I’m certainly the kind of person who will nitpick over whether a word is being used correctly. On the other hand, I also realize there is no objectively correct definition of any given word. The meaning of words and the rules of grammar change over time. Language was not designed, it evolved, and continues to evolve.  One simple example of this process is the evolution of the word “planet.” Is Pluto a planet, or not? That depends on how the word “planet” is defined, and that definition has changed over time. This video summarizes how the meaning of that word has changed, and how what we designate Pluto has changed as a result. It’s not as though in 2006, we realized that it had been objectively wrong to call Pluto a planet this whole time, and that thankfully we have now finally figured out What “Planet” Has Really Meant All Along. Over time, we’ve learned more about the objects our solar system contains. As our knowledge of them increased, new terms were made to categorize objects with similar traits, and sometimes in this process an object that was in one category gets reclassified into another.  I bring this up because there’s an argument these days about how the word “racism” has been redefined. Traditionally, “racism” meant an irrational dislike of someone due to their racial background, usually paired with some desire to oppress or disadvantage that person. Now, “racism” is taken to describe a far wider scope of phenomena. Famously, or infamously, Ibram Kendi defines “racism” to be anything that doesn’t produce identical outcomes across all groups. For Kendi, racism is an outcome, not a process, which is why in his book How to be an Antiracist Kendi openly states “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.” It’s the outcome that determines (not merely indicates or suggests, determines) racism. If you discriminate against people on the basis of race and end up producing the same outcomes for everyone, then to Kendi you are an antiracist. And if you treat everyone equally regardless of race but outcomes aren’t identical, then to Kendi you are a racist.  Still, it’s not enough to object that Kendi and his fellow thinkers have “redefined” racism. The meaning of words and the scope of concepts are things that change over time, so why can’t racism be redefined just as planet was? Simply appealing to the “original meaning” of the word doesn’t go very far. Nowhere is it written that the “original meaning” of a word is forever the Objectively Correct Meaning – if it was, we’d have to start referring to the moon as a planet again.  Still, some redefinitions are better than others. There are two problems I see with Kendi’s redefinition of racism that make it a bad redefinition, in contrast to how redefining the meaning of planet was a good redefinition.  The first problem is that Kendi’s definition makes racism useless as an explanation for anything that happens. Using the traditional definition, the statement “racism created this difference in outcomes” makes is a clear statement establishing a causal connection. Using Kendi’s definition, this claim becomes meaningless. Since racism is simply anything that produces different outcomes, the statement just becomes “a process that creates different outcomes created different outcomes.”  The second is an issue of clarity. A good redefinition makes the meaning of a word more precise – that is, it narrows the relative scope of what you’re describing. A bad redefinition expands the scope of what you’re describing and makes the term more vague and nebulous. The wider a range of phenomena a word can describe, the less information that word communicates.  This point was brought to mind when reading an article describing the current troubles experienced by Kendi and Boston University. The author, who describes himself as “someone rather to the left of Kendi”, has exactly this concern with how the scope of the term “racism” has been expanded to describe a wider and wider range of things. According to the author, Tyler Harper, “the real damage that Kendi’s philosophy has wrought on American culture is in the way he turned words like ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ into banal, everyday terms like any others.” Harper goes on to say: Once reserved for the gravest of racial trespasses, thanks to the influence of Kendi and other charlatans like Robin DiAngelo, “racism” is now routinely employed to describe anything from workplace microaggressions to terrorist attacks. The march on Charlottesville was white supremacy, but so too is asking Black people to show up to Zoom meetings on time…The mainstreaming of Kendi’s brand of anti-racism has made “racism” into a word so plastic as to have lost all descriptive power — and with it all moral magnitude. Obviously there is a huge difference between the racism that motivated the Charleston church shooting and asking people to show up on time to a meeting. If your proposed definition suggests these wildly different events should be described with the same word, then you have offered up a really bad definition and it should be firmly rejected.  Calling everything bad or upsetting in the world “racism” does not transfer the moral urgency to oppose racism (as traditionally defined) to these other things. On the contrary, to use a metaphor from economics, all you’re doing is devaluing the currency through inflation. These new attempts at a definition of racism may not be “objectively wrong,” but they are still debasing.  (1 COMMENTS)

