Last week I attended an excellent talk on Taiwan and semiconductors given by my Hoover colleague Glenn Tiffert. It was at the Naval Postgraduate School. It was quite informative and the questions from the students in the audience reminded me of what I miss most now that I’m retired from NPS. At a couple of points in his talk. Glenn matter of factly referred to the large decline in manufacturing in the United States in the last few decades. I didn’t correct him for two reasons: (1) I wanted to ask other questions and not monopolize and (2) I think the point he was making might have followed simply from the decline in manufacturing employment, which certainly has happened. I wrote him and attached two graphs. I haven’t heard back and so I’m writing this up and giving links to the graphs. First, on manufacturing output, see this graph from FRED. As you can see, manufacturing output in the second quarter of 2023 was only 6 percent below its all-time peak, which it reached in the fourth quarter of 2007. Second, manufacturing employment has plummeted. See this graph from FRED. Employment peaked at 19.553 million in July 1979 and was only 12.985 million in July 2023. That’s a drop of 33.6 percent. Necessarily implication: labor productivity has increased.       (0 COMMENTS)

Eliezer Yudkowsky once described a mental trick called a “semantic stopsign.” This is when someone proposes an answer to question in a way meant to terminate further inquiry. As he puts it, a semantic stop sign “isn’t a propositional assertion, so much as a cognitive traffic signal: do not think past this point.” He gives an example of how the possibility of new technology allowing us to alter our biology raises all kinds of questions for the future – and an acquaintance of his who uses “democracy” as the proposed solution to all of the issues raised. Yudkowsy says: That’s it. That’s his answer. If you ask the obvious question of “How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?” or “What if liberal democracy does something stupid?” then you’re an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy. The key signal that an answer serves as a semantic stop sign isn’t the answer itself – it’s whether the answer is meant to serve as a blocking mechanism from asking the next obvious question. Genuine answers facilitate further conversation, while semantic stop signs prevent it.  One common semantic stop sign I see these days comes when asking the kinds of people who are inclined to support the proposals of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren about how the programs these Senators propose will be funded. The common answer is “tax the rich!”, or something like “we’ll make billionaires pay their fair share!”  But what’s the next obvious question? How much extra money can really be brought in by “taxing the rich” or “making billionaires pay their fair share”? And would that be enough to pay for the proposed policies?  Let’s start with something raised in 2019 by the economist Antony Davies when he pointed out the following: The 550 US billionaires together are worth $2.5 trillion. If we confiscated 100% of their wealth, we’d raise enough to run the federal government for less than 8 months. Perhaps our problem isn’t how much billionaires have but how much politicians spend. Politifact reexamined this claim in 2021 and rated it as “mostly true.” As they put it, “The two figures are out of date [as of 2021, when the post went viral], but the thrust of the claim is accurate: The estimated $5 trillion in wealth of the nation’s billionaires is enough to cover about eight months worth of federal spending.” Even this overstates how much mileage you could get from such a move. Elon Musk may be worth $225 billion at the moment, but that doesn’t mean he has $225 billion sitting in his checking account. That number is overwhelmingly made up of the value of his stock holdings in the various companies he owns, along with other assets like bonds, land, home equity, and so forth. If the government wanted to take all of Musk’s wealth to finance current spending, that would require Musk to massively sell off assets, which would drive down the prices of all those assets and cause much less than $225 billion to be recovered.  But it gets worse than that. Even if you seized all the wealth of all billionaires, and even if you made the highly unrealistic assumption that you could in fact get the full value of those assets in the process, that would only cover what the government is currently spending for a handful of months. But the Urban Institute estimated that Elizabeth Warren’s health care plan would require $34 trillion dollars in additional government spending over the next 10 years. $34 trillion over 120 months comes out to over $280 billion per month. In 2023, Forbes estimated that the net worth of all US billionaires was $4.5 trillion – lower than what Politifact found in 2021, as Forbes notes more than half of billionaires were worth less than the previous year. Let’s be generous and round that back up to $5 trillion. At $280 billion per month, seizing 100% of all the value of billionaire assets and (unrealistically) keeping all that value in the process would cover the additional spending Warren’s plan requires for less than a year and a half. And it’s even worse than it sounds at first glance. Wealth is a stock, but spending is a flow. The value built up by wealthy Americans represents a cumulative process that spans many decades. This means that if you completely tapped the billionaire well dry to run Warren’s program, you can’t just repeat that process again 16 months down the road to keep things going. You can seize all of Musk or Buffet’s wealth, but you can only do that once. Grandiose plans like those put forth by Warren and Sanders simply can’t be funded by going after billionaires or even just “the rich” – and anyone who gives that answer is likely caught in a semantic stop sign.    (1 COMMENTS)

