The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal rightly applauds the Environmental Protection Agency:
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday at long last repealed Barack Obama’s so-called endangerment finding that declared greenhouse gas emissions a threat to public health and safety. Cue the apocalyptic warnings unhinged from reality. What progressives really fear is that they won’t be able to dictate the energy supplies, cars and appliances that Americans can buy.
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal also rightly criticizes the Federal Trade Commission:
Lina Khan may have left to advise Zohran Mamdani in New York, but her ghost still animates the Federal Trade Commission under new Chair Andrew Ferguson. That explains how the agency has now drawn a First Amendment challenge for allegedly targeting a media outfit.
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The FTC justifies its action on grounds that NewsGuard is itself engaging in censorship. Mr. Ferguson has said NewsGuard “led collusive ad boycotts—possibly in violation of our antitrust laws—to censor the speech of conservative and independent media in the United States.”
But Mr. Ferguson misreads the law in going after NewsGuard, a private outfit. The First Amendment protects private actors against censorship by the government.
We’re not fans of media rating shops, since they typically have their own mostly leftward biases. PolitiFact is Exhibit A. NewsGuard’s James Warren once sent us an importuning query objecting to something in an op-ed we had published. But we thought it was a matter of opinion and ignored Mr. Warren, a former political columnist.
Alex Tabarrok’s high hopes that a Trump FDA would be more freedom-oriented than under past administrations have been dashed. Here’s his conclusion:
An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.
Here’s the abstract from a new paper by Brian Albrecht, Alex Tabarrok, and Mark Whitmeyer:
Price controls kill the incentive for arbitrage. We prove a Chaos Theorem: under a binding price ceiling, suppliers are indifferent across destinations, so arbitrarily small cost differences can determine the entire allocation. The economy tips to corner outcomes in which some markets are fully served while others are starved; small parameter changes flip the identity of the corners, generating discontinuous welfare jumps. These corner allocations create a distinct source of cross-market misallocation, separate from the aggregate quantity loss (the Harberger triangle) and from within-market misallocation emphasized in prior work. They also create an identification problem: welfare depends on demand far from the observed equilibrium. We derive sharp bounds on misallocation that require no parametric assumptions. In an efficient allocation, shadow prices are equalized across markets; combined with the adding-up constraint, this collapses the infinite-dimensional welfare problem to a one-dimensional search over a common shadow price, with extremal losses achieved by piecewise-linear demand schedules. Calibrating the bounds to stationlevel AAA survey data from the 1973–74 U.S. gasoline crisis, misallocation losses range from roughly 1 to 9 times the Harberger triangle.
Jimmy Alfonso Licon explains that “immigration arrest quotas undermine ICE’s mission.” A slice:
The logic is straightforward. Violent criminals, gang leaders, and professional smugglers are difficult to locate and expensive to apprehend, often relying on networks of other people to help them evade detection. Pursuing such criminal organizations requires investigations, coordination across jurisdictions, surveillance, and uncertain outcomes, making it easy for agents to come up empty-handed. By contrast, unauthorized immigrants who are otherwise law-abiding are comparatively easy to find. They have fixed residences, work regular jobs, and their children often attend the local school.cMany are already interacting with the state through legal channels, including standard immigration check-ins.
When arrest quotas rise, then, it’s no surprise that arrests have accelerated disproportionately among those who are easiest to find and arrest rather than those who pose the greatest threat.cRecent data confirm this pattern.cEnforcement activity has surged, but the majority of arrests involve individualswithout prior criminal convictions,ca distribution consistent with quota-driven optimization rather than threat-based prioritization. And given the career and political incentives behind meeting those quotas, it is what we should expect. This behavior is rational given the incentives; it would be surprising if agents behaved otherwise.
When, during the 2024 campaign, rumors about Haitians eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio, were disseminated, with Vance’s help, this was his response when confronted with the fact that no facts supported the rumors: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He has a duty to lie because the media are indolent.
Vance has a knack for late — very late — adolescent naughtiness. It is not easy being transgressive in an era when there are few norms remaining to transgress. Undaunted, he tries. Of Europe’s largest war since World War II: “I don’t care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Very edgy.
Performative politics is almost the only politics on offer nowadays. But must it be a coarseness and flippancy competition?
Let it be said on Vance’s behalf that he refuses to present himself as other than what he is. But before celebrating him for his authenticity, attention should be paid to what he authentically is.
