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… is from page 33 of George Will’s excellent 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility (footnote deleted):

American politics can be considered a tale of three liberalisms, the first of which, classical liberalism, teaches that the creative arena of human affairs is society, as distinct from government. Government’s proper function is to protect the conditions of life and liberty, primarily for the individual’s private pursuit of happiness.

DBx: Yes! But this additional reality should be kept in mind always: Because the individual in bourgeois society can successfully pursue happiness only by attending to the interests of others – Jeff Bezos got rich by pleasing countless strangers who voluntarily purchased his company’s services – protection of each individual’s ability to best pursue his or her own happiness is simultaneously protection of the conditions under which that pursuit serves the interests of as many others as possible.

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This short video voiced over by Ronald Reagan makes a great point.

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… is from page 38 of my colleague Bryan Caplan’s brilliant 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter (original emphases; footnote deleted):

The root error behind 18th-century mercantilism was unreasonable distrust of foreigners [rather than the false identification of money with wealth]. Otherwise, why would people focus on money draining out of “the nation,” but not “the region,” “the city,” “the village,” or “the family”? Anyone who consistently equated money with wealth would fear all outflows of precious metals. In practice, human beings then and now commit the balance-of-trade fallacy only when other countries enter the picture. No one loses sleep about the trade balance between California and Nevada, or me and Tower Records. The fallacy is not treating all purchases as a cost, but treating foreign purchases as a cost.

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… is from Joseph Epstein’s May 2015 essay “The Unassailable Virtue of Victims“:

Many bask in the warm virtue of victims by coming out strongly on their side. These are the virtucrats, or those people whose political opinions are propelled by their strong sense of self-virtue.

DBx: Spot-on. (Epstein, by the way, is the inventor of the very useful word “virtucrat.”)

Only the naive believe that self-interestedness manifests itself exclusively in the acquisition of material goods and services. (Only the super-naive believe that self-interestedness manifests itself exclusively in the acquisition of money.) Fame, power, the love and affection of others, and the urge to be what Adam Smith described as “lovely” are among the experiences that most persons find appealing and, hence, seek for themselves.

Some of these experiences are inherently good (for example, being lovely). Others are almost always bad (most notably, possessing power). Joseph Epstein above identifies one rather pathetic experience that many people self-interestedly seek, and often seek greedily: a sense of being ethically superior to others based on displays of concern for the downtrodden.

The downtrodden objects of this ‘concern’ need not really be downtrodden. All that’s necessary is that enough people believe that the downtroddeness is real. With this belief on the loose, virtucrats can satisfy their lust for a sense of ethical superiority by championing the cause of the downtrodden.

Yet because a virtucrat’s goal is to enhance his or her own sense of superiority, it matters very little if the championing of the downtrodden will actually succeed in helping the downtrodden. The latter isn’t the virtucrat’s goal. So the virtucrat typically spends no time actually assessing the situation in a rational manner.

Are those who are alleged to be downtrodden really so? Doesn’t matter. If they appear to be so, we’re good to go with the virtue-signaling. Will the screamed-for, chanted-for, or ‘demanded’ means of uplifting the downtrodden really work? Doesn’t matter. If these means can be made to appear to be useful, we’re good to go with the virtue-signaling.

Extra virtue-sensations are won by identifying previously unnoticed exploitations of the downtrodden and passionately speaking out against these. “Oh look! Not all women have as part of their employment contracts paid family leave!” “Omigosh! Graduate students are paid too little!” “It’s intolerable that college students encounter on campus ideas that disturb their sensibilities!” “How disgusting that female workers are at risk of being complimented on their dress or hairstyles by male co-workers!”

Virtuocracy is dangerous.

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This piece by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick on medical terminology and covid is quite informative. (HT Lyle Albaugh) A slice:

[Governments locked down] because of the mad mathematical modellers. The academic epidemiologists. Neil Ferguson, and others of his ilk. When they were guessing (sorry estimating, sorry modelling) the impact of COVID they used a figure of approximately one per cent as the infection fatality rate. Not the case fatality rate. In so doing, they overestimated the likely impact of COVID by, at the very least, ten-fold.

In the Wall Street Journal, the Classical Liberal Institute’s Tunku Varadarajan writes about Scott Atlas’s views on covid and the lockdowns that it inspired. A slice:

Add restrictions on medical facilities and the effects of patients’ fearing to seek care, and the health toll is apparent across the demographic range. Nearly 80% of patients in active treatment for cancer have reported delays in care. Diagnostic cancer screenings have fallen to a third of pre-Covid levels nationally. Half of all kids didn’t get immunizations, “setting up the potential of a massive future health disaster,” he says. “Did you know that almost 40% of acute stroke patients just didn’t call the ambulance? We have to look at the impact of the pandemic, and the impact of societal lockdowns. It would be reckless to do otherwise.”

Warren Gibson corrects Joe Biden’s misunderstanding of profits and their role.

Arnold Kling explains why he leans libertarian. A slice:

I believe that even if government officials were free of special-interest influence and wanted to be pro-social, they would fail. They under-estimate their own ignorance, and in choosing leaders the political process selects for a lack of humility. Officials are prone to blunders, and the error-correction mechanisms are much weaker in the public sector than in the private sector. Markets tend to correct their failures. Governments tend not to.

Damon Root makes the case for abolishing qualified immunity for police officers.

Here’s George Selgin on the Fed’s new policy.

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… is from pages 38-39 of Kristian Niemietz’s important 2019 book, Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies:

Planned economies have no way of replicating this knowledge-collecting and knowledge-disseminating function of market prices. They therefore deprive themselves of vast amounts of information, which must lead to worse economic decisions. This is not just a problem for fully planned economies, where prices are set by a planning board. It is also true in an economy where the private sector accounts for the bulk of economic activity, but where the government tampers with market prices.