Bill Clinton famously told voters:  “I feel your pain.”  Although I now look back on the Clinton years rather fondly, I suspect that even his strongest supporters would not view his soulful empathy as anything more than an act.  The government does not feel your pain.  The FDA does not feel your pain.  Doctors and nurses do not feel your pain. You feel your pain. Consider this recent FT story: But when the procedure began, Czar was still alert and gripped by intense pain. “I remember saying ‘I feel everything’ and nobody believed me.” The new podcast The Retrievals hears from a dozen women who had the same procedure at the Yale Fertility Center and who all reported extreme pain throughout. At the time they were told by staff they had been given the maximum amount of pain relief, meaning they couldn’t have more. However, it later transpired that a nurse at the clinic had been stealing fentanyl and replacing it with saline solution. It is thought that 200 patients had been denied pain relief during egg retrievals over a period of five months. . . . I doubt there will be a woman listening who does not recognise elements of this story: of medical professionals underplaying their pain, or rushing them as they explain symptoms, or being made to feel weak, hysterical or unreliable witnesses to their own experience. Nobody believed them?  All 200 patients?  I’d be really annoyed. There’s a perception that people have different tolerances for pain.  And yet I’ve never seen a shred of evidence for that claim.  No one can truly know what another person is feeling.  There are lots of things that other people find painful that don’t bother me at all.  But that doesn’t mean I have a high tolerance for pain.  There are other things that bother me more than they bother other people.  We’re all wired differently; we experience the world in different ways.  I have no idea what it feels like to be you. Here’s Scott Alexander, criticizing the fact that our medical establishment refuses to take reports of pain seriously:  This paper lists signs of drug-seeking behavior that doctors should watch out for, like: – Aggressively complaining about a need for a drug – Requesting to have the dose increased – Asking for specific drugs by name – Taking a few extra, unauthorised doses on occasion – Frequently calling the clinic – Unwilling to consider other drugs or non-drug treatments – Frequent unauthorised dose escalations after being told that it is inappropriate – Consistently disruptive behaviour when arriving at the clinic You might notice that all of these are things people might do if they actually need the drug. . . . Greene & Chambers present this as some kind of exotic novel hypothesis, but think about this for a second like a normal human being. You have a kid with a very painful form of cancer. His doctor guesses at what the right dose of painkillers should be. After getting this dose of painkillers, the kid continues to “engage in pain behaviors ie moaning, crying, grimacing, and complaining about various aches and pains”, and begs for a higher dose of painkillers. I maintain that the normal human thought process is “Since this kid is screaming in pain, looks like I guessed wrong about the right amount of painkillers for him, I should give him more.” The official medical-system approved thought process, which Greene & Chambers are defending in this paper, is “Since he is displaying signs of drug-seeking behavior, he must be an addict trying to con you into giving him his next fix.” Here’s the NYT: How does it feel to suffer from debilitating pain but not be able to get your hands on the medication that could help? In the Opinion video above, we hear from Americans who have had to endure this nightmare. They are among the countless people with chronic pain who have been the unintended victims of the national crackdown on opioid prescribing. In response to the deadly opioid crisis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines intended to limit opioid prescriptions. That advice soon became enshrined in state laws across the country. Suddenly, many pain patients lost the drugs that made their lives bearable. Some sought relief in suicide. Last year the C.D.C. issued new prescription guidelines intended, in part, to induce a course correction. But facing a confusing mess of federal and state laws, many physicians are still afraid to prescribe opioids to genuine pain sufferers. Critics of utilitarianism often point to thought experiments:  “What if a certain social goal could only be achieved by torturing thousands of innocent people.”  I guess the idea is to show that the policy in question is obviously abhorrent, even if it were to pass some sort of utilitarian cost-benefit test. In this case, you cannot even justify these rules by pointing to gains in other areas.  The crackdown on pain relief had a negative effect even if you put zero weight on all of the suffering of people denied pain relief by doctors.  That’s because the crackdown on opioid prescriptions in the early 2010s led to an enormous surge in the use of illegal alternatives such as fentanyl.  The annual death toll from these illegal substitutes is now an order of magnitude higher than a decade ago. The ideology of paternalism is based on the idea that the government understands your interests better than you do.  