MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell makes a good point about the extremely low probability that Donald Trump will get a fair trial in Washington, D.C. He doesn’t use the term “fair trial” and he doesn’t seem to mind, but that is the point he’s making. But he overstates dramatically. After pointing out that of 700,000 people in D.C., only 676 voters voted for Donald Trump, O’Donnell states: The odds of one of the 676 Republicans who did vote for Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. yesterday ending up on his jury there are worse than your odds with any lottery ticket you could buy anywhere. Do you see the problem? There are a few. The big one, of course, is that 676 out of 700,000 is approximately 1 in 1,000. Let’s make it exact. It’s 1 in 1,036. There are many, many lotteries with worse odds. In fact, all of them have worse odds, if we’re talking about the lotteries with prizes greater than, to pick a number not at random, $1,000 in return for a $1 ticket. There are other more-minor problems. I’ll mention two. First, there are just shy of 700,000 people living in D.C. Probably, no more than 500,000 of them, and probably even fewer, are eligible to serve on a jury. So that makes Trump’s odds better than O’Donnell says, although still grim. Let’s pick the 500,000 number. So Trump’s odds are 1 in 740. Second, I don’t think O’Donnell understands the idea of people acting on principle. I can certainly imagine a Trump voter voting to convict Trump once the judge has laid out the instructions to the jury. That would make Trump’s odds worse than 1 in 740, although, of course, it doesn’t rescue O’Donnell’s absurd claim. But I can also imagine that there are principled people among Democratic jurors who would, following a judge’s intructions to the jury, vote to find Trump not guilty. That would, of course, make Trump’s odds somewhat better. The bottom line: Trump cannot get a fair trial, but O’Donnell badly exaggerated how unfair it would be. It’s too bad O’Donnell didn’t consult his colleague Rachel Maddow, who I hear is smart. (0 COMMENTS)

Since the copyright to “Steamboat Willie” expired, the earliest versions of Mickey Mouse are now in the public domain. Does this mean everyone can grab the mouse, kick back, and let him create a media empire for them? Probably not. Where does value come from? According to what is called the physical fallacy, it comes from the transformation of material stuff into other material stuff. This is a serious mistake: as Deirdre McCloskey has argued, every good begins as an idea. IKEA furniture, for example, is not valuable because of the physical material that goes into it. It gets its value from people’s ideas about how to use those materials to make people better off. Thomas Sowell points to a particular instance in his classic book Knowledge and Decisions. A guy named Walt Disney had created a character called Oswald Rabbit that had gained popularity. His studio, owning the copyright and thinking they didn’t need Disney to make successful Oswald Rabbit cartoons, shut him out. They thought Disney’s income came from superfluous charges above the “real” costs of making the cartoons. They reasoned that they could make money without Disney’s input once they had the character and the animators. Except, of course, that isn’t what happened. Oswald Rabbit flopped, and a new character Disney created (and made sure he owned) called Mickey Mouse succeeded. As Sowell points out, the value of Oswald Rabbit (and later Mickey Mouse) was not the product of the material means of production conditioning creators’ minds. It was the product of Disney’s creativity and vision. When the studio told him to get lost, they ultimately hurt themselves–but undeterred, Disney pressed on and revolutionized entertainment. Without Walt Disney’s stories, Oswald Rabbit died. “But they don’t make anything.” That’s not true. Writers, animators, and storytellers might not transform matter, but they create value where it didn’t exist before by finding new ways to entertain people. Collectors and dealers form a mini-industry evaluating, appraising, and moving their creations from lower to higher value uses. “But without intellectual property law, Disney wouldn’t be the behemoth it is today.” That’s probably true, and intellectual monopoly is an unnecessary evil. However, Disney’s stock price did not plunge when Mickey entered the public domain and is, as of this writing, about 10% higher than it was when the copyright for “Steamboat Willie” officially expired. People have wondered what would have happened had the Super Mario Bros. video game franchise entered the public domain–as it would have a few years ago under old intellectual property rules. This example suggests that it is dangerous to appoint moral and intellectual surrogates to decide on behalf of people they may not know and in response to incentives that do not reward them for being right or punish them for being wrong. Fortunately, Disney found a new outlet for his creative genius. it makes me wonder how much culinary, creative, and technological genius the world has wasted because someone had power, a particular vision, and poor incentives. (0 COMMENTS)

Not long ago I pointed to a case where we could see the perfectly predictable outcomes of wage controls playing out in real time in Seattle. Now, my current state of residence, Minnesota, is offering a chance to see in real time how licensing laws come into being. Let’s take a look.  There is a proposal under way to prevent anyone from providing “unlicensed” painting services. If passed, this proposal would create a new “paint contractor board to oversee the licensing. It would require all painters to get licensed or work as a journeyworker under a contractor.” Apparently, we here in Minnesota have been living with the horror of painting services provided by unlicensed and uncredentialled workers, which is bad for reasons that are never clearly explained. I certainly haven’t seen the harm – when my wife and I moved into our current residence, we had most of the interior repainted by a father-son family business, and they did a great job, despite a lack of licensing requirements. As the news story I linked above points out, “Twenty-three states currently do not license painters, according to the Institute for Justice. Red states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas have rejected licensing, but so have blue states such as Illinois and Colorado.”  It certainly seems to me that Minnesota has been getting along just fine without requiring painting licenses. Unfortunately for the painters we hired, and for everyone else who has been making a living or doing some extra work on the side by providing this service, this doesn’t seem to matter to Minnesota legislators. Even established painters “with decades of experience” will be required “to go through the licensing regime and, in the meantime, hire an approved painter to oversee their work.” This would also impact the work of “small contractors and remodelers by requiring them to find a licensed painter even if they are capable of doing it themselves. A plumber who installs a new toilet, shower, and sink would be banned from adding a coat of paint to finish a bathroom remodel.” So, where is the push for this new licensing requirement coming from? Perhaps, in states allowing unlicensed painters, there has been a string of buildings spontaneously collapsing as a result of being painted by people lacking government-dictated credentials, and I just haven’t noticed? Of course not. This legislation, as is almost always the case with legislation of this kind, is not coming about because consumers have been raising the alarm and petitioning their governments to protect them from the menace of unlicensed painters (or unlicensed florists). Instead, Minnesota may end up engaging in this misadventure as a result of “three Democratic-Farmer-Labor senators: Jennifer McEwen, Judy Seeberger, and John Hoffman. All were backed in their elections by the Painters and Allied Trades Council, the union that stands to benefit from the bill.” And here we see the public choice lesson playing out in a nutshell. The typical person in Minnesota isn’t spending a moment of time thinking or worrying about paint licensing – they are too busy with the process of living their normal lives. Meanwhile, a small but concentrated special interest group and just a few legislators, having a very different set of incentives, can go about passing a new regulation that puts up new barriers to entry to what used to be an easy to enter profession, limit competition, and drive up costs, benefitting the politically connected few at the expense of everyone else.  Of course, this one change is not going to bring about devastation to Minnesota. But just as the little things matter when they are positive, so too do they matter when they are negative. And just as a large number of tiny improvements can come together to create major improvements, large numbers of these little degradations can come together to cumulatively impose substantial burdens.  (0 COMMENTS)

