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In my latest column I write about various con artists, including those who seek election to government offices. Two slices:

But where is this horse sense at election time? With the November election fast approaching, websites, television, radio, newspapers, and local streets are bursting with pleas from perfect strangers asking me to trust them with my wealth and liberties.

“Vote for me and I’ll make your life better by building more roads for your use – and at no expense to you! Under my plan, only people richer than you, who now don’t pay their fair share in taxes, will pay for the roads!”

“Elect me and I’ll improve your well-being by reducing the cost of medical care and improving its quality!”

“Once in Congress, I’ll work tirelessly for you and all Virginians!”

These television and website ads are also filled with clips – obviously staged – of the candidates talking with school children, shaking hands with senior citizens, listening earnestly (usually while wearing hard hats) to factory workers, commiserating with ordinary townsfolk at the local diner, and playing touch football at community picnics. We’re supposed to believe that these office-seekers are singularly special and caring servants of others. We’re supposed to feel confident that we can trust these individuals with power as well as with access to our purses.

…..

Strangers asking for bank-account numbers do differ in some ways from strangers asking for votes. But I’m struck by the similarities. In both cases, individuals who we don’t know and who don’t know us seek to gain our trust so that they can then gain open-ended access to our wealth. In both cases, the strangers seeking our trust proclaim there to be a special, personal connection between them and us. And in both cases there is every reason to distrust these proclamations.

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Phil Gramm praises Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 today. Two slices:

Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, doesn’t get enough credit for the quarter-century economic boom from 1983 to 2008 and the underlying resilience of the economy since. Without Mr. Carter’s deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads, energy and communications, America might not have had the ability to diversify its economy and lead the world in high-tech development when our postwar domination of manufacturing ended in the late 1970s. The Carter deregulation helped fuel the Reagan economic renaissance and continues to make possible the powerful innovations that remake our world.

The Airlines Deregulation Act of 1978, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 unleashed competition and spawned the invention and innovation that gave America the world’s most efficient transportation and distribution system. The cost of flying a mile declined by half and air travel became a mainstay of American life. The logistical cost of moving goods shrank as a share of gross domestic product by 50%. The leader of that effort, recently retired FedEx CEO Fred Smith, describes Mr. Carter’s “underappreciated leadership” as follows: “The reduction of logistics costs in the late 20th century was profound, largely unreported and underappreciated. These farsighted changes were the great achievement of the Carter presidency.”

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By 1979, when I came to Congress, the Carter administration was desperately trying to cope with inflation and interest rates that were both in the double digits and rising. As a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a co-author of the bipartisan conservative alternative budget resolution of 1980, I had back-row standing space in the room as Mr. Carter sought to hammer out a program with a Democratic Congress to deal with the energy crisis and the exploding inflation rate. Mr. Carter never struck me as a micromanager in over his head. At every turn in trying to expand energy production and stop the inflation, he ran into the entrenched old guard of the Democratic Party, which wanted no part of a new competitive world or any fiscal restraint.

Russ Roberts talks with Mike Munger about the great Italian autodidact Bruno Leoni.

Speaking of Mike Munger, I’m pleased to have been his guest for an episode of The Answer Is Transaction Costs; we spoke about law, James Buchanan, F.A. Hayek, and Bruno Leoni.

George Leef describes California as leading the way “in undermining freedom of speech.”

But also a threat to freedom of speech is Donald Trump.

Jon Miltimore looks into Kamala Harris’s political opportunism and media bias.

Andrew Byers explains that “spreading democracy may not be in the United States’ best interest.” A slice:

The United States has a dismal track record of imposing democracy. Two cases in particular — West Germany and Japan — are usually held up as successes, the exemplars of what can be achieved by forcibly transforming autocracies into democracies. Unique factors present in both those societies are present in few others since World War II. Both were orderly, disciplined, homogeneous societies already interested in liberalization, reform, and embracing Western values and institutions. Contrast those cases with the two most recent ones attempted by the United States: Afghanistan and Iraq. Both efforts failed catastrophically and have not resulted in the creation of Western-style liberal democracies. The key problem is that many states and societies don’t currently want to be democratic. To impose democracy on these countries would be an unwanted imposition, and one likely to require the use of US military force.

Sheldon Richman decries “the preoccupation with income and wealth inequality.” A slice:

To start with the basics, we are not talking about inequality. We’re talking about income and wealth differences. Substitution of the term inequality is an appeal to emotion, a cashing in on other senses of the word. “You oppose equality? Don’t you believe that ‘all men are created equal’?” That’s demagoguery not argument.

In a market-oriented economy, most income is not distributed. There’s no distribution to describe as equal or unequal, fair or unfair. (What the government does is another story.) As Ludwig von Mises, wrote 102 years ago in Socialism: As Economic and Sociological Analysis, “Under Capitalism incomes emerge as a result of market transactions which are indissolubly linked up with production.” That’s not distribution or allocation.

Eric Boehm is correct: “The government monopoly on donated kidneys is killing Americans.”