In the old days before the web, I used to go through the Reader’s Digest almanac to find interesting facts. One thing that always grabbed my attention was the tax tables for various states. Hey, I’m a nerd, spelled e-c-o-n-o-m-i-s-t. I remember being surprised at how heavily Iowa’s government taxed income. In 1987, Iowa’s top state income tax rate was 9.98 percent, and that rate kicked in at an income of $45,000. That put Iowa into California territory. In California that same year, the top tax rate was 11 percent. But California Republican Governor George Deukmejian and the legislature dropped the top rate to 9.3 percent in 1988, and that rate kicked in at $47,000. I don’t know which part of the previous sentence is more surprising: that California’s government dropped the tax rate or that California once had a Republican governor. The two facts are connected. Back to Iowa. Since 1996, when the government indexed the tax rates to inflation, Iowa has been moving in the right direction on taxes. In 1998, all tax rates were cut by 10 percent, making the top rate 8.98 percent. Then all rates were cut in 2019, making the top rate 8.53 percent. This is from David R. Henderson, “Iowa Leads the Way on Tax Cuts,” TaxBytes, October 11, 2023, Institute for Policy Innovation. Read the whole thing. You’ve already read half of it. (0 COMMENTS)

This is the second of two posts I am writing in reaction to Adam Martin, who wrote two responses to my essay about ways in which James Buchanan may be leading free market economists astray with his ideas. This post will focus on social welfare functions and debt. To start, I am a perplexed that Martin claims social welfare functions are a “zombie” idea that was “buried” long ago by Kenneth Arrow and James M. Buchanan. Maybe this is true amongst libertarians, but social welfare functions are alive and well in numerous areas of modern economics, including climate change economics, optimal tax theory, and macroeconomic growth theory, just to name a few. Neither Arrow nor Buchanan buried them, and it may be a sign of an insulated culture amongst Austrian economists that Martin incorrectly thinks they did. With regard to Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem, Martin supports the unpopular Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) condition. IIA is indefensible for at least two reasons. The first is that it requires pairwise comparisons. That is, it requires the decision maker to choose between alternatives in pairs, rather than in groups of three, four, or some other number. There is no basis for this assumption. It certainly doesn’t conform with reality, where people routinely choose amongst many options simultaneously. For this reason alone, we can disregard Arrow’s theorem. Even if we assume the pairwise comparison restriction is reasonable, IIA has other problems. For example, it rules out the possibility of contingencies. In a previous essay, I used the example of how if the option to go to college becomes available, this could change a preference ordering I have with respect to how I spend my evenings (studying or partying). By excluding information from this alternative as “irrelevant,” it’s as if consequences are removed from consideration. If Martin doesn’t like my college example, a common example found in the academic literature is third party candidates running in a political race, which can result in strategic voting. Some Florida voters in 2000 preferred Nader over Gore, but in a matchup between Nader, Gore, and Bush, they voted for Gore in hopes of preventing Bush from winning the election. They did this because they care about the outcome of the election. According to IIA, Bush running against Nader and Gore shouldn’t result in strategic voting of this kind. Again, consequences seem not to matter. IIA is too rigid. Any new information contained in third options is ruled out as irrelevant by assumption. There can be no reaction in the form of a reordering of preferences based on new information contained in third alternatives. It’s as if time stands still.  We should not be surprised therefore that Arrow’s theorem has had such considerable influence in areas like neoclassical equilibrium analysis and, yes, cost-benefit analysis, where analysis takes a fixed, static perspective constituted from the viewpoint of a single moment in time. With regard to my claim that a social welfare function underpins market activity, there is both a positive and a normative side to this. On the one hand, we can write down the particular equation, or equations, that correspond with what we observe. In that sense, social welfare analysis is a form of positive analysis. There need not be any value judgments.  On the other hand, we can assign normative claims to such equations, labelling them “good” or “bad” or something else. To claim that following the decision-making apparatus of the market leads to good outcomes is simply another way of expressing the invisible hand of Adam Smith. I see value in both the positive and the normative enterprises. Finally, with regard to debt, Martin compares my critique of Buchanan to a similar critique from the market socialist, Abba Lerner. I have no problem with this comparison. My criticisms here are not original, as others before me have pointed out the errors in this line of thinking. It may be worth noting that Ludwig von Mises agreed with me that government deficits are financed with real resources today and not through future taxpayers magically transferring resources to the present.  