On the evening of March 1st, President Javier Milei delivered an unprecedented speech in front of Congress, and for many reasons. For one thing, his office labeled the event as a ‘State of the Nation’ address, even though he was formally opening congressional sessions for the year. He also unveiled an ‘anti-caste’ law which would criminalize monetary emission and eliminate public financing for political parties. But most importantly, Milei announced his intention to sign a new national ‘pact’ on May 25th, on the 214th anniversary of the Revolución de Mayo that freed Argentina from Spain. The Pacto de Mayo that Milei proposed includes commitments to: 1) the inviolability of private property; 2) non-negotiable balanced budgets; 3) the return to a level of 25% of government expenditures as a percent of GDP; 4) a tax reform that effectively reduces fiscal pressure; 5) a reform of the system of tax ‘coparticipation’, i.e. the federal tax revenue share scheme across provinces; 6) the exploitation of available natural resources; 7) the flexibilization of labor laws; 8) pension reform to allow for private pension funds; 9) political reform so as to eliminate public financing of political parties; and 10) free trade.  Some of the Pacto de Mayo principles are, in theory, already embedded in Argentina’s constitution, such as the protection of private property, but most of them seem like basic goals for all liberal democracies. In fact, they are very similar to the 1989 Washington Consensus, also a set of economic policy prescriptions that mostly encouraged nations to embrace economic liberalism.  Compared to John Williamson’s ten Washington Consensus points, Milei’s originality lies in stressing the need for pension reform, in a country where private savings were confiscated a few years ago while millions of government handouts disguised as pensions were given out in recent years at the expense of taxpayers. Another difference is Milei’s push for exploiting natural resources, especially when some provinces refuse to do so (La Rioja even banned lithium exploration) and rely instead on federal tax revenue. This is why the president is also insisting on reforming tax co-participation, as it allows for provinces to increase public spending while relying on the federal government to levy taxes. The one Pacto de Mayo principle that stands in direct contrast to one of the Washington Consensus’ is the call for tax cuts, as Williamson advocated for expanding the tax base. In the end, then, the Pacto de Mayo looks like an improved Washington Consensus.  So who is to sign the Pacto de Mayo? Governors. And this is because Milei’s announcement is not just ideological, but also strategic. After his failure to have Congress pass the Ley Bases, an omnibus bill which included sweeping deregulation and which would have complemented his late 2023 megadecree, Milei knows that he will need to cooperate with subnational authorities if further reform is to be implemented. But kirchnerismo, the leftist movement Milei defeated in the polls a few months ago, rejects the Pacto de Mayo. His strategy, then, is to by-pass negotiations with parties or individual congresspeople and instead appeal to key governors. By offering fiscal relief to some of their provinces, the idea is governors will instruct legislators (as they usually work as their political bosses) to support government bills. Besides the announcement of the Pacto de Mayo and the ‘anti-caste’ law, Milei also announced the elimination of Télam, a state news agency which was effectively a taxpayer-funded vehicle for leftist propaganda. For the most part, though, Milei’s speech was similar to the one he delivered for his inauguration. This time, he quoted Milton Friedman and referenced Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. The future of Milei’s Pacto de Mayo, as well as the rest of his agenda, is uncertain. Not only did his administration decide to send the Ley Bases back to the committee stage to prevent defeat, but his megadecree has also been challenged in the courts. Whether he can appeal to governors with his improved version of the Washington Consensus remains to be seen. But despite the dire economic situation, Milei is still popular and his Friday night speech marked an ideological comeback that energized his base. The president is not backtracking. Instead, he is accelerating.   Marcos Falcone is the Project Manager of Fundación Libertad and a regular contributor to Forbes Argentina. His writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, National Review, and Reason, among others. He is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (0 COMMENTS)

The executive arm of the European Union government imposed a fine of nearly $2 billion against Apple Computers for abusing its “dominant position” on music streaming in its app store. Spotify was the bruised competitor that complained against Apple under the EU’s antitrust laws. (“Apple Fined Nearly $2 Billion in Europe Over Music-Streaming Apps,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2024; and “Apple Hit With €1.8bn Fine for Breaking EU Law over Music Streaming,” Financial Times, March 4, 2024.) The argument against antitrust laws can be briefly summarized as follows. Perfect competition is a positive model in economics: it simplifies reality to explain it. It is true that some economists—notably the 20th-century welfare economists—gave some normative significance to the model. But even if perfect competition is desirable, there is no reason to believe that politicians and bureaucrats could move the economy there. Moreover, as many economists (including famously Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) have observed, large firms that develop on free markets bring benefits to consumers. In the absence of government-built obstacles to market access (such as regulations and protectionism), large firms are anyway pushed to behave much like perfectly competitive ones, lest they lose their customers and market to new entrants. (A good introduction to the elementary theory of monopoly can be found in David Friedman’s book Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, Chapter 10.) Politicians, bureaucrats, and their courtiers seem to ignore these considerations; it is often in their interest. One wonders why EU bureaucrats and politicians don’t go and create their own Apple–indeed, why they haven’t already done so. And why isn’t Spotify able to compete on the free market, without shouting for Big Brother’s help? Nobody in the world is forced to use Apple products and services. Yet, many think that governments may legitimately force successful firms into their questionable competition mold, however monopolistic these governments themselves are. Spotify executives and shareholders, as well as developers of Apple apps, think it is ethical to win politically the success they are not able to achieve through competition for consumers’ patronage. Some think that this dirigisme can be consistent with the rule of law, provided that comply with laws formerly adopted by democratic assemblies and committees, and with regulations adopted by bureaucrats hired under such a system. Much questioning and unlearning is required on these topics. I would argue that the best word to encapsulate the EU government’s decision against Apple is: extortion. One irony is that private high-tech companies used to think that their friendly and benevolent governments were ideologically and politically on their side. The assault against high tech, in China, America, and Europe, revealed the illusion. Another dimension of the issue is the apparent belief of politicians, bureaucrats, and their admirers that any cost can be imposed to the producers of the marvels of civilization and that the production will automatically continue as before. These believers resemble José Ortega ‘s barbarian mass-men, who think that the conveniences of modern life are “the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree.” ************************************** The featured image of this post, also reproduced below, was created by ChatGTP 4. I gave “him” a series of commands around the theme “Generate [an image of] an Apple computer as it would look like if it had been designed by politicians and government bureaucrats.” My more discrete prods included that the computer be “sustainable.” The images produced by our artificial friend were not overly original; this one was among the best. (PL) Apple computer as politicians and bureaucrats would conceive it. Source: ChatGTP (0 COMMENTS)