There are undoubtedly cases where that assumption is correct.  But on average?  When children suffering from cancer are screaming in pain, are most of them just faking it?  Would you want a government bureaucrat in the DEA to make that decision for you and your child’s doctor? I don’t agree with the government policy that denies people the right to take certain drugs.  But I understand the logic behind these laws.  I understand why some people would disagree with me. I don’t agree with the government policy that denies people the right to practice medicine without going through an absurdly long training program, often in areas that have no relationship to their future work.  But I understand the logic behind these laws.  I understand why some people would disagree with me. I don’t agree with the government policy that denies licensed doctors the right to determine appropriate pain relief.  I do not even understand the logic behind these policies.  I do not understand why anyone would disagree with me. What are we doing here? PS.  Here’s an example of differential pain tolerance.  Later today I’ll get a blood test.  In addition, my front teeth recently shifted and now I’m repeatedly biting my lip where it’s raw.  I know lots of people who would find the blood test to be painful, and wouldn’t be bothered by the lip biting.  I’m just the opposite. One more example.  Since 2021, I’ve had chronic (mild) headaches.  But there are no external signs that explain these headaches.  So I guess they are “all in my head”.  (BTW, I do not take any painkillers for the headaches, even though I could easily take over the counter medication.  So don’t take this argument for deregulation of pain relief as being about me.  I’m doing fine for someone of my age.  The point is that doctors have no objective way of determining how you feel.) (0 COMMENTS)

Wildfires destroyed Lahaina. Now Hawaii officials are trying to ward off outsiders from scooping up properties on the cheap in the popular tourist destination. Gov. Josh Green said Wednesday he is working on a sales moratorium for damaged and destroyed properties. He acknowledged it may face legal challenges. “My intention from start to finish is to make sure that no one is victimized from a land grab,” Green said at a news briefing Wednesday. “People are right now traumatized,” said Green. “Please don’t approach them with an offer to buy land. Please don’t approach their families to tell them that they are going to be better off if they make a deal, because we’re not going to allow it.” This is from Joseph Pisani and Ginger Adams Otis, “Lahaina Worries About Real-Estate Speculators After Fire Destruction,” Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2023. Josh Green, Democrat governor of Hawaii, seems to think the the best way to deal with traumatized people is to prevent them from exercising one of their most important options connected to the trauma: selling their land and starting over. Later in the article: Green said he and Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen are considering temporarily blocking permit-issuing as a protective measure. Seriously? Permits to build? And that protects people who lost their property? (0 COMMENTS)

Historian and author Walter Russell Mead of Bard College and the Hudson Institute talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about how innovation and religion can help us make sense of the current state of the world. The post Walter Russell Mead on Innovation, Religion, and the State of the World appeared first on Econlib.

Imagine a criminal justice system with such a high degree of effectiveness that 100% of crimes are immediately solved and 100% of the offenders are incarcerated. What sort of prison population would we expect? Now imagine the opposite extreme, where 0% of crimes are solved. What sort of prison population would we expect? I suspect that the answer to the first question is “fairly low” and the answer to the second question is “precisely zero.” In the first case, crime wouldn’t pay, so the only crimes would be crimes of passion—say a jealous husband murdering his wife. In fact, neither of these scenarios describes the US, which has a prison and jail population of nearly 2 million. There’s a sort of Laffer curve effect with crime, whereby (starting from zero) stricter enforcement of laws results in more people in prison, and then beyond some point fewer people in prison.In the following, I’ll use murder rates, as the accuracy of other crime data is highly suspect due to spotty reporting. I was born 1955, a time when the annual US murder rate was about 4.5 per 100,000. It rose to a peak of over 10 per 100,000 around 1980, and then fell sharply in the 1990s and 2000s. It was 6.81 per 100,000 in 2021, and seems to have fallen in 2022 (although the national data is reported with an oddly long lag.)   During the 1960s and 1970s, the US adopted a soft on crime approach that contributed to a sharp rise in the crime rate.  We moved to the left on the incarceration Laffer curve, toward a more lenient policy.  Despite this softer approach, however, the total amount of incarceration actually increased during the 1970s.  Crime rates rose faster than punishment rates declined.  In the 1980s, we switched back toward a tougher approach toward crime, and for a time the incarceration rate rose even further.  Eventually, crime rates fell and incarcerations also declined.  In recent years, places like California have moved back to a softer approach to crimes like shoplifting and car theft.  Not surprisingly (except to sociologists), the rate of shoplifting is rising.  