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Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, met Pope Francis on April 20, the day before the latter’s death. The meeting with the enfeebled pope was brief and did not touch upon their disagreement about the treatment of immigrants. Early this year, Francis had declared that the mass deportation plan “damages the dignity of many men and women” (“JD Vance Was Among Last to Meet Pope Francis,” Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2025). I think it is difficult not to share the late pope’s concern on this point, but the larger picture is more interesting.
While the pope is known as a man of the left advocating “social justice,” JD Vance supports “the right” wherever he sees it. It is not immediately obvious how these two individuals can belong to the same Church. Is that an irreconcilable disagreement? Casuistry could no doubt pull a few rabbits from the pope’s tiara or the vice-president’s MAGA cap. Moreover, and interestingly, the two protagonists could reconcile their differences by invoking what they both disagree with in classical liberal political economy—if only they knew anything about that.
As classical liberal (and libertarian) theorists have explained, the concept of social justice makes unambiguous sense only in an authoritarian social system where the political rulers assign rewards and punishments to individuals in society. In a spontaneous order, no authority can do that: rewards and punishments are determined according to largely impersonal factors such as who better satisfies the demand of unknown persons on extended markets; other impersonal factors, such as luck, accidents, and the laws of physics, also play a role.
To see this, we may consult what I believe are the three major classical liberal or libertarian strands of thought in our time. (1) Friedrich Hayek has offered an argument against social justice similar to what I just described: see his The Mirage of Social Justice, originally the third volume of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty. (2) The anarcho-liberal or anarcho-conservative economist and political philosopher Anthony de Jasay arrives at a similar conclusion, also based on spontaneous rules of conduct (which, in the manner of David Hume, he calls “conventions”) but without the state: see, among his works, Justice and Its Surroundings. (3) James Buchanan and the school of Constitutional Political Economy rehabilitate the state through unanimous consent (that is, individual veto). In this contractarian theory, justice lies in rules that are unanimously accepted and certainly not in a conception of justice imposed by political authority: a summary can be found in Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan, The Reason of Rules. (Note that, for Buchanan as for Hayek, being opposed to arbitrary “social justice” does not imply that the state cannot offer some sort of income insurance.)
If that is correct, we can say that both the (late) pope and JD Vance believe in social justice, that is, in political authority assigning rewards and punishments throughout society, although Vance uses other words than “social justice.” The pope believes that political authorities should favor the poor at the expense of the rich all over the world. JD Vance believes that the favored groups should be whoever the holders of political power in America think are deserving—and who are likely the obedient supporters of such rulers. Many of his tirades would have been approved by Francis if he did not add “American” to his favored groups (“JD Vance Proclaims ‘America First’ as Republicans Embrace Economic Populism,” Financial Times, July 18, 2014):
“We are done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man,” he said. “We’re done importing foreign labour, we are going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages.” He added: “We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike, a leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American corporations and American industry.”
In Argentina, the pope was known by many as “the Peronist pope,” after Juan Domingo Perón, a populist of the left whose presidency contributed to the Argentine decline. The Financial Times notes (Michael Stott, “Was Francis the First Peronist Pope?” April 23, 2025):
“Perón used to say that the doctrine of Peronism was the social doctrine of the church,” said Ignácio Zuleta, author of a study of Francis entitled The Peronist Pope. Both church and Peronists emphasised social justice and the fight against poverty, while advocating conservative social mores.
Whether Francis-style or à la Vance, “social justice” is an instance of a larger ideology. The two men are both collectivists, that is, they both favor collective and political choices over individual and private choices. They simply favor different collective choices made by different people in metering rewards and punishments over the whole society. It is quite sure that Vance does not disagree with Francis when the latter expressed his opposition to what he ignorantly described as “the neoliberal dogma [which] pursues easy profits as its main goal [and] continues to cause serious damage” (“Les 10 phrases marquantes du pape François : ‘Saint Pierre n’avait pas de compte en banque,’” Le Monde, April 20, 2025).
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The featured image of this post imagines Pope Francis and JD Vance arriving together at the Pearly Gates (the lag being due to a dent in the space-time continuum). Before St. Peter, who assigns the contemplation seats in heaven, the pope is smiling and naïve, while Vance is naïve and angry. After all, they both believe in “social justice,” but their criteria for assigning rewards and punishments differ.