DBx: The more totalitarian the regime, the more extensive is its control of the flow of knowledge – of the ability of the people under its jackboot to generate, test, and share knowledge with each other and with the outside world. The most obvious way governments control the flow of information is through censorship of the media and of speech. But another equally unethical and destructive means that governments use to control the creation and spread of knowledge is to obstruct commerce among adults spending and investing their own money.

Interventions such as tariffs, price ceilings, and wage floors block mutually beneficial exchanges that would otherwise occur. Subsidies do the same, but more indirectly: The gains to the parties of subsidized exchanges are lower than the losses of the persons whose resources are seized and then used to subsidize those exchanges. (We can be sure of this reality because, if it weren’t true, coercion would be unnecessary to get the resources in question into the hands of the parties to the subsidized exchanges.) With fewer resources at their disposal, the parties who are compelled to pay for the subsidies can no longer make some mutually beneficial exchanges that they would have otherwise made.

The larger point is that all such interventions make society more ignorant. All such interventions prevent the creation and sharing of knowledge. It’s true, again, that full-on socialist regimes, compared to less-interventionist ones, impose more extensive and draconian controls on the media and speech. And it’s true also that full-on socialist regimes impose more extensive and draconian controls on knowledge-generating commercial exchanges. But it’s untrue that government-orchestrated destruction of knowledge happens only with full-on totalitarianism or socialism.

Few people outside of those who embrace cancel culture would disagree that mild restrictions on the media and speech prevent some useful knowledge from being created and shared. It is no defense of such mild restrictions that they aren’t as draconian or as destructive as are the restrictions imposed by more-interventionist regimes. No serious person argues that restrictions on speech and the press have ill effects only when such restrictions are total.

Yet many people argue that restrictions on commerce have no ill effects until and unless such restrictions are complete. This argument is mistaken. While the amount of knowledge destroyed by tariffs is less than was the amount of knowledge destroyed by Soviet socialism, tariffs nevertheless destroy some knowledge. While the amount of knowledge destroyed by subsidies is less than is the amount of knowledge destroyed by the brutal economic restrictions now in place in Venezuela, subsidies nevertheless destroy some knowledge.

Obstructing commerce – either directly, as through tariffs or minimum-wage diktats, or indirectly, as through subsidies – destroys some knowledge. Obstructing commerce makes society more ignorant and, thus, more subject to avoidable error.

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In what must be one of the most ignorant tweets authored by someone supposedly well-informed and knowledgeable about economics and public policy in the U.S., Sam Hammond of the Niskanen Center writes:

The Ex-Im fight isn’t really about “crony capitalism.” Every industrialized nation has an export credit agency.

See it for what it was and is: A demonstration project to test the efficacy of the Koch’s advocacy network at mobilizing right wing populism.

What nonsense, at once illogical and dishonest, and throughout gratuitously insulting.

First comes the illogic. We are to believe that because every industrialized nation has an export-credit agency, then it’s obvious that such agencies – including the one here in the U.S. – serve the greater good rather than serve the interests of cronies. Alternatively, I suppose, Hammond might expect us to believe that if every industrialized country has cronyist institutions, there is then no good reason for anyone in the U.S. to protest our own such institutions.

I need say no more for anyone of intelligence to detect the obvious weakness of either interpretation of Hammond’s claim. (For those who might still perhaps find some potential merit in Hammond’s claim, ask yourself if you believe that agricultural price supports, protective tariffs, and rent control – policies also widely practiced by many other industrialized nations – are thereby proven to be policies that promote the greater good and not likely to be motivated and maintained by cronyism.)

Next comes the dishonesty. Hammond personally knows many of the people at the Mercatus Center, and at other like-minded institutions, who write and testify against ExIm. He therefore knows – or recklessly refuses to know – that they sincerely believe that ExIm is an unjustified creature of cronyism. Even if they are mistaken, Hammond – who once worked with them – must know that their convictions are held sincerely rather than worn as a costume for purely political ends. Hammond’s insinuation that these opponents of ExIm do what they do, write what they write, say what they say, because they are paid to do so is despicable. He knows that these people are not mercenary. He may legitimately disagree with their economics, their values, and their policy positions – and he might even be correct to so disagree – but he cannot possibly really believe that these people are insincere mercenaries with no real convictions about the matter.

Nor, by the way, does Hammond have any reason whatsoever to believe that Charles Koch himself is insincere in his opposition to cronyism or in his belief that ExIm is an instance of cronyism. Everything in the long history of Mr. Koch’s support for liberal causes reveals beyond any doubt that he would understand that ExIm is an economically harmful cronyist outfit. (Ditto for Mr. Koch’s employees.) No – let me make this point stronger: Hammond surely knows that the belief held by Mr. Koch and his employees that ExIm is a cronyist institution is a belief held sincerely. That Hammond knowingly suggests otherwise is worse than contemptible.

Hammond should apologize.

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… is from the 17th-century liberal theologian John Tillotson, as quoted on page 254 of Will & Ariel Durant’s 1963 volume, The Age of Louis XIV:

We need not desire any better evidence that a man is in the wrong than to hear him declare against reason, and thereby to acknowledge that reason is against him.

DBx: Perfectly put. This acid and accurate observation is as apt today as it was when Tillotson first offered it centuries ago.

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In my column for the July 28th, 2010, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I told a hypothetical tale of government efforts to artificially stimulate demand for pianos. You can read my column beneath the fold.

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