Congress created the ERC in 2020 to reward businesses and nonprofits for keeping employees on payrolls during the pandemic. Three years later, it has turned into a headache for the Internal Revenue Service and a bonanza for firms such as Bottom Line that help clients calculate and claim the tax credit. Bottom Line is one of the largest of dozens of ERC companies clamoring to capitalize on the opportunity. The ERC is proving far more costly to U.S. taxpayers than expected. The IRS paid more than $150 billion in ERC refunds through early March, and the money is still flowing. Total payments through July could be $220 billion, with another $120 billion in the pipeline, according to a recent Piper Sandler estimate. That would be roughly triple early congressional estimates. This is from Ruth Simon and Richard Rubin, “Inside a Sales Army Turning a Tax Break Into a Modern-Day Gold Rush,” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2023. I get calls once or twice a week telling me that I might qualify for this tax credit. I’m pretty sure I don’t because I don’t have employees. I thought it was a scam until I read this article. I still think it’s a scam, but I’ve changed the identity of who I think are the scammers. It’s not these people, who are trying to make money telling people about an absurd and expensive government program. The real scammers are the Congress people who voted for it. One of the people trying to cash in is Kevin O’Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank. I had always liked him, thinking of him as someone who opposes big government on principle. But no more. It’s one thing to take advantage of a government program. I don’t admire O’Leary for it, but I don’t fault him either. It’s quite another to advocate extending the government program beyond its current expiration date. And that’s what O’Leary is doing. “Shark Tank” veteran Kevin O’Leary is Bottom Line’s best-known partner. He promotes the ERC on television, on social media and to Congress, where he has pressed lawmakers to extend the deadline for claiming the ERC for an additional 24 months. By pushing for extending this handout, O’Leary cannot plausibly be a strong opponent of high government spending. (0 COMMENTS)

Legislators in Minnesota are currently debating a bill which illustrates one of the most fundamental questions of public policy. HF 2513 would abolish subminimum wages for people with disabilities. If enacted, the legislation would have drastic consequences for about 70 day and employment centers — also known as ‘sheltered workshops’ — across the state that benefit from a special allowance in federal labor law that permits them to pay disabled workers below the federal minimum wage. Supporters of the bill argue that: Fundamentally, this is a civil rights issue,” said Natasha Merz, assistant commissioner at the Department of Human Services (DHS), which supports the shift away from subminimum wage work. “Work is one of the main ways that humans create community…and if we only rely on service models that have the tendency to isolate and segregate people, then we’re cutting off their opportunity to be fully contributing members of society. Of course, this assumes that the alternative to employment in these centers is employment somewhere else. In fact, the alternative might be no employment at all. Another of the bill’s supporters, Minnesota’s biggest newspaper, the Star Tribune, offers a number of examples of workers who have moved away from such employment as arguments in favor of its abolition. Of course, those examples could just as easily be taken to show that abolishing sheltered workshops isn’t necessary. But even so, as one correspondent notes: “There is no mention of the “not so abled” that the law would leave behind: I have a nephew with Angelman syndrome, a serious genetic disability. He is nonverbal and requires 24/7 care. But he is highly social. He loves being around “his people.” If supervised and motivated, he can perform some of those “menial” tasks. Sheltered workshop environments gave him an opportunity to interact with others and to enjoy the benefits of meaningful work that suited his abilities. His work provided him social interactions with others of varying skills. I don’t know the number of people who will forever lose such opportunities to get out of the house and to work in a safe and structured environment. For my nephew and his parents, it was never about the money. He made only $70 one year. His parents put the money in his “fun money pouch.” He knew it was money he had earned. His parents helped him spend it on fun activities. The highly supervised work structure helped him be more responsive when he was with his personal care attendant. The program saved his parents thousands of dollars in paid professional care. Between COVID and the closing of the few remaining work programs, my nephew now has few opportunities to get out of the house and be in society. The structured workshops had kind staff who labored diligently to provide individuals with serious disabilities some of the joys and rewards of work. Minnesota’s model of disability employment can, in fact, be seen as a success. An estimated 48% of Civilians with Disabilities Aged 18-64 Years Living in the Community were employed in Minnesota in 2019, the sixth highest rate in the United States. That rate comes, in part, from people like that gentleman with Angelman syndrome who would not be employed without the sheltered workshops. In 2020, 98% of comments submitted to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for a report on this issue supported keeping such programs in place. Evidence suggests that if this bill passes the “not so abled” will suffer. Prof. Carlisle Ford Runge of the University of Minnesota points out that: Evidence