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… is from page 195 of the 1962 Gateway edition of University of Georgia economist David McCord Wright’s unfortunately forgotten 1951 book, Capitalism:

The attitude toward capitalism taken in this book is simply that, as long as most people accept its basic requirements, it is on balance the most workable method of getting continued growth, change, opportunity, and democracy in a relatively peaceful manner. We are not trying to maintain that the system is perfect….

DBx: Yes. And no requirement is more basic to capitalism – or, indeed, to any sort of economy that people expect will generate high and rising standards of living for as many people as possible – than that production be guided by the desires of income earners who, as consumers, spend their own (and only their own) money as they choose. To the extent that people as consumers are obstructed in exercising their right to spend their money in whatever peaceful ways they choose, the economy wastes resources and fails to produce as much as possible. This conclusion isn’t diluted by the fact that a common reason for obstructing people’s right to spend their money as they choose is to stimulate production.

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Here’s Colin Grabow on a new study that “finds high costs and few benefits from [the] protectionist Buy American Act.” A slice:

Some Americans may be surprised to learn (or perhaps not, given trillion-dollar budget deficits) that a federal law requires the government to pay inflated prices for many of the products it buys. Passed in 1933, the Buy American Act (BAA) grants, with some exceptions, a significant price preference to US-produced goods and materials in federal procurements. By tilting the playing field against less expensive imported products, the law means the government must spend more money, and purchase fewer goods, or some combination thereof.

While government has never been a byword for efficiency, such protectionism makes it even less so.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports on the rising economic oppression in Mexico – a trend almost certain to continue under incoming president Claudia Sheinbaum. A slice:

Capital has been fleeing the country. On June 1 it cost 16.95 pesos to buy a U.S. dollar. Now it costs 19.7 pesos. The carry trade, which captures the interest-rate spread between the two countries, is one reason the peso has held up during the López Obrador government. But that alone can’t support the currency. Ms. Sheinbaum’s first budget is due Nov. 15 and she will be under pressure from financial markets to bring the 6% budget deficit down to 3% or 3.5%.

Increasing uncertainty about property rights may be her bigger challenge. Last week AMLO effectively expropriated the American-owned Vulcan Materials quarry and port in the state of Quintana Roo by declaring its investment a natural protected area. The Alabama company bought the land in the 1980s and 1990s and built the only deepwater port on the Yucatán Peninsula. It operated for decades without trouble and in full compliance with regulations. It even won recognition for its environmental record.

But then Mr. López Obrador set his sights on the property. He didn’t want to pay the company for its multibillion-dollar operation. So in May 2022 Mexico suspended Vulcan’s permit for the Sac Tun limestone quarry and for the port. That was an indirect expropriation. Now the government has declared the property permanently unusable for the company.

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley details some unintended consequences of the interventions by California’s hubris-slathered government. A slice:

Mr. [Rob]Bonta [California’s Attorney General] garnered headlines last week by suing Exxon Mobil in what amounts to a declaration of war on the U.S. plastics and petrochemical industries, along with the tens of thousands of workers they employ in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

“For decades, Exxon Mobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Mr. Bonta declared. His lawsuit accuses the company of creating a “public nuisance” by producing plastics from oil and gas feedstock.

Ms. Harris has walked back her pledge in 2019 to ban plastic straws. But the California lawsuit underscores that progressive elites really do want to banish fossil fuels as well as the plastics and jobs that flow from their production.

The gist of Mr. Bonta’s 147-page lawsuit is that Exxon duped the public by promoting recycling even though the process isn’t economical, because it costs more than producing so-called virgin plastic. The company’s alleged deception supposedly caused California lawmakers in 1989 to pass legislation forcing cities to set up recycling programs “that required mandatory participation by all residents.”

In other words, it is Exxon’s fault that Californians must place plastic waste into separate trash containers even though most of it doesn’t actually get recycled. Mr. Bonta claims that Exxon has “wrongly convinced consumers that plastics separated for recycling would actually be recycled,” though, notably, the state hasn’t repealed that law.

Andrew Stuttaford decries progressives’ ever-increasing authoritarian hostility to free speech.

Tad DeHaven gives us the gist of Kamala Harris’s policy book.

Zoe Strimpel is correct: “Progressives have destroyed the great cities of coastal America.” A slice:

Much of this nonchalant criminality is down to woke officials, especially [Manhattan] public prosecutor Alvin Bragg. Bragg has himself admitted to being frightened on public transport, but it’s thanks to his lax bail laws that so many of the system’s criminals run free despite previous arrests.

Predictably, Bragg dropped criminal charges in June against the anti-Israel protesters who had been arrested after storming a Columbia campus hall and barricading themselves in.

Jason Brennan, at his Facebook page, suggests this classroom exercise: (HT David Henderson)

Try this as a 2-part writing exercise in your classes:

Part 1: Write a very mundane, trivial, platitudinous statement on the board, such as “Sometimes, things change”. Ask the students to rewrite the sentence, but to compete in making it as long-winded and as high-falutin’ as they can. They will all succeed, but they will likely produce a horrible paragraph that reads like typical academic writing.