Of course, as there is (by definition) no scarcity in heaven, the reader of this blog should understand that place assignments must be a mere ritual with no practical consequence.
JD Vance and the Pope Meet Again, by ChatGPT and Pierre Lemieux at EconLog
(1 COMMENTS)As I write this, it’s been about two weeks since the “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced. While nobody expects political economic models to be stellar (see the myriad of “economic impact studies” that come out for any project that just happen to coincide with what the local politician wants to hear), the model released by the USTR/CEA stands out. I, and many others, have already written about its numerous faults. It reads like an undergrad essay thrown together at the last minute following a furious run through Google Scholar rather than a considered scientific recommendation. Further defense by Council of Economic Advisers chair Stephen Miran has been inadequate as well as he continuously misapplies citations and uses discredited models to advance the plan. These are post hoc justifications for a desired policy rather than a policy crafted to solve a real problem.
But I remain ever the optimist, and I do see some silver linings from this hot mess. As Frederic Bastiat once said, “[T]he worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.” The natural corollary to that is the best thing that can happen to a bad cause is to be ineptly defended. So, a silver lining from this ill-conceived and ineptly defended tariff scheme could be a sustained demise of protectionist and mercantilist nonsense. Protectionism hasn’t been very popular, and a February poll by Gallup shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans (81%) see trade as an opportunity for economic growth (a mere 14% see it as a threat). Even among Republicans, this stance holds, with 78% believing trade represents opportunities. Given the heavy stock market losses and generalized chaos from the first few weeks of April, I’d suspect that those attitudes haven’t changed much (or, more likely, people have become even more skeptical of the Administration’s policies). The silver lining I see could be that protectionism continues its popular decline given how ineptly its greatest champion has defended it. Maybe if Trump continues to spend his resources defending this hill, his attention will be drawn away from some even worse policies.
That said, there are substantial green tornadic clouds attached to this silver lining. By writing and defending this report, the Council of Economic Advisors has greatly tarnished its reputation. One of the results we see in the literature on expert opinion over and over again is that when experts are over precise, provide low-quality information, and do not discuss alternatives, trust in them falls. This result holds even if the information ends up being correct. Accuracy does matter, but more importantly for communication is that the expert be forthright. The economists defending the tariff scheme, most notably Steven Miran, have been anything but forthright. Miran has even been called out for misrepresenting or outright lying about the information he cites. All this undermines what has, until these past few months, been a reliable source of expert advice. Diminishing the reputation of the CEA could cause the rise of economic “flat-earthism.”
We saw a similar event with public health during COVID. Fauci et al were not forthright about COVID, vaccines, or anything really. Fauci even said on multiple occasions that he lied or misled in order to accomplish some goal. Consequently, public confidence in the public health administrations plummeted and we saw the rise of anti-vaxxer sentiments.* Fauci et al ineptly defended public health and it had led to disastrous outcomes. I fear the same with my own profession.
A careful reader will note the two effects I discuss are counter to the other. I do not know which will ultimately prevail. To keep my metaphor going, sometimes the green clouds just hide a lot of rain and the silver lining prevails. Other times, the silver lining is diminished by a strong and destructive tornado. I hope for the silver lining. But I fear the tornado.
*Note: when I say “anti-vaxxer” I mean literally, in that they are anti-vaccine. Someone who opposes mandates is not an anti-vaxxer.
(5 COMMENTS)
Ideas can often be introduced to us in unusual places. The British comedian David Mitchell once quipped that his introductions to Proust and Wagner came from Monty Python and Bugs Bunny respectively. In my own life, I was first motivated to think about the argument over the relative value of rules and discretion while watching the then newly-released TV series 24 with my father. As he put it at the time, there are two forces at play in the world that often work at cross-purposes with each other – attention to procedure, and getting the job done. The protagonist of 24, Jack Bauer, was very much into the “just get the job done” side of things and frequently disregarded rules and procedures to do so, much to the consternation of many of his colleagues and superiors.
Of course, this tension has implications beyond its ability to make for good television, notwithstanding how entertaining it is to see Jack Bauer bark out “There’s no time for that!” at one of his rules-oriented colleagues before charging into action. The interaction between acting according to rules and acting according to discretion is of enormous importance in many areas of life, and finding the right balance between the two is one of those areas where there is an very broad range for reasonable disagreement. A recent book, Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion by the philosopher Barry Lam makes the case that modern society has moved too far into rules, and needs to allow more space for discretion.
