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Unsurprisingly, Arnold Kling’s take on Greg Ip’s take on China’s effect on the global economy is sound. A slice:

Our ability to produce and consume goods and services depends on our productivity. China does not affect that. China can affect the mix of goods and services that we produce. If it sells us some stuff at below cost, we can say “thank you” and produce something else instead.

As long as we are looking only at our consumption opportunities, trade is positive sum. If China wants to sell us stuff below cost, that hurts them and helps us.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post reveals “the lunacy of asking tourists to turn over their social media history.” A slice:

America’s closest allies are among the 42 countries in the visa waiver program whose visitors would now be subject to these checks. Not only does this seem impractical, creating unnecessary red tape for our friends to navigate when coming to America. It also cedes the free-speech high ground. Can the U.S. inveigh against the U.K. arresting an Irish comedian for his tweets or South Korea enacting “disinformation laws” when it also treats speech as dangerous?

It’s certainly not going to help tourism. Hospitality industry leaders complain they weren’t consulted before the new rule was proposed in the Federal Register, which kicked off a 60-day period for public comment. The agency responds that this is just “the first step in starting a discussion.” If the administration is so interested in reading what foreigners have to say on social media, they should heed the complaints from people across the world who fear old Facebook posts could prevent them from getting to see the World Cup next year.

Ramesh Ponnuru explains that, on the question of birthright citizenship in the U.S., “the president and his allies are … wrong about the Constitution.” A slice:

The meaning of a law is, in the first place, not limited to what its authors mainly had in mind. The equal protection clause, also in the 14th Amendment, was motivated principally to ensure that state governments protected ex-slaves. Because it was written in general language, though, it extends to other groups and it doesn’t apply only to racial discrimination.

Here’s the speech that María Corina Machado would have personally delivered had she – the 2025 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize – been able to get to Oslo in time. Two slices:

Meanwhile, something deeper and more corrosive took place. It was a deliberate method: to divide society by ideology, by race, by origin, by ways of life; pushing Venezuelans to distrust one another, to silence one another, to see enemies in one another. They smothered us, they took us prisoners, they killed us, they forced us into exile.

It had been almost three decades of fighting against a brutal dictatorship.

And we had tried everything: dialogues betrayed; protests of millions, crushed; elections perverted.

Hope collapsed entirely, and belief in any kind of future became impossible. The idea of change seemed either naive or crazy. Impossible.

Yet, from the very depths of that despair, a step that seemed modest, almost procedural, unleashed a force that changed the course of our history.

We decided, against all odds, to run a primary election. An unlikely act of rebellion. We chose to trust the people.

To rediscover one another, we traveled by road and by dirt path in a country with gasoline shortages, daily blackouts, and collapsing communications.

Forbidden from advertising, without money or media willing to speak our names, we crossed it armed only with conviction.

Word of mouth was our network of hope, and it spread faster than any campaign. Because our desire for freedom was very much alive within us.

…..

Our political prisoners, the persecuted, their families, and all who defend human rights; those who sheltered us, fed us, and risked everything to protect us; the journalists who refused silence, the artists who carried our voice; my exceptional team, my mentors, my fellow political and social activists; the leaders around the world who joined and defended our cause; my three children, my adored father, my mother, my three sisters, my brave and loving husband, who’ve all supported me throughout my life; and above all, the millions of anonymous Venezuelans who risked their homes, their families, and their lives out of love.

To them belongs this honor.

To them belongs this day.

Peter Savodnik reports on “the revenge of the climate realists.” A slice:

Of course, [Michael] Shellenberger said, the decline of climate alarmism does not mean the decline of alarmism. We had segued seamlessly from the Cold War–era fear of nuclear war to the fear of overpopulation to the fear of climate change.

And now?

“Now, it’s probably going to be AI security,” [Steven] Koonin said. “That’s a big one. Or maybe microplastics. It could definitely be microplastics.”

It did not help that we inhabited a supremely political moment, [Roger] Pielke said. The polarization, the anger, the constant ratcheting up of our emotions—it made us more susceptible to other people’s moral crusades.

“I would not expect a reckoning,” Pielke added.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds the exposure of some faulty climate ‘science.’ A slice:

Still other scientists in August noted in a comment that “data anomalies arising from one country” in the “underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.” When the Uzbekistan data was removed and statistical uncertainty corrected for, the results were no longer “statistically distinguishable from mitigation costs at any time this century.”