Part 2: Give them a complicated paragraph, and ask them to rewrite it in a way an 8th-grader can understand. Half won’t be able to do it.

For me, this helps sell the idea that bad writing that sounds fancy is easy, but writing that is rigorous yet engaging and clear is hard. It also helps them realize many of their professors are faking it.

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… is from pages 164-165 of philosopher Michael Huemer’s new book, Progressive Myths (original emphasis):

But as it turns out, government behavior is not very well predicted by asking what they are supposed to do. It is better predicted by asking about the process by which government agents are selected and the incentives they face. The bureaucrats who make regulations generally have no incentive to protect the public, apart from the warm feeling inside that goes along with doing what one is supposed to do. If they make a regulation that causes prices to rise while having no effect or a slight negative effect on quality, nothing will happen to them. They won’t lose money, they won’t lose their jobs, and most members of the public will never even realize that they did that. If members of the public even hear about the regulation, most will assume that the agency had to do it to protect the public.

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… is this recent comment on Facebook by my emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague, Vernon Smith; Vernon’s comment is about Kamala Harris:

Her words are salad because her thinking is salad.

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GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino continues to argue against protectionism. A slice:

Daniel Hannan, in a speech to the House of Lords, wants to know why British citizens are being taxed extra when they buy tomatoes from Morocco.

Aside from having been a member of the European Parliament before Brexit, which he championed, Hannan is the president of the Institute for Free Trade. For all of protectionists’ talk about “strategic” tariffs on “critical” goods, actual protectionist measures currently on the books often make no sense and don’t even protect anything.

Arnold Kling explains that “our systems for determining who is influential seem to have decayed.”

David Rose rightly criticizes economists who give credence to the ‘theory’ – such as the idiotic one peddled by Kamala Harris – that inflation can be caused by greed.

Steven Greenhut rightly criticizes Trump and Vance for their uninformed attacks on immigrants from Haiti.

Tevi Troy looks back on the career of New York Times columnist William Safire. A slice:

Safire’s weekly column made news and was read by world leaders, who were also his sources. Yitzhak Rabin was a friend and a source, even as the two men disagreed politically. Safire framed and hung on his wall a 1988 column of his that Vice President George H. W. Bush had heavily marked up. “I have the greatest job in the world,” Safire said. “I’m free to write, to select my subject and say anything I want about the subject.” When his name was broached as a possible Secretary of State, he scoffed, saying, “Why take a step down?” He ended his column in 2005 and died four years later.

Bob Graboyes riffs interestingly on music.

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… is from page 60 of the 2006 Liberty Fund edition of Ludwig von Mises’s 1956 volume, The Anti-capitalistic Mentality (available free-of-charge on-line here):

Neither does the wage earner depend on the employer’s arbitrariness. An entrepreneur who fails to hire those workers who are best fitted for the job concerned and to pay them enough to prevent them from taking another job is penalized by a reduction of net revenue. The employer does not grant to his employees a favor. He hires them as an indispensable means for the success of his business in the same way in which he buys raw materials and factory equipment. The worker is free to find the employment which suits him best.

DBx: Mises was born on this date, September 29th, in 1881.

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Eric Boehm reports on just how much it would cost to make toasters in the United States.

Quin Hillyer writes about the economic danger we Americans will suffer if Trump carries through with his tariff threats.

GMU Econ alum David Hebert explains why Zephyr Teachout is mistaken when she advises that economists be ignored when the discussion turns to government-imposed restrictions on so-called “price gouging.” A slice:

But back to Teachout’s arguments for anti-price-gouging laws: she claims that “short-term demand cannot be met by short-term supply.” But an economist would point out that producers do not need to “spin up” new factories or increased capacities in the short term. Instead, they need to respond to price-signals. In such cases, resources bound for other parts of the country would be redirected to the area where the price is higher. This is what happened with lumber during Hurricane Katrina and bottled water during Hurricane Sandy. Trucks carrying these precious resources were recalled and rerouted to New Orleans and New York City, respectively. This reduced the supply in the “low-demand” areas of the country and provided the increased quantity-supplied in the area experiencing temporarily high demand.

Lest we think that this phenomenon is isolated to natural disasters, we saw the same happen in Flint, Michigan during its water crisis. Because the price of bottled water rose, more bottled water was sent there to people in desperate need of it rather than other locations where it was less necessary.

George Will makes the case for stopping Putin’s incursions into Ukraine. Here’s his conclusion:

The West, including Germany, has given Ukraine substantial succor. But absent many more weapons, with fewer restraints upon their use, the West might be purchasing protracted defeat, thereby vindicating Putin’s estimation of the West’s inability to persevere.

Arnold Kling is frustrated with large language models (LLMs).

Juliette Sellgren talks with GMU Econ alum Nicholas Snow about prohibition.

David Henderson asks: “Is there a good case for requiring gasoline sellers to carry minimum reserves?”