I also never suggested that the ability to roll over debt turns “government spending into a magic goodies creator.” However, rolling over debt can prevent the government from ever having to raise taxes in the future to pay debts. Faster economic growth can do the same. These facts in themselves contradict the assertion that deficits necessarily “reduce the present discounted value of assets held by individuals in the present.” There is no reason why, on net, this needs to be the case. This is not to say our actions do not impose costs on future people. In fact, the costs we impose on the future generations are a paramount concern to me. But it’s not whether spending adds to the deficit that matters (within reason, course), but instead the composition of spending that is important. Buchanan turned economists’ attention toward little pieces of paper whilst simultaneously propping up the populist myth that deficits are paid for by future generations. This focus on deficits distracts us from the more important issue of how money is actually spent. To suggest I have a simple “state bad, market good” perspective or am somehow a market socialist-MMT sympathizer (which is it, by the way?) is not helpful. I acknowledge James Buchanan has made positive contributions to economics and that those contributions are sometimes undervalued by the mainstream of the profession. At the same time, in at least three areas: cost, social welfare functions, and debt, Buchanan’s theories are either logically invalid or missing pertinent information that would lead to alternative conclusions. The purpose of my original essay was to point out that for some reason Buchanan seems to be influential in these areas amongst the libertarian/Austrian/free market community of economists. This community’s attachment to these ideas could help explain the lack of progress observed in the Austrian economics research program in recent decades.  I proposed James Buchanan may be one important part of this story, but I am open to alternative explanations. It was in hopes of furthering this kind dialogue that my original essay was written. I still hope that discussion takes place.     James Broughel is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute with a focus on innovation and dynamism.  (0 COMMENTS)

Advanced Western countries are very regulated societies, covered by what Tocqueville forecasted would be “a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” When you notice something strange and annoying, there is a good chance that some regulation is the culprit. I recently found another example in an obscure health regulation (“Raw Medical Test Results Right to Your Inbox Spark Confusion and Concern,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2023). If you have registered on your doctor’s health portal, you will find there the results of any medical tests such as blood test or scan at the same time as it is electronically transferred to him. You will also get an email or a text warning you that the new results are in. It is often convenient, but not always: [Dr. David Gerber, a Dallas-based oncologist] said he’s had patients learn about a cancer diagnosis from a smartphone notification in the middle of a business dinner, while reading a bedtime story to a 3-year-old, and during a rush-hour commute. One patient’s spouse went to the emergency room for an anxiety attack after misinterpreting her husband’s CT scan. And there is no way the technician can ask you if you want to receive the results at the same time as your doctor and check a box on her computer. She, and perhaps the software coder, could be guilty of a federal violation and liable to a $1-million fine. This is part of a 2016 federal law, the 21st Century Cures Act (as brilliantly named as the recent Inflation Reduction Act), dreamed by benevolent politicians and designed by conscientious bureaucrats. They apparently did not understand that if there is a demand for such immediate information, competitive (and often greedy) hospitals and doctors would certainly find a way to offer it to their customers (called “patients” in the jargon of pre-consumer societies, from a Latin root meaning “sufferer”). That is just a small part of the big picture. The Code of Federal Regulations contains close to 1.1 million references to prohibitions or mandates and more than 188,000 pages. I am not claiming that the grass is greener elsewhere than under “this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful” (quoting again from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). Arbitrary despotism like in, say, China, Russia, or India is certainly worse for most people and, to add insult to injury, less conducive to general prosperity. My doctor told me that, when physicians’ notes were not automatically available and probably hand-written, physicians used some standard abbreviations: for example, FLD meant “funny-looking dad.” (The implication is less funny if the annotation reflected the doctor’s disapproval of the father’s lifestyle!) At any rate, easy access to the notes of your doctor or your child’s doctor has some benefits. There are also benefits in being reasonably sure that your toaster won’t melt down, that your computer will not randomly swallow your articles, that your cartridges will go bang when hit from behind by the striker or hammer, that your life insurance company will pay in 50 years’ time, and that your grocery will stock bread tomorrow; but none of that requires special laws and regulations. (0 COMMENTS)

