Not surprisingly, bailouts beget more bailouts. My colleagues at the Mercatus Center, Matthew Mitchell and Tad DeHaven, write, “We know from the history of bailouts that the true cost of a bailout is not the taxpayer expense (which is often recouped) but the expectation it sets for future bailouts, an expectation that invites future disaster.”
Peter Lyons claimed the purpose of trade barriers in the US is to encourage investment in businesses that provide a decent return on capital – unlike agriculture, according to Lyons. That is implausible. Since when did capitalists need governmental coercion to invest in high-return businesses? The real purpose of trade barriers is to do favours for politically influential domestic businesses.
Unfortunately, the leaders of both major parties fail to understand the basic fact that trade is not about more jobs or fewer jobs but about better jobs, whether in manufacturing or the service sector. Like technology, trade allows the US economy to shift workers and investment to sectors where we are relatively more productive. That generally means producing goods and services that play to our strengths as an advanced economy, such as airliners, semiconductors, and financial services, and making fewer goods and services that workers in other nations can produce more competitively.
For about 150 years after the Founding, many political controversies at the federal level were apt to begin with debate about constitutional principle: Did the federal government’s enumerated powers entitle it to act on a particular subject? Only after this debate came the policy discussion. Today, almost nobody in either the legislature or executive branch believes that there is any subject, any sphere, from which the federal government is constitutionally excluded.
… is from page 123 of the late Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, Factfulness:
The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected – by your own attention filter or by the media – precisely because it is scary.
DBx: Human nature itself – for we are creatures of natural selection in a brutal physical environment – makes us especially attuned to signs of the sorts of dangers that were commonplace five million years ago, two million years ago, one million years ago, a half-million year ago, 250,000 years ago. Even though modernity – chiefly, innovative capitalism – has significantly reduced the typical person’s exposure to such dangers, when signs of such dangers arise, or when news of such dangers spread, we naturally go on high alert. The modern world, as Rosling says, seems scarier than it is.
But of course we are not evolved to fear dangers of the sort that seldom, if ever, arose in our deep past. This fact is unfortunate, for such dangers today are real and ever-present. I have in mind here, above all, those destructive forces that undermine the emergent order that builds and sustains our modern prosperity. Indeed, because the modern, extensive division of labor is so very recent – and because its success requires that each of us be dependent upon countless strangers, many of whom speak a ‘foreign’ language and worship a different god – we are inappropriately fearful of what we can easily ‘see’ about the modern economy and are inappropriately blasé about that which is truly the greatest threat to our prosperity.
So many of us positively demand greater use of discretionary state power, ignorant of the fact that the more such power grows the more likely it is to undermine the sources of our prosperity. And even those of us who don’t exert much effort to demand more such power remain blasé about its growth.
We denizens of modernity excessively fear that which we should not, and we are excessively trusting of that which we should fear.
Stephanie Slade eloquently exposes the arrogance and intolerance that constitute – and the grave danger posed by – what she accurately labels “will-to-power” conservatism (“Will-to-Power Conservatism and the Great Liberalism Schism,” October 2020). Ms. Slade’s essay calls to mind this long-ago, tho’ sadly still relevant, observation by that most astute of all Americans who have ever pressed pen to paper, H.L. Mencken:
“But the right to freedom obviously involves the right to be foolish. If what I say must be passed on for its sagacity by censors, however wise and prudent, then I have no free speech. And if what I may believe – about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor-oil, or God – is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.”*
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
… is from page 85 of the May 9th, 2020, draft of the important forthcoming monograph from Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Illiberal and Anti-Entrepreneurial State of Mariana Mazzucato:
We enthusiasts for the invisible hand, made visible every time a loaf of bread is miraculously available for you at the grocery store, are often accused of mysticism—Mazzucato attacks us for believing in “myths.” To which we reply, Mythmaker, unmyth thyself. We have the logic and the data and the loaf of bread on our side, and Mazzucato has nothing.
DBx: Yep. Every advocate of industrial policy ultimately is, on this matter, a mystic. He or she has nothing to justify his or her assumption that government officials will somehow know how to allocate resources better than resources are allocated in competitive markets.
Classical liberals seek a world in which everyone is free to live out his own conception of the good so long as he abstains from forcibly interfering with others’ ability to do the same. We’re therefore just as concerned with defending a person’s right to view pornography or buy alcohol on Sundays (to the chagrin of some traditionalists) as we are with defending an employer’s right not to be involved in the provision of his workers’ birth control (to the chagrin of many leftists). One’s freedom, as far as the law is concerned, does not depend on his using it to do what’s objectively moral.
For Will-to-Power Conservatives, just the opposite is true: By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, they say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others’ choices. In place of equal rights under the law, it’s error has no rights. This is no way to achieve the common good.
Books could be written about how wrong—historically, morally, logically—Osterweil is. But there is one place where she’s right. Rioting and looting are fun, which is why young people do it from time to time. Mobs are thrilling, which is why they’re so dangerous and evil. (Presumably rapists and murderers feel “joy” too, that doesn’t make them good; it illuminates their evilness.) That’s why civilized societies try to prevent them. Barbarians come up with clever word salads to defend them.
“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”
… is from page 196 of the 1972 Nash Publishing edition of Felix Morley’s 1949 volume, The Power in the People:
The distinguishing characteristic of American civilization is the subordination of centralized power in behalf of individual liberty.
DBx: Or so was the case when Morley offered this observation, in 1949. In 2020, this observation seems to me to be no longer accurate. If I were a praying man, I’d pray that I am wrong. But not being a praying man, I’m left only to hope. And I sincerely, fervently, intensely hope that the sense of pessimism that now engulfs me will prove to be unwarranted.
… is from pages 10-11 of the 1998 Liberty Fund edition of the late Anthony de Jasay’s great 1985 book, The State (emphasis added):
Very few of the countless inequalities people are likely to resent lend themselves to levelling, even when the attack on difference is as forthright as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is no use making everyone eat, dress, and work alike if one is still luckier in love than the other. The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful out of a countless multitude of inequalities.
For about 150 years after the Founding, many political controversies at the federal level were apt to begin with debate about constitutional principle: Did the federal government’s enumerated powers entitle it to act on a particular subject? Only after this debate came the policy discussion. Today, almost nobody in either the legislature or executive branch believes that there is any subject, any sphere, from which the federal government is constitutionally excluded.
The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected – by your own attention filter or by the media – precisely because it is scary.
We enthusiasts for the invisible hand, made visible every time a loaf of bread is miraculously available for you at the grocery store, are often accused of mysticism—Mazzucato attacks us for believing in “myths.” To which we reply, Mythmaker, unmyth thyself. We have the logic and the data and the loaf of bread on our side, and Mazzucato has nothing.
The distinguishing characteristic of American civilization is the subordination of centralized power in behalf of individual liberty.
Very few of the countless inequalities people are likely to resent lend themselves to levelling, even when the attack on difference is as forthright as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is no use making everyone eat, dress, and work alike if one is still luckier in love than the other. The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful out of a countless multitude of inequalities.