from three other states that have eliminated below-minimum wages is deeply disturbing, as reported in 2018 by a national group representing autistic adults. In Maine, two-thirds of disabled former workshop employees are now unemployed. Those who are still working work an average of 12 hours a week, the lowest average in the country. In the state of Washington, 80% of those with severe cognitive impairment remain unemployed. In Vermont, there are now fewer developmentally disabled adults in supported employment than in 2002, when employment workshops closed. As the document citing these failures states in conclusion: “When sheltered workshops close, participants often end up idle at home, not in competitive, minimum wage jobs.” This is the fundamental policy question here: We all wish that disability carried no wage penalty but the sad reality is that in many cases it does and we cannot magic it away with the wave of a legislative wand. Reality often gives us a choice between a sub-optimal outcome and an even more sub-optimal one. In those situations – in this situation – we ought to choose the former instead of pretending that some third option exists. The personal costs of pursuing such fantasies will be devastating.   John Phelan is an Economist at Center of the American Experiment. (0 COMMENTS)

Even those who are not unfriendly toward markets often ignore or forget some of their properties. Consider zoning. A recent article in The Economist reports how high house prices have generated a YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement that challenges some zoning regulations (“The Growing Movement to Restrain House Prices,” September 6, 2023). It is refreshing that the simple idea that less supply leads to higher prices ceteris paribus seems better recognized. Speaking about the old NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) movement, the Economist story suggests: Nowadays, people are more likely to fear that new housing will worsen traffic, or that their views will be spoiled, or that new neighbours will be annoying, or that public services will not expand to meet extra demand. This all creates strong incentives for existing residents to organise against new development. By contrast, the people who would live in homes that are not yet built do not get a say. The NIMBYs also fear that the value of their property will decrease if the supply of housing increases. In fact, it will probably go in the other direction if property owners are allowed to build a second house or an apartment block on their lots. But I mainly want to emphasize the last sentence: “people who would live in homes that are not yet built do not get a say.” This is a general problem in politics (that is, the institution of command and obedience). Most individuals don’t have a say in politics. An individual vote has practically no chance of changing the result of an election. On the market, on the contrary, everybody has a direct say through his demand, whether he buys at the market price or bids up the price—by making a better offer on a house he wants. This is why entrepreneurs build new housing units: because they think some unsatisfied demand is silently bidding up the price at which they will be able to sell. (Note also how a competing supplier can similarly bid down the price at which he is willing to sell.) In fact, even children and individuals not yet born have a say through their parents’ land holdings or through speculators who keep land undeveloped until a new demand appears and bids up prices. Another paragraph in the same story is more clearly deficient: But all rich countries regulate construction, for good reason. Whereas a car can be manufactured and then transported almost anywhere, land is an inherently scarce resource, and for the most part housing is only valuable when it is near jobs, public services and infrastructure. Few people want to live right next door to a sewage plant; lots want to live near a large park. Planning is meant to take such things into account. The babble about “inherent” scarcity wouldn’t pass introductory economics. Scarcity is always and only the result of supply and demand. A diamond can be mined or “manufactured and then transported almost anywhere.” Cars require steel or aluminum, the inputs of which are mined in places that don’t float above the land. But what I want to focus on are the last two sentences: the blurb about planning being necessary because “few people want to live right next door to a sewage plant” and “lots want to live near a large park.” Few people would die for flank steak while very many love tenderloin. Would planning “taking such things into account” help people who cannot afford tenderloin? Suppose you live on an expensive lot near a large park: what is the probability that a sewage plant will buy the expensive lot bordering yours? Infinitesimal—except perhaps if the buyer is a government agency. A billionaire might also do it just because he hates you and wants to make your life difficult, but that’s not the way he has become a billionaire (and perhaps that might be considered a nuisance). Some people who cannot bid up the price of the house near the large park do choose to live near pork farms, sewage plants, or airports, or on floodable lands. The reason is simple reason: demand for, and prices of, such locations are lower. (When a nuisance does “come to you,” even without malicious intent, represents a complex legal-economic case, as suggested by the strange 1879 decision in Sturges v. Bridgman; see Ronald Coase’s seminal 1960 article “The Problem of Social Cost.”) What zoning does is to prevent some people from bidding up prices on pieces of land where other people don’t want them to live. Politics does not allow individuals to bid as well as they can on markets. Interestingly, the rich can often do political bidding better than the poor. And for most people, punishments for breaking laws are worse than the economic constraints on bidding up the prices of what they want. Markets and contracts are not perfect; but politics and commands are worse. (0 COMMENTS)

