Greenwald and Carlson show their true stripes. “Hey, babes,” I said to my wife, Rena, “you buy things at the Dollar Store, don’t you?” “Yes,” she answered, “why?” “Because Tucker Carlson says that they’re degrading. “Why does he say that?” she asked. So I gave her this link of an interview he did with Glenn Greenwald. Here’s close to a literal transcript: Tucker Carlson: I think a lot of people have awakened to the now demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending so they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private equity culture that’s hollowed out the country. That’s my personal view and I’ve seen it up close my whole life, so I think it’s a fair assessment. I think a smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results so you can assign whatever name you want to the economic system of the United States. You could call it market capitalism. You could call it I mean you could call it a whole host of different things but I I don’t think any of that’s useful. Those are boring conversations. I think you need to ask does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar stores and if it does, it’s not a system that you want because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society and anything that increases ugliness is evil. Let’s just start there. So if it’s such a good system why do we have all these Dollar stores. The Dollar store is the clear, I mean it’s not the only ugly thing being created in the United States but it’s the one of the most common and it’s certainly the most obvious so if you have a Dollar store you’re degraded and any town that has a Dollar store does not get better. It gets worse and the people who live there lead lives that are worse. So and and the counter argument to the extent there is one: oh they buy cheaper stuff. Great but they become more unhappy and the Dollar store itself is a sort of symbol what’s what’s a physical thing it’s a real thing; it’s not just a metaphor, but it’s also a metaphor for your total lack of control over where you live and over the imposition of aggressively in your face ugly structures that send one message to you, which is you mean nothing. You’re a consumer, not a human being or a citizen and so again I don’t know what we call our current system but its effects are grotesque. They’re grotesque. It’s wrecked. I’ve been here 54 years and I watch carefully. That’s my only gift is I watch and this has become a much uglier place, a much more crowded place, a much more hostile place, a place that cares much less about people so whatever system that produces that outcome is a bad system and you can call me whatever you want oh you’re a socialist I don’t care what you call me actually I’m beyond caring about name calling. It’s bad and I oppose it. Glenn Greenwald:  Yeah, believe me, I know I got in a lot of trouble once for suggesting that you and Steve Bannon are a lot more socialist in a certain limited sense than a lot of people who claim that title and of course the nuance of that point got completely lost but I do think the fact that you are focused so much on kind of the welfare of ordinary people and you know, you go to anywhere in the world, you go to obviously you go to Western Europe and you see these structures that people spent 200 years building just for the sheer beauty of it and you go into nature and you see beauty like it never exists and you go to developing countries and you see a kind of dedication to buildings even that are designed to be inspiring and to kind of stimulate things in the human soul and then you go to the places in the United States where our infrastructure is falling apart where our new structures are designed to be as ugly as possible and it’s a very difficult thing to do to communicate these sort of spiritual components of our politics but ultimately politics does have no purpose other than to elevate the happiness of our citizenry and by every metric the happiness of our citizenry is declining: suicide, addiction, use of anti-depressants. All of that So being able to buy things cheap is degrading. Notice something, though. This 54-year old who “watches carefully” does not bother to say why being able to buy things cheap is degrading. Are the buildings ugly? I don’t know. I go to the Dollar store in Seaside once a year when I’m looking for stocking stuffers–I’m due in a couple of days–and I don’t really notice the building. What I like is the people inside. The customers are a real demographic mix, many of whom seem to be enjoying finding bargains. Greenwald claims that Carlson