Scott Lincicome reports that Trump continues to want to ban exports of diesel.
Barry Brownstein is correct: The price of admission to civilization is humility.
Justin Wolfers discovers merit in what his libertarian friends have been saying. Two slices:
I count Greg Mankiw — a Harvard economist who was one of George W. Bush’s economic advisors — as a dear friend and mentor. Michael Strain at the center-right American Enterprise Institute is a good mate. Jonathan Meer texts me anytime he thinks I’m wrong about something (frequently). I’ve long enjoyed agreeing and disagreeing with libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok in a conversation that has stretched over decades (and it’s no less fun — though a bit less frequent — that I tangle with his Marginal Revolution co-blogger, Tyler Cowen). I’ve learned a lot about trade from Scott Lincicome at Cato, and about fiscal issues from Jessica Reidl who was once at Heritage, but is now at Brookings. One of the great things about economics is that we have a shared language. We can talk and figure out what leads us to to see the world differently.
Except it turned out that everyone I’d been talking to seems to have ended up on the never-Trump side of the Republican fence.
…..
My libertarian-leaning friends have consistently argued against a powerful federal government in favor of individual freedoms. I had — somewhat naively — never taken their views seriously enough. My friends who worked in government were good people, I reasoned, and surely that’s true more broadly.
But I’ve had to admit to my libertarian friends that they were right. Concentration of power can be abused. We’re seeing it happen right now.
And that’s led me to become more small-c conservative. The old conservative idea was that we have rules of the game that have served us well for generations. We should be slow to change them. Our children should be handed the same set of opportunities we had, if not better ones.
The foundation of American prosperity is our institutions — the rule of law, respect for contracts, and deep engagement with the rest of the world. Markets that work, rather than favors for those in power. A democracy. A democracy means that when our leaders do a bad job, we can kick the bums out.
I don’t think that’s a deeply controversial position. But it’s the foundation of our prosperity, and it’s worth defending.
George Will ponders the decline of the book. Two slices:
Supposed menaces multiply rapidly as technologies — smartphones, artificial intelligence — mutate. But the most menacing development involves no exotic technology, so it is disregarded.
But not by James Marriott. This British thinker warns us: An artifact that enabled modernity — skepticism, rationality, science, democracy — is now of rapidly dwindling importance. This artifact, which onlookers said “addicted” its early adopters, was: the book.
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“On the page,” Marriott says, “invective quickly becomes tedious.” On screens, “intransigence and madness” proliferate. We are attempting “to run a democracy without a grown-up conversation.” We are learning this: Reason, tolerance and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.
Is it possible, Marriott wonders, “to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society”? He notes that, in proposing a grotesquely gargantuan Arc de Trump, “the first post-literate president reached instinctively for a visual style that defined autocratic politics before the age of mass literacy.”
Jeffrey Blehar reflects on the sorry story of Jason Arday and Cambridge University. A slice:
It ought to be the end for Cambridge’s credibility. Realistically, we know it will not be. But once more I am reminded of emeritus Cambridge don (and former chair of the school’s Politics department) David Runciman’s archly resigned take on the scandal, written back in August: Of course Arday was a transparent fraud who deserved exposure, Runciman writes, but all in all nothing of great value was lost by him holding his position because nothing of value has ever been created by departments like Arday’s; it’s merely a question of who wins the lottery and gets to fill out the academic position. (Somebody is going to do it.)