In other words, the economic harm from climate change no longer exceeded the costs of the government interventions to do something to arrest warming temperatures.

The study had so many errors that Nature has now retracted it, but what an embarrassment. “Post-publication, the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995–1999,” the retraction says.

The retraction is also a black eye for the Network for Greening the Financial System, a group of central banks and financial regulators that incorporated the study’s projections into its bank climate stress test scenarios. The Federal Reserve belonged to the network until Chair Jerome Powell withdrew in January.

One question is why the study’s glaring errors weren’t caught by peer reviewers before it was published. One culprit might be conformity bias, as reviewers didn’t want to gainsay findings that support the narrative that humanity is killing the planet and the entire world economy must be rearranged to prevent it. When politics is in the saddle, the chances of bad science increase.

If progressives want to know why so many Americans don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable.

Eric Rasmusen accuses the American Economic Association of hypocrisy.

My GMU Econ colleague Mark Koyama reviews W. Walker Hanlon’s The Laissez Faire Experiment.

Responding to a context-less – and, hence, misleading – tweet by E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., GMU Econ alum Jeremy Horpedahl tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

A Big Mac was $2.45. The average wage in 1994 was $11.33. One hour of work bought 4.6 Big Macs

Today: Big Mac is around $6. Average wage is $31.53. One hour of work buys 5.2 Big Macs

No one took anything from you!

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… is from page 15 of Paul Seabright’s excellent 2004 book, The Company of Strangers:

Citizens of the industrialized market economies have lost their sense of wonder at the fact that they can decide spontaneously to go out in search of food, clothing, furniture, and thousands of other useful, attractive, frivolous, or life-saving items, and that when they do so, somebody will have anticipated their actions and thoughtfully made such items available for them to buy. For our ancestors who wandered the plains in search of game, or scratched the earth to grow grain under a capricious sky, such a future would have seemed truly miraculous, and the possibility that it might come about without the intervention of any overall controlling intelligence would have seemed incredible.

DBx: I say again to those who doubt that free markets are genuine and that these markets work wonders for ordinary people: Step into a modern American supermarket and behold the cornucopia before your eyes! Every item – each of the nearly 50,000 goods – is priced such that you can purchase it easily. Think of all the efforts of the countless strangers who daily work to make this cornucopia available to you. What prompts them to perform these great services? And what guides them to perform these services in ways that are genuinely useful to you and other strangers?

You have a soul of vinegar or a mind of mud if you are not in awe of the glorious human cooperation spontaneously achieved by market processes.

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Here’s a letter to a regular, and friendly, correspondent.

Tim:

Thanks for your email. You write:

Leadership in China, regardless of political persuasion, isn’t stupid, so what’s its motive for such a policy? World dependence on its products? To temporarily ramp up production to expand capacity? What?

Leadership in China might not be stupid, but this fact doesn’t mean that it’s intelligent and informed enough to centrally direct the Chinese economy in ways that will steadily improve the lives of the ordinary people of China. The honchos and mandarins in Beijing are just as certain as is leadership in any other country to fail in their attempts to override the market at allocating resources productively.

Like government officials everywhere, the rulers in Beijing have no idea what are the inevitable unintended consequences of their economic interventions. Drunk with power – power that shields them from frank assessments of, and feedback on, their proposals – Pres. Xi’s and his cronies’ industrial policies will make China’s economy weaker and more brittle, even if they do manage to artificially expand a handful of industries and thereby impress economically ignorant and gullible westerners.

As for Xi & Co.’s motives, undoubtedly the overriding one is to retain power. And in pursuit of this goal they might well be unmatched geniuses. But it is their very need to suppress economic and other freedoms in order to cling to power that will ensure that they will never succeed at making China anything close to the highly productive economic colossus that is America.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Gale Pooley – inspired by the research of GMU Econ alum Jeremy Horpedahl – reports that “housing amenity abundance has increased significantly since 1956.” A slice:

Median home size has almost doubled, rising from about 1,150 square feet in 1956 to roughly 2,210 square feet today. Over the same period, average household size has shrunk from 3.3 people to 2.51. The result is a dramatic increase in living space per person—from just 348 square feet in 1956 to about 880 square feet today. That’s 532 more square feet per person, or a 153 percent increase. Had space per person stayed at its 1956 level, the typical home today would measure only about 874 square feet.