Eventually, voters will demand a crackdown and incarcerations rates for shoplifting will begin rising again. Here’s an analogy.  It is possible that a central bank would have to raise interest rates in order to reduce inflation.  But that does not imply that a low inflation world would be expected to feature high interest rates.   Richard Hanania recently attracted some controversy with this tweet: This is a pretty bleak vision, and one that I do not share.  It’s true that we need more effective law enforcement.  But I do not believe that a low crime rate requires incarcerating a large share of the black population.  In my view, Hanania is overlooking Laffer curve effects. America’s incarceration rate was far lower in the 1950s than it is today.  And yet the murder rate was also lower (and I suspect the overall crime rate was lower as well.)   If you don’t like comparisons over time, how about comparisons across nations?  In the UK, blacks are much more likely to be killed than whites.  That might seem to support Hanania’s argument, as most murders occur within a given race.  But even if British blacks commit murder at a much higher rate than other British residents, the rate seems to be roughly the same as for whites living in America (around 4 per 100,000).  And yet the incarceration rate in the UK is far lower than in the US.  Not only is a high level of incarceration not the only solution to high rates of crime, it is not even the only solution to high rates of crime in the black community. The ideal solution is high rates of incarceration and low levels of incarceration.  Punishment so certain that the crime doesn’t get committed.  The UK isn’t perfect, but it’s much closer to that ideal than is the US.  Indeed it’s closer to that ideal even among the black portion of the British population.  The ideal solution is to have a criminal justice system that is so effective that the incentive to commit crimes falls to very low levels.  We don’t need “more incarceration”; we need higher rates of incarceration per offense and much lower total levels of incarceration due to lower crime rates.  Ending the War on Drugs might also push us toward that goal.  During Prohibition, America’s murder rate soared much higher (during both booms and depressions.)  After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, our murder rate plunged much lower, despite very high unemployment. California has recently seen mobs of young people ransacking department stories.  This followed a decision to stop prosecuting so-called “minor crimes” such a shoplifting.  But shoplifting is not a minor crime—jaywalking is a minor crime.    California needs to take a much tougher approach to crime.  But the ultimate goal should not be thousands of young shoplifters rotting in California prisons, rather the ultimate goal should be to return to the situation where mobs of young people were not raiding our department stores.  If they don’t do the crime, they won’t have to do the time. You might argue that there’s no meaningful difference between what I’m saying and what Hanania is saying, as we both favor a “tough on crime” approach.  But his fatalistic vision seems much less likely to lead to the sorts of changes that are actually needed.  Hanania implies we don’t have the “stomach” for policies with a “disparate impact”.  But our criminal justice policies already have a hugely disparate impact, so he’s clearly wrong on that point.  And contrary to popular opinion, voters in black neighborhoods typically do not favor a “defund the police” approach to crime.  Many are concerned about their safety and wish more money was spent on protecting their lives and property.  I suspect they understand the difference between high rates of incarceration and high levels of incarceration.  And they also understand that more police on the streets can reduce crime for any given level of incarceration.   PS.  In this post, I’ve focused on how prison can deter crime.  But other approaches are likely to be far more effective, including putting more police on the streets and ending the War on Drugs. PPS.  Hanania’s tweet seems aimed at liberals.  But he might also have asked how many Americans have the “stomach” to enforce our tax laws (and which political party lacks the stomach to enforce those laws)?  How many Americans have the stomach to enforce our laws against trying to interfere in Georgia elections?  How many Americans have the stomach to enforce laws on stealing classified documents, or lying to law enforcement officers after the crime is uncovered?  I’m not encouraging people to be “woke”, but unconscious bias is a real thing.   PPPS.  I’ve ignored the issue of gun control, as it’s orthogonal to my claims here.  My argument does not depend on whether gun control is or is not a good idea, or the extent to which it explains the low UK murder rate.  Gun control may or may not be wise, but it is clearly not mass incarceration.  If you wish to raise the issue of guns, ask whether Americans have the “stomach” to enforce our existing gun laws. (0 COMMENTS)

Unlike many of the people who are writing encomiums to James Buckley (see here and here, for example), who died yesterday at age 100, I didn’t know him. But I still remember sitting in my Winnipeg apartment with some libertarian friends and watching U.S. election returns on November 3, 1970. The media showed James Buckley’s victory speech and I still remember his words: “How sweet it is.” Buckley, running on the Conservative Party ticket in New York state, was running against Richard Ottinger, the Democratic candidate, and Charles Goodell, the Republican candidate and incumbent whom Governor Nelson Rockefeller had appointed to the U.S. Senate after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in June 1968. Goodell, by the way, was the father of Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League. It’s not often that one has reason to remember a one-term U.S. senator. The reason I do remember is the case he brought, on First Amendment free-speech grounds, against the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. The case, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court, was Buckley v. Valeo. This link gives a nice summary. Buckley prevailed on a few key points but not on all.   (0 COMMENTS)

