list of nations being beastly to America includes mighty Switzerland, which he has threatened with stratospheric tariffs. (Because it has pushed upon Americans unconscionable amounts of chocolates and wristwatches?) The “China shock” was larger than the “Swiss shock,” but not really shocking.
A frequently cited study says China destroyed 2.4 million U.S. jobs between 1999 and 2011. If so, in those 13 years, as many jobs were eliminated by Chinese imports as are eliminated, on average, by the normal churning of the U.S. economy every 41 days. Between 2000 and 2015, U.S. dynamism involved Americans leaving manufacturing and other jobs about 900 million times.
Manufacturing as a percentage of post-1945 U.S. GDP peaked in 1954 and has declined ever since, as it has in most developed nations. The U.S. decline has been remarkably steady, around 2 percent a year, since before the surge of Chinese imports began. Veronique de Rugy, of the Cato Institute and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, notes that today’s manufacturing job problem is a shortage of workers to fill the more than 600,000 openings in the sector.
…..
[Henry] Clay, however, thought national “honor” was a casualty of U.S. “dependence” on international commerce, so he praised the self-sufficiency of the farm of Kentucky’s first governor: “You will behold every member of his family clad with the produce of their own hands and usefully employed, the spinning wheel and the loom in motion by day-break.” And at nightfall, the family gathers at the hearth to make, with their own hands, smartphones and pharmaceuticals.
Trump has often claimed that foreign exporters, not Americans, pay tariffs. In fact, importers (such as retailers) remit the duty to the government. They can, in theory, persuade exporters to absorb some or all of the tariff, or pass it along to their customers. While who ultimately pays can’t be known precisely, several economists estimate that American businesses paid 50% to 60% of Trump’s tariffs to date, with the balance split roughly between exporters and consumers.
So if the Supreme Court gives Trump what he wants, tariffs could end up as one of the biggest business-tax increases in decades, wiping out the tax benefits for expensing capital investment in this year’s Republican tax and spending law.
There would also be no end to uncertainty. “Unlike most other tariff authorities, these tariffs are not enshrined in statute, there’s no process to change them, and they can change very rapidly, in a day, without much notice, as we’ve seen,” said Greta Peisch, a trade attorney at Wiley Rein and former general counsel for the U.S. trade representative.
As professors and students are returning to campus, the journal Nature has published another culture-war screed masquerading as academic critique.
In “Decolonize scientific institutions, don’t just diversify them,” eight scholars representing multiple fields declare that “Western science” is “rooted in colonization, racism and white supremacy.” The task of the scientist is thus no longer the dispassionate pursuit of objective truth—the scholars dismiss the whole idea as a myth—but rather the passion-filled, “anti-racist” work of “decolonizing” the disciplines and promoting “Indigenous research methodologies.” The scholars also advance something called “citation justice,” which takes the diversity, equity and inclusion ideology to a new stratosphere. They would even sort footnotes by race, sex and sexuality.
Loony jargon sloshing out of our universities isn’t new. But this particular provocation comes as many campuses are in crisis mode. The Trump administration has moved aggressively against grotesque antisemitism tolerated by elite schools. Universities have fought back, accusing the administration of extortion in pursuit of political sound bites. But the locus of the problem—and of eventual reform—is neither the faculty lounge nor the Oval Office. It’s the boardroom.
Modern universities are officially governed by regents or trustees. Board members are typically prominent people with consequential jobs who exhibit great accomplishment and judgment. But for too long, when confronted with anti-intellectual activism, politicized inquiry and attacks on campus free speech, trustees have buried their heads.
Jack Nicastro reports on some prominent Republicans’ Biden-esque approach to regulating AI. A slice:
Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R–Mo.) recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference revealed an opposition to AI more specific and extreme than [Ron] DeSantis’. Hawley claimed that recent technological developments have proven inimical to the common man’s liberty: “Every so-called innovation that the tech class has delivered in recent decades operates as a power transfer…from us to them.” But, as Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward points out, the “decentralization, democratization of communications and banking and labor and travel…made possible by new tech” has been a boon to people and society.
Hawley most proudly displays his Luddism and lust for central planning when he says that “most jobs should be reserved for humans. Only humans ought to drive cars and trucks.” As the Cato Institute’s Jennifer Huddleston explains, adopting such a policy would hinder the development of autonomous vehicles, whose enhanced safety features have the potential to “save more than 30,000 American lives each year.” Hawley’s statement also implies that AI will push people out of their jobs, but rumors of an impending AI labor market apocalypse are greatly exaggerated.
John O. McGinnis makes a strong case that more government spawns more gerrymandering.
Arnold Kling tells why he is, understandably, no fan of the prominent Harvard economist Raj Chetty:
I am not a fan of Chetty. His study claiming to show that moving to a good neighborhood has dramatic effects on life outcomes reminded me of his study claiming to show that having a good kindergarten teacher has dramatic effects on life outcomes. This work becomes prominent because of social desirability bias—many people want to believe that these sorts of interventions work. But social desirability bias is a reason to discount a study.
John Stossel wisely calls on the U.S. government to reduce its holdings of real estate.