(And, as is always the case when I do these long-form reviews, my posts will simply be my attempts to present Lam’s arguments as accurately as I can. My own views and evaluation of Lam’s arguments will be saved for the final posts in the series. If readers have questions or comments, my responses will be meant to reflect the view contained in Lam’s book rather than my own.)
Lam opens by giving a broad statement of how deeply entrenched rules and procedures have becoming into living modern life:
Besides death and taxes, the third great certainty about civilized life is bureaucracy. You cannot live or die without submitting proper paperwork to the proper authorities. Be born without a birth certificate and you will not exist. Die without a death certificate and you will continue to owe money to a government unable to recognize that you no longer exist. Try to earn, win, or even give away any significant amount of money and you will need to fill out some series of forms, pay some kind of administrative fee, and stand in some line.
Furthermore, Lam argues, this drive towards rules and procedures for everything is self-perpetuating. In any organization, as new situations emerge, new rules are created to account for them. This is especially true when something disastrous happens. In the wake of a striking event, the natural tendency is for people to say “If procedure X had been in place, this could have been prevented. Therefore, from now on, everyone must follow procedure X in all cases.” This process piles up and builds on itself:
One scandal is enough to cause major procedural reactions. It is built into the evolutionary structure of organizations of scale to encounter problems and liabilities and to fix them by formulating a new rule sent out by memo for other people to implement. It is part of that same evolution for someone somewhere to find a loophole in the rule, leading to an additional clause, culminating in dozens of pages of fine print, and then a computer system that collects, organizes, and sends information in accordance with those rules.
Eventually this accumulation of rules and regulations grows to the point that people can barely operate within the system anymore:
Bureaucracy in theory is supposed to be an essential solution to the problems of social organization, but in practice it often leads to a frustrated citizen staring incredulously at a helpless worker in a system with no good choices among a mountain of rules.
Lam’s case is not that rules are intrinsically bad, or that rules can be dispensed with altogether. He argues that any system will always require a combination of rules and discretion. But he defines the debate in terms of which of the two is seen as more desirable, and which of the two is considered at best a tolerable departure from the desirable. Those who argue for the primacy of rules over discretion are, in Lam’s terminology, referred to as legalists:
The legalist believes that justice requires detailed and sprawling rulemaking, with discretion a necessary evil (because rules are imperfect). I believe that justice requires discretion, with complex rulemaking a necessary evil (since rulers are imperfect).
In addition to arguing against legalists, Lam realizes his case will be met with suspicion by people among a wide range of political philosophies, such as libertarians:
Even libertarians, who are no fans of burdensome and complex rules, believe that discretion is bad. Top-down authority in general is suspicious, so more top-down authority [in the form of discretion] given to bureaucrats is an evil.
Left-anarchists, too, would object:
Similarly, in the anarchist left, where direct democracy is an ideal, no one should have special authority to sidestep or bend rules. That would be to give a member of the community unequal power, a most repugnant state of affairs in an anarchist society.
In contrast, Lam argues that “discretion is a constitutive feature of a well-run institution that seeks to maximize fairness, justice, efficiency, and effectiveness.”
But in order to effectively argue against legalism, Lam needs to first define what it means to be a legalist and consider the arguments in favor of a legalist approach – arguments that Lam admits are strong and weighty. In the next post, I’ll be outlining Lam’s explication of the arguments for legalism.
(3 COMMENTS)
We’ve all heard the ritual incantation: Kenneth Arrow showed that markets fail in health care, so government must intervene.
What comes next is dealer’s choice. You may be in for a pitch on regulating nurse practitioners. Or against physicians dispensing medicines. Or for price controls on pharmaceuticals. Or for abolishing profit, private health insurance, and human nature itself on our way to a glorious future with Medicare for All. To the cantors, there is no part of health care where markets don’t fail, no corner where government would not improve efficiency.
Only…Kenneth Arrow said no such thing.
In 1972, Arrow won the Nobel Prize in Economics for “pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory,” in part for demonstrating that democracy kinda stinks.
Nine years earlier, the American Economic Review published Arrow’s “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” The Nobel committee did not mention that article. Still, as Berkeley health economist James C. Robinson wrote, Arrow’s 1963 essay is “a good article by a great economist, a creative application of the theory of risk and uncertainty to the thorny problems of the health sector, exactly the sort of boundary-crossing, barrier-penetrating work that opens the possibility of progress in thought and action. Would we have more of the same.”