The median home cost about $14,500 in 1956—roughly $12.61 per square foot. With average wages at $1.85 an hour, each square foot required 6.82 hours of earning. Today, the median home price is about $420,300, or $190.18 per square foot. However, average wages have risen to $36.53 an hour (before benefits), bringing the time price down to 5.21 hours per square foot. So, while the dollar price per square foot has risen 15-fold, wages have increased nearly 20-fold. The result is the time price of housing has fallen by almost 24 percent.

Compared to 1956, we now enjoy 532 more square feet per person as well as homes packed with 3.7 times more amenities—and all of it for about 24 percent less time per square foot.

Patrick Carroll reveals what U.S. cities with the fastest declining rental rates have in common with each other.

George Will decries the ham-fisted intrusions of the U.S. government’s executive branch into higher education. Here’s his conclusion:

Finally, it is almost sublimely hilarious that Trump’s compact forbids universities to “belittle” — wait for it — “conservative ideas.” Such as? Civility? Free trade? Fiscal continence? The separation of powers? The rule of law? Keeping the public and private sectors distinct by not conscripting corporations (Intel, U.S. Steel and others) into the public sector? Government too modest to decree that universities must be “safe spaces” for conservatives (who used to be proud of not being snowflakes)?

The Trump administration is today’s comprehensive belittler of conservative ideas. Its solicitude for “conservative ideas” will not encompass this one: Many things are beyond government’s proper scope and actual competence. Watching today’s politics toy with an institution of MIT’s complexity and importance is like watching a toddler play with Sèvres porcelain.

Mitch Daniels applauds Indiana legislators for resisting intimidation from the White House to gerrymander. A slice:

It’s not that Indiana Republicans have deserted their president. Ninety percent of them voiced their approval of him in the same survey. It is simply that this proposal runs so counter to most people’s sense of principle, and priority. Attempts by outside political action committees to generate pro-redistricting rallies at the Statehouse flopped pathetically.

Jack Nicastro is correct: “The real villain in Minnesota’s $1.5 billion fraud scandal isn’t Somalis—it’s the feds.”

Arnaud Bertrand shares the details of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s new, absurd requirements for foreign tourists to the U.S.: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Insanely, submitting your past 5 years’ social media to enter the U.S. as a tourist is only a small part of the proposed upcoming requirements.

You’ll also need to give your DNA (!) among many other new requirements.

All the additional info you’ll need to give as a tourist eligible for ESTA (meaning those tourists who don’t need a visa, for instance from EU, UK, Australia, Japan, and other Visa Waiver countries):

– All social media accounts from the last 5 years
– All your biometrics: face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris
– All your phone numbers from the last 5 years
– All your email addresses from the last 10 years
– IP addresses and metadata from your submitted photos
– Names of your family members (parents, spouse, siblings, children)
– All your family members’ phone numbers from the last 5 years
– Your family members’ dates of birth
– Your family members’ places of birth
– Your family members’ residencies
– All your business phone numbers from the last 5 years
– All your business email addresses from the last 10 years

If you do need a visa (i.e. non ESTA), I imagine the requirements are going to be far more drastic.

This is straight from the Department of Homeland Security documentation which you can find here.

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… is from page 168 of the 1955 edition of Stuart Gilbert’s translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s wisdom-packed 1856 book, The Old Régime and the French Revolution:

In fact, those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long.

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This column by Greg Ip received a lot of undeserved attention.

Mr. G__:

Thanks for your email asking for my thoughts on Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip’s recent claim that “China’s growth is coming at the rest of the world’s expense.”

Here are my thoughts in a nutshell: Ip could not be more mistaken.

He writes about China:

In the past five years, its export volumes have soared while imports have flatlined. China is swallowing up a growing share of the world’s market for manufactured goods. This reveals an uncomfortable truth: Beijing is pursuing a “beggar thy neighbor” growth model at everyone else’s expense.

Let’s reword Ip’s passage to more clearly reveal the reality that it describes:

In the past five years, the goods it has produced and shipped to foreigners for their use have soared while the outputs it has gotten in return have flatlined. Those of us outside of China are benefiting from ever-more of China’s manufactured goods without our having to give to China in exchange any more of our goods. This reveals an uncomfortable truth for the Chinese people: Beijing is enriching the rest of the world by pursuing a “beggar thy own citizens” degrowth model.

A people are made poorer, not richer, when their government arranges for them to produce more output for foreigners’ use while simultaneously restricting what they receive in exchange from foreigners for their own use.