Why are social problems so intractable? We’ve spent trillions of dollars on a war on poverty, and yet we continue to experience widespread homelessness. A recent article in the OC Register provides some interesting data points: Jamboree Housing, an Irvine-based company that builds communities aimed at helping the unhoused, with lower-priced dwellings and services aimed at helping tenants stay sheltered, estimates that local taxpayers spend about $100,000 a year for every chronically unhoused person, versus about $52,000 a year for providing them with a permanent home and related services. This raises a few questions: 1.  Wouldn’t both the homeless and the taxpayers be better off if we stopped spending $100,000 on each unhoused person and simply gave them each a check for $80,000 per year? 2.  Why spend $100,000 on homeless people when you could provide them with both housing and social services for $52,000/year? The first question is easy to answer.  If we gave $80,000 to each homeless person, there would be a very dramatic increase in the number of homeless people.  Many Americans would be willing to experience brief periods of homelessness in order to qualify for this sort of benefit.   You cannot solve complex problems such as poverty merely by providing cash to poor people.  That’s why California doesn’t try to solve its homeless problem by giving each homeless person a check for $80,000.  Government officials know that this solution will not work.   But if you were to ask them why the solution won’t work, it’s very unlikely that you would get an honest answer.  The progressives that run California don’t like to view poor people as responding to incentives. So what about the other solution—spend $52,000 housing each homeless person.  Isn’t that better than spending $100,000 on each “chronically unhoused person”?   I suspect that the same problem applies to this solution.  Imagine if California were to put ads on national TV telling Americans that they will provide anyone with a $52,000 housing voucher if they move to California and end up without housing.  As with the hypothetical cash benefit of $80,000, this would dramatically boost the supply of homeless people, drawn here by the generous benefits. To avoid this situation, local governments develop extremely complex poverty programs.  The complexity is a feature, not a bug—designed to discourage people from taking advantage of the benefits.  Consider the $100,000 spent on each unhoused person.  How much of that spending actually benefits the unhoused person?  If they remain unhoused despite this large expenditure, then clearly they are not living the lifestyle that we would typically associate with someone making $100,000/year.  Taxpayers are spending lots of money, but the unhoused receives very little perceived benefit.  I say “perceived”, as I am allowing for the possibility that there are benefits that are not seen that way by recipients.  Thus there may be significant expenditures on counseling for drugs and mental health issues, which the homeless person would not purchase if simply given the cash. From this perspective, the wastefulness of our poverty programs is a feature, not a bug.  Governments do not wish to spend money alleviating poverty in the the sort of way that poor people would prefer, as they fear that this will encourage more poverty.  But they cannot say that publicly, as that would appear to be “blaming the victim.”  So instead they develop programs that cost $100,000 per homeless person, hoping that progressive readers of the OC Register won’t notice the absurdity of this system and start asking awkward questions. Two points are worth keeping in mind: If California allowed more housing construction, it would have fewer homeless people. If California continued to have expensive housing but stopped providing expensive programs for its unhoused population, a portion of our homeless would move to cheaper states. California has a vastly disproportionate share of America’s homeless due to a combination of NIMBY housing policies and expensive social welfare programs. PS.  It’s notable that America’s most successful poverty program (Social Security) is also the program where disincentive effects are of least concern.  Social Security does somewhat discourage old people from working, but this is generally viewed as a less of a problem than when young people rely entirely on “welfare.”   (0 COMMENTS)