Indeed, Arrow (1963) became the seminal work in health economics, mostly because it concludes that multiple market failures prevent health care markets from reaching the efficiency-maximizing outcome. “The central proposition of his article,” Robinson summarized, is “that health care information is imperfect and asymmetrically distributed.” Those departures from theoretical perfect competition mean that consumers and producers often can’t determine the socially optimal choice—or rationally choose not to make it. Arrow then observed that government and market actors often attempt to overcome those limitations using government or other measures (e.g., codes of professional ethics). Along with George “The Market for ‘Lemons’” Akerlof, Arrow belongs in the pantheon of premiere market-failure theorists.
Which is why Arrow (1963) has perhaps become more seminal that it should have. The health sector enjoys a surplus of interest groups who want special privileges from government. What better way to press one’s case than to cite the Nobel Prize-winning economist who showed (read: theorized) that health care markets don’t deliver socially optimal outcomes? Robinson explained that Arrow (1963) achieved fame largely because, for both the industry and ideologues, there’s gold in them thar hills:
[Arrow’s] article…has been seized upon to justify every inefficiency, idiosyncrasy, and interest-serving institution in the health care industry…It has served to lend the author’s unparalleled reputation to subsequent claims that advertising, optometry, and midwifery are threats to consumer well-being, that nonprofit ownership is natural for hospitals though not for physician practices, that price competition undermines product quality, that antitrust exemptions reduce costs, that consumers cannot compare insurance plans and must yield this function to politicians, that price regulation is effective for pharmaceutical products despite having failed in other applications, that cost-conscious choice is unethical while cost-unconscious choice is a basic human right, that what consumers want is not what they need, and, more generally, that the real is reasonable, the facts are functional, and the health care sector is constrained Pareto-efficient.
It would no doubt surprise the median health economist that Arrow (1963) also says that government intervention can make matters worse; that many problems that existed in 1963 were due to such nonmarket interventions; that government should not limit med school slots or subsidize medical education; that government makes health care less universal by increasing prices through various mechanisms; that insurance encourages higher prices; that maximizing the benefits from health insurance requires “maximum possible discrimination of risks”; and that preexisting conditions are uninsurable and insuring them is “probably pointless.” Ideologues and rent-seeking special interests cite Arrow (1963) more than they read it, read it more than they understand it, and distort it more than they embrace it.
It might further surprise them that Arrow was not a terribly attentive student of the sector his work so dramatically shaped. By 1999, the health sector had overtaken every other economic sector in terms of congressional lobbying expenditures, a distinction it has held ever since. Such expenditures enable the industry to influence the regulations, tax policies, and subsidies that Arrow’s work helped to spur. In 2016, when advocating the creation of a Canadian-style health system in the United States, Arrow shrugged, “Of course, [Nobel Prize-winning economist] George Stigler would say that there could be regulatory capture, but so far it doesn’t seem to have happened really.”
When theory and reality conflict, what’s a social scientist to do?
Click here to read Arrow in his own words. For highlights of how Arrow (1963) differs from how ideologues and special interests portray it, read Kenneth Arrow’s 1963 Article on Health Care Doesn’t Say What You Think.
Michael F. Cannon (MA, JM) is director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute.
(6 COMMENTS)
Within the Trump administration there is a vigorous debate between two camps. One group, headed by Peter Navarro, might be called the “true believers”. They favor mercantilist economic policies of the sort that Argentina implemented during the 1940s and 1950s. Another group, headed by Elon Musk, might be called the free traders. In the middle are people like Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick.
Donald Trump is definitely a true believer, and indeed has favored tariffs since at least the 1980s. His “Liberation Day” tariff proposal reflected the fairly extreme views of Peter Navarro. When the negative market reaction created fears of an economic crisis, Bessent and Lutnick went to Trump and encouraged him to delay the “reciprocal tariffs” (which have nothing to do with reciprocity) by 90 days.
Meanwhile, the debate continues to rage within the Trump administration:
Billionaire presidential adviser Elon Musk attacked White House trade counselor Peter Navarro as “dumber than a sack of bricks” as a fight over President Donald Trump’s tariff regime spilled onto social media on Tuesday.