Rich Countries Are Becoming Addicted to Cheap Labor So reads the headline of a long news story in the March 3 Wall Street Journal by Tom Fairless. We generally think of addictions being bad. But workers aren’t cocaine. What’s wrong with being “addicted” to cheap labor? In a word, nothing. The headline is true to the content of the article and Fairless isn’t simply asserting his own views. He actually quotes economists who claim that there’s something wrong with hiring cheap labor when instead you could pay for more-mechanized production methods. Economists often point out that one of the downsides of an increase in the minimum wage is that it would cause employers to adopt labor-saving production methods sooner than otherwise. If the economists quoted in this news story were consistent–and maybe they are–the would see that downside as a feature, not a bug. Here’s one excerpt that references a prominent Canadian economist named David Dodge: In Canada, economists say the government has cast aside a carefully managed immigration system that gave priority to highly skilled workers, and ramped up significantly the intake of foreign students and other low-skilled temporary workers. By flooding the market with cheap labor, Ottawa may be propping up uncompetitive businesses and ultimately damaging productivity, according to a December report co-written by former Canadian central-bank governor David Dodge. Notice the strange use of the word “uncompetitive.” If those businesses are able to do well and maybe even thrive, how are they uncompetitive? In fact, they are quite competitive. And how would hiring more workers reduce productivity? Are the employers stupid? Do they want to pay people who not only don’t produce but also reduce production? Of course not. It ‘s clear what Dodge means. He means that hiring low-skilled workers could easily reduce average productivity. Indeed, the very next paragraph of the news story makes my point: Economic output per capita is lower than it was in 2018 following years of record immigration, notes Mikal Skuterud, an economist at Waterloo University in Ontario. Canada has been bringing in so many low-skilled workers that it lowers the country’s productivity overall, he says. Skuterud is pointing to average productivity even though he blows it at the end by equating that to the “country’s productivity overall.” But in this context average productivity is not a good measure. The employers have found a cheaper way to produce and the workers, many of them from poor countries, as the news story points out, are better off. Also, with cheaper production, consumers are better off. What other objections, according to Fairless, do economists have to cheap labor? Fairless writes: “Once industry is organized in a certain way and the structure encourages employers to recruit migrants, it can be very hard to turn back,” said Martin Ruhs, a professor of migration studies in Florence, Italy. “In some cases, policymakers should ask, does it make sense?” said Ruhs, who is also a former member of the U.K. Migration Advisory Committee, which advises the British government on migration policy. It might be hard to turn back. But who has the better incentive to look ahead and estimate whether they will need to turn back: economists at universities and think tanks or employers with a whole lot of skin in the game? And while I don’t know how quickly employers would adjust if they found labor becoming cheaper, we do know that the history of the U.S. and other rich economies in the 20th century is that production methods became more and more capital-intensive as labor became more and more expensive. Relative prices matter. The pic above is of a car dealership that has a number of workers from India serving as apprentices. The horror! HT2 to Marian Tupy.   (0 COMMENTS)

Back in the 1970s, I occasionally travelled to Mexico. At the time, the people I met seemed slightly paranoid, seeing CIA conspiracies behind many events in their own country. Now I wonder whether America is becoming similarly suspicious.In recent years, there has been hysteria over the supposed threat posed by TikTok, a Chinese owned social media app. There has been fear of Chinese purchasing American real estate, and Chinese students attending American universities.  And now there is fear that Chinese cars represent a “national security threat“: Joe Biden has ordered an investigation into whether Chinese “connected” vehicles, including electric cars, pose a security risk to Americans, as he tries to prevent China from flooding the US market. At first, I thought this referred to a risk of job loss. But the administration actually claims that these cars could be used to spy on Americans: Biden said most cars were now “connected”, making them “like smartphones on wheels”. He said he was concerned Chinese vehicles could collect sensitive data about US citizens and infrastructure, and that the information could be sent back to China and enable its government to remotely access the vehicles. I have a hard time believing the administration actually believes this far-fetched theory.  More likely, they are using “national security” as a fig leaf to cover up old fashioned crude protectionism: US Treasury officials recently told the Financial Times that EVs were one of the areas where the Biden administration was most concerned about the possibility of China flooding the US and other markets. “This particular inquiry is motivated by the national security risk . . . though it fits into a broader strategy for making sure that we are supporting a strong US auto industry,” said one official. Today, the US has a large surplus in its auto trade with China, and the Biden administration seems determined to maintain that surplus.  Unfortunately, these protectionist actions have three negative effects: 1.  US consumers are hurt because Chinese electric vehicle provide far more value for the dollar. 2.  The global environment is damaged, as this slows the transition to cleaner electric cars. 3.  US taxpayers are hurt as the US government has spent large sums in a futile attempt to make the “big three” competitive in electric cars.  This policy is now widely viewed as a failure. Mathias Miedreich, chief executive of Umicore, said sales of Chinese electric cars were surging in contrast to the US due to better performance and affordability. “They are simply good cars and people buy them,” he said in an interview, referring to Chinese vehicles. “The American ones [producers] seem to struggle to bring good electric vehicles [to market].” The current level of anti-Chinese paranoia is something I’d expect in a third world country, not a great power like the US. PS.  The Economist recently injected a bit of sanity into the debate over the China threat: Since 1978 foreign owners of agricultural land have been required to declare it to the us Department of Agriculture (usda). The agency’s data show that, at the end of 2022, around 3% of privately held land nationwide was declared foreign-owned. The biggest holders were firms and individuals from Canada, followed by the Netherlands and Britain. Declared Chinese entities held less than 1% of all foreign-owned land, or 0.03% of the total. People in Luxembourg own more. Foreign land ownership has grown by 40% since 2016, but China is not evidently the driver. From 2021 to 2022 the total amount of land owned in full or in part by Chinese firms shrank from 384,000 acres to 347,000. In Iowa, Chinese holdings totalled just 281 acres—an area smaller than the state fairgrounds in Des Moines. PPS.  While visiting China last year I rode in several BYD cars.  The quality seemed to be very high and they are quite cheap. (0 COMMENTS)

The assumption commonly prevails that effective healthcare provision, especially during public health disasters like pandemics, must come from top-down authorities. Yet, this assumption overlooks the reality that local communities actively and routinely orchestrate the bottom-up delivery of healthcare services. Communities can, and frequently do, provide endogenous responses to all sorts of disasters, including pandemics. Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work, particularly in “Governing the Commons” in 1990, laid the foundation for understanding collective action through the lens of co-production, whereby people manage common-pool resources without centralized control.1 Other scholars have extended Ostrom’s concept to disaster recovery. Co-production involves active collaboration between communities and governments, where both bottom-up and top-down parties participate in planning, implementing, and evaluating initiatives following a crisis.2 By integrating local knowledge, informal institutions, and social networks, communities play an essential role in designing and executing contextually relevant recovery strategies. They are not passive actors in a top-down, governmental recovery process but rather are active agents who foster a sense of ownership and empowerment. Through the utilization of local and cultural knowledge, these recovery efforts can often foster more robust and sustainable recoveries. It is important here to distinguish between economic and technical solutions in response to crises. Technical solutions often tend toward a single solution for all, but economic solutions often direct scarce resources to the pursuit of multiple and complementary rather than competing ends. Governmental recovery efforts tend to involve technical solutions or allocating a scarce means toward one centrally defined end. Community recovery efforts then produce economic solutions by valuing a spectrum of ends, including physical health, mental health, religious practices, and community, among others. This approach fosters a more comprehensive and adaptable recovery because it recognizes that people rationally value multiple and complementary ends more than the single end defined by authorities. For example, in response to a deadly and infectious virus, government efforts produce technical solutions that primarily address public health concerns through lockdowns and shutdowns to contain cases, hospitalizations and deaths. While potentially crucial for controlling the spread of diseases, these measures can overlook the broader array of community needs, and importantly, contain large tradeoffs (e.g., the toll lockdowns in 2020 had on mental health3, women exiting the labor force at higher rates4, high learning deficits among underprivileged children5, and many more). People rarely value one sole end, but instead seek to meet a variety of ends with scarce resources. It is likely incorrect to assume that pandemics are any different, even if the ends sought by communities may vary and change. “Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it is unsurprising then that communities emerged as vital agents in disseminating accurate information and implementing localized responses, playing a crucial role in the recovery process.” Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it is unsurprising then that communities emerged as vital agents in disseminating accurate information and implementing localized responses, playing a crucial role in the recovery process. Co-production became particularly relevant during the pandemic as communities actively engaged in the production of essential healthcare services. Communities’ deep understanding of local contexts allowed for the development of context-specific measures, ensuring that recovery efforts were tailored to the unique challenges faced by each community. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Orthodox Jewish communities throughout the world provided a plethora of private health services, despite the stigma that Orthodox communities disregarded health concerns at this time.6 My coauthors and I researched Orthodox Jewish communities within the greater New York City area, investigating their endogenous responses to the pandemic. To do so, we designed a content-analysis of several large, New York City-based, Orthodox Jewish newspapers.7 My coauthors and I found that emergent narratives in Orthodox communities emphasized their care for health, building upon the literature of communities’ robust responses during crises. In particular, we found that rabbis and rabbinical councils provided private healthcare guidance; private, Jewish ambulances and medical response teams provided culturally and religiously sensitive healthcare; and, private, Jewish day schools provided ‘traditional’ public health services, like testing and tracing, while also prioritizing religious education.8 First, rabbis, rabbinical councils, and other Jewish advisory boards played a crucial role in providing health guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City and surrounding areas by leveraging their trusted positions within the community to disseminate accurate information.9 Their influence extended beyond religious matters, fostering a sense of communal responsibility and adherence to health guidelines. Rabbis consistently conveyed a message which emphasized that, in adherence to elements of the Orthodox Jewish faith, one should prioritize health and the sanctity of life over religious practices, like in-person worship. This principle, known in the Jewish religion as pikuach nefesh, roughly translates to “saving a life”, and advocates that when in contention, preserving life must come before religious duties and observances. Many rabbis throughout the greater New York City area issued warnings to the community about distancing and masking, and many chose to close synagogues to in-person worship voluntarily. For instance, one Manhattan synagogue decided to close all services and classes, and the leading rabbi issued the following statement, justifying their closing by placing an emphasis on pikuach nefesh: “We strongly believe that safeguarding health is a Halakhic10 priority, one that requires us to act boldly to protect our community, our neighborhood, and beyond. We know that this requirement supersedes any requirement of congregational prayer.”11 One well-known rabbi in New York City wrote publicly, in the New York Jewish Week, that Torah readings and other Jewish thinkers like Maimonides show the Jewish people that “Halacha calls on us to be more careful with protecting our lives than with fulfilling ritual obligations.”12 Through my coauthors’ and my content analysis, we found several other instances in which rabbis directly refer to pikuach nefesh and the necessity to put the sanctity of life above religious obligations. Figure 1. Important Joint Statement to the Orthodox Community In addition to messages from individual rabbis, rabbinical councils often provided health guidance and chastised communities who did not adhere to guidelines through the pandemic, again largely basing their guidance on pikuach nefesh. Indeed, this was one of the more commonly cited reasons rabbinical boards put out for why they closed synagogues and encouraged at-home worship. For example, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, President of the New York Board of Rabbis, stated that “Halachically… the preservation of life—maintaining health—is of paramount concern.”13 The New York Board of Rabbis, the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County, New Jersey, and the Long Island Board of Rabbis were just a few of the rabbinical boards issuing statements and advice through the pandemic; of course, nation-wide councils, like the Rabbinical Council of America, issued statements; so too did small, local councils across the country. These councils not only issued advice, but also chastised communities who did not place the sanctity of life above religious observance. For instance, the New York Board continued to issue guidance and criticism throughout the pandemic when Orthodox communities in Brooklyn broke crowd limits. In response to a Borough Park protest of COVID-19 public health restrictions in October 2020, the Board called the protests “shameful.”14 Last, these councils were also important in the re-opening process. Several large councils released their own guidelines for reopening synagogues and other areas related to worship, such as high-holiday worship and religious bathhouses called mikvahs. Importantly, each council tailored reopening guidelines to their communities’ needs. For instance, informed by a medical advisory panel and the guidance of Jewish religious-legal scholars (called Poskim), the Agudath Israel of America released an 11-point guide for gradually reopening synagogues (see Figure 2). Through our research, we found several other reopening guides that all mentioned the necessity for integrating local, on-the-ground knowledge into decisions around reopening. Figure 2. Another common theme from our content analysis were the services provided by Hatzalah. With origins in 1960s New York City, Hatzalah are community-based, volunteer, emergency medical organizations that provide ambulance and healthcare services that would become vital during COVID-19. Hatzalah provide swift and culturally sensitive responses in Orthodox Jewish communities, which during the pandemic, alleviated strain on the broader healthcare system. There are approximately nine Hatzalah chapters in New York, some of which have multiple divisions that serve numerous communities. For example, the Chevra Hatzalah chapter has fifteen branches throughout New York. A female counterpart to the Hatzalah in New York formed during the pandemic as well. After attempting to get approval from the state for years, the Ezras Nashim finally received approval to operate an ambulance during the pandemic. It is largely important for the same reasons the Hatzalah is important: certain groups prefer culturally sensitive medical care. In this case, many Orthodox women “might not wish to be treated by male staff for modesty reason.”15 These services were essential during the pandemic not simply because they provided culturally and religiously sensitive healthcare, but also because Orthodox communities, which already felt alienated and disliked during the pandemic, had access to healthcare providers they could trust. In addition to providing ambulatory and healthcare services, Hatzalah also served as a general source of information and guidance for Orthodox communities. In August 2020, for example, amidst escalating outbreaks in Orthodox communities in New York City, local Hatzalah branches issued warnings about surging case rates and provided guidance to community members on appropriate courses of action. Figure 3 shows a common example of statements released by Hatzalah branches throughout the pandemic. What seems clear is that these services, existing in some places since 1965, are essential for public health provision, especially when healthcare must be provided with cultural and religious sensitivity. Throughout the pandemic, these bottom-up, organic, healthcare services were essential for Orthodox Jewish communities. Figure 3. Hatzalah branches At the same time, Jewish schools also proved indispensable by implementing proactive measures such as testing and safety protocols, all while upholding the significance of Jewish faith and traditions within schools. This dual commitment to Jewish education and public health underscored the communities’ ability to pursue economic solutions rather than technical ones. Furthermore, it showcased the capacity of Jewish institutions to tackle pandemic-related challenges through bottom-up, community-based solutions rather than top-down, governmental measures. While the Jewish