You, of course, would make your own household poorer, not richer, by obliging yourself, your wife, and your children to produce more goods for your neighbors’ use while preventing yourself, your wife, and your children from accepting from your neighbors anything more in exchange. The victims of your household’s bizarre, self-destructive trade policy wouldn’t be your neighbors; they’d benefit. The victims would be you and your family.

This economic reality isn’t changed if a government compels every household and firm within its jurisdiction to produce more goods for foreigners’ use while preventing these households and firms from accepting from foreigners anything more in exchange.

Economic self-destruction does not become economic self-help just because a government enforces self-sacrifice on a national scale.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is understandably unimpressed with Trump’s attempt to use tariff revenues to compensate farmers for some of the damage that farmers are suffering as a result of the very tariffs that generate those revenues. Two slices:

President Trump said Monday he is “delighted” to give American farmers “$12 billion in economic assistance.” According to Mr. Trump, this money will be coming from his tariffs, which is interesting, in that much of the pain farmers are feeling is also coming from his tariffs. Now watch, as the left hand pays off the right.

…..

“Trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Mr. Trump once boasted. Then why does he keep needing to divert billions of dollars to compensate the people whose livelihoods are collateral damage? Mr. Trump promised “Liberation Day.” He’s offering farmers a bailout instead.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

Trump’s tariffs are also a small-business-killer in other industries, including manufacturing. The big guys can navigate this (or pay someone to do it for them). The little guys don’t stand a chance.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, decries “the bipartisan war on prices.” A slice:

Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Their “10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act“—also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign—sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25 percent interest?

In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They’re the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn’t just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.

Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans—the people proposals like these are supposed to protect—at risk of being “debanked.” Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks, and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.

It gets worse. A cap this low wouldn’t merely shrink credit availability; it would invert it. At 10 percent, banks would only lend to the safest, highest-income borrowers. Credit cards would become a luxury product for the affluent—a financial advantage while everyone else is pushed into the financial shadows.

Jennifer Huddleston warns against siccing the antitrust dogs on app stores.

Arnold Kling ponders conservatism.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino (now a columnist at the Washington Post) offers some basic economics lessons to Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and others who insist that corporate CEOs are overpaid. Two slices:

Why are these executives paid so much? [Starbucks CEO Brian] Niccol’s career offers an interesting example. He is among the highest-paid CEOs in the food industry, and he previously worked for Taco Bell and Chipotle. Both times, he led successful turnaround efforts, and Starbucks needs one. The company has been closing stores and cutting its workforce while its stock price has stagnated for several years.

It’s too early to tell how Niccol will do at Starbucks, but his record at Chipotle is complete, and it’s remarkable. Niccol became the CEO of Chipotle in 2018. By the time he left for Starbucks in 2024, Chipotle’s revenue had doubled and its stock value had octupled.

…..

The question becomes: How much credit does the CEO deserve? Ten percent? Five percent? Chipotle’s answer during Niccol’s tenure: less than 1 percent.

The company’s market capitalization, the total value of all outstanding shares of its stock, on the day Niccol became CEO in March 2018 was about $9 billion. When he left in August of last year, it was about $77 billion.

That means, over six years, the shareholders of Chipotle paid Brian Niccol a mere $167.3 million to increase their wealth by $68 billion. He got paid about 0.2 percent of the wealth he helped create.

Yesterday (December 11th) was the 300th anniversary of the birth of George Mason the man, who is celebrated here by Jonathan Horn. Two slices:

Sick with gout, depressed over the death of his wife, and worried what would happen to their nine surviving children, Mason often refused summons for his service in assemblies away from home. But in the spring of 1776, as the American colonies inched toward independence, he went to Williamsburg to serve in the convention that would design a new constitution for Virginia as well as a declaration of rights. Mason largely wrote the drafts, including the first right enumerated: “That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights. . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Sound familiar? Copies of the draft Virginia Declaration of Rights appeared in Philadelphia just as the Continental Congress assigned Jefferson to a committee to write a “declaration of independence.” In fairness, Jefferson didn’t boast of any “originality” in his quickly written work. The Declaration, he explained in his response to Henry Lee, “was intended to be an expression of the American mind. . . harmonizing sentiments of the day.” Indeed, had Jefferson attempted to do otherwise, his fellow delegates would not have agreed to affix their names to his work.

