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Is the world overpopulated?

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… is from page 118 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s posthumously published and sadly neglected 1907 volume, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:

My conclusion is that so far as Private Law – the law which governs our conduct in our ordinary transactions with each other – is concerned, the influence of legislation – of written law – has been exceedingly small.

DBx: Carter added, two pages later, that “its [legislation’s] own efficiency is dependent upon its conformity to habit and custom.”  Workable law cannot be designed and imposed, any more than workable language can be designed and imposed.  Insofar as legislation conforms to existing law, it stands a good chance of achieving its authors’ goals.  Insofar as legislation conflicts with existing law, the goals of legislations’ authors can be achieved, if at all, only through the application (or the credible threat of the application) of coercion – and even then only at the additional price of suffering unintended ill consequences.

It seems to me that many people believe that we human beings left undirected by a sovereign power are either inert blobs, capable of achieving nothing, or unintelligent and brutal barbarians destined only to rob, rape, plunder, and kill each other until and unless a sovereign power restrains us and directs our energies onto more productive avenues.  In the 16th and 17th centuries it was believed that the beneficent sovereign power must be monarchial; in the 19th, 20th, and (so far) 21st centuries it is believed that the beneficent sovereign power must be “the People,” usually in the form of democratic majorities.  We moderns applaud ourselves for having discarded our ancestors’ unenlightened attachment to monarchy and for our having replaced that attachment with an attachment to majoritarian nationalist democracy.  We moderns do not understand that our attachment to nationalist sovereignty itself is a far more dangerous superstition than is an attachment to a variety of sovereignty other than majoritarian nationalist democracy.

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The Economist reviews Doug Irwin’s Clashing Over Commerce.  A slice:

Mr Irwin also methodically debunks the idea that protectionism made America a great industrial power, a notion believed by some to offer lessons for developing countries today. As its share of global manufacturing powered from 23% in 1870 to 36% in 1913, the admittedly high tariffs of the time came with a cost, estimated at around 0.5% of GDP in the mid-1870s. In some industries, they might have sped up development by a few years. But American growth during its protectionist period was more to do with its abundant resources and openness to people and ideas.

I don’t know if The Niskanen Center’s Jerry Taylor is correct or not to have changed his mind about global warming.  But as I explain in my most-recent Pittsburgh Tribune-Review column, I do know that a recent Mother Jones description of his career as a public intellectual is highly misleading, and in a way that is unjust to him..

Harvard undergraduate Laura Nicolae writes wisely and eloquently about the frivolous yet frightening infatuation that many young people today have with communism.  (HT Mark Perry)  A slice:

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.

Speaking of poorly educated college students, here’s Jonathan Haidt.

James Walpole makes the case for principles.

Trade saved the American pilgrims.  (HT Bryan Riley)

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My tv yesterday afternoon was tuned to a local news telecast by DC’s NBC 4.  I wasn’t paying close attention to the telecast, but I did catch part of a report about how Trump allegedly gave a misleading account of what his administration did to secure the purchase of aircraft from Boeing rather than from some foreign manufacturer.  The report featured a ‘fact checker’ who disputed some aspect of Trump’s claim.  Because I wasn’t paying close attention, I never got the details.  (I looked this morning on NBC 4’s website for the report, but couldn’t find the report.)

But these details here aren’t important.  I write here to comment on a clip of Trump that was played during this report.  In this clip, Trump boasts that, because of his administration’s actions, the aircraft buyers “bought it from us” (or “bought them from us”).  The part that caught my full attention is the “from us.”

Such language is common.  If a non-American buys, say, building products from Georgia-Pacific or jetliners from Boeing, Americans often say – as Trump said here – that they “bought it from us” (or that “we sold it to them”).  Yet although common, such language is highly misleading.

Who is the “us”?  If a non-American bought a jetliner from Boeing, that foreigner didn’t buy that jetliner from me.  I neither own stock in Boeing nor work for Boeing.  This sale by Boeing is not a sale by me; the purchase made by Boeing’s customer is not a purchase from me.  The fact that my passport is issued by the same agency (i.e., the U.S. government) that issues the passports of most of Boeing’s owners and workers does not, contrary to the widespread presumption, make me one with Boeing or otherwise render the use of the first person plural pronoun “us” appropriate in this case.  Using the word “us” in this way – here to refer to all Americans – gives the wholly mistaken impression that all Americans benefit whenever Boeing (or any other American company) makes a sale to non-Americans.

Here’s just one of countless specific ways to see why this use of “us” is misleading.  Assume that in the actual case of these aircraft being bought from Boeing that Boeing’s owners and workers spend none of their profits and higher wages on sending their children to George Mason University.  Further assume that if non-Americans had instead bought the aircraft from Airbus that some of Airbus’s owners or workers would have spent some of their resulting profits and higher wages on sending their kids to George Mason University to study economics.  These assumptions are not implausible.