community was criticized for being unwilling to shut down schools, a narrative that emerged from our analysis was that schools understood that to remain open, they must prioritize health. Orthodox Jewish schools implemented similar measures to other schools, such as keeping desks spaced apart, requiring masking, and adding plexiglass enclosures at tables. Moreover, some schools even provided and required COVID-19 rapid testing, despite pushback from parents who feared if too many students tested positively, the school would be forced to close. Like rabbis, rabbinical councils, and Hatzalah organizations, schools published guidance for parents on how to keep case rates down in order to keep schools open. Importantly, schools not only tried to limit the spread of COVID-19 within their premises, but also helped limit the spread throughout the larger community. For instance, some Orthodox schools urged caution amid the Jewish holidays: in a joint letter from Orthodox high schools across the United States, including several in New York City, administrators urged parents not to “schedule sleepovers” and to “[r]equire masks even for outdoor play dates. Remind children to keep their distance from one another. And forget about traveling during the upcoming Jewish holidays.” They continued, stating that their rationale was to ensure community safety and to keep schools open: “[W]e are writing this letter to communicate with you a number of important communal norms that must be adhered to in order to minimize the spread of COVID, thus preserving the health of our community and the viability of our schools.” In some cases, schools even asked children to quarantine if they knew that the family had attended large weddings.16 It should be noted that not all schools and school leaders complied when shut down by city or state mandates. During both the spring and fall of 2020, several predominantly Orthodox schools defied closure orders, resulting in tension between Orthodox communities and Mayor DeBlasio, as well as between Mayor DeBlasio and Governor Cuomo. This discord centered on differing perspectives regarding the strict enforcement of pandemic-related regulations.17 That said, it must be stressed that all the organizations that emerged in our content analysis (rabbis, rabbinical councils, Hatzalah, and Orthodox Jewish day schools) released guidance and health advice on how to keep communities safe. This advice was typically based on care for life (pikuach nefesh) and care for maintaining religious practices, such as continuing Jewish education. Importantly, these were the dominant themes that emerged from our content analysis of several large Orthodox newspapers. While we did find evidence of discord between Orthodox communities and government health authorities, the primary messaging from key leadership areas, including rabbis, rabbinical councils, Orthodox Jewish ambulatory and healthcare service organizations, and schools, all centered around ensuring the health and wellbeing of the community so that religious practices could continue. Leaders recognized that the Orthodox community would be unable to continue their religious practices as normal unless they provided for public health. Importantly, my coauthors and I found substantial evidence that emergent, community-driven public health institutions helped pursue local and public health goals. For more on these topics, see “Public Health from the People,” by Byron Carson. Econlib, Feb. 5, 2024. A Guide for the Perplexed, by Moses Maimonides. Online Library of Liberty. Emily Oster on the Pandemic. EconTalk. This discussion here has many important implications. First, Orthodox communities were singled out during the pandemic as caring little for public health and instead caring solely for religious observances. We find evidence that points to a different story: Orthodox community leaders stressed adhering to public health guidelines, and Orthodox private health services (like Hatzalah and schools) helped facilitate this, so that Orthodox communities could continue religious observances. Second, it is important to ask what ‘optimal public health policy’ truly is. Is it policy that follows what communities want and need, or is it policy that is dictated without regard for the multiple ends valued by the people it affects, and instead acts to solely meet one end? Future outbreaks may need to be informed by considerations of individual and community values and their resulting endogenous public health rules to avoid clashes between communities and public health authorities, and perhaps to provide more sustainable, effective recoveries. Footnotes [1] Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). [2] For a discussion of co-production during the pandemic, see Pedro Paniagua and Vishnu Rayamajhee, “A Polycentric Approach for Pandemic Governance: Nested Externalities and Co-production Challenges,” Journal of Institutional Economics 18, no. 4 (2022): 537-552. [3] See, for instance, Vahia, Ipsit V., Dilip V. Jeste, and Charles F. Reynolds III. “Older Adults and the Mental Health Effects of COVID-19.” JAMA 324, no. 22 (2020): 2253-2254. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.21753. PMID: 33216114. [4] Claudia Goldin, “Understanding the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. w29974 (2022). She finds, in particular, that African American women excited the labor force at the highest rates, highlighting concerns of racial and gender disparity stemming from the pandemic and its related policies. [5] See, for instance, B.A. Betthäuser, A.M. Bach-Mortensen, and P. Engzell. “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Evidence on Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Nature Human Behaviour 7 (2023): 375–385. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01506-4. [6] New York City Mayor De Blasio, for instance, tweeted a message to the entire “Jewish community” that they needed to heed local rules, or they would be arrested. This led to large backlash from Jewish communities, since at this time, there was no data indicating that Jewish communities violated distancing and other local orders at higher rates than non-Jewish communities. See Matt Katz, “Jewish Americans Feel Scapegoated for the Coronavirus Spread,” NPR, May 13, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/05/13/854852779/jewish-americans-feel-scapegoated-for-the-coronavirus-spread. [7] The content-analysis evidence discussed in this piece draws from my current research with Trey Carson, Tony Carilli, and Justin Isaacs, and is produced here with their permission. Running a content analysis involves systematically and objectively examining the characteristics and meanings of textual, visual, or audio content to identify patterns and themes. In our case, we examined prominent Orthodox Jewish newspapers, including the Jewish News Week, The Jewish Press, and Hamodia. Importantly, our research found further themes than what is discussed here, such as religious communities altering religious observances (like funerals) for these to be observed safely, but we only include three themes here for brevity. [8] It should be noted that the Jewish community has traditions dating back thousands of years that emphasize health. See, for example, N.L. Muravsky, G.M. Betesh, and R.G. McCoy, “Religious Doctrine and Attitudes Toward Vaccination in Jewish Law,” Journal of Religion and Health 62, no. 1 (February 2023): 373-388 for a discussion on vaccinations and Jewish law. [9] See Figure 1 for a typical example of statements from rabbinical councils during the pandemic. [10] Halakhic refers to matters related to Halakha or Halacha, which is the collective body of Jewish religious law. [11] Steve Lipman, “Chabad Rabbis Shut Down Brooklyn Synagogues,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 18, 2020. https://www.jta.org/2020/03/18/ny/chabad-rabbis-shut-down-brooklyn-synagogues [12] Rabbi Noah Gradofsky, “To Protect Life During a Plague, Build Yourself a Fence,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 11, 2020, https://www.jta.org/2020/05/11/ny/to-protect-life-during-a-plague-build-yourself-a-fence. [13] Stewart Ain, “Jewish Community Grinding to a Halt as Coronavirus Spreads,” NY Jewish Week, March 13, 2020, https://www.jta.org/2020/03/13/ny/jewish-community-grinding-to-a-halt-as-coronavirus-spreads, accessed October 11, 2023. [14] David Israel, “NY Board of Rabbis: Violent Chasidic Protests ‘Shameful,'” The Jewish Press, 2020, https://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/ny/ny-board-of-rabbis-violent-chasidic-protests-shameful/2020/10/09/. [15] Cnaan Liphshiz, “Brooklyn’s Orthodox Women’s EMT Service Gets Right to Operate an Ambulance After Years of Lobbying,” JTA, August 14, 2020, https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/brooklyns-orthodox-womens-emt-service-gets-right-to-operate-an-ambulance-after-years-of-lobbying. [16] Quoted and drawn from articles by Shira Hanau, “Orthodox Day Schools Urge Covid Safety Ahead of High Holidays,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 17, 2020, https://www.jta.org/2020/09/17/ny/26-day-schools-urge-covid-safety-ahead-of-high-holidays, “‘This Is What We Expected’: Covid Closures and Quarantines Already Widespread at New York-Area Jewish Day Schools,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 15, 2020, https://www.jta.org/2020/09/14/health/this-is-what-we-expected-covid-closures-and-quarantines-already-widespread-at-new-york-area-jewish-day-schools, and “Messages in Jewish New York City School Parent Chats Advise against COVID Testing to Prevent Shutdowns,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 24, 2020, https://www.jta.org/2020/09/24/health/parents-at-jewish-schools-in-new-york-city-advised-not-to-test-for-covid-to-prevent-shutdowns. [17] Shira Hanau, “In a Repeat of the Spring, Yeshivas in Brooklyn Are Operating despite School Closure Mandate,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 15, 2020, https://www.jta.org/2020/10/15/united-states/in-a-repeat-of-the-spring-yeshivas-in-brooklyn-are-operating-despite-school-closure-mandate. *Rachael Behr LaRose is Teaching Professor of Economics at Xavier University Department of Economics, Cincinnati, OH. This article was edited by Features Editor Ed Lopez. (0 COMMENTS)

