Warning: There will be spoilers in this post for the plot of Dune, including plot points from the second book that will serve as the basis for the as-yet unmade third movie.  The recently released Dune: Part 2 has been a big box-office success, as was the first movie. These two movies were based on the first book in the series, and it’s been confirmed that the second book, Dune Messiah, will serve as the basis for a third movie. I first read Dune in my early teen years and have re-read it several times since then. I also re-read the book prior to watching each of the two most recent movies, to maximize my ability to notice and be annoyed by everything the movie changes from the book. (Don’t ask me why I do this to myself, I don’t fully understand it either!) I’ve also recently re-read Dune Messiah, even though the third movie won’t arrive for at least a few years. There has also been a lot of online discussion about a key element of the Dune story – is Paul Atreides the hero of the story, or is he a villain? To briefly summarize, with the secret assistance of the Emperor and his feared Sardaukar army, House Harkonnen launches a massive attack that all but wipes out House Atreides. Paul, the son of Duke Leto Atreides, and his mother, the Lady Jessica, narrowly escape and are taken in by the Fremen, a civilization that has lived natively on the harsh desert planet of Arrakis for thousands of years. The Bene Gesserit, an all-female religious order to which Lady Jessica belongs, had implanted among the Fremen (as well as other civilizations through the galaxy) the seeds of legends and prophecies to help make those populations more susceptible to control. The wing of the Bene Gesserit responsible for this process, the Missionaria Protectiva, puts these superstitions in place to ensure that if any member of the Bene Gesserit is trapped among these societies, they can leverage the implanted beliefs to put themselves in a position of authority and ensure their own security. The Fremen come to see Paul as a savior fulfilling one of these manufactured prophecies, and he quickly ascends to a position of authority among the Fremen. The Fremen, having spent generations living and surviving in the harshest conditions in the galaxy, become a fighting force that outmatches even the Emperor’s seemingly invincible Sardaukar army. The first book (and second film) end with Paul ascending to the Imperial throne, deposing the Emperor and bringing about the downfall of House Harkonnen. In the second book (and presumably in the third movie) we learn some of the consequences of Paul’s ascendancy to the throne.  With Paul’s reign, the Fremen are set out on the galaxy determined to spread the religion of Muad’Dib (Paul’s Fremen name). By the time all is said and done, over sixty-one billion people have been killed, ninety planets have been rendered sterile and over five hundred others devastated, and the followers of over forty other religions have been completely wiped out. Paul estimates his reign has brought about more destruction than any before and any that will follow, and that the galaxy will spend a hundred generations recovering. Paul’s regime is despotic, bloodthirsty, and brings about devastation.  The author, Frank Herbert, considered the story of Paul Atreides (and the Dune series more generally) to be a cautionary tale against the idea of messiahs, strong leaders, and so-called “great men.” Paul became a messiah and an icon of devotion, and this only precipitates an unprecedented wave of destruction. And some people interpret the story of Paul Atreides as the rise of a villain – perhaps the literary embodiment of Lord Acton’s dictum that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But I interpret things differently.  I don’t see the story of Paul Atreides as an example of a good person corrupted by power. (To be clear, I do think power is corrupting even of good people, but that’s not what I take from the story of Dune.) Instead, I see it as a critique of the idea that power becomes less dangerous if it’s wielded by good people. Paul comes to power as good person and continues to be a good person even after taking power. But nonetheless, he cannot wield this power to do good – he finds, to his despair, that every path he takes leads to tragedy and devastation. Paul Atreides does not seek to bring about the atrocities that come about as a result of his reign. On the contrary, he desperately wishes to prevent things from happening the way they do. Paul is a good and noble person, motivated by a strong sense of justice. He has been raised with Mentat training, which gives a person superhuman mental abilities akin to a living supercomputer. He becomes the first male to fully gain the powers and abilities of the Bene Gesserit, and gains prescient abilities allowing him to see how possible futures and timelines unfold. And even in the first book, he begins to glimpse the future that awaits him: Somewhere ahead of him on this path, the fanatic hordes cut their gory path across the universe in his name. The green and black Atreides banner would become a symbol of terror. Wild legions would charge into battle screaming their war cry: “Muad’Dib!” It must not be, he thought. I cannot let it happen.  