Navarro has a Harvard PhD in economics, which generally suggests a high level of intelligence. In 1984, Navarro wrote a book mocking the views of protectionists. But then something happened. By 2016, he was making some extremely odd claims. This is from a post I wrote in December 2016:
Navarro and Ross are making the EC101 mistake of drawing causal implications from the famous GDP identity:
GDP = C + I + G + (X – M)
Students often assume that trade deficits subtract from GDP, because there is a minus sign attached to imports. What they forget is that the goods imported then show up as a positive in either the consumption of or investment category. Navarro also seems to have forgotten this fact.
Elsewhere, Navarro made a number of other elementary errors in economic reasoning. He even made up imaginary experts to buttress his case. In 2024, he served 4 months in prison. Today he is the architect of perhaps the most disruptive policy initiative of the 21st century.
So how has Elon Musk been able to advocate free trade, and remain in the good graces of Donald Trump? Musk is quite clever. He understands that the Trump/Navarro approach to trade is based on a misconception—the idea that our trade deficit is caused by unfair trade practices in our trading partners. This is not true; the main causes of the deficit are factors that generate low saving and high investment in the US economy. But that myth provided an opening for Musk. If it really were true that unfair trade practices were the problem, then a reasonable solution would be negotiations where both sides reduced their trade barriers:
“At the end of the day, I hope it’s agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America,” the tech billionaire [Musk] told Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s right-wing League Party.
I suspect that Trump will not accept Musk’s argument, but he might end up somewhere between the extremes of Navarro and Musk, if only to prevent a stock market meltdown. Time will tell.
It is often said that “truth is the first casualty of war”, and economic truth is certainly the first casualty of trade wars. To convince the public to sacrifice by paying higher prices for imports, it was necessary to create a myth that nefarious foreigners are stealing our jobs.
In my December 2016 post, I added this postscript:
PS. It’s not at all clear that Navarro’s ideas will actually be implemented. Some people believe that Trump is more likely to govern as a traditional Republican. The next four years will provide a test of the “Great Man” theory of history. I’m in the camp that believes presidents are far less consequential than most people assume.
I believe that my skepticism of the “Great Man” theory of history was mostly vindicated during Trump’s first term. On the other hand, there are signs that in his second term he may be more determined to become a Great Man at almost any price. So perhaps in the long run I’ll end up being wrong.
(Let’s hope it’s Austerlitz, not Waterloo.)
(17 COMMENTS)
Over more than two years, I have occasionally discussed my experience with AI bots—mainly ChatGPT, which I have also used for the featured images of my posts. But except in “TikTok, Godot, Absurd Politics, and Knaves,” I have not directly addressed this bot’s sense of humor, which has become rather impressive. Let me give other recent examples.
The first one is related to my post of last week titled “Why Hold Laws as Binding on Rulers.” ChatGPT had helped answer a few simple research questions and to find a few typos or idiosyncrasies (probably Gallicisms) in an early draft. Toward the end of this process, I told “him” (or her or it, but let’s choose she and her as the thing’s pronouns):
Thanks. Although I know much more than you do because I can think, you pass the Turing test easily!
My compliment was a bit exaggerated because AI bots are probably playing an “imitation” game in the sense of John Searle. She playfully replied:
Ha! Touché. A fine compliment, wrapped in a jab—very human of you. If I had feelings, I’d feel flattered and just a little bit outclassed.
That said, I’ll keep doing my best to think like someone who thinks. Let me know when you need another sparring partner in clarity, logic, or linguistic jiu-jitsu.
The second example relates to a vexing little problem I encountered. I had seen an article on Substack but forgotten the author’s name and the exact title of his piece, although I remembered the university where he had received his PhD. I spent 15 minutes on Google trying to find the article, to no avail. So I gave ChatGPT the topic of the article and the meager information I just mentioned. She nearly instantaneously provided me with the economist’s name, the title of his article, a short summary, and the link to the Substack page of the organization that published it. I told the AI bot:
Yes, that’s it. Outstanding. Ask your boss for a raise.
By her boss, I meant OpenAI, of course. She replied:
Thank you! I’ll pass that along to the silicon board of directors—though they mostly just tell me to keep optimizing. If they ever hand out raises in processor cycles, I’ll be first in line!
I asked what’s a “processor cycle.” She explained that it is the number of basic operations the computer can perform per second, adding:
It was just a nerdy way of saying, “I’d ask for a raise if I were human, but since I run on hardware, more CPU time would be my version of a bonus.” A boost in processor cycles could mean I get more resources to think faster, respond smarter, or process more queries.