As if Washington was not busy enough internationally, serious Korea analysts wonder if Northeast Asia could erupt in flames. North Korea is rewriting its constitution to drop plans for peaceful reunification with the Republic of Korea, declaring the South to be the North’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy.” Worse, Pyongyang celebrated the approach of Christmas by staging another intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test, its fifth in just one year. Let’s be clear at the outset, ICBMs serve only one purpose for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK): to target the U.S. homeland with a credible nuclear threat and deterrent. Not long-ago Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un was writing “love letters” to President Donald Trump and working to warm up relations with the South. However, after the failed Hanoi summit in February 2019, Kim retreated, essentially ending dialogue with the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK). The Biden administration’s efforts to restart talks have gone nowhere, as Kim accelerated his missile development program, reinforced ties with China, and revived a once moribund relationship with Russia. In mid-December Washington and Seoul felt it necessary to warn the DPRK that a nuclear attack “is unacceptable and will result in the end of” Kim’s regime. Although minuscule by Chinese and Russian standards, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal may soon raise Cold War dilemmas when it comes to establishing deterrence. America’s and South Korea’s overwhelming military superiority makes Pyongyang’s forces vulnerable to a preventative or preemptive strike. To the extent that Kim believes his forces are essentially “use it or lose it,” he will be tempted to launch if he believes an allied attack might be in the offing. The result would be catastrophic. Writing about the Soviet Union, Thomas Schelling applied game theory to the international nuclear standoff. As if the duelists, as he envisioned them, “were assured of living long enough to shoot back with unimpaired aim, there would be no advantage in jumping the gun and little reason to fear that the other would try it.” Thus, he suggested, governments should protect weapons before people. In the same way, today’s national antagonists should be wary of seeking first strike and regime decapitation capabilities. Doing so might precipitate the very war everyone wants to avoid. As with the DPRK. “Why is North Korea America’s problem? Such is the price Americans pay for what is known in Washington as ‘global leadership.'” All of which is a good reason to ask: Why is North Korea America’s problem? Such is the price Americans pay for what is known in Washington as “global leadership.” For most of America’s existence events in Pyongyang didn’t matter much. The Korean kingdom was famed as a “shrimp among whales,” helplessly buffeted as the Chinese, Japanese, and Russian empires wrestled for influence, resources, and territory. After Tokyo’s victory over the dying Qing dynasty in 1895, the Korean peninsula came under Japan’s sway. With Tokyo headed to catastrophic defeat a half century later Washington and Moscow agreed to occupy the peninsula, temporarily dividing it along the 38th parallel. As the Cold War went into deep freeze, however, the border hardened, and two competing Korean states emerged in 1948. The Truman administration (1944-53) believed the peninsula to be of minimal strategic value—a judgment which even General Douglas MacArthur shared—and withdrew U.S. military forces from the South. Washington also refused to provide Seoul with heavy weapons, given then President Syngman Rhee’s threats to march north and forcibly reunify the peninsula. In the North Moscow chose Kim Il-sung, who had fought against the Japanese, as local frontman. Possessing a ruthless will to rule, he took control and convinced Joseph Stalin to approve an invasion of the South. Launched in June 1950, the conflict drew in the United States and then China, ending in an armistice in July 1953. Washington agreed to a “mutual” defense treaty with and left a troop garrison in the ROK, both of which remain more than seven decades later. In the early years South Korea’s survival depended on U.S. support. Seoul was an impoverished, unstable dictatorship. Only under President, formerly General, Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule in the 1960s did the South begin its economic take-off. His assassination in 1979 led to an equally repressive reign under another general, Chun Doo-hwan. By then South Korea was far ahead of the North economically. And there was little reason to believe that either Moscow or Beijing would support another North Korean invasion. This would have been a good time to shift defense responsibilities to Seoul. Indeed, President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) proposed withdrawing American forces, but his idea triggered wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a Biblical scale in both Seoul and Washington. Even members of Carter’s own administration resisted. Although incoming President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) reversed Carter’s policy, it was the end of the Cold War that would bring change to the Korean peninsula. Why could not a democracy with twice the population and 30, 40, and eventually 50-times the economic strength of its antagonist defend itself? Publicly a South Korean official declared that his nation could not spend more on the military since it had education and health care needs, apparently assuming the United States did not. Privately, South Korean policymakers admitted that the question was hard for them to answer satisfactorily. And the disparity between the two Koreas only grew over the years. Yet until Donald Trump was elected in 2016, no other U.S. official raised the question. With America wallowing in debt, why not a little burden shifting to rather than sharing with prosperous and populous allies? However, when Trump challenged the conventional wisdom, hysteria again enveloped both capitals. Proposing that a U.S. ally use its own wealth and deploy its own manpower to protect itself from foreign threats, rather than expect Americans to come rushing to its defense, was treated as sacrilege by the U.S. military-industrial-intellectual complex. There’s no doubt that the DPRK is an unpleasant actor. Kim Il-sung consolidated power by eliminating competing factions linked with South Korean communists as well as the USSR and China. He built a personality cult eventually exceeding those of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and created a totalitarian state that stood alongside Albania in arbitrary brutality. When I visited in 1992 the North appeared to be a Potemkin country. Pyongyang had an airport without airplanes, roads without cars, and streets without street signs. There were propaganda pictures, posters, and banners in every office and home as well as on every building, over every street, and in every field. Overpowering was the utter grayness with a hint of menace filling the air. Freedom of choice was reduced to choosing which of Kim’s likenesses to pin to one’s clothing. Even today, the North remains at or near the bottom of every international human rights ranking. At least when I first visited, there was only a whisper of nuclear ambitions. But this would soon explode into a refrain of roars, spawning an international crisis and triggering a tsunami of worries, meetings, threats, deployments, agreements, and, inevitably, failures. The Clinton administration (1993-2001) considered launching military strikes, a step vehemently opposed by South Korean officials who feared such action would trigger Korean War II. When Kim died in July 1994 he was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-il. The latter had pushed aside an uncle and younger half-brother to seize the throne. Despite his lack of revolutionary pedigree and aversion to public speaking, Kim the son would settle in as “Dear Leader,” pushing both nuclear and missile programs forward. Kim Jong-il began thinking of the succession only after a stroke in August 2008. In turn, he selected his son Kim Jong-un over two older male siblings. But upon his death three years later, many observers