But he could feel the demanding race consciousness within him, his own terrible purpose, and he knew that no small thing could deflect the juggernaut. It was gathering weight and momentum. If he died this instant, the thing would go on through his mother and his unborn sister. Nothing less that the deaths of all the troops gathered here and now – himself and his mother included – could stop the thing. Of course, Paul cannot spontaneously manufacture the deaths of himself, his mother, and an entire Fremen army on the spot. And thus, the terror unfolds. In the minds of some people, great power can serve great good, as long as the power is in the hands of the right kind of person. But in Herbert’s saga, this turns out to be false. Paul Atreides is not corrupted by the power he gains, nor does not crave power for its own sake. If ever anyone could be trusted with absolute power and to bring about good results with it, it should be Paul Atreides. Here we have someone who is sincere, well-intentioned, harboring a strong sense of justice, and who has the benefits of superhuman mental abilities and prescient foresight. And yet, in the story of Dune, even someone like Paul Atreides can’t wield absolute power without devastating results. The problem isn’t that power corrupts good people – the problem is with power itself.  (0 COMMENTS)

Perhaps as a sequel of mankind’s long tribal history, people apparently need scapegoats to shed the weight of sins and responsibilities from their shoulders. In democratic countries, “unelected officials” figure among the favorite scapegoats. It is an easy path to follow under the sun of simple beliefs, and I confess I once found it tempting. Elon Musk also seems to walk into this cul-de-sac in his otherwise worthy resistance to the Australian government’s censorship (“Elon Musk Criticizes Australia for Ordering Removal of Stabbing Video,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2024): “Should the eSafety commissar (an unelected official) in Australia have authority over all countries on Earth?” he posted, using a disapproving nickname to refer to the eSafety commissioner. What difference would it make if the commissar were an elected official? It is elected officials who have adopted the laws requiring the hiring of bureaucrats to enforce these very laws. Indeed, the Australian prime minister himself, arguably the ne plus ultra of elected officials in that country, supported his bureaucrat against Musk’s social media. It is true that, without any non-elected official, the power of elected ones would be reduced to the vanishing point. But this is not an argument for the whims of elected officials to replace any power they have delegated to bureaucrats. Power, whoever exercises it, needs to be constrained by the rule of law, and we can trust politicians to respect this limit even less than bureaucrats. Any individual or company, except for cronies, faces a more perilous situation if an elected official can rule by his whims. Consider the following example. Imagine what would happen if Donald Trump could, as it is being debated among his would-be advisers, run the Federal Reserve (see “Trump Allies Draw Up Plans to Blunt Fed’s Independence,” Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2024). The creation of money at the call of American presidents in the 1960s and 1970s generated inflation that, at the end of the period, grew to more than 10% per year, higher than what we experienced over the past three years as a consequence of the Trump and Biden deficits. In the early 1980s, two recessions were needed to tame inflation. Good reasons exist to believe that central banks are not only useless but detrimental. We have good reasons to believe that truly private money and banking would be more efficient. But there is little doubt that monetary policy would be more capricious and dangerous if it were wielded by some elected czar. The outcome would likely be more monetization of government deficits up to hyperinflation. Back to our general topic. Elected officials have too much power, which allowed them, in fact obliged them, to delegate some of it to the administrative state. Thankfully, laws constrained the latter, even if imperfectly, to follow some general rules. The problem is power, not how it is shared within the state (even if the sharing can limit it to a certain extent). It would be much worse if power were concentrated in politicians, especially under a czarist presidency. The same argument would apply to Joe Biden or any other glorified politician. Of course, the more ignorant the elected official is, the higher the probability of dumb errors. Elections do not provide the needed constraint. The typical voter remains rationally ignorant because his vote does not change the result of an election and he has therefore no incentive to spend time and resources gathering information on political platforms, public policies, and their likely consequences. Most voters know little about how “their” government works. Ask a voter chosen at random to tell you what the money supply is composed of, or what were the annual deficits under Trump and Biden, and he will not even know where to find the answer. If he does find correct information with the help of Google, he will likely not understand the methodology and significance of the numbers. Public choice economics strongly suggests that the democratic glorification of “elected officials” is no less dangerous (and, I would say, likely more dangerous) than the mystique of the disinterested bureaucrats. But through their working under rules, as they are expected to, bureaucrats can at least dampen the whims of politicians. ****************************** A government bureaucrat turned into a scapegoat for enforcing the laws adopted by elected officials (DALL-E under the influence of Pierre Lemieux) (0 COMMENTS)