is “focused so much on kind of the welfare of ordinary people.” I don’t see it. Carlson admits that people can buy stuff cheaper. My wife points out to me that certain kinds of soap she buys for our bathroom are much cheaper there than anywhere else. The term for the benefit she gets is consumer surplus. People who are focused on others’ welfare tend to be happy for them when they get consumer surplus. Tucker clearly isn’t. Greenwald even ups the ante, talking about how people spent 200 years erecting buildings in Europe “just for the sheer beauty” of it. And did those workers who spent the first 150 of those years get to experience that beauty? I do think Greenwald is on to something when he calls Carlson somewhat socialist. I’ve noticed this kind of fake concern for lower-income people in a lot of socialists I know. I’ve been selectively a fan of Carlson and more frequently a fan of Greenwald. But these two showed their true elitist stripes. (0 COMMENTS)

After a year dominated by historically high inflation and soaring home loan rates, 2023 is carving another negative as the annum of antitrust accusations. From lawsuits targeting Amazon and Google to the emergence of concerns over trading card and sandwich shop monopolies,  the growing antitrust frenzy poses a threat to what these laws were originally crafted to safeguard: consumers. Actions of antitrust’s biggest modern advocates, like the Federal Trade Commission’s Chair Lina Kahn and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, reveal their misunderstanding of these competition laws. To maintain their protected freedoms to buy, sell, and trade, consumers and businesses must know the truth enshrined in these laws and not be duped by misrepresentation.  Antitrust laws were enacted with a noble purpose—to protect consumers and promote fair competition. These laws were designed to ensure consumer access to various choices across the marketplace and prohibit businesses from engaging in anti-competitive practices. If those parameters seem vague, that’s because they are. That is, without antitrust’s crucial cornerstone, “the consumer welfare standard” established in the 1970s to help narrow the law’s scope.   A principle that assesses whether consumers are better or worse off due to a company’s actions, the consumer welfare standard is mathematically defined as “the value consumers get from the product less the price they paid.” The addition of this language shifted antitrust’s emphasis from preserving competitors to competition. But perceived value varies between individuals. Concerns about monopolies can be legitimate when there is concern about diminished value from a product or service because of a company’s actions. Such monopolistic behavior may result in higher prices and lower quality. These tactics are most likely to prevail when outside competition is intentionally stifled by the government through regulations, spending, and corporate welfare. However, having a large or growing market share alone does not violate antitrust laws, as progressives like Warren would lead people to believe. In a healthy competitive market, companies naturally strive to develop and acquire other businesses to expand their offerings and meet consumer demands. Roark Capital’s acquisition of Subway, adding the sandwich chain to its portfolio, and major sports leagues signing contracts with trading card company Fanatics may seem like consolidation of power, but these changes do not inherently harm consumers or competition. In fact, if permitted to expand via purchasing and agreements with other companies or leagues, not just these but all businesses can improve consumer welfare and profitability.  To the chagrin of its Italian competitor, the NFL, MLB, and NBA making agreements with the sports trading card company Fanatics was a voluntary decision executed because increased, not diminished, consumer welfare was perceived. While Panini SpA points the antitrust finger at Fanatics, it has three other fingers pointing back at itself, as the company has its own agreements with the NFL and NBA.  Rather than viewing the new competition as an opportunity to improve its company and become the first choice, Panini SpA would rather waste time and resources trying to punish its competitor. This is what the FTC will try to do with Subway, the European Union wants to do with Amazon, and the DOJ has tried to do with Google.  This knowledge is critical because consumers are being swayed to favor legal action that does not serve their best interest, more than likely because of widespread misinformation.  