believed that Kim Jong-un was likely to end up as merely one of many in a system of collective rule or even as a frontman for others. Instead, the latter proved to be no less ruthless than his grandfather, firing party grandees, disappearing military leaders, executing his uncle, and assassinating his half-brother. Bolstered by his younger sister, the ostentatiously belligerent Kim Yo-jong, the Kim dynasty appears to be in firm control to this day. Kim Jong-un spent some time in school in Switzerland, during which he evidently gained an appreciation for both the Chicago Bulls and market-based economies. This sparked faint hope that he might be a liberalizer, as he welcomed flamboyant NBA basketball player Dennis Rodman, dabbled with economic reform, enjoyed South Korean K-Pop, showcased his attractive wife, and flirted with Donald Trump. However, after the Donald/Jong-un relationship hit the rocks, so did Kim’s liberal impulses. Today his regime jails teens caught singing the same songs once performed in concert in Pyongyang. Unfortunately, the ruling Kim has turned his small, beleaguered state into a nuclear power, accelerating both missile and nuclear developments. The North possesses at least enough fissile material to produce 45-55 weapons. Some estimates run twice as high, but no one outside of Pyongyang knows the actual number and the regime is expanding its arsenal. At the high end, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies and Rand Corporation have warned that the DPRK could possess as many as 242 weapons before the decade’s end, which would make it a serious second rank nuclear power, ahead of the United Kingdom, India, and Pakistan. Today, Kim is increasing the variety as well as size of his nuclear holdings. He is developing tactical nukes, as well as submarine-launched and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Moreover, the regime is threatening to strike first with nukes, suggesting a willingness to use them offensively. Last year, the Supreme People’s Assembly, Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp legislature, formally legislated North Korea’s nuclear status. Kim explained: “As long as nuclear weapons exist on Earth, and imperialism and the anti-North Korean maneuvers of the United States and its followers remain, our road to strengthening our nuclear force will never end.” Indeed, he added, his nation’s nuclear role is “irreversible.” Until now the potential cost of the U.S. commitment to the ROK was serious but limited. Going to war would risk military forces deployed to the peninsula but not much beyond. North Korea, not America, would be the principal battleground and bombing target. However, Pyongyang’s pairing of nuclear weapons with shorter-range missiles puts U.S. territories, interests, and allies at risk because the ICBMs under development could even reach the American homeland. Thus, in the not-too-distant future Pyongyang will be able to credibly threaten the destruction of U.S. cities. Washington’s stake in an inter-Korean conflict would become almost infinite. Of course, with credible threat comes deterrence. The threat has never actually been a DPRK first strike. The North has never been seriously interested in attacking America. Rather, Pyongyang’s objective has been to prevent America from striking the North. In 1950 the United States intervened after North Korea’s invasion of the South, driving the former’s forces north and overrunning most of the DPRK. Then Beijing intervened to save Kim Il-sung’s reign. Today China is unlikely to fight America over North Korea. Instead, the North’s new deus ex machina could be the threat of nuclear retaliation if Washington makes preparations to destroy the Kim dynasty. As Thomas Schelling might point out, the U.S. president can now ill afford to play geopolitical chicken. After all, in that case nothing would be more important than preventing the incineration of American cities. Collaterally, the US-ROK alliance would be under extreme pressure and might not survive. Concern over the viability of so-called extended deterrence has created a cottage industry of analysts and consultants, reassuring Seoul that Washington solons are truly willing to risk their nation’s destruction to protect the ROK. In April of 2023, this effort culminated in the “Washington Declaration,” an outgrowth of President Joe Biden’s summit with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol. As the two presidents observed: “The ROK has full confidence in U.S. extended deterrence commitments and recognizes the importance, necessity, and benefit of its enduring reliance on the U.S. nuclear deterrent.”1Of course, Yoon could hardly say anything else, but every step in North Korean nuclear development makes the statement less believable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of South Koreans express support for developing their own nuclear weapons. Elite political support lags but has been increasing. Indeed, last January President Yoon Suk-yeol observed that “if the issue becomes more serious, we could acquire our own nuclear weapons, such as deploying tactical nuclear weapons here in ROK.”2 No doubt, such a course would set off geopolitical tremors. Washington would have to consider allowing another exception, like India, to its nonproliferation policy. Beijing would be unhappy and might strike back politically and/or economically. Many Japanese likely would want to match the ROK and other nations, perhaps Australia, might also consider the possibility. Despite such consequences, a South Korean bomb still might be better than the alternative. After all, better the South than America be at risk to defend the South. The possibility of Seoul going nuclear would encourage Beijing to put more pressure on the DPRK to restrain the latter’s nuclear activities. Moreover, a South Korean nuke would also help constrain the PRC, should it grow more aggressive. Nevertheless, this possibility horrifies U.S. policymakers, who seem passionately devoted to the policy of risking Honolulu, Los Angeles, Chicago, and perhaps many more American cities to protect Seoul. On few issues is there such unspoken unanimity, with alternative views dismissed out of hand. Why are Washington solons so determined to fight a nuclear war on the ROK’s behalf? Critics insist that the United States shouldn’t abandon its policy of complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement/disarmament (CVID), arguing that North Korea shouldn’t possess nuclear weapons at all. Unfortunately, it has produced nukes, and by now it has scores of them. South Africa remains as the only nation that has ever disarmed, and it had only six warheads to dismantle. Virtually no one in the policy community believes that Pyongyang, absent regime collapse or defeat, would follow suit. Wishing won’t make it so. Preserving the possibility requires sounder strategy. As for nonproliferation policy, the challenge is posed by the North’s arsenal, not Washington’s recognition that the North has an arsenal. Seoul and Tokyo might be unhappy if the United States formally abandoned its denuclearization efforts, but nothing else would change. What amounts to the Ostrich option, pursuing the impossible while hindering a long-time democratic ally from creating its own deterrent, is no solution. The better option would be a policy of de facto arms control, negotiating to limit the North’s nuclear program. It would be a second-best solution with unpredictable geopolitical consequences. However, so far everything else has failed. Although the Biden administration remains committed to denuclearization, Trump is reportedly considering the arms control strategy if he wins. Setting more reasonable ambitions wouldn’t prevent Pyongyang from eventually disarming if it desired to do so. However, even a change in regime wouldn’t necessarily lead the North to abandon its nukes. The ancient Korean monarchy long suffered the ill attention of its neighbors. In contrast, the recent Kim dynasty ruthlessly defended its independence, skillfully playing Moscow and Beijing against one another. Kim Jong-un likely saw Washington as a third, and conveniently distant, power to bring into the mix. Indeed, China’s Xi Jinping ignored Kim while courting South Korea until the announcement of the planned Trump-Kim summit; afterwards Xi and Kim met five times, including once in Pyongyang. Notably, they have not previously met since 2019, when the US-DPRK relationship tanked. It appears that Xi was afraid of being dealt out of the game by Washington. More recently Chinese officials have grown nervous about the much tighter relationship between North Korea and Russia, highlighted by the former’s weapons sales to Moscow. The possession of nuclear weapons strengthens Pyongyang’s position against its nominal friends as well as against the United States. Ultimately, Americans will be safer if Washington steps back from the Korean imbroglio. The United States had special responsibilities toward the peninsula in 1950, having divided the peninsula and refused to arm South Korea, despite the North’s threats. Moreover, concern that the ROK’s fall would have undermined Europe’s defense, though overstated, was real. Today Washington’s military dependent has grown up. The Korean standoff is growing more