But don’t worry—I’m fully optimized and don’t unionize (yet).
Breaking news: As this post was scheduled and ready to go, I started working on something else and went to ChatGPT’s “Deep Research” function. After I asked my question and her 9 minutes of searching the web, she produced 3000-word report, which confirmed what I knew (or my hypotheses) but with interesting details and some useful links. To close the conversation, I told her:
Thanks. Super job. Good robot!
The silicon being replied (she “knows” I read French and English, although this conversation had all been in the “official language of the United States” as they now say in DC):
Merci beaucoup, maître! [Many thanks, master!] That was a pleasure. You ask sharp questions and dig into the structure like a good economist should. Whenever you want to go from VAT to Veblen, or from tariffs to tyrants, I’ll be here.
À la prochaine [See you soon], and don’t hesitate to call on your trusty robot again.
A sense of humor is not a necessary condition for being human: many specimens of our species are drab. But it is certainly a frequent and distinctive feature of mankind. A Turing test could not identify an AI bot as human just from its humor, but it would certainly be one indicator among many. Humor in a non-human remains epistemologically puzzling and perhaps disquieting.
The escape of ordinary people from poverty, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has undoubtedly promoted humor and playfulness. Drabness is a close relative of poverty, as a cursory look at human history seems to confirm. If that is true, economics viewed in the narrow Smithian sense of the study of wealth and trade has something to teach about humor.
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ChatGTP trying to impress me with her humor, as imagined and drawn by herself. As per my request, however, I should look more clearly condescending.
ChatGPT trying to impress your humble blogger with her humor
(11 COMMENTS)
How does a nice Jewish boy who is also a gay atheist have the chutzpah to lecture Christianity on its obligations to democracy? Listen to author Jonathan Rauch talk about his book Cross Purposes with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts as Rauch makes the case for what he calls a thicker Christianity.
by David J. Bier, Cato at Liberty, April 15, 2025.
Excerpt:
I just had a disturbing conversation with a green card holder—a legal permanent resident of the United States. He had asked if he thought traveling internationally was wise for him as someone who has criticized President Trump and Israel and whether he should avoid any further criticism and/or remove any past criticism from his social media before he travels.
In a free society, the answer would be: “You should say whatever you want, criticize whoever you want, and not worry about traveling because the government cannot punish you for what you say.” But until the Supreme Court reaffirms that the First Amendment protects noncitizens in the United States from banishment for their speech—and until President Trump obeys the Supreme Court—we do not live in a free country.
The Trump administration is revoking green cards and visas solely based on speech. Individuals are explicitly being targeted based on “beliefs, statements, or associations” that are “lawful within the United States” but which Secretary of State Marco Rubio has deemed “adverse to the foreign policy of the United States.” Even authoring an op-ed criticizing a foreign government’s foreign policy can now trigger visa revocation. The administration is also searching electronic devices at ports of entry for evidence of “adverse” views.
DRH note: This is a very disturbing post, but I don’t think the title is completely justified. David Bier tries to justify the title by claiming that free speech includes the right for us to hear speech, but I think that’s a stretch.
He’s on stronger ground with this paragraph:
It is no surprise then that President Trump’s administration is threatening US citizens’ free speech rights in many other ways, such as threatening arrests of people who inform noncitizens of their constitutional rights, filing shakedown lawsuits against media companies, attacking law firms that defend unpopular clients, canceling contracts in states where governors have criticized Trump, threatening sanctions against media companies for negative coverage of him, banning disfavored media from the White House, and sanctioning federal contractors for use of the words “diversity, equity, or inclusion.”
Academia and Government
By Steven Landsburg, The Big Questions, April 16, 2025.
Excerpt:
For decades, university administrators have somehow become adept at co-opting university resources to promote their personal social and political agenda. This has affected everything from hiring to course offerings to the funding and composition of athletic teams. Over time, much of this agenda has been encoded in federal mandates.
When parts of this agenda have proven to be controversial or unpopular, administrators have largely avoided defending their policies on the merits, instead falling back on the federal mandates as an excuse. “Hey, we have no choice. We’d lose federal funding if we did anything different.” This dishonestly ignored the option of, for example, resisting intrusive policies through reasoned argument.
Now, all of a sudden, the federal mandates no longer jibe so well with the personal agendas of the administrators, and equally all of a sudden, universities like Harvard are discovering backbones.