In this alternative scenario, because I am employed to teach economics at George Mason University, I would have benefitted had the non-American bought the aircraft, not from Boeing, but instead from Airbus.

Don’t get hung up on my hypothetical alternative scenario.  Whether or not this scenario itself would be accurate in its details is unimportant.  What is important is the recognition that

(1) the fortunes or misfortunes of any particular producer or producers within your country are not the same as your fortunes or misfortunes (here, if you own no Boeing stock, Boeing’s higher profits are not your higher profits), and, relatedly,

(2) ‘seeing’ the full consequences of international trade requires an examination not only of the immediate set of actual transactions (here, non-Americans’ purchase of aircraft from Boeing) but also of (a) transactions subsequent to the immediate ones, and (b) transactions that didn’t happen as a result of the transactions that did happen.

The use of “us” in cases such as this reflects the mercantilist notion that each country is a large firm competing for sales against other countries.  Such a notion is central to Trump’s understanding of trade; it is a wholly mistaken notion.

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… is from page 124 of Thomas Sowell’s forthcoming 2018 volume Discrimination and Disparities:

[K]illing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable strategy from a purely political standpoint, provided the goose does not die before the next election.

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Russ Roberts’s latest EconTalk podcast is with Tim Harford.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy reflects on some things about Thanksgiving dinner for which we Americans ought not be thankful.  A slice:

Take the ridiculous protective scheme built around a politically powerful cartel of domestic sugar processing companies. Between protective tariffs that reduce cheap foreign supplies, loan guarantees and bailouts, American consumers pay about double the global average price for sugar. Obviously, consumers are hurt, but so are all the producers of goods that require the use of sugar, such as bakers and candy-makers.

And here’s Richard Ebeling on the first American Thanksgiving.

George Will recollects some unintentionally hilarious American moments from 2017.

David Henderson is thankful.

Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis distinguishes the multiculturalism of liberty from the multiculturalism of coercion.

Warren Meyer ponders worker mobility.

In this short video, Johan Norberg busts some myths about cross-country differences in students’ performances on tests.

Sam Staley reviews The Florida Project.

Cole Webb Harter celebrates Black Friday.

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… is from page 16 of Doug Irwin’s new (2017) volume, Clashing Over Commerce:

For most of US history, however, there has not been a single, unified “capital” or “labor” interest regarding trade policy, because there are many different types of capital and labor that are affected by trade in different ways.  Capital owners and workers employed in industries that compete against imports (iron and steel, textiles and apparel) typically have a much different view of trade policy than the capital owners and workers employed in industries that export (agriculture, machinery, or aerospace).

DBx: This reality, which should be obvious, is often missed.  Despite the deeply held dogma of many people, “capital” (or “business” or “corporations”) is not one large and unified, or homogeneous, interest group.  Nor does the interest of “capital” necessarily conflict with the interests of “labor.”

More directly to Doug’s point, to recognize the reality highlighted in this quotation is to immunize oneself against the error, committed by the typical protectionist, of defending trade restrictions on the grounds that such restrictions “save jobs” and “protect domestic producers.”  Trade restrictions save only some particular domestic jobs and businesses while they destroy others.  The typical protectionist, therefore, has no business patting himself on his back for his alleged ‘enlightened’ concern for domestic workers and business owners.  At best, the typical protectionist has more concern for certain workers in the domestic economy (namely, those whose jobs are more visibly affected by international trade) and less concern for other workers in the domestic economy (namely, those whose jobs are either less affected by international trade or less visibly affected by such trade).

It is beyond my comprehension why anyone deserves applause for championing worker Jones over worker Smith for no reason other than that worker Jones happens today to be employed by a firm that is more subject to international competition than is the firm at which worker Smith today is employed.  My incomprehension springs both from the fact that I see no reason to regard the interests of worker Jones to be superior to those of worker Smith, and from the reality that using the state to artificially protect worker Jones from competition is thereby to use the state to artificially impose undue hardships on Smith, both as a worker and as a consumer.  The protectionist gets away with defending such an ethically dubious distinction only by ignoring worker Smith.

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… is from John Stossel’s latest column, “Thankful for Property Rights on Thanksgiving Day“:

Had the Pilgrims continued communal farming, this Thursday might be known as “Starvation Day” instead of Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, the Pilgrims were led not by Bernie Sanders fans or other commons-loving socialists, but by [William] Bradford, who wrote that he “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could… that they might not still thus languish in misery… After much debate [I] assigned each family a parcel of land… This had very good success, because it made every hand industrious.”

There’s nothing like private ownership to make “every hand industrious.”

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An early Christmas gift arrived today: my long-awaited copy of Doug Irwin’s new book, Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy.  My Mercatus Center colleague Dan Griswold read the page proofs of this massive study and has nothing but high praise for it – which, knowing Doug’s other work, is not at all surprising.

This book jumps immediately to the top of my reading list.  I’m thrilled to dive into it!