Jefferson, with some editing help from his fellow delegates, did exactly what they needed him to do and perfected the phrasing. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The improvement on Mason’s version is, to borrow a phrase, self-evident.

…..

Fashionable as it’s become to argue that it was in defense of slavery that the colonists ultimately declared independence, it’s not true. As historians like Gordon Wood and Jack Rakove have pointed out, the forces leading to independence were already, to borrow Washington’s analogy, “like a snowball in rolling” long before Dunmore printed his proclamation. Only in desperation did he resort to emancipation and, even then, not for the slaves he himself owned.

Rich Lowry rightly excoriates Tucker Carlson. Two slices:

It’s passing strange that a self-styled defender of Western civilization and scathing critic of the persecution of Christians would find so much to like about Qatar, which is not part of the West and suppresses Christianity (apostasy from Islam is illegal, and so is proselytizing for a non-Islamic faith, while public worship is restricted for non-Islamic faiths).

Also, it doesn’t make sense for a free man making a stirring statement about freedom to do it by cozying up to an unfree country like Qatar.

In fact, Qatar is as inapt a location for making such a statement . . . as Russia (although Doha’s grocery stores are probably even better than Moscow’s).

…..

The aforementioned Russia is another country that Carlson puffs up, and it, too, is illiberal and hostile to the West.

All this just speaks to how deeply disaffected Tucker Carlson is with the West as it exists now and its course over the last 80 years or maybe more. It says it all that he is much more prone to attack Winston Churchill than the emir of Qatar.

For pilgrims and dissenters, the embrace of a place outside America with a different culture and different system always involves an implicit, and often explicit, critique of America.

So it is with Carlson and Qatar. The kingdom may trample on basic human rights, but it is orderly, illiberal, and not in any danger of being talked into becoming allies with Israel by the Jewish lobby.

What’s not to like?

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… is from page 380 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics:

The fortune made by Henry Ford was an incidental by-product of the historic expansion of productivity that expanded the lives of millions. Why third parties should imagine themselves entitled to intervene in such processes, to which they contributed nothing, and to preempt the decisions of others – decisions for which the interventionists pay no price if they are wrong – is one of the great mysteries of our time.

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Here’s a note to a commenter at my Facebook page.

Mr. Reviere:

Commenting on Facebook, you write:

Tariffs are taxes intended to create an incentive within the supply chain to rebase in the US as much as is economic for investors to do. Deal with that. Where the supply chain can’t or won’t move, it’s just a tax, one of many tax choices….

But someone has to address this ‘for our side’, because you can bet your cotton socks that someone is doing it in every other country. So you are stuck with the need for a regulator in the US, simply because they already have their counterpart in every other country.

The premise of your comment has several fundamental flaws.

First, you presume that the amount of economic activity that occurs within a country without tariffs is suboptimal. But how do you know? What source do you have that reveals this alleged information to you? More to the point, what source do you suppose government officials have that reveals such information to them? The fact is, neither you nor any politician or bureaucrat is justified in presuming that the pre-tariff amount of economic activity in the U.S. is suboptimal. Further, economic theory and history give us good reason to believe that economic activity under a regime of free trade is much more likely to be close to ‘optimal’ than is any pattern engineered with tariffs and other interventions.

Second, you ignore the fact that no sources of supply can be ‘rebased’ in the U.S. without destroying some other sources of supply currently ‘based’ in the U.S. If, for example, tariffs cause Americans to produce more steel, the resources used to produce this additional steel must be diverted away from other U.S. industries, causing outputs in these other industries to fall. Do you have any idea which particular U.S. industries will shrink as a result of whatever economic ‘rebasing’ is achieved by Trump’s tariffs? Of course you don’t, because no one does or could possess such knowledge. This reality, in turn, means that your implicit presumption that tariff-induced ‘rebasing’ will be economically – or even militarily – worthwhile is unwarranted.

Third, while you correctly note that other countries have government officials who fancy that they know how to use government power to override market forces in order to improve their economies’ performance, you incorrectly presume that these officials get it right. The economic interventions of government officials abroad, no less than the economic interventions of government officials here, are distorted by political considerations and, worse, also by the inescapable ignorance of such officials of the myriad economic details and trade-offs that they’d have to know if their interventions were to have any prospect of success.

The economic interventions of foreign-government officials weaken, rather than strengthen, their economies. You therefore err in asserting that we must have our government officials commit the same folly.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030