In mid-October 2023, I wrote a draft of a blog post that I didn’t end up posting. I’m running it below, word for word as I wrote it in October. In October, I ran it by a friend who is very pro-immigration and, even though he largely agreed with it, he thought my proposal wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being accepted. The barriers to people immigrating from anywhere, he argued correctly, are just too high. So the idea of letting people in from Gaza didn’t seem worth bothering to push. He persuaded me. I shouldn’t have been persuaded. Because look at what just has happened. The Biden administration is starting to talk about letting people in from Gaza. Here’s a post from Dave DeCamp from antiwar.com, titled, “White House Considers Taking in Palestinian Refugees from Gaza.” And here’s a quote from his short post: The Biden administration is considering taking in certain Palestinian refugees and giving them a permanent safe haven in the US, CBS News reported on Tuesday. The report said that officials across several government agencies are examining options to resettle Palestinians who have immediate family members who are American citizens or permanent residents. They are also considering making the option available for Palestinians with any relatives who are Americans. The number of Palestinians eligible for permanent resettlement in the US is expected to be relatively small, but the report said it would mark the first time the US refugee program accepts Palestinians in large numbers. I should not have accepted the idea that proposals that seem unlikely today will be unlikely 6 or 7 months from now. Here’s my post from October. I’ve kept the same title. Or, at least, let some of them in. Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have been competing recently for the title of who most wants to keep people from Gaza out of the United States. I can’t compete, because I want to allow many of the people from Gaza in to the United States. And even in the likely case that I can’t convince many people, I want to allow many people to leave Gaza. They are not allowed do so now. Many critics of Israeli government policy have claimed that Israel has made Gaza into an “open-air prison.” But a simple look at a map tells you that that can’t be true. The Israeli government can’t do it alone. What has made Gaza into an open-air prison is the fact that Israel’s government won’t let many Gazans enter Israel and that Egypt’s government won’t let many Gazans enter Egypt. There’s not complete closure for people entering Israel, or, at least, there wasn’t before the horrendous Hamas murders on October 7. Similarly, there hasn’t been, until recently, complete closure into Egypt. But in both cases, it was a trickle. Of course, there’s one other possible way to exit Gaza: by boat. But Israel’s Navy forcibly prevents people from leaving Gaza by boat. Let’s imagine that the U.S. government or some other government decides to let in some people from Gaza and that the various governments persuade Israel’s government to let them go. How would a government choose whom to let in? It should be obvious that it’s a really bad idea to let in members of Hamas or even non-members who strongly support the Hamas agenda of wiping out Jews. And vetting them is not easy. What kinds of records would a government require? When I immigrated to the United States in 1977, I had to get a statement from the RCMP that I had no criminal record in Canada. That was relatively easy to do. Can the U.S. government trust a police force in Gaza to the same extent it could trust the RCMP? Probably not. In short, I don’t have a good way to suggest for vetting potential immigrants from Gaza. But that doesn’t mean that no one does. In particular, I would want to know what Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier, two immigration analysts and proponents at the Cato Institute, think. One thing that helps the vetting problem is self-selection. Many people would rather stay in Gaza than leave because they still believe that they can take over Israel and run the Jews into the sea. Fortunately, that’s highly unlikely, but try telling them that. Better yet, don’t try telling them that. Leave them and choose from the ones who want to come. Let’s say that the vetting problem is solved. We’re unlikely to get, say one million people from Gaza. It’s more likely to be hundreds of thousands. If it were, say, 200,000, that’s approximately 10 percent of the number of residents. That may not sound like a lot. But one conclusion I came to when I was an economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers is that if you solve 10 percent of a problem, and do so with almost no new government spending, you’ve done a lot. And the way to have almost no government spending, beyond the amount spent on vetting, is to let them work. People coming from Gaza, like immigrants from other low-income countries, would immediately multiply their productivity, as Bryan Caplan has shown in Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. So there would be no need for government to house or feed them. You might wonder why, then, governments in various cities are breaking their budgets to house and feed immigrants who come in through our southern border. It’s for one main reason: for the first 180 days they’re here, they can’t legally work. What about the fear that even those who don’t support Hamas will be anti-semitic? This is a reasonable fear. But before Ariel Sharon forcibly removed thousands of Jews from Gaza, those Jews got along reasonably well with many of their Arab neighbors. What changed is that now the only contact most