For instance, a recent poll showed that 60% of Americans believe Google is too big and hurts businesses and consumers. However, conflicting data reveal that, overwhelmingly, Google users and employees derive immense value from its service. At the same time, other search engines continue to increase in popularity alongside Google, with Safari recently reaching more than one billion users. So, if the majority of Google users are happy with the service and other search engine options exist, the welfare of its consumers is far from threatened. But that hasn’t stopped the FTC from trying to take them down. So-called “big tech giants” and “trading card monopolies” aren’t the true titans threatening consumer welfare; it’s the rent-seeking politicians, government bureaucrats, and corporate rent-seekers wielding an insatiable appetite for control that are consumers’ actual adversaries.      Vance Ginn, Ph.D., is the president of Ginn Economic Consulting, chief economist of the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, and was previously the associate director for economic policy of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, 2019-20. Follow him on X.com at @VanceGinn.   (0 COMMENTS)

I’m a day late on posting highlights of my weekly reading because I got sick Friday night and felt crappy until this morning, when I feel so-so. Eric Boehm, “Baseball Star Shohei Ohtani’s New Contract Is a Massive Tax Avoidance Scheme. Nice!,” Reason, December 15, 2023. Excerpt: The 29-year-old Ohtani will collect $2 million in each of the next 10 years. The rest of Ohtani’s $68 million salary will be deferred for a decade, and the Dodgers will owe it to him in annual installments starting in 2034. By the time Ohtani collects the last of those payments in 2043, he’ll be 49 years old (and almost certainly well into retirement). Because he’ll be playing most of his games in high-tax California, taking most of his pay via what’s effectively a fixed annuity gives Ohtani the possibility of avoiding some massive tax payments. “By the time he starts receiving the $68 million payments, he may be able to avoid state income taxes by living someplace like Florida without an income tax, or by moving back to Japan,” The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Notice the word “avoidance,” not “evasion.” As far as I can tell, there is nothing illegal in this. All of the $68 million that he doesn’t take immediately would have been taxed at a whopping 12.3 percent. Steven Greenhut, “Why Are California’s Animal Shelters Killing So Many Pets?” Reason, December 15, 2023. Excerpt: Yet The Orange County Register‘s Teri Sforza reported on data analyzed by a former volunteer and found the “kill rate for adult dogs…has nearly doubled since 2018, and the amount of time they spend behind bars has jumped 60 percent.” During the pandemic, the shelter stopped walk-in visits and required appointments. That was understandable then, but even after the pandemic ended the shelter continued focusing on appointments and requiring accompanied visits. Obviously, fewer people will fall in love with a purring or barking buddy if they can’t wander through the kennels and see which animal pulls at their heartstrings. You can no more pick out a pet based on a shelter’s photo than you can pick out a spouse solely on their dating website bio. Animal Care increased the number of walk-in visits amid criticism, but it’s still absurdly limited and I gave up trying to get info after a really long wait on its phone line. The bureaucrats who run the facility—the largest municipal “animal-care” operation in the West—depict these customer-unfriendly, animal-harming policies as a means to protect the critters from stress and protect the public from animal bites. In reality, it’s just the latest instance of government putting the employees’ convenience above the public good—like the way public schools and teachers’ unions dragged their feet on school re-openings. Adam N. Michel, “2026 Tax Increases in One Chart,” Cato at Liberty, December 12, 2023.   (0 COMMENTS)

Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur takes us on a deep dive into the origins of Israel–how European Jew-hatred gave birth to Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. He then turns to the rise of Palestinian terrorism and explains why the Palestinian experience and the Israeli experience are so incompatible. Along the way, […] The post An Extraordinary Introduction to the Birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (with Haviv Rettig Gur) appeared first on Econlib.