One way to adjust for choice of occupation is to compare earnings of men and women in the same occupation with the same or similar schooling. Ms. Goldin, Mr. Katz and Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago made that comparison in a 2010 study, which found that the primary factor behind long-term differences in earning was child-rearing. For M.B.A. students who graduated from the University of Chicago’s business school between 1990 and 2006, the authors found almost no gender gap in employment or wages just after graduation. But 10 years later, women had taken an average of one year off from work, while men had taken off only 1½ months. [Paragraph missing.] It makes sense. In a 2010 study, Ms. Goldin and Mr. Katz pointed out that women often receive a wage penalty for demanding a job that’s flexible enough for the woman to be the “on-call” parent. Men are more apt to receive a wage premium for being willing to be the “on-call” employee. This is from David R. Henderson, “Claudia Goldin Deserves That Nobel Prize,” Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2023 (October 10 print edition.” I’m allowed to publish only 2 paragraphs until 30 days have passed. Thus the missing paragraph. There was so much more I wanted to write, but I was given an 800-word limit. I actually thought that Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz deserved the Nobel. Claudia wrote the article “Gender Gap” for David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. (0 COMMENTS)

Erik W. Matson has a defense of reading Adam Smith and other past thinkers. His article is titled, appropriately, “Why We Read Adam Smith.” He admits that he is biased, writing: In the spirit of self-disclosure, I admit I have a vested interest in people reading Smith. I am part of a cottage industry of academics and educators devoted to the study and teaching of Smith’s ideas—I’m the deputy director of a program named for Smith in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. A declining interest in Smith would probably not bode well for me professionally. I won’t repeat his argument. I will note, though, that he cites Richard Hanania’s argument against reading Smith and others. He quotes this from Hanania: [T]he idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical. If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them. You can’t dismiss Hanania’s argument; it’s an empirical one. What I will say is that people often miss the insights from a few generations back. Talk to young economists nowadays and tell them that from the mid-1930s to about 1980, the federal Interstate Commerce Commission insisted that trucks be licensed to carry whatever goods they carried in interstate commerce. So, for example, they might be licensed to take good A from city X to city Y, but that didn’t mean they could legally carry good B back from city Y to city X. So trucks were often forced to come back empty. There’s a good chance that those economists won’t believe you. That’s because they’re not reading any of the very good studies of the effects of trucking regulation from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. Of course you might argue that this is a failure to read works that are 50 years old, not 250 years old. True, but that’s a matter of degree. You might also argue that it’s a failure to read empirical studies, not the classics. But what were the classics? When Adam Smith claimed that the cost of Britain holding on to the 13 colonies exceeded the benefits to Brits, he was doing a back-of-the-envelope empirical study. My favorite example of someone not knowing the history of a policy idea comes from Ron Hoffman, an economist in the U.S. Treasury in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a senior economist colleague of mine when I was a summer intern at the Council of Economic Advisers in 1973. (Parenthetically, I’m still grateful to Ron for telling me about a first-rate immigration lawyer whom I hired that summer when I got in trouble for working illegally, unbeknownst to me, at the CEA. Ron, by the way, is Dustin Hoffman’s brother.) When I became the senior economist for health policy with the Reagan/Feldstein CEA in 1982, I looked up Ron, who told me the following story. During President Carter’s one term as president, Ron was heavily involved in health economics policy at the Treasury. The Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) from 1977 to 1979 was Joseph Califano. Califano had the idea of imposing a special federal tax on cigarettes and (I think) alcohol to finance part of Medicare. Ron went over to HEW to discuss the idea with one of Califano’s guys. Ron took along a Treasury veteran who had been in the Treasury from the late 1930s on. Califano’s guy had a gee-whiz, isn’t this a great idea tone, and expressed his thought that this was a new idea. The grizzled Treasury vet then proceeded to tell him about past similar proposals in the 1930s that had gone nowhere for various reasons. Ron was impressed and the HEW guy was stunned. Postscript: Here’s the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics entry on freight transportation regulation and deregulation. (0 COMMENTS)

How much do we remember of what we learn in school or from conversation? Psychologist Adam Mastroianni says: from little to nothing much. What do our brains retain? Mastroianni argues that often it’s a mix of emotions, meanings, and values that end up shaping who we are, what Mastroianni calls “vibes.” Listen as he and […] The post Adam Mastroianni on Learning and Mostly Forgetting appeared first on Econlib.

