The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly calls out the hypocrisy of “socialist crybullies.” A slice:
It’s been a tough week for Cea Weaver, the socialist activist appointed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to lead his Office to Protect Tenants. First her old tweets began to recirculate, including previous assertions that “homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy” and calls to “seize private property.”
Then on Wednesday news reporters confronted Ms. Weaver on the street and asked if she wanted to comment on her mother’s ownership of a home in Nashville that the Daily Mail said is valued at $1.4 million. “The 37-year-old began running down the street,” the paper’s Natasha Anderson wrote, “then said ‘No’ through tears.”
Isn’t this the way it often goes? The socialist Bernie Sanders, whom Mr. Mamdani cites as an idol, used to rage about millionaires and billionaires. Then Mr. Sanders hit seven figures himself, and he quietly shifted his focus to the billionaires alone. “I wrote a best-selling book,” Bernie said in 2019. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States. She believes that “rent control is a perfect solution to everything” — not least because it is an “effective way to shrink the value of real estate.” She considers that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy,” she believes that “homeownership is racist,” and she holds that the highest aim of government ought to be to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” And they say that ambition is dead in America!
Yeager placed great attention on the need for clear communication in conveying the fundamental principles of political economy. As he noted in a December 1979 speech, “The economic ignorance that is so painfully evident in public-policy discussions is ignorance not of the subtleties or technicalities but of the basic truths. Economists should make an effort to communicate these basics, and not only to their students but also to a wider audience.” For Yeager, the basics included: scarcity, choice, opportunity cost, gains from trade, and the principle of spontaneous order based on free markets, a just rule of law, private ownership, and monetary stability. He believed that, in giving policy advice, economists should keep those fundamentals at the forefront.
Paul Mueller reviews Phil Gramm’s and my The Triumph of Economic Freedom.
Dominic Pino sheds no tears for the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Two slices:
Good riddance. The United States no longer needs the CPB, if it ever did. The organization’s mission to expand access to information is superfluous in an era when Americans are drowning in information. Radio and TV aren’t public goods and are amply provided by the private sector.
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Actual private corporations are also “funded by the American people” — their customers, who pay them in exchange for valuable goods and services. Actual private nonprofit corporations rely on donations from people who choose to give, not tax collections from people who are legally required to give.