Andrew Batson recently asked me for my thoughts on Chinese macro policy: Could you write another post summarizing the argument of your talks in Beijing, about fiscal vs monetary policy for China right now? Conventional wisdom is favoring fiscal so interested in your perspective. First, we need to be clear about what it means to use “fiscal policy”.  There is a sense in which governments are always doing fiscal policy, as they always have some level of spending and taxation.  But when people discuss the issue of whether fiscal or monetary policy is more appropriate, they have something more specific in mind.  The real question is whether fiscal policy should be used for the purpose of controlling the level of aggregate demand. In my view, monetary policy should always be set at a position where the expected growth in aggregate demand is equal to the policy objective.  (That objective might be 4% NGDP growth in the US, although other objectives are certainly possible.)  If the central bank enacts an appropriate monetary policy, then there is no role for discretionary fiscal policy.  Full stop. China should enact the tax and spending policy that makes sense from a cost-benefit perspective, without any consideration of the impact on nominal spending.  Monetary policy should then take that fiscal policy into account when policymakers adjust their policy instruments (monetary base, interest rates, reserve requirements, exchange rates, etc.) Western countries like the US have foolishly used fiscal policy to boost spending, and this has helped to create a public debt time bomb that will cause economic distress in the decades ahead.  It is true that China’s central government debt is relatively low as a share of GDP, but as Batson points out in a recent blog post, China’s local government debt is implicitly a liability of the central government: Such a distinction would make sense if China were a federal state: if the central and local governments were independent entities with clearly defined constitutional and legal roles and separate finances. But China is not a federal state, and local governments are not separate from the central government. There is only one government throughout China; local governments are merely the authorized agents of this state.   The graph he provides shows a worrisome trend: When the public debt becomes excessive, governments are forced to raise distortionary taxes, or engage in other inefficient options such as hyperinflation.  In contrast, monetary stimulus does not lead to an increase in the public debt, and hence is less costly than fiscal stimulus. Now let’s consider three cases where people have argued for fiscal stimulus.  In each case, the arguments are faulty: Case 1:  An economy not at the zero lower bound. In China, interest rates are still well above zero.  In that case, there is no plausible argument that monetary policy is ineffective at boosting nominal spending.  Even so, most Western experts seem to recommend fiscal policy.  I have no idea why. Case 2:  An economy where nominal interest rates are at zero, and expected to stay there forever.   In that case, the central bank should buy back any existing government bonds that are still paying positive interest rates with newly created zero-interest base money, and then begin buying other assets to boost nominal income.   As Ben Bernanke once pointed out, such a policy would clearly be effective: To rebut this [pessimistic] view, one can apply a reductio ad absurdum argument, based on my earlier observation that money issuance must affect prices, else printing money will create infinite purchasing power. Suppose the Bank of Japan prints yen and uses them to acquire foreign assets. If the yen did not depreciate as a result, and if there were no reciprocal demand for Japanese goods or assets (which would drive up domestic prices), what in principle would prevent the BOJ from acquiring infinite quantities of foreign assets, leaving foreigners nothing to hold but idle yen balances? Obviously this will not happen in equilibrium.”  Case 3:  An economy where nominal interest rates are zero but expected to rise above zero in the future. In that case, a central bank should engage in “level targeting”, by committing to return to the target path for nominal spending once interest rates rise above zero.  Research by people like Paul Krugman, Michael Woodford and Gauti Eggertsson has shown that this sort of forward guidance is the optimal policy at the zero lower bound for interest rates, when the liquidity trap is not permanent. Once again, however, this is all a moot point for China, where nominal interest rates are still positive.  Chinese policymakers should look at the mistakes made in the US and Europe, and avoid going down the same road.   (0 COMMENTS)