There are many arguments against government regulation of price and quantity. In competitive markets, regulation moves equilibrium away from the most efficient outcome. Regulation can produce black markets. There are administrative costs associated with regulation.One often overlooked consequence of regulation is that it adds to the complexity of decision-making. Thus government regulation tends to favor the better informed members of the community, over those who are less well informed.Although I have a PhD in economics, I don’t believe that I am anywhere near well informed enough to deal with government regulation:1. The tax code is too complex for me. I’ve given up and farmed the job out to an expensive tax accountant.2. The health insurance system (which is almost completely a product of government regulation) is too complex for me to navigate. I spend far too much of my life dealing with its complexities, and still fall well short of understanding the system. There are many other areas of life where being well informed helps one to deal with the complexity of regulation.  Big companies have an easier time complying with complex regulations than small companies.  Occupational licensing laws favor those with more formal education.  Our welfare state favors those who understand the complexities involved in applying for benefits.  Expertise in taxes favors those who wish to avoid estate taxes, or those who wish to avoid losing wealth to the government after signing up for Medicaid.  Our immigration system is highly complex and difficult to navigate. In the past few days I came across two stories that nicely illustrate this concept.  One story discusses applying for Global Entry.  Apparently it is extremely difficult to schedule the required interview.  (I am currently attempting to do so.)   Thus well-informed people will hire a firm to search out an available spot.  I won’t say this never occurs in the private sector (concert tickets can be hard to get) but with government offices a long wait is more the norm than the exception.  Ever been to the DMV?  The Social Security Administration? Another example was discussed in a recent Reason magazine article:  Legal restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales, in short, gave us reformulated products, including pseudo-Sudafed, that not only do not work as well but apparently do not work at all, as you may have discovered after trying them. But at least those ineffective products are easy to buy. Legal restrictions on pseudoephedrine, by contrast, took it off the shelves and put it behind the pharmacy counter, whence it can be retrieved only under certain conditions. Readers might be thinking, “What’s the problem, you could just ask the pharmacist for the better product.”  Here’s the problem.  A solution that is obvious to one person might be not at all obvious to another.  I spend an enormous amount of time on monetary economics.  When I have free time I watch films and read books.  Yes, I could have spent my time researching how pharmacies dispense drugs, and then the regulation would not have harmed me.  But I bet I’m not the only consumer who naively assumed that the cold medicines that one found on the aisle in a pharmacy were effective in reducing the symptoms of a cold.   There’s an almost infinite amount of time we could spend making our choices more effective.  I could spend hours looking into how to change the oil in my car, or how to get the best deal when buying airline tickets, or how to save money on my taxes.  But my time is valuable, so I choose to spend it in other ways. When the government designs its tax laws and regulations, it seems as though almost no weight is put on the way in which the rules favor those who are better informed.  I have two problems with complex regulations: 1. They favor the cognitive elite (as well as big businesses that can hire people to navigate the regulations.) 2. They incentivize people to become well informed about facts with no social utility. The first problem relates to equity, the second to efficiency.  Regulation creates a shortage of painkillers.  Who gets painkillers in that environment?  Those who are smarter and more well connected.  Regulation creates a shortage of kidneys for transplant.  Who gets kidneys in that environment?  