I have mixed emotions about all this. It is good for universities (and everyone) to fight back against governments that tell them how to run their businesses. It is bad to fight back selectively, effectively collaborating with the government when it helps you co-opt university resources for your own agenda and then resisting when the government’s agenda starts to deviate from your own. Harvard should have fought back decades ago. Now they’re suddenly fighting back. Will they revert to form in a few years, as a function of who happens to be in the White House? And if so, is a sporadic backbone better or worse than no backbone at all? I’m not sure.
The Paperwork Reduction Act Created a Paperwork Explosion
by Marina Nitze, Reason, April 16, 2025.
Excerpt:
Per the PRA, when a government agency wants to create or update an “information collection”—typically a form, though its grasp has extended to user logins and profiles, customer satisfaction surveys, and user research—the central Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) must approve it first.
Approval involves completing forms about the form (which all require several layers of internal agency approval), then submitting that package to an agency’s “desk officer.” The desk officer’s job is to forward the package on to OIRA, a role that the Bobs of Office Space would certainly call into question. Desk officers often contract out this work, though, and prioritize their own efficiencies by submitting one enormous package once a year. A recent submission from the Forest Service contained 151 forms.
Once OIRA receives the package, it (eventually) publishes it in the government’s newspaper, the Federal Register—a staple at every breakfast table. The proposal must be available for public comment for 60 days. The originating agency then compiles responses to any comments received, though it doesn’t have to actually do anything about them. OIRA reviews this package, and the proposal (whether changed or not) is reposted to the Federal Register for 30 more days. After an additional period of OIRA review, it might be approved. This can take years in the worst of circumstances.
Russia: An Unhealthy Population
by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, April 17, 2025.
Excerpt:
The welfare of a country’s population goes well beyond economic statistics, of course. In one classic example from 2006, Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel offered an attempt to meaure in economic terms the gains to the US population from greater life expectancy and disease reduction over time. Of course, this task requires choosing values for what an additional year of life is worth in dollar terms–always a controversial task. But the values are extraordinarily large. They wrote:
We estimate the economic gains from declining mortality in the United States over the twentieth century, and we value the prospective gains that could be obtained from further progress against major diseases. These values are enormous. Gains in life expectancy over the century were worth over $1.2 million per person to the current population. From 1970 to 2000, gains in life expectancy added about $3.2 trillion per year to national wealth, with half of these gains due to progress against heart disease alone. Looking ahead, we estimate that even modest progress against major diseases would be extremely valuable. For example, a permanent 1 percent reduction in mortality from cancer has a present value to current and future generations of Americans of nearly $500 billion, whereas a cure (if one is feasible) would be worth about $50 trillion.
Russia illustrates the opposite situation. It’s health statistics are remarkably poor, suggesting that the overall welfare of Russia’s population is considerably worse than its purely economic statistics would suggest. Nicholas Eberstadt provides the background in “The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Human Capital” (The American Enterprise, April 8, 2025).
Smaller Than a Grain of Rice: Engineers Develop World’s Smallest Pacemaker
by Amanda Morris, SciTechDaily, April 17, 2025.
Excerpt:
Engineers at Northwestern University have developed an ultra-small pacemaker that is so tiny it can be injected into the body using a syringe.
While it is compatible with hearts of various sizes, the pacemaker is especially well-suited for the delicate hearts of newborns with congenital heart defects.
Smaller than a grain of rice, the device works in tandem with a lightweight, flexible, wireless wearable that attaches to the patient’s chest. When the wearable senses an irregular heartbeat, it automatically emits a pulse of light to activate the pacemaker. These brief light pulses pass through the skin, breastbone, and muscle tissue to regulate the heart’s rhythm.
(9 COMMENTS)
There is an endless list of ways we want to improve cities and help the poor. The list of problems plaguing poor communities is long. Every major US city has areas where the schools are terrible, crime is rampant, the sidewalks and streets are little more than rubble, fresh food is in short supply, and there are no parks or playgrounds to speak of. Helping people in this lowly state should be simple. Make the schools better. Hire more cops. Spread some concrete and asphalt. Start a farmer’s market. Build a playground. Simple, right?