residents of Gaza have ever had with Israelis (the median age of a resident of Gaza is about 19) is with Israeli soldiers or Israeli police. That’s bound to affect, in a negative way, their overall impression of Jews. The late Carlos Ball, whose father was once the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States, told me that his father had said, “Never judge a country by its government bureaucracy.” The implication was that the people of any country are almost always nicer than the bureaucrats. If I had had to judge Americans by the way the bureaucrats at the Immigration and Naturalization Service treated me, I wouldn’t have wanted to come. Similarly, many Gazans who come here might well be anti-semitic. But most of them would be too busy making a living and enjoying the incredible wealth that they would be creating. Trade creates peace. It also reduces racism.   (0 COMMENTS)

America is an outlier. Its GDP per capita is far higher than any other country with at least 10 million people. The US GDP per capita (PPP adjusted) is $85,373, while the next nine range from Taiwan at $77,858 to the UK at $58,880.  (All of these are IMF estimates for 2024.)  If you prefer nominal GDP measured at current exchange rates, the gap is even larger. The US is again at $85,373, while Australia comes in second at $66,589. There’s another way in which the US is an outlier.  We’ve experienced much more immigration than any other country.  How should we think about those two facts? Opponents of immigration often claim that it makes America poorer by depressing wages.  Presumably this means that if we had experienced less immigration, we’d be even richer.  Imagine that instead of 330 million people, our population had only risen to 110 million—to somewhere between Germany and Japan.  How rich would we be in that case? I suppose it is possible that even though America is much richer than all other mid-sized and large countries, and even though we’ve had vastly more immigration than other countries, the immigration has depressed incomes in America. Perhaps with lower levels of immigration we’d be even more of an outlier. But does that seem likely? David Levey directed me to a recent study of this question, by Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri.  Here’s the abstract: In this article we revive, extend and improve the approach used in a series of influential papers written in the 2000s to estimate how changes in the supply of immigrant workers affected natives’ wages in the US. We begin by extending the analysis to include the more recent years 2000-2022. Additionally, we introduce three important improvements. First, we introduce an IV that uses a new skill-based shift-share for immigrants and the demographic evolution for natives, which we show passes validity tests and has reasonably strong power. Second, we provide estimates of the impact of immigration on the employment-population ratio of natives to test for crowding out at the national level. Third, we analyze occupational upgrading of natives in response to immigrants. Using these estimates, we calculate that immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less educated native workers, over the period 2000-2019 and no significant wage effect on college educated natives. We also calculate a positive employment rate effect for most native workers. Even simulations for the most recent 2019-2022 period suggest small positive effects on wages of non-college natives and no significant crowding out effects on employment.  [Emphasis added] I think this is the key: native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants Other countries tend to be good at one thing, such as building cars or pumping oil out of the ground.  America’s diverse population allows us to adapt to changing global trends.  When new industries develop, we are usually in the forefront (smart phones, fracking, pro basketball, e-commerce, electric cars, AI, GMO foods, superhero movies, high speed trading, etc., etc.  We have all kinds of people, able to fill all sorts of niches. Opponents of immigration may have in mind a model where adding labor to a fixed quantity of land reduces per capita output.   But that’s not how the real world works.  America’s people, not its land, is its greatest resource. PS.  The per capita GDP of very small countries is often distorted by factors such as multinational earnings, oil income, and tax haven status.   (1 COMMENTS)

Every public policy comes with its own set of externalities and unintended consequences. Moreover, because politics exists at the nexus between competing interests, outcomes can often approach zero-sum, whether or not this was the initial aim of policymakers. Simply put, someone gains while someone loses; there is always a cost. In my previous post, we ended by taking a cursory glance at some of the social costs of drug prohibition, such as increased violence, property crimes, and a rise in the incidence of overdose deaths. In this post, we will take a deeper look into the (sometimes hidden) costs imposed by the War on Drugs™.    