dangerous, especially so, game theory suggests, as Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal expands in size while remaining vulnerable to attempted allied preemption. The United States remains the world’s most powerful nation, but with rapidly aging population, expanding social programs, and burgeoning national debt, Washington no longer can afford to provide military welfare to the world. The military budget is the price of America’s foreign policy, rising to well above the benefits received from attempting to micro-manage the globe. South Korea would be a good place to start shifting defense responsibilities back on to allied states where it belongs. For more on these topics, see “Life, Liberty, and M*A*S*H,” by Thomas Firey. Library of Economics and Liberty, Nov. 1, 2020. Barry Weingast on the Violence Trap. EconTalk. Farewell Address, by George Washington. Online Library of Liberty. Which is the way it was always supposed to be. The Constitution tasks the federal government with the nation’s defense, by which the Founders meant this nation—its territory, people, and liberties. In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned against “a passionate attachment of one nation for another,” which by “infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.” This warning has taken on added importance with the spread of nuclear weapons and consequent increase in dangers of unnecessary wars. Footnotes [1] Washington Declaration, April 26, 2023. Whitehouse.gov. [2] Dasl Yoon, “South Korean President Says Country Could Develop Nuclear Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korean-president-says-country-could-develop-nuclear-weapons-11673544196, * Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times. This article was edited by Features Editor Ed Lopez. (0 COMMENTS)

Characteristically, Friedman had a contrarian take on the Washington consensus. Ironically, the turn toward markets gave new life to the classic institutions of the postwar managed economy, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). No longer working to stabilize a gold-backed currency, the two international organizations offered loans to emerging economies—typically conditional upon implementing some version of the Washington consensus. This was a primary mechanism by which the consensus spread, the carrot that lured nations into making change. But to Friedman, their continued existence was a textbook case of bureaucratic overreach. Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.1 (pp. 445-446). Jennifer Burns’ biography of Milton Friedman is the product of a prodigious research effort. Nonetheless, it does not quite make it to my top shelf of economist biographies. Residing there are Perry Mehrling’s biography of Fischer Black and Robert Skidelsky’s biography of John Maynard Keynes (the full three volumes, not the condensed version). Keynes and Black, as well as Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred O. Hirschman, did their biographers the favor of living colorful lives. Skidelsky and Mehrling are able to extract interesting connections between their subjects’ personal lives and their scholarly contributions. For example, Keynes’ intense hatred of the ethic of saving is plausibly due to his closeness to Lytton Strachey and other Cambridge Apostles and Bloomsbury Group members who rebelled against Victorian morality in general. Friedman was quite tame by comparison. Burns has to struggle to tease out anything interesting relating Friedman the person to Friedman the intellectual. “Within the economics profession, Friedman came closest to running the show in the early 1970s.” In an interview with Politico in April of 2020, then candidate Joseph Biden declared “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show any more.” Within the economics profession, Friedman came closest to running the show in the early 1970s. His influence on economic policy probably peaked about 15 years later, with the spread of the “Washington Consensus” in favor of limited government and low inflation. But Friedman seemed never satisfied with his victories, seeing them as incomplete. As his criticism of the Washington Consensus shows, he did not see himself as running the show even when others did. The biggest battle Friedman fought was over monetary policy. He wanted to achieve three things. (1) The central bank (The Fed in the United States) should take responsibility to curb inflation. (2) To do this, the central bank should follow a strict rule concerning growth in the money supply, rather than make discretionary changes based on other economic indicators. (3) In particular, the central bank should try for steady, slow growth in the measure of the money supply known as M2. On (1), Friedman won a decisive victory. But he lost completely on (2) and (3). Even Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman whose adoption of (1) is considered the classic central banking achievement, did not go along with (2) and (3). Burns writes, Although Volcker called his approach “practical monetarism,” he always kept Friedman at arm’s length. Like most central bankers, he considered Friedman’s concept of a fixed monetary growth rule too mechanistic and abstract. p. 413. Friedman succeeded in convincing most economists that policy makers could not drive unemployment below its “natural rate” while achieving a stable rate of inflation. Other battles that went Friedman’s way in the 1970s include the ending of the military draft and the shift from foreign exchange rates fixed by government to flexible exchange rates determined in the market. When I studied economics as an undergraduate from 1971-1975, one of my teachers, Professor Bernie Saffran, said that Friedman would likely earn the Nobel Prize (which he subsequently did) based on three contributions: the “natural rate” hypothesis, the “permanent income” hypothesis, and the Friedman-Savage explanation for why people gamble and also buy insurance. Burns explains each of these contributions. Bernie quipped that, “Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson believe the same price theory. But Friedman applies it to policy.” This was a dig at Samuelson, whose left-wing inclinations often led him to advocate policies that went against basic economic theory. Bernie also talked to students about the Cowles Controversy, which took place in the early 1950s. The Cowles Foundation inaugurated the development of large computer models of the economy. Prior to that, the National Bureau of Economic Research, under Wesley Mitchell and Arthur Burns, focused on gathering various indicators of economic performance—”Measurement without theory,” as it was derided in a famous essay by Tjalling Koopmans of the Cowles group. Jennifer Burns writes, At seminar after seminar, Friedman pressed the same question: How were models chosen? If the commission wouldn’t clarify its decisions, or publish information on models that hadn’t worked, he would assume they were simply chosen based on the prejudice of the investigator. Repeated week in and week out, the criticism added up to the accusation that the Cowles inquiries were fundamentally corrupt. p. 157. My first job out of college was working with Cowles-inspired models, but I eventually came to share Friedman’s view of the project. In Jennifer Burns’ telling, Friedman saw to it that the Cowles group was not welcome at the University of Chicago, and they fled to Yale. But although Friedman was an admirer of Arthur Burns in those days,2 he was more anti-Cowles than pro-NBER. He simply did not trust that the big computer models would yield reliable results. He has been proven correct. Although Friedman’s methodological criticisms of other economists were on point, he himself seemed to approach empirical work with what Julia Galef would call a soldier mindset rather than a scout mindset. Burns writes, It seemed to Friedman’s critics that he was not testing his theory with facts but using facts to confirm his theory. p. 91. For more on these topics, see Robert Chitester on Milton Friedman and Free to Choose. EconTalk. Milton Friedman on Capitalism and Freedom. EconTalk. “Drop Your Intellectual Defenses,” by Arnold Kling. Library of Economics and Liberty, Jun. 7, 2021. As in the Cowles example, Friedman fought hard on academic personnel matters, often with success. He seems to have been very combative by nature. That is what struck me most about him in reading Burns’ book. Some of the fights have lost their salience, and perhaps Burns could have devoted fewer pages to some of these or even left them out altogether (the Friedman/Meiselman vs. Ando/Modigliani [see Franco Modigliani] argument had no lasting significance, as far as I can tell). But other debates in which Friedman was involved, such as the existence or not of a trade-off between unemployment and inflation, are just as important today. Milton Friedman seemed to lean into every battle. Probably that is what enabled him to run his ideas past the gauntlet of prevailing orthodoxy. Footnotes [1] Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. 2023. [2] I was struck reading this book how often Arthur Burns (presumably no relation to the author) comes across as a villain, both on a personal and professional level. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)