Those who are smarter and more well connected.  The safety net doesn’t have enough money for everyone who is needy.  Who benefits from government programs?  People smart and well connected enough to navigate through all of the paperwork.  (I.e., not the homeless.)  Who has an easier time navigating the regulatory gauntlet to build new houses?  The big builders.  There are many more such examples. Progressives tend to favor big government, thinking it will help those on the bottom of society.  Sometimes it does.  But big government also creates a system that favors those who are skilled at navigating its complexity—the economic and cognitive elite.   PS.  These Razib Khan tweets makes a related point:   (1 COMMENTS)

If individual liberty is the highest value, one can certainly imagine situations where laws should be broken by government rulers. These, however, do not cover Donald Trump’s claim, in a motion to dismiss filed on October 5, that the president has “absolute immunity” against prosecution, a claim reminiscent of Richard Nixon. The neatest case may be Anthony de Jasay’s “Capitalist State,” a minimal state that he believes would be acceptable if only it were not unstable. The Capitalist State would not govern, that is, discriminate in favor of some citizens and against others, but on the contrary would reign for the sole purpose of preventing any other state, domestic or foreign, from taking over. Its only function would be to preserve the free society. It if were seriously challenged by a non-minimal state intent on governing, technical violations of the law would presumably be welcome. Indeed, they may be codified in state-of-emergency provisions. Of course, we are not any close to such a situation, but perhaps it could be argued that the same reasoning could apply mutatis mutandis to an intermediate situation where a much “less minimal” state threatened a “more minimal” one. The difference between the “less minimal” and the “more minimal” state would have to be obvious and significant for liberty. It would be preposterous to believe that Donald Trump ever represented such a “more minimal” state. In a more standard approach, Gordon Tullock wrote in his Appendix to The Calculus of Consent (James Buchanan had his own Appendix too): The State should have enough power to “keep the peace” but not enough to provide temptation to ambitious men. The State should never be given enough power to prevent genuinely popular uprisings against it. This looks like a useful principle although we need an understanding of what a “genuinely popular uprising” would be. We can safely assume that Tullock had in view an uprising related to the protection of unanimous consent, not a brawl on whether an election was won with 51% or lost with 49% among two Leviathan-loving parties. So Trump could not invoke any such Tullockian principle to justify his “absolute immunity” in his attempts to reverse the 2020 election. Note that I am not discussing constitutional law as it is, although the Wall Street Journal does suggest that the Constitution did not condone, and was never seen as condoning, such an absolute immunity of the president to criminal prosecution (“Trump Seeks to Have Federal Election-Interference Case Dismissed,” October 5, 2013). I am instead studying rules of constitutional political economy that would be most likely to stop Leviathan at least in some irreversible step. Another principle should not be forgotten—as was tragically illustrated by the French Revolution and as radical libertarians are perhaps tempted to ignore: the continuity of the rule of law. The ultimate reason why you can rest nearly totally assured that the government will not arrest you and keep you secretly locked up (or worse) is the uninterrupted application of the rule of law. Once the rule of law is broken and seen to be broken, you can have no reasonable certainty of its capacity to protect you, and it could take decades or more to restore it. This incidentally provides an argument against the multiplication of laws and regulations, a process that is necessarily accompanied by an increase in the probability of a crash of the rule of law; as the laws approach 100% coverage of everybody’s actions, the probability that the rule of law will be unenforceable approaches 1. (1 COMMENTS)