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… is from page 104 of Michael Strain’s excellent 2020 book, The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It):

Both the populist left and right are turning inward – anxious about the future, closed to to the world, attempting to return to an imagined past, intoxicated with nostalgia or with the concept of an unobtainable utopian future. Both are retreating from the importance of personal responsibility, embracing a narrative of victimhood, and treating those with whom they disagree as enemies to be defeated rather than as fellow citizens with whom to compromise.

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… is from page 152 of the late Stanford University economic historian Nathan Rosenberg’s December 1991 paper “Critical issues in science policy research,” as this paper is reprinted in Rosenberg’s 1994 collection, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History:

The most successful American research laboratories in private industry have demonstrated that it is possible to perform research of both a fundamental and an inter-disciplinary nature in a commercial, “mission-oriented” context.

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Cathy Young brilliantly defends liberalism against the ill-informed attack on it by Yoram Hazony. A slice:

Before writing off Enlightenment liberalism as a dead end, though, we would do well to remember what came before it. Almost everyone abhors France’s Reign of Terror, during which revolutionary violence may have killed as many as 300,000 people; but the French Revolution’s conservative critics rarely acknowledge the territorial and religious warfare that regularly erupted in Europe during the preceding centuries. Half a century before the fall of the Bastille, about half a million people from seven countries—mostly civilians—lost their lives in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), which broke out because the ascension of Maria Theresa to the throne of the Habsburg empire (Austria) was disputed and several other monarchs saw their chance for a land grab. A few years later, unresolved disputes from that conflict led to the Seven Years’ War, which killed about 1.3 million.

Jeff Jacoby is correct: the ballpark is no place for the national anthem.

Kevin Williamson neatly exposes the politically opportunistic hypocrisy of both Democrats and Republicans concerning the nomination and appointment of U.S. Supreme Court justices in presidential-election years. Here’s his conclusion:

It would be easier if we stopped pretending that this fight is about something other than straightforward power politics.

Here are Steve Landsburg’s brief thoughts on the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Trump, and a likely Trump nominee to fill the vacancy, left by Ginsberg’s death, on the Court.

Phil Magness documents the New York Times‘s whitewashing it’s own recent record regarding its infamous “1619 Project.”

Citing, among others, Deirdre McCloskey and Tom Palmer, Ethan Yang eloquently decries 2020’s mad abandonment of principles.

Jacob Sullum calls for an end to the so-called “war on drugs.”

Steve Horwitz and Frank Stephenson rightly advise that “following the science” includes “following the social science.”

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… is from page 259 of Matt Ridley’s important 2020 book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom:

Technology is absurdly predictable in retrospect, wholly unpredictable in prospect.

DBx: This reality is yet another that is predictably ignored by proponents of industrial policy as a means of improving the economic fortunes of the bulk of ordinary people within a country. These proponents fail to understand the importance of permissionless innovation – of open-ended, competitive trial-and-error – of emergent order. They are economic creationists, intellectually no more credible than are biological creationists who deny the reality of evolution by natural selection.

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… is from page 106 of the late Stanford University economic historian Nathan Rosenberg’s insightful 1992 paper “Economic Experiments,” as this paper is reprinted in Rosenberg’s 1994 book, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History:

It is inherently difficult to experiment [economically] and to introduce numerous small changes, and to do so frequently, in a large hierarchical organizational structure where permissions and approvals are required from a remote central authority.

DBx: Each proponent of industrial policy, whether from the political left or right or middle, necessarily presumes that the government officials who craft the industrial policy perform their crafting with god-like knowledge. For any such plan to work – that is, for any such plan to generate outputs that when either consumed directly in the home country or traded for imports improve the economic well-being of the people of the country as much as possible – the drafters of the plan must determine just what exactly will be produced, in what quantities, and how these outputs will be produced.

If the drafters of the plan do not have such knowledge, then after the plan is launched errors will eventually be committed. Adjusting to the discovery of these errors will require revision of the plan. Such revision will, in turn, often require that the original plan be adjusted not just in the location where the error is first discovered (“Omigosh, the cost of using carbon fiber to build airplane frames is higher than we thought!”) but also in other, more-distant parts of the plan (“We need to shift some aluminum over to our aircraft producers, so you producers of automobiles and washing machines have to find some other materials to use.”)

Industrial-policy proponents simply ignore this reality. They simply – or, rather, simple-mindedly – assume that government officials either already possess or will easily come to possess all the vast amounts of knowledge, much of it subject to change, necessary to make the industrial policy a success.

I understand that regular readers of this blog likely tire of my repetitiveness, but I repeat a question that I will repeatedly ask until someone offers to it a serious answer: Exactly how will those officials who craft and monitor industrial policy obtain the knowledge they must possess in order to make industrial policy work in the ways that industrial-policy proponents promise it will work?

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Jeffrey Tucker again rightly decries the evil of the covid lockdowns.

And Bryan Caplan wonders at the cognitive dissonance that contributed to support for the evil lockdowns.

I’ve always liked Van Morrison’s music. Now I like it even more.

Bruce Yandle explains that Trump’s hubris blinds him to the reality that the economy cannot be engineered to “greatness.” A slice:

Once again, President Trump is engaged in gatekeeper capitalism, where he employs the misguided conceit that he holds the keys to the U.S. economy, and that he can marshal enough information to actually manage this massive economy from a White House conference room.

Eric Boehm inquires: “Is it too much to ask for a presidential candidate who cares about America’s fiscal health and respects the limits of his office?”