One hundred years ago today, Vilfredo Pareto passed away in his villa near Lausanne. I’ve writen a little piece for Project Syndacate on him and this anniversary. Also a new entry is up in the Encyclopedia at Libertarianism.Org. Pareto’s is a household name for many, because of the notion of Pareto optimality or the so-called Pareto principle. His contributions go way beyond that. Pareto was a pioneer in economics, political science, and sociology, and he contributed original ideas of all three fields. This is all the more surprising, when you consider that he never gave a University lecture before he was 45. For the first part of his life, Pareto, who studied mathematics and engineering, was a businessman, a CEO. In his spare time, he became an advocate of free market liberalism, contemplated a career in politics (which luckily for us all, it wasn’t to be), wrote and published extensively, in Italian but also in French. He befriended Gustave de Molinari and published on the Journal des économistes en France. He read an article, there, about Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty and sent the American anarchist journal a few correspondences. He admired English liberalism, Cobden and Gladstone, and was saddened by how liberty was watered down in England, too. A number of Pareto’s writings are translated into English and could be found on archive.org. More recently, a few books worth reading were added to the body of Pareto scholarship. For one thing, now we are lucky we have the three volumes biography by Fiorenzo Mornati (available in English from Palgrave Macmillan), which is a superb examination of Pareto’s thinking and its evolution through time. A critical edition of the Manual of political economy was published a few years ago, thanks to Aldo Montesano, Alberto Zanni, Luigino Bruni, John S. Chipman, and Michael McLure. This year, Christopher Adair-Toteff edited a collection of essays on the occasion of the centennial. A few years ago, we had a Pareto conversation on LibertyMatters. Giandomenica Becchio, Rosolino Candela and Richard E. Wagner contributed to it. This is a good day to pick up a Pareto’s book. (0 COMMENTS)

Every week I read a few outstanding articles but I have little or nothing to add. So I don’t post on them. But occasionally–and this is the first time–I will link to a few of the articles, quote a few segments, and maybe add my few thoughts. Here are two excellent articles that I read this week. Jesse Walker, “The Battlefields of Cable,” Reason, August 15, 2023. Excerpt: When C-SPAN’s cameras came to Congress in 1979, a wave of bloodless guerrilla maneuvers followed. Newt Gingrich, in those days a brash young Georgia congressman, led an insurgent cell of Republicans looking for ways to make the cameras work for them. One of their techniques was to deliver so-called “special order” speeches when the day’s business was over, which in addition to airing live on cable could be shared with local channels back home. “These speeches frequently called out the Democratic opposition directly, daring them to respond,” the Purdue historian Kathryn Cramer Brownell writes in 24/7 Politics, a new history of cable news and the regulatory forces that shaped it. “But nobody did,” she adds, “because the legislative session had ended and everyone was gone.” Not that you could tell that by watching the show, since the camera’s eye stayed fixed on the person speaking. And: C-SPAN was the brainchild of Brian Lamb, who had worked for Whitehead at the Office of Telecommunications Policy, and it was sponsored by the cable industry, which hoped the channel would prove the medium’s value. Between its noncommercial ethos, its commitment to shining a light on the government’s inner workings, and its Warholian willingness to let a motionless camera run while nothing appeared to be happening, C-SPAN was one of the few national cable channels of the 1980s that resembled those old hippie dreams of what TV could be. But it was also a creature of the milieu it covered, a place where Bob Walkers and Tip O’Neills could jockey for position. If this was guerrilla television, it wasn’t the sort the New Left had imagined a decade before. It was a landscape for folks like Gingrich to conduct guerrilla warfare. I’ve long been a fan of Brian Lamb. He was one of C-SPAN’s best interviewers of authors. His questions were not “gotcha” questions but, instead, “information-seeking” questions. But along the way, he occasionally got incredible admissions from authors who, because of his format, relaxed. David J. Bier, “The Government Cheats, Loses, and Cheats Again to Make Immigrating Illegal,” Cato at Liberty, August 16, 2023. Excerpt: You traveled a thousand miles and spent thousands of dollars to reach the United States. The immigration rulebook (sometimes called “the law”) says that if you made it, you could apply for asylum and that officials “shall” process you. But guess what? In this game, the government cheats. It doesn’t want to process you. It wants you to go home. So when you