The Astonishing Growth of the Prison-Industrial Complex While comprising roughly 4.23% of the world’s population, America is responsible for nearly one-quarter of the world’s prison population. At any given time, 1.9 million individuals are the unwilling guests of Federal, state, and local prisons, a per capita rate of 565 per 100,000 residents. (Note: in the wake of COVID, many states elected to release prisoners early due to health and staffing concerns. This has led to a temporary 16% drop in the incarceration rate). For the sake of comparison, China, which has four times the population of the United States and is known for its repressive regime, has 1.7 million people incarcerated in its prison system – a per capita rate of a mere 119 individuals per thousand. According to the Federal Department of Prisons, some 44% of inmates in Federal correctional facilities are there because of drug offenses. That number decreases to roughly 25% for state and local facilities, a share of the prison population exceeded only by those imprisoned for violent offenses. In creating a whole new class of criminal, drug policy generated an ever-increasing need for space to house these inmates. While Richard Nixon-era drug policy tended towards treatment over incarceration (which isn’t to say that Nixon didn’t want incarceration; he did, at least of certain segments of society), Reagan’s Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 established mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenders (and civil asset forfeiture, another social cost that bears discussion). This, of course, precipitated a rise in the prison population, but it was the Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that jump-started the prison construction industry.  Not only did this law mandate a minimum sentence of 25 years for individuals convicted of a felony for the third time, it earmarked $97 billion for the construction of new prisons. State and local governments availed themselves of this funding, and while adding their own, 544 correctional facilities were built between 1990 and 2015, an average of one every 10 days. The straw that stirs this noxious drink is the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). While the Thirteenth Amendment made it possible for prisoners to be used as a cheap source of labor, this was restricted to utilization by individual states, as it was illegal to transport prisoner-made goods across state lines or use prison labor for private entities. When the PIECP was approved by Congress in 1979, these restrictions on prison labor were lifted, introducing perverse incentives into the criminal justice system by way of the profit motive. With Reagan’s ACT requiring new space for the influx of drug offenders, corporations and political leaders not only began contracting for the building and management of new facilities, but officials began negotiating with the private sector for opportunities to monetize and profit from prison labor (Chang & Thompkins, 2002). In essence, prisons went from being a nominally rehabilitative, functionally punitive institution to being an avenue of profit. Thus, the prison-industrial complex was born. Much of the literature on this odd paradigm focuses on the rise of private prisons, but although these facilities are problematic, they house a mere 8% of incarcerated individuals. The pressing issue is that the profit motive that exists in private for-profit correctional facilities also exists in publicly funded state and local facilities. This is reflected in the fact that large institutional investors such as Merrill/BofA Securities purchase prison-construction bonds to the tune of over $2.3 billion annually (Cummings, 2012). They are willing to underwrite the construction of both private and public prisons because they guarantee generous returns. This ROI is insured by the low wages paid to inmates, both those employed in facility upkeep and those laboring for private industry.  Estimates suggest that inmate labor is responsible for over $2 billion in goods and services, while prisoners earn pennies on the dollar; the average wage is between 13 to 52 cents per hour. Additionally, correctional facilities earn extra revenue by charging back to inmates items such as room and board, court costs, and necessities such as toiletries. These chargebacks can take up to 80% or more of the inmate’s eager wages, and some even leave their incarceration in a monetary deficit. Prisoners who are fortunate enough to work for private employers under the PIECP program are paid a higher wage that must be commensurate with prevailing local wages. This comprises less than 6% of inmates, and their chargebacks tend to be even higher. The irony of this situation is that the PIECP was intended to enhance the rehabilitative function of prison labor by imparting inmates with skills that would be valued on the market after their release. A confluence of interests, from politicians who wish to appear tough on crime during election season, police departments that benefit from enhanced funding and equipment to focus on drug arrests, prisons that directly benefit from contracted labor, and private interests wishing to exploit the many opportunities available to them from financing, construction and low-cost labor, have all conspired to turn the whole thing into a cottage industry of perverse incentives. In my next post, we will continue with the militarization of police.   Tarnell Brown is an Atlanta based economist and public policy analyst. (0 COMMENTS)