Kudos to Bo Winegard.

While I could pick nits with some points that Michael Strain makes in his defense of Milton Friedman’s famous case for what is sometimes called ‘shareholder capitalism,’ overall Michael’s essay is excellent. A slice:

As a matter of practicality, asking CEOs to make society better — the environment cleaner, working conditions safer, compensation higher — is beyond their competence and ability. It also invites inconsistencies. For example, doubling workers’ wages would make them better off, but it would require raising prices, making customers worse off. And if stakeholder capitalism has any teeth, it must mean that executives should on occasion act against the interest of their company’s owners. How is that a defensible management strategy? Should union members, Friedman reasonably asked, tolerate leaders who don’t fight for better wages and working conditions to keep prices lower for customers?

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… is from page 221 of my good friend and old teacher Randy Holcombe’s superb 2019 book, Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History:

Democratic institutions act as a filter on public opinion, sifting out small costs and benefits that are spread among the population at large and focusing instead on concentrated costs and benefits that have large impacts on narrow interests. For this reason, democratic political institutions favor policies that impose small costs on most people, who are rationally ignorant about the policies, to finance large benefits to smaller groups.

DBx: History testifies repeatedly to the correctness of this observation. And yet well-meaning peddlers of schemes to use government to create on earth something closer to paradise ignore this reality. This ignorance plagues proposals whether new or merely newly packaged, and regardless of how real or fanciful are the problems that the scheme-peddlers’ propose to ‘solve.’

“Secure our supply chains!” “Secure our borders!” “Leave no child behind!” “Bring back manufacturing jobs!” “Stop exporting our jobs!” “Invest in the industries of the future!” “Protect the environment!” “Spread the wealth!” “Just say ‘No!'” “A living wage for everyone!” “Save the family farm!” “Save small businesses!” “Strengthen our national defense!” “End corporate greed!” “Protect our cultural heritage!” “Stricter campaign-finance laws!” “Break up the monopolies!” “Common-good capitalism!” “Common-good constitutional law!” “Common-good this, that, and the other thing!”

And so it goes, on and on and on – slogans with wide appeal are trumpeted, power is created ostensibly to ensure the realization of the lovely aspirations, and the pigs rush gluttonously to the resulting troughs. Yet the pigs are too seldom noticed; they devour their feasts undisturbed. Most people continue to be bedazzled by the brilliance of the mirages conjured by the slogans.

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Here’s a letter to MarketWatch:

Editor:

Your story today headlined “Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer say U.S. should immediately cancel $50,000 in student loans for millions of borrowers” reaffirmed this realization: Modern democracy is a political system under which it is both a serious crime and an atrocious ethical offense for politicians to attempt to buy votes with their own money, but under which it is not only legal, but in the eyes of many saintly, for politicians to attempt to buy votes with other people’s money.

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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… is from page five of the Mercatus Center’s hot-off-the-press 2020 reissue of the late Ludwig Lachmann’s 1986 book, The Market as an Economic Process:

No agent can enter a market, or extend his range of activity within one by making offers to other agents, without disrupting some market relationship presently existing between them and others. This fact is of course of the very essence of competition.

DBx: This insight is seemingly so obvious as to be trite. Yet failure to grasp it is typically at the core of arguments made by protectionists, and even by most free traders, that trade has “losers” as well as “winners.”

The fact that increased international trade disrupts some existing exchange relationships is, of course, undeniable. Also undeniable is the fact that sellers whose relationships with buyers are so disrupted by trade as to cause these sellers to lose sales, or to have to lower their prices, are made worse off than they would be had trade not increased. It’s this worsening in some particular sellers’ economic fortunes that people have in mind when they say that “trade has losers as well as winners.”

But as I’ve argued before, such talk is highly misleading. Whatever truth there is in the observation that trade “has losers as well as winners” is a truth not unique to trade. It’s a truth that holds for all economic change. And so to single out trade in this fashion is to imply a non-existent reality – namely, that increased international trade uniquely disrupts existing patterns of buyer-seller relationships.

Put differently, if some important point is conveyed by observing that “increased trade with foreigners has losers as well as winners,” then an equally important point is conveyed by saying that “increased trade with women has losers as well as winners” or that “increased trade with Episcopalians has losers as well as winners” or that “increased trade with gay people has losers as well as winners.” Whatever truth there is in saying that “increased trade with foreigners has losers as well as winners” exists in identical statements made about increased trade with members of any other classifications of trading partners.

And so because saying that “increased trade with foreigners has losers as well as winners” implies, or at least suggests, that increased trade with members of any other classification of trading partners does not have losers as well as winners, saying that “increased trade with foreigners has losers as well as winners” is misleading to the point of being mistaken.

Also, precisely because increased trade with members of any conceivable classification of trading partners has such losers as well as winners, if it is appropriate (as many people believe) to allow such increased trade only if it passes some cost-benefit test administered by econometricians, politicians, or thinktank wags, then increased trade with members of any other group should also be conditioned on it passing the same cost-benefit test. Let’s have econometricians, politicians, and thinktank wags offer their assessments of the justice and cost-benefit outcomes not only of increased trade with foreigners, but also of increased trade with redheads, increased trade with short people, increased trade with people 56 and older, increased trade with Denver Broncos fans, and increased trade with lesbians of Italian descent.

Anyone who recognizes the absurdity of calling for any of these last-listed cost-benefit tests should recognize the equal absurdity of calling for a cost-benefit test of increased trade with foreigners.