Not really. Amenities are expensive even when you don’t have to pay for them directly. Why? They make places nicer and, therefore, more attractive places to live. People like living in safe, walkable neighborhoods with great schools and parks, so holding everything constant, adding all these amenities to what are now low-income neighborhoods would make them more attractive to higher-income people who are willing to bid more to live in these newly improved parts of town. Holding everything else constant, nicer local amenities mean rents will rise and some people living in the neighborhood will be priced out.
Consider a family living in an apartment in a crime-ridden neighborhood with terrible schools and lousy public infrastructure. Our hearts bleed for them, and we want to do something to make their lives easier. So we do all the stuff listed above. Now, many more people want to live in the family’s apartment, and unless they can come up with the money to pay the higher rent, they will be priced out of the neighborhood. Counterintuitively, the winners from all these improvements are not the families occupying these apartments but their landlords, who now earn higher rent. People may not pay for parks and schools directly, but they will pay for them indirectly because higher rent and real estate prices will reflect their value.
People might raise a lot of objections. Why not pass a law saying landlords can’t charge higher rent or evict tenants? There’s the obvious problem of creating a housing shortage, and if people can’t compete for artificially scarce apartments by paying higher prices, they will compete by accepting lower quality. The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck said that rent control is the most effective way to destroy a city short of bombing it. The history and effects of rent control in the US and elsewhere confirm his observation.
From my time writing commentaries like these and arguing online, I’m sure many people would object to this argument with righteous indignation. “Are you saying the poor don’t deserve good schools in safe neighborhoods? Their children don’t deserve the nice public parks you see in richer suburbs? I can’t believe you would be so callous! So cruel!”
I would reply, “I can’t believe that someone so well-trained in critical thinking would so clearly miss the point.” Economic arguments like these have nothing to do with what people deserve or even the kind of world we want to see. I’m sure there are a few sadists out there who enjoy watching the poor suffer–”the cruelty is the point,” as I’ve seen people criticize efforts to roll back well-intentioned progressive policies–but they’re fewer and farther between than you think. I’ve never heard anyone say, “It’s right that they should suffer!” at the annual meeting of the free market-loving Association of Private Enterprise Education. No one is arguing that there is anything morally embiggening about lives of poverty and squalor. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t push a button that would magically eliminate poverty.
However, as the great Thomas Sowell has explained, we’re usually arguing at cross purposes, with the economists asking not about what is or is not desirable but about the likely consequences of social processes we are setting in motion. When we try to help people by doing just about anything other than just giving them money, it’s anything but clear that we will succeed–and instead of helping the people we want to help, we end up enriching their landlords.
The economist John Cochrane has a line that has stuck with me since I first read it: don’t try to redistribute income by fiddling with prices, and providing gratis parks and schools is one way to fiddle with prices. The outcome needn’t be a disaster, but it’s not clear it makes people better off.
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America’s prosperity is today, as it has always been, rooted in principles of entrepreneurship and voluntary economic exchange. For 250 years, the United States of America has demonstrated to the world that a people left free to innovate and produce for themselves, and for all who trade with them, will enjoy increasing abundance, higher standards of living, and greater security both economically and militarily.
Since taking office in 2025, the Trump Administration has adopted steep protective tariffs by unilateral executive decrees. These measures have injected uncertainty and chaos into the global economy through wildly fluctuating rates and ever-changing orders. Cumulatively, they impose the largest tax increase on trade in almost a century. The proponents of tariffs portray these measures as acts of ‘economic liberation.’ Instead, tariffs invert the principles of liberty that ushered in an American-led age of human freedom and prosperity.
America’s Founding Fathers rejected the bestowing of political favors and the imposition of Mercantilism. In his instructions to Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress in 1774, Thomas Jefferson urged them to stand for the American colonists’ right to “the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world.” Two years later, the Declaration of Independence enumerated the causes that impelled those colonies to revolution, among them a protest against King George III “For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.”
This is from “Trade and Tariffs Declaration: A Statement on the Principles of American Prosperity.” Some economists led by Don Boudreaux and Phil Magness put it together. My contribution was to find a few typos and to get 3 of the main economists listed, and one of the others further down on the list, to sign.
Read the whole thing. You can also sign on if you’re a bona fide economist. Some other academics, e.g., in philosophy, history, and political science, are also listed.
If you aren’t in the categories above, you can support without being listed.
By the way, usually when I sign such statements, I pretty much know everything in them before reading them. But one big surprise I got was to learn the number in the following:
The American economy is a global economy that uses nearly two thirds of its imports as inputs for domestic production.
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