Who do tariffs punish? Many people think they punish unscrupulous, shifty foreign manufacturers who aren’t playing fair and “dumping” their shoddy wares on American markets at prices below American producers’ costs, but that’s not true. Tariffs are sanctions and penalties imposed on American consumers for not paying enough. Governments regularly impose sanctions on other governments for various abuses of human rights and international treaties, or other similarly bad behavior. These sanctions can be a refusal to allow a country’s citizens to trade with another country’s citizens or an outright trade embargo. The basic idea is that punishing a country with trade sanctions will get it to change its behavior. Or, perhaps, by punishing a country’s citizens, we can inspire them to rise up and throw off the chains of their oppressors.  Sanctions have a checkered history and a less-than-inspiring track record. Protectionism is a classic example of a policy that does the opposite of what it is supposed to do. It increases American employment in the protected industries, but the workers’ additional earnings are transferred dollar for dollar from consumers. We could use the land, capital, labor, and other resources more efficiently to make something else. According to a Daily Mail poll asking about Donald Trump’s plan for 10% tariffs on all imports, “24 percent of likely voters strongly support the policy proposal while another 30 percent tend to support it.” Protectionism is bipartisan: a few weeks ago, Reuters reported that Senate Democrats from manufacturing states were pushing for tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles because “Allowing heavily subsidized Chinese vehicles to enter the U.S. marketplace would endanger American automotive manufacturing.” It’s not hard to show that any gains to domestic producers come out of domestic consumers’ pockets. It’s also fairly easy to show that the reduction in gains from trade for consumers is greater than the increase in gains from trade going to producers and the tax revenue the government enjoys. These videos from Marginal Revolution University walk you through the graphs. If you scratch an economist, you will find someone more enthusiastic about free international trade than the average person and the median voter. Indeed, 1100+ economists signed a 2018 open letter from the National Taxpayers Union urging the government to abandon protectionism. Unfortunately, the median voter embraces populist demagoguery and votes enthusiastically for tariffs and other restrictions on international trade. The results do not Make America Great Again. They just make us poorer.  Tariffs on foreign goods are “sanctions” on American consumers. Their crime? Not wanting to pay as much as domestic producers want. (0 COMMENTS)

Russ Roberts, EconTalk Host The favorite EconTalk episodes for host Russ Roberts are when he and his guest have an unusually powerful connection such as his recent episode with Charles Duhigg, and the ones where he learns something mind-blowing, like Adam Mastroianni’s insight that you can’t reach the brain through the ears. Listen as Russ […] The post The Top EconTalk Conversations of 2023 (with Russ Roberts) appeared first on Econlib.

The OC Register reports that a California judge has struck down a new law allowing as many as four units on a single lot: “The Legislature finds and declares that ensuring access to affordable housing is a matter of statewide concern and not a municipal affair,” SB 9 states. “Therefore, … (this law applies) to all cities, including charter cities.” But the law does nothing to guarantee more affordable housing, Kin wrote. At the same time, he rejected the state’s argument that SB 9 promotes housing affordability at lower income levels by increasing the overall housing supply. ” ‘Affordable’ refers to below market-rate housing,” Kin wrote. The state gave “no evidence to support the assertion that the upzoning permitted by SB 9 would result in any increase in the supply of below market-rate housing.” Redondo Beach City Attorney Michael Webb hailed Kin’s ruling, saying SB 9 amounts to a “kind of trickle-down economics applied to zoning.” In fact, the single best way to provide more affordable housing is to build more unaffordable housing.  And contrary to the claims of Michael Webb, housing is textbook example of trickle down economics in action. Consider the following analogy.  Suppose you are worried about high used car prices.  Low wage workers are struggling to afford the few used cars that are available on the market.  Would you suggest that the car companies start building some crappy junkers, which sell for $5000?  Obviously not.  The optimal solution would be to build more “unaffordable” new cars.  The affluent people that buy those new cars would then sell their old cars, which would put downward pressure on the price of used cars.  Eventually the benefits would “trickle down” to those people who are unable to afford new cars.  Not only does trickle down economics work, it’s the key to understanding important markets such as autos and housing. In any advancing society, new houses should be better than existing homes.  That means that new houses will be “unaffordable” to the median purchaser of houses of that size.  That’s good.  That’s how living standards improve over time.  If new houses were no more expensive than existing homes, then we’d all still be living in log cabins. Judge Kin doesn’t seem to understand the laws of supply and demand.  He speaks of building houses at price points below “market rate”, whereas the whole point of the policy is to make housing more affordable by reducing the market price of housing.  Build more mansions, and the benefits will trickle down to the working class.  I don’t even like the phrase ‘trickle down’, as it suggests the process is slow.  The benefits of housing construction will flood down onto the lower end of the market. PS.  The judge’s decision applies to the state’s 121 “charter cities”, but not the much larger number of “general law” cities that lack a charter. (0 COMMENTS)

