Allen Torrey claims that if Thanksgiving were allowed to fall on the last Thursday of November instead of the now-established fourth Thursday, the result in years with five Thursdays would be to “curtail the Christmas shopping season and harm the national economy” (Letters, Dec. 2).
Not so. Americans are as capable of shopping on a Nov. 23 that falls before Thanksgiving as on a Nov. 23 that falls after. Why? Because the amount of money we spend on Christmas gifts is determined by our incomes, our consumer confidence and the price of goods. The number of calendar days between the two holidays is economically irrelevant.
Even if fewer days caused us to spend less on presents, that foregone money would either go toward other consumer purchases or be kept in savings that fund investments. There’s no reason to suppose that “aggregate demand” is affected by how much Americans spend on Christmas gifts—and, hence, no reason to suppose the economy would be harmed if holiday spending fell.
Also writing wisely about the folly of protectionism is the Editorial Board of the Washington Post. A slice:
Trump’s tariffs have driven up input costs for farmers. Fertilizer prices skyrocketed; some cost $100 per ton more than a year ago. Trump has recognized a handful of the negative consequences, which is why, for example, he removed import taxes on certain fertilizers last month.
GMU Econ alum Erik Matson asks: “What should classical liberals do in these troubling times?” A slice:
Part of the answer is that we need to remain serious about our basic principles and convictions. Classical liberalism offers the world a message of hope and reciprocity. The good of the one—individual or nation—need not come at the expense of the good of many. The peaceable pursuit of interests within a set of established rules protecting property and enforcing contracts facilitates cooperation and yields astounding material abundance.
We know the world can be a better place because, in so many places, it is so much better than it was in recent history. The concentration of power corrupts. Protecting the freedom of all to pursue their interests their own way serves the common good of humankind.
These insights are fundamental—but easily forgotten. They must be reintroduced and applied to novel policy contexts and challenges each generation. But it is also important for us today to deal with thornier issues of political coherence and stability. We must focus more concerted attention on how to preserve the underlying social structures that we take for granted in our higher-level discussions of policy reform.
The history of the twentieth century is, in large part, the story of competing totalitarian ideas put into practice, and the destruction, immiseration, and death they produced. It is a rarity in human history, perhaps unprecedented, that the lives of four generations could be told primarily through the lens of a clash of ideas that touched every corner of the globe and every facet of society, politics, and economics. That contest was fought in the pages of journals and newspapers, at the ballot box, and in wars both traditional and undeclared.
Most of these ideas, of course, were bad ones. An optimistic or perhaps Whiggish interpretation of twentieth-century intellectual history would highlight how Marxism, Communism, socialism, Nazism, fascism, postmodernism, and Islamism all rose up and were brought down, at times by their own failures and internal contradictions, and at others by the moral and martial forces of freedom.
None of these ideas were small or for the faint of heart. All sought to reorder society along radical lines, fundamentally change human nature, and extirpate root-and-branch the evolved institutions of private life and the liberal democratic order. The grandiosity of these ideas and their totalizing tendency stirred the souls of their followers, calling them to a mission to build a new society—and to destroy an existing one.
A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, the difference between then and now could not be more stark. While ours is a moment racked by popular discontent, the diminution and desecration of formal and informal institutions (often at the hands of these institutions’ ostensible leaders), and a significant increase in the breadth of ideas in circulation, there has been very little in the way of legitimately new ideas this century, either at the level of ideology or public policy. Indeed, most of the bad ideas in circulation today are old bad ideas, not new bad ideas.
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The less intellectual corners of the new right offer something even less novel; ideologically, they present a grab bag of racial essentialism, ethnic grievance, and antisemitism of varying degrees of gentility. As with [Curtis] Yarvin, novelty here is restricted to the realm of presentation and promotion, in particular, a delight in subverting social norms of decency.
The left is likewise in thrall to old bad ideas occasionally gussied up in ambitious rhetoric. Doctrinaire Marxism having fallen out of favor, the body count of communism still too fresh in historical memory, the left’s economic ideology is primarily a kinder, gentler “democratic socialism” or “social democracy.” On questions of identity (which now regrettably carry more political salience than do matters of political economy), there’s the same mishmash of postcolonialism, critical theory, third-worldism, anti-white racial resentment, and anti-Americanism that characterized much of leftism in the twentieth century. “Wokeism,” the only significant left-wing ideological innovation of the past quarter-century, had no new intellectual underpinnings; it was novel only in its rhetoric and Internet-optimized political tactics.
The Minnesota Medicaid grift illustrates how open-ended government welfare can easily become an inducement for fraud. A new Government Accountability Office report finds the pandemic-era sweetened ObamaCare subsidies are also ripe for gaming.
The GAO last fall began an undercover test in which it submitted insurance applications for fictitious individuals to the federal ObamaCare exchange and insurance brokers. Nearly all of its invented people were able to enroll in subsidized plans despite submitting false or no records to verify their identities and incomes.
Mark Jamison urges Florida governor Ron DeSantis to champion AI rather than regulate it.
Federal and state antitrust enforcers and legislators may want to reconsider their algorithm-skeptical positions, which if maintained could retard technology-driven improvements in the working of U.S. markets. In assessing recent government litigation aimed at limiting algorithmic-pricing freedom, keep in mind that the government’s record in seeking to regulate business pricing is dismal and rife with economically harmful failures, as reflected in shortages, black markets, inflation, and reduced innovation.
Simply put, price controls undermine the economy. They prevent market participants from reacting to constantly changing market conditions, thereby misallocating resources, and reducing the quality of goods and services over time. “Softer” forms of pricing oversight through antitrust litigation may be less draconian, but it should not be assumed that they are without economic costs.