Wilhelm Röpke seems to have been thinking about death when he wrote A Humane Economy, which was his final book.  He wrote at the beginning of the book that he was a “coeval” of the twentieth century but “he cannot hope to see its end.”  He seems to have wanted his readers to consider their own deaths as well.  While those acquainted with Röpke’s thought will be familiar with his emphasis on the moral conditions of the market, perhaps some have not noticed the recurring theme of mortality in A Humane Economy.  Röpke was not arguing for some persistent, morbid contemplation of mortality.  Neither does this brief essay argue such a thing.  Instead, I only seek to point out something that readers of Röpke’s book might have heretofore missed, and to suggest that Röpke believed that it merits attention. When it first appeared in 1958, A Humane Economy was published under the title Jennets von Angebot und Nachfrage (Beyond Supply and Demand).  The conditions necessary, Röpke argued, for the perpetuation of the free market lie “beyond supply and demand.”  Those things beyond supply and demand that make life worth living are what he called the “vital things.”  Money cannot buy all that we need to live: “Man simply does not live by radio, automobiles, and refrigerators alone, but by the whole unpurchasable world beyond the market and turnover figures, the world of dignity, beauty, poetry, grace, chivalry, love, and friendship, the world of community, variety of life, freedom, and fullness of personality.”  No free enterprise exists without property rights, the rule of law, and free prices, but these institutional features of the free market depend upon something deeper – a cultural commitment to certain vital things that matter more than prices and which themselves can have no price. That recurring phrase in the book, “vital things,” refers to those “which give meaning, dignity, and inner richness to life,” a definition that renders odd, perhaps, the inclusion of death itself in his list of vital things.  The word “vital” itself makes it odd: death seems to be necessary for good life.  Why? The most immediate economic consequence of the forgetting of death is that it seems to erode the moral norms that preserve a healthy market.  John Maynard Keynes’ (in)famous line that “in the long run, we are all dead,” says Röpke, “reveals an utterly unbourgeois unconcern for the future, which has become the mark of a certain style of modern economic policy and inveigles us into regarding it as a virtue to contract debts and as foolishness to save.”  Delayed gratification becomes rare, impatience the norm. By contrast, Röpke writes that a healthy society is one in which one seeks to “live one’s life as a consistent and coherent whole extending beyond death to one’s descendants rather than a series of brief moments of enjoyment followed by the headaches of the morning after.”  Such a society embodies certain salutary habits such as “individual effort and responsibility, absolute norms and values, independence based on ownership, prudence and daring, calculating and saving, responsibility for planning one’s own life…a sense of tradition and the succession of generations combined with an open-minded view of the present and the future, proper tension between individual and community, firm moral discipline, respect for the value of money, [and] the courage to grapple on own with life and its uncertainties.”   Not a morbid obsession with death but a cultural consciousness of it seems to be among those vital things that encourage those salutary habits.  But birth, sickness, and finally death often no longer take place in the places that we live but instead in hospitals.  Ropke scorned “distant cemeteries” as “human refuse heaps… prudently removed” from daily life.  Yet in much of the modern west, with smaller families and the modern phenomenon of the nuclear family, many of us see death more rarely in our youths than most people once did.  What’s more, our society pleasantly guards us from death with various circumlocutions (“passed on”) and with various means of sterilizing the agony and suffering of life (“prudently removed” cemeteries). Röpke therefore opposed what he called “the asymmetry of the market” – that is, the tendency of market society to bleed market forces into areas of life which contain an intrinsic goodness and which should be free of those forces.  The vital things – those things beyond supply and demand – often resist monetary valuation, and as such, they atrophy in the absence of a vigilant preservation of them.  A proper regard for the meaning of death seems to be one such item.     Bill Reddinger has been a professor of political science at Regent University since 2010. Prior to that, he taught political science at Wheaton College in Illinois and at South Texas College. He received his undergraduate degree from Grove City College in Pennsylvania before completing his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science at Northern Illinois University, where his studies focused on the history of political philosophy and American political thought. You can also find Reddinger’s posts in the OLL Reading Room. (0 COMMENTS)