Yet Another Drug War Failure by Ted Galen Carpenter, antiwar.com, April 23, 2024. Excerpt: Despite such spectacular policy failures, drug warriors in the United States and other countries cling to hard-line strategies and refuse to face an inconvenient economic truth.  Governments are not able to dictate whether people use mind-altering substances.  Such vices have been part of human culture throughout history.  Governments can determine only whether reputable businesses or violent criminal gangs are the suppliers.  A prohibition strategy guarantees that it will be the latter – with all the accompanying violence and corruption.  The ongoing bloody struggles among rival cartels to control the lucrative trafficking routes to the United States merely confirm that historical pattern. And a great last line: Ecuador is just the most recent proof.  Prohibition is akin to expecting long-term victory in a game of Wack-a-Mole. I’m a little picky about language. I would have said “Ecuador is just the most recent evidence.”   The Jones Act: Consequences of a Destructive Industrial Policy by Timothy Taylor, Conversable Economist, April 24, 2024. Excerpt: The United States has had an industrial policy aimed at boosting its domestic shipbuilding industry since the passage of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly known as the Jones Act. Whatever the arguments for the passage of the bill a century ago, it has over time been a disaster for the US maritime industry, and continues to impose significant costs on other parts of the US economy. Colin Grabow goes through the arguments in “Protectionism on Steroids: The Scandal of the Jones Act” (Milken Institute Review, Second Quarter 2024, pp. 44-53). And: 2) The higher costs of Jones-Act-compliant US shipping naturally impose heavy costs on places like Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. Weird consequences result, and Grabow provides a number of examples. Puerto Rico gets its liquified natural gas from Nigeria, because there are no Jones-Act-compliant US ships to transport natural gas within the United States. US lumber producers complain that they have a disadvantage vs. Canadian firms, because the US lumber producers must use higher-cost Jones Act ships to send their products to US destinations, while Canadian lumber producers can use cheaper international shipping companies.   It’s Time to Take a Hard Look at Public Libraries by Marc Joffe. Cato at Liberty, April 25, 2024. Excerpt: Like mom and apple pie, the public library seems so intrinsically good that it should be beyond criticism. But like any institution that consumes millions of tax dollars, public libraries should not be free from scrutiny. And the facts are that neighborhood libraries have largely outlived their usefulness and no longer provide value for the public money spent on them. Consider the situation in Northern California, for example. In this fiscal year, four Bay Area counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara) are collectively spending $270 million to operate their library systems, with some cities chipping in extra to finance extended operating hours. Contra Costa County is spending $20 million of state and county funds to build a new library in Bay Point, and El Cerrito voters may see a sales tax measure on the November ballot, part of which will go to building a new library as part of a transit‐​oriented development near a Bay Area Rapid Transit station. The public library’s historical functions of lending physical books and enabling patrons to view reference materials are being made obsolete by digital technology. An increasing proportion of adults are consuming e‑books and audiobooks in addition to or instead of printed books, with younger adults more likely to use these alternative formats.   There’s a kind of racism embedded in DEI by Erec Smith, Boston Globe, April 19, 2024. Unlike traditional racism — the belief that particular races are, in some way, inherently inferior to others — prescriptive racism dictates how a person should behave. That is, an identity type is prescribed to a group of people, and any individual who skirts that prescription is deemed inauthentic or even defective. President Biden displayed prescriptive racism when he said “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black,” a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think. “Prescriptive racism” is probably a new term for most readers, but it’s not exactly a novel concept. It has a historical analogue: the concept of the “uppity Negro,” a Black person who dared to act like an equal to whites. One of this term’s most famous usages is attributed to Lyndon B. Johnson, who apparently said: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness.” Clearly, “uppity” was meant to describe people of color who exercised “agentic” power — that is, they were competent and did not need a white person’s heroism. These “uppity” Black people were forgetting their scripted lines, as it were.       (0 COMMENTS)

Pierre Lemieux’s excellent post on The Economist‘s dismissal of an argument against gun control reminded me of a line from, I think, one of Robert MacNeil’s books. He said, “It has always been axiomatic to me that easy access to firearms would lead to more crime, in particular, homicide.” See the problem? It’s not axiomatic. It might be true, but it’s not axiomatic. MacNeil’s claim has to be researched. I remember, when I read that years ago, being so disappointed that a person who made his early living as a reporter would regard such a claim as axiomatic. And because he did, he probably never pursued the evidence. (0 COMMENTS)