David Henderson decries Donald Trump’s – and many of Trump’s supporters’ – battering of free speech. A slice:
Any interviewer is free to edit any interview any way he or she wishes. That’s part of freedom of speech. Sullum goes through the issues and lays out a strong case that Trump’s suit was unjustified. Indeed, I would bet that even most Trump-appointed judges would find in CBS’s favor. Read on to see why CBS settled.
I’ve been very disappointed by the absence of many conservative voices against Trump’s assault on freedom.
It’s actually worse. Some of them are not silent about his assault on freedom of speech; they’re triumphant.
Why was the recovery so feeble? The National Recovery Administration, established in 1933, has always been Exhibit A that the New Deal made things worse. Accordingly, Selgin devotes two chapters to it. One outlines the contours of its programs and surveys the growing literature by economic historians. The second mines an overlooked contemporane-ous “damning” report by the Brookings Institution, whose members “had no axe to grind with either the Roosevelt administration or with planning as such” (p. 123). The crux is that the program’s codes of “fair competition” mandated the cartelization of hundreds of industries, allowing them to increase their prices, which naturally caused a drop in sales and production, thereby reversing the recovery. Lower production was paired with rules that pushed up wages, so it is no surprise that the quantity of labor employed decreased. This is the consensus of the economic history profession and has been for decades, but Selgin adds an argument from the Brookings report that part of the rapid recovery in the middle of 1933 was in anticipation of the program going into effect. Employers raced to produce at lower costs before their workers’ wage rose—and then scaled back production afterward.
Amity Shlaes reviews Jill Eicher’s Mellon vs. Churchill: The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War. A slice:
Not only Britain’s Labour Party but other parties proved too tolerant of union demands, the result being that wages became higher than Britain could afford. As economists Thomas Hatton and Mark Thomas note in their contribution to The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today, toward the end of the 1920s some politicians recognized the missteps. The eminent English economist Arthur Pigou—hardly a pure free marketeer—noted in 1927 that as a result of such policies “wage rates have, over a wide area, been set at a level which is too high” and “the very large percentage of unemployment during the whole of the last six years is due in considerable measure to this new factor in our economic life.”
Nowadays, conservatives treat as heresy the slightest criticism of Churchill. Heresy or not, the truth is that out of ignorance, opportunism, or pride, Churchill ignored such realities—and took the easier path of blaming the U.S. for Britain’s struggles.
Steven Greenhut reports some good news about California.
This letter in the Wall Street Journal is excellent:
Not one week after his win in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani told the press that we shouldn’t have billionaires (“The People’s Republic of New York City,” Review & Outlook, June 26). That, sadly, applies to only one of us. But it is no less nutty.
First, we aren’t too comfortable with anyone saying that “we shouldn’t have” a class of people. The young assemblyman merely wants to tax these scoundrels into oblivion, not something worse, though it’s easy to be confused about the intentions of the guy who seems OK with globalizing the intifada.
We have substantial inequality in this country. But it’s also true that on many broad-based economic indicators, the U.S. is doing wonderfully, regardless of what populists on either end of the horseshoe say. Unless you can claim that “billionaires” have made their money in underhanded ways—or ignore that they already pay a large tax burden, on which the city relies—where does he get off saying this? We could list the incredible innovations brought to you by companies founded by billionaires—who didn’t start out that way—but you’re likely familiar with the litany.
Instead of slogans that attack a class he finds it politically expedient to savage, perhaps Mr. Mamdani should focus on his own policies. Doubling down on rent control that economists, near ubiquitously and across political divides, say has destroyed every city it has touched. Coming for low-margin bodegas with city-run grocery stores. Wanting to seize “the means of production,” because, you know, real communism has never been tried. Such disastrous policies always hurt the poor, who mainly didn’t vote for him, more than the rich, who did.
We are tempted to end by saying, with considerably more evidence than Mr. Mamdani, that “we shouldn’t have socialists.” The country would be better off without such noxious and destructive ideas. But unlike him, we know we don’t get to decide who exists and who doesn’t.
Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson
AQR Capital Management
New York
Pierre Lemieux ponders the arrogant and illiberal hostilities to Jeff Bezos’s Venetian wedding. A slice:
Claiming a right to control a geographical place that is not yours is analogous to the claim that one has a right to one’s customers against competing suppliers. For example, domestic workers would have a right to the patronage of their domestic customers and could thus to forbid them, through tariffs or bans, to purchase from foreign (or non-local) suppliers. This sort of theory is either incoherent or authoritarian. Having a right to one’s customers implies that the latter do not have a right to choose their suppliers, just like having a right to one’s own Venice implies that other Venetians don’t have a right to their own Venice. Enforcing one’s right then implies controlling what other Venetians can import or export. (Remember that tourism is an export.)
On the contrary, a coherent and non-authoritarian conception of free exchange—the right to buy from, or sell to, whomever is capable and willing to sell to you or buy from you—underlies the right of Bezos to marry in Venice on some property rented from owners who are willing to welcome his party; the same for his right to buy pastries from a local (or foreign, for that matter) baker who is willing to sell them. In a free society, neither buying nor selling is forbidden (with some very limited exceptions such as buying stolen goods or the services of a killer-for-hire).