“A man has got to do what a man has got to do” is a popular dictum I have heard invoked in defense of the Israeli government’s way of waging war in Gaza. Disregarding the difficulty of going from “a man” to “a government,” I don’t disagree with the dictum if a caveat is added: “within certain moral constraints.” If strong moral constraints are not clearly proclaimed, bad consequences are bound to follow. Political economy suggests that some moral rules are not only required for the preservation of a free society but that they are also part of a good strategy. The killing of three hostages who had been waiving a white flag by the army supposed to deliver them was one such consequence. (In a previous post, I raised the question of the moral requirements of just wars, specifically in the case of the war against Hamas.) It is easy to imagine the fear and stress of an Israeli soldier fighting the Hamas thugs. However ethical he may be, his first goal is likely to go back home alive with all his body parts after the war. We have learned from Geoffrey Brennan and Gordon Tullock that to understand an army at war like any other social phenomenon, we must start from the individuals’ motivations, perceptions, and actions (see my post “Methodological Individualism and the Hamas Ruler”). Executions for desertion, as the Wagner group apparently practiced regularly, is a way for an army to cope with the problem; propaganda, esprit de corps, and tribalism are probably poor substitutes. I suspect that waving a false white flag is a trick that Hamas terrorists could use. All that provides more reasons for a civilized government to proclaim its moral principles. It is praiseworthy but not sufficient for the Israeli army to declare after the fact that the soldiers who fired at the hostages violated their rules of engagement (“Israel Says Its Soldiers Killed Israeli Hostages as They Held Up White Flag,” Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2023): Standing rules in the Israeli military prohibit soldiers from shooting people who no longer pose a danger, said retired Israeli general and former Mossad chief Danny Yatom. “Whoever raises hands or waives a white flag, it’s prohibited to shoot them. Even if it’s a terrorist,” he said. But “everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.” A man has got to do what a man has got to do, within certain moral constraints. After October 7, the Israeli government should have proclaimed the principle as loud as the calls for revenge were heard, and should have endeavored to lead by example. The rulers, I would say, carry more guilt than the stressed soldiers. Will the lesson be learned? (0 COMMENTS)

It would be hard to overstate the impact TV commercials have had on business and culture around the world. In the United States, television ads generate tens of billions of dollars every year and reach their pinnacle at the Super Bowl. As with every powerful force, though, there’s a humble origin story behind today’s polished spots. And it played out 75 years ago Friday. On July 1, 1941, the NBC-owned station WNBT in New York aired the first legal commercial in television history. Advertising was banned on TV until the Federal Communications Commission gave commercial licenses to 10 stations on May 2, 1941, to go into effect July 1. As Quartz points out, WNBT was the only one to air an ad on that day. The commercial played before a Brooklyn Dodgers–Philadelphia Phillies game at Ebbets Field. Ad Age reported in 1995 that it was a brief spot called the “Bulova Time Check,” which showed a watch face with the second hand ticking while a voice-over read the time. Bulova paid $4 for air fees plus $5 for station fees. At $147.08 in 2016 dollars, it was really a steal. Ad Age notes that there were about 4,000 televisions total in the New York area at that time. This is from Lily Hay Newman, “American’s First TV Ad Cost $9 for 9 Seconds,” Slate, July 1, 2016. That seems so typical of government agencies: when they don’t understand something or consider consequences, they ban it. (0 COMMENTS)

What sort of driving policy do you have?  Are you a fast driver or a slow driver?  And how should we evaluate a person’s driving policy? Suppose I’m driving my Ferrari up a long mountain road outside of Denver.  I overtake and fly by a slow moving 1968 VW minivan, which is chugging up the hill at 55 mph.   I say to my passenger, “What a slow driver!”  The passenger might respond by denying that I had passed a slow driver: “Drivers should be judged based on intentions, not outcomes. Perhaps the minivan driver had depressed the gas pedal 80% of the way to the floor, while in this Ferrari the pedal is only depressed 50% of the way to the floor.  In that case, the minivan driver had a faster speed policy, despite the slower outcome.” That seems an odd way to describe a speed policy.  But my passenger insists that the term “policy” implies actual intentions, not outcomes, and depressing the gas pedal by more or less is the specific action that causes the car to change speeds.  So speed policy should be judged based on the specific actions taken by the driver. I respond that depressing the gas pedal 80% of the way to the floor means something very different when going up a hill as compared to taking the same “concrete step” when going down a hill.  It makes no sense to describe someone choosing to go 55 mph on an expressway as having a “fast speed policy.” One potential compromise would be to define an equilibrium rate of pedal depression.  That’s the gas pedal setting that yields the appropriate speed—say 70 mph.  Using this criterion, depressing the gas pedal by more than equilibrium leads to a high speed policy, and depressing the gas pedal by less than equilibrium leads to a low speed policy. I guess that would work, but how do you know the equilibrium rate of pedal depression?  