reached the border in 2019, the officials at the legal crossing point wouldn’t process you. They stood in the middle of the bridge to block you. You joined a lawsuit, and a court said, “Government, what you’re doing is illegal. Stop.” So in November 2021, the government issued a new policy that says, “You border guys, you can’t tell people to go away.” But it then promptly ignored that policy “because of COVID-19.” But that excuse ended in May 2023, so it reiterated the policy in a formal rulemaking. It couldn’t be clearer: “Our policy is to inspect and process all arriving noncitizens.” So you’d think you would get processed if you arrived at the border. But no, the government cheats. Border officials are telling people that they must make appointments before they can request asylum, and they cap the number of appointments, even though the new rules make it perfectly clear an appointment will not be required. You can’t even schedule an appointment at all. Rather, you are put in a lottery to decide if you can even request an appointment. When Isabel “Doe” showed up unannounced at a legal crossing point with her bleeding husband whom a cartel shot, she was turned away. Her husband was then murdered in Mexico. A number of my friends tell me that they are not against immigration but, rather, against illegal immigration. Here’s the test of their sincerity: Do they favor having the government obey its own law? If not, they are not in favor of legal immigration and are, in fact, in favor of government illegality. (0 COMMENTS)

The famous statement attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief (“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime”), is the paradigmatic example of what the rule of law is not. It represents a sort of social and political institution antithetical to individual liberty, economic prosperity, and human flourishing. Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, was charged in Georgia with participation in a criminal enterprise. The prosecutor, Fani Willis, used the state’s imitation of the federal Racketeering and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act. A Wall Street Journal story contrasts the Georgia indictments with the federal one for attempting to overturn the 2020 election (“The Curious Case of Mark Meadows, Told Through Two Indictments,” August 17, 2023): The Georgia prosecution, however, is a racketeering case, with Trump charged as being at the center of a criminal enterprise. Under Georgia’s RICO law, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has the power to cast a wider net and implicate any player—big or small—who took part in the alleged conspiracy. Any act that furthers the alleged enterprise, which could be as simple as making a phone call or sending an email, can place an individual in legal jeopardy if done to advance the conspiracy’s broader goals. RICO is a very dangerous sort of law that was officially meant to go prosecute mafia bosses. If serious evidence exists that a mafia boss has committed a real crime, he should of course be prosecuted for that crime. Conspiring or attempting to commit a crime was always a crime, long before the invention of RICO in 1970. Standard law-and-economics theory explains this with simple incentives: if you try to steal $1 million and your probability of success is 0.5, your expected gain (not the net gain, of course) remains an attractive $500,000. Law-and-economics would also explain why delusion cannot be an excuse for a crime. (See David Friedman, Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters [Princeton University Press, 2000].) Contra Rico, the minion who just carried the mafia boss’s luggage should not be prosecuted—a fortiori if he was trying to restrain the boss from committing crimes, as Meadows may have done. This remains true if one believes that Trump was engaged in a criminal enterprise and trying to expand it. It would probably have been wise for his collaborators to jump ship earlier, as some did. On the other hand, it would have been very dangerous to have Trump running loose in the City of Command, as Bertrand de Jouvenel called the seat of the state. I note with the Wall Street Journal that the federal prosecutor, Jack Smith, did not use RICO nor prosecute Meadows. I think that my critique is consistent with the liberal conception of the rule of law as defended notably by Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan. A prosecutor naturally hopes to “flip” criminal accomplices into providing evidence lest their own crimes be more harshly punished. On the accomplices’ side, we meet what game theory calls the “prisoner’s dilemma.” This actually explains why complex conspiracies involving large groups of individuals are rare and rarely unpunished—why, for example, a complex conspiracy to overturn a US presidential election does not happen often. But a strict rule of law, not to mention civilized decency, would not incentivize prosecutors to round up all those who were standing around. Show me the man… In the case under consideration here, there is also a supreme irony, if not something like natural justice. In the 1980s, Rudolph Giuliani, who was a politically ambitious and immoral federal district attorney, used the federal RICO to wage a witch-hunt against New York financiers, sending many innocent men to prison and destroying many lives. He was too ignorant of political economy to suspect that the same sort of law could turn against him and, more worryingly, against future innocent individuals. It is all to the honor of the Wall Street Journal to have, at that time, defended many of the persecuted financiers. (0 COMMENTS)