Don’t you have to look at the speedometer to determine whether the gas pedal has been depressed too much or too little?  I’m not saying this pedal approach is impossible—maybe a computer could be programmed to take everything in account and estimate the pedal depression required to reach 70 mph, but isn’t it just easier to look at the speedometer? In the comment section, please tell me if you would view a Ferrari and minivan as having the same speed policy if both drivers depressed the pedal by 50%, or would you regard these cars as having the same speed policy if both vehicles were going 70 mph? Also, do you see any similarities between the question of ascertaining the speed policy of a driver, and ascertaining the monetary policy of a central bank?  What is the analogy for pedal depression?  What is the analogy for speedometer reading?  What would the optimal speedometer look like if speed responds with a lag to pedal depression? PS.  Suppose a driver already going downhill depressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.  The car ended up going so fast that an accident resulted.  Would it be a valid excuse to say, “The steep hill caused the accident”?  How does this analogy apply to fiscal and monetary policy during 2021? PPS.  My actual car is not a Ferrari, it’s a Nissan Maxima.  (Still faster than a minivan):   (0 COMMENTS)

For fairly obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about free speech on campuses, whether at government universities or private universities. The issues differ, of course, because private universities are not constrained by the First Amendment or state constitutional rules that require free speech. For now, I want to consider private universities. Like many people, probably most people who watched, I was appalled by presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT when Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked them fairly straightforward questions and they answered as if they had “lawyered up,” which they actually had. But I had to think through why I was appalled. And I came to a conclusion very much at odds with my initial reaction. The Misreporting First, I’ll point out how badly some in the press–print and electronic–have misrepresented what happened. I’ll deal with that briefly before going on to the issue at hand. Exhibit A of the problem is Jennifer Rubin. In her December 9 Washington Post column, titled “University presidents flunk the humanity test,” she stated: “That was an unacceptable statement from the president of Penn,” [Pennsylvania governor Josh] Shapiro said in response to Magill not condemning calls for genocide. “Frankly, I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.” Granted that Rubin is quoting someone else but it’s clear from context that she agrees. Here’s the problem: Magill was never asked to condemn calls for genocide. I hope she would have condemned such calls if asked, and I hate to say this, but I’m not sure she would have. But that’s not what she was asked. She was asked the narrower question of whether such calls “violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct” or “constitute bullying or harassment.” And she did a decent job. Here’s part of the transcript: STEFANIK: Ms. Magill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? MAGILL: If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes. STEFANIK: I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment? MAGILL: If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment. STEFANIK: So the answer is yes. MAGILL: It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman. STEFANIK: So calling for the genocide of Jews is, depending upon the context, that is not bullying or harassment. This is the easiest question to answer. Yes, Ms. Magill. So is your testimony that you will not answer yes? Yes or no? MAGILL: If the speech becomes conduct. It can be harassment, yes. Freedom of Speech I won’t bother reporting the other parts of the interaction. The major excerpts are in Valerie Strauss, “How Harvard, Penn, MIT leaders answered–or skirted–questions on antisemitism,” Washington Post, December 6. Here’s the problem. While you might get the impression that these 3 presidents believe that anything goes in speech as long as it doesn’t escalate to action, that seems to be false. I don’t know the MIT or Penn stories as well, but I have been following Harvard for some time. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which began as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and to which I have donated annually for almost 20 years, tracks respect for freedom of speech on campus. In its latest rankings, Harvard is #248 out of 248 universities and colleges that FIRE ranks. Not good. I want to caution, though, that the FIRE site gives some bottom-line data without telling us enough to judge the data. For instance, one component of the ranking is whether students feel comfortable expressing unpopular views. That’s a bit of a squishy criterion. When I’m around some of my friends who are less concerned than I am about innocent people being killed in Gaza, I sometimes hold back. Part of it is that I don’t want to sound like a broken record; part of it is that, because of past reactions I’ve gotten, I don’t always feel “comfortable” expressing that view. But are my potential listeners hurting my freedom of speech? Hardly. What I would want to know is what happens if the students do express their views. Do people chant at them, follow them around campus, make threats? Even the chanting is simply freedom of speech unless it’s a mob chanting and chasing after the person being disagreed with. So I need to know more. But following them around campus and making threats is action and, depending on how far the stalking goes or the threats go, could be grounds for expulsion. If I had been Stefanik, I would asked questions about that. FIRE does give some objective data. If you go to their background on Harvard, you see the categories “Student Sanctions,” “Scholar Sanctions,” and “Speaker Disinvitations.” If you click on those items, you see the explanation that this datum is the number of times the particular thing happened in a 4-year period from 2019 to 2023. My prior had been that there were many such things. It turns out, though, that the number of student sanctions was 1.0, the number of scholar sanctions was 4.0, and the number of speaker invitations was 2.0. All of these are bad. How many such actions does it take for Harvard’s administration to communicate to students and faculty that certain views and certain speakers will not be tolerated? Probably not many. Still, what struck me was how few incidents FIRE found in each of those categories. I thought that I had heard of many such incidents, so I googled to find them. I didn’t find much. Of course, Harvard, with its deep pocket, can hire people to go on the web and make it hard to those incidents to show up. I did find one thing that’s close and one that seems like a clearcut retaliation against two faculty members. The one that’s close is a 2017 story by Hannah Natanson from the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, titled “Harvard Rescinds Acceptances for At Least Ten Students for Obscene Memes.” Natanson writes: Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat. Judging whether that crosses the line into a restriction of freedom of speech is complicated. On the one hand, the Harvard administrators are communicating what they will tolerate, and their tolerance is low. On the other hand, the “students” were not yet Harvard students. I would want to see the contractual commitment that Harvard had made in initially accepting these students. My guess is that Harvard’s lawyers were smart enough to set it up so that Harvard did not breach a contract. The clearcut retaliation was in 2019, with Harvard’s announcement that it would not renew faculty members Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and Stephanie Robinson as faculty deans of Winthrop House. That followed a number of student protests. The students objected to Ronald Sullivan’s decision to be one of the lawyers defending Harvey Weinstein. It seems clear from context that the Harvard administrators objected to his decision to exercise his freedom of speech in defending Weinstein. None of this is good. It’s just less bad than I had expected. Russ Roberts, Niall Ferguson, and Tom Palmer In his latest EconTalk episode, an interview with the Hoover Institution’s Niall Ferguson, Russ Roberts states: But, I want to see if you share this insight I heard from Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute and the Atlas Network, which I used to disagree with. This is where I’m a little less of a fundamentalist. He argued that when a group–a group, not an individual–when a group advocates for a movement that would eliminate free speech, that is the Communists. For a Soviet communist marching in the 1970s or 1980s, or a Nazi, say, marching in Skokie or trying to march in Skokie, a Jewish neighborhood, a highly Jewish neighborhood outside of Chicago. Tom argued that if this group does not believe in free speech for others, they should not be able to use the protection of free speech to advocate their agenda. And, I used to disagree with that. That’s where I’m a little more open to restrictions. I think that’s a very bad idea. How do you get discussion? It’s possible that some people in the group could be persuaded otherwise but, not having the protection of free speech, will shut up. That sounds similar to what FIRE reports about students at Harvard. There’s another more fundamental problem. I won’t put this on Russ because he seems to be considering the idea rather than advocating it. But I will pose it to Tom Palmer and others who agree with them. The problem is that they have just argued against their own freedom of speech. After all, they advocate eliminating free speech for some subset of people. If I understand their proposal correctly, they should not, therefore, have the protection of free speech. Are they sure they want to undercut their own free speech. I have known Tom Palmer since he was 17. He’s a smart, articulate, and passionate defender of freedom in all its dimensions. He makes his living speaking and writing. Would he want to advocate something, that if followed, would put that living at risk? (1 COMMENTS)