Yes, but not in the way that most people assume. Brian Albrecht has a very good post criticizing ad hoc theories of inflation, such as those that point to a mysterious rise in “collusion”.  He favors the traditional supply and demand approach to prices: The important part is that while supply and demand is overly flexible, the issue is worse with other models. Any story that relies on implicit agreements, folk theorems, and coordination failure arguments is likely unfalsifiable. There is no way to tell when firms move prices together due to collusion or due to normal supply and demand. The two outcomes are “observationally equivalent.” Why did collusion start when it did? There was a supply shock. But do you know what other theory predicts supply shocks lead to higher prices? Supply and demand. These models do not show us how a market switches from no collusion (low prices) to collusion (high prices). The folk theorem offers no means for the prediction of future prices.  In my view, there are actually two problems here.  Collusion is generally a weak explanation for the rise in the price of a particular product, and changes in individual prices do not explain a change in the overall price level. Consider the following hypothetical.  Suppose there is a 10% fall in the relative price of housing.  How would that impact the overall cost of living?  At first glance, you might assume that this would reduce the overall price level.  After all, housing has a weight of nearly 30% in the CPI. But this is to confuse changes in relative prices with changes in the overall price level.  The supply and demand model only explains relative prices (with one exception, which we’ll consider momentarily.) Recall the maxim, “Never reason from a price change”.  Why did housing prices fall?  Let’s suppose that the decrease was caused by a decline in population growth.  With fewer people and a fixed quantity of land, assume the price of housing declines by 5%.  But fewer people also represents a negative supply shock, reducing the supply of labor.  That sort of shock tends to be inflationary.  Suppose non-housing prices rise by 5%.  In that case, the relative price of housing will decline by 10%, but the overall CPI will rise (as housing comprises less than 50% of the CPI.)   You cannot explain movements in the overall CPI by looking at changes in a single component of prices.  You need to consider why prices changed.   So if the relative price of individual goods and services does not explain absolute changes in the overall price level, why do I claim that supply and demand can help us model inflation?  It turns out that there is one very important relative price—the price of money.  By definition, the price level is the inverse of the relative price of money.  Thus a rise in the price level is nothing more than an equivalent fall in the relative price (purchasing power) of money.  And S&D theory can explain changes in the value of money.  If you double the money supply and the demand for money doesn’t change, then the value of money falls in half.  Prices double. Now let’s use S&D theory to consider the impact of a decline in population.  Start with an automatic monetary regime, such as a pure silver standard.  In the long run, a lower population would likely lead to a higher price level.  With fewer people there would be less demand for coins.  Prices rose after Europe was hit by the Black Death around 1348.  To be sure, fewer people might also lead to fewer silver discoveries, but the direct effect of a lower population reducing money demand would probably be more significant. The short run effect of slower population growth is trickier.  It might initially lead to lower nominal interest rates.  Because the interest rate is the opportunity cost of holding silver coins, this might temporarily increase the demand for silver—pushing the price of goods and services lower.  During the gold standard period, prices tended to be lower during periods of low interest rates. With a fiat money regime, one also needs to account for the response of the central bank.  Under NGDP targeting, a lower population would clearly lead to higher prices (as RGDP would fall.)  In contrast, if the central bank is targeting interest rates at a fixed level, then a falling population might accidentally trigger tighter money by pushing the equilibrium interest rate to a level below the policy rate.  This could at least partly explain what happened to Japan after the early 1990s.  There are no easy answers here. But if we evaluate inflation using a model of the supply and demand for money, we can at least think about the problem in a coherent fashion.  In contrast, looking at the supply and demand for individual goods is of no help at all when trying to explain changes in the overall price level.  The S&D model can only explain relative prices.  And the price level reflects the relative price of only one good—money. (0 COMMENTS)

Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute is the analyst of immigration that I most turn to when wanting to know the facts. So I was excited to see that he testified last week on the topic “Terrorist Entry Through the Southwest Border.” I should have anticipated what I learned while watching: he was the expert called by the Democrats on the committee, not the Republicans. The whole 2 hours plus is worth watching if you click on “transcript” so that you can jump through a lot of stuff. It also helps to go at 1.25 speed. By doing both, I was able to watch it in just under 1 hour. What struck me was that Alex was the most prepared to talk about the issue, not of illegal crossings but of crossings by terrorists on their way across the border to commit terrorist acts in America. His bottom line is that the probability of being murdered by a terrorist crossing over the southwest border is very close to zero. In their questions, Republican congressmen and congresswomen tried to shake him, but were unsuccessful. They kept changing the subject to issues like murders and rapists crossing the border or terrorists over in other countries killing Americans. He kept insisting on talking about what the hearings were supposed to be about. My assessment of Republicans in Congress has not been this low in a long time. One Congressman in particular disappointed me: Chip Roy of Texas. A few elections ago, I had asked a fairly libertarian friend in Washington who follows politics closely whom I should donate money to in a close race. His first choice was Chip Roy. When I checked his campaign contributions, I learned that they were about $10 million, so my $200 or $25o would likely have about the same impact that a vote in Roy’s district would have. So I didn’t contribute. I’m glad. Chip Roy goes after Nowrasteh on an issue that has nothing to do with terrorist entry through the Southwest Border and starts shouting at him. Some highlights. 52:00: Alex’s testimony. It goes to 56:30. 1:02:09: Rep. Biggs claims that Alex’s testimony is “asinine” and also claims that we have open borders. 1:08:08: Good back and forth between a calm Rep. Jayapal (D-WA) and Alex. Goes to about 1:12:27. Notice how Alex, at the 1:11:24 point, gets at one of the drivers of immigration: “Guatemalans Hondurans Salvadorans Colombians and others fleeing dangerous despotic socialists poor cruel regimes.” I loved watching him say this to Rep. Jayapal, for obvious reasons. 1:18:07: Good back and forth between Rep. Nadler (D-NY), whom I’ve never been impressed with, and Alex. Goes to about 1:23:54. Alex makes a good point at about the 1:23:41 point–if we have an open border, why do people pay smugglers between $5,000 and $20,000 to get across. 1:23:54: Chip Roy (R-TX) starts lambasting Alex, getting really angry at him, and changing the subject away from terrorism. Alex tries to get the subject back on track but Roy gets increasingly angry and gets confused at the 1:26:28 point where he says, “I’m answering the questions here.” Actually he was supposed to be asking them, but this was a rare moment of honesty on Chip Roy’s part. 1:41:49 and ff: Rep. Correa (D-CA) gets all 3 of the Republican-called witnesses to admit that they would deport 10 million illegal immigrants. 1:46:18: Rep. Van Drew (R-NJ) accuses Alex of sitting in his office looking at numbers rather than talking to people at the border. Parenthetically, what I notice in almost all the Republican Congressmen is that they sound like the Democratic Congressmen I saw in action during my time in the Reagan administration, from 1982 to 1984. They use emotional arguments and attack people who present facts. 1:58:11: Alex gets into the data on the very small risk. 1:59:00: Alex draws on the other witnesses’ points about smuggling humans to make his case for expanding legal immigration. 2;08:50 and ff: Chairman Tom McClintock (R-CA), whom I have heard and seen good things about over his entire career–he’s one of the most libertarian members of Congress–tries to switch the subject to terrorism in Afghanistan. When Alex calls him out, McClintock accuses Alex of “playing dumb.” No, it’s just that Alex was under the mistaken impression that the hearings were about terrorist entry through the Southwest border.         (0 COMMENTS)

Adam Smith, portrayed in video production, An Animal that Trades. In the original version of a now classic thought experiment, five people are about to be killed by a runaway trolley. Would you divert the trolley knowing that your choice will kill a single innocent bystander? Listen as Michael Munger of Duke University argues that Adam Smith gave […] The post Michael Munger on How Adam Smith Solved the Trolley Problem appeared first on Econlib.

Lydia Dugdale was comfortable talking about death well before she became a medical doctor. Then her experiences in hospitals made her realize that most people weren’t. She long wondered how conversations about dying could be started earlier in such settings. When she came across an ancient manual for death- the Ars moriendi– she was inspired to write her book, The Lost Art of Dying, based on this genre of literature that existed for more than 500 years- and then disappeared. In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes Dugdale to talk about it. The two talk about how attitudes toward death have changed over time- from the Civil War to picnics in cemeteries- as well as across religious traditions. How we die, and where we die, and with whom are all vital parts of the conversation. There’s a lot to think about in listening to this conversation- some of it uncomfortable. As always, we’d like to hear what you have to say. Please share your thoughts in the comments below, or use our prompts to start your own conversation offline.     1- Dugdale asks how we might make our health care system more conducive to facilitating conversations about death, as well as why they seem so resistant? How would you respond to this challenge?   2- As Dugdale reminds us, there are legal and technical considerations related to dying. She relates the story of an elderly patient who was “brought back to life” three times. Why does this story trouble her? Should patient have been resuscitated? How would you make this decision if you were this man’s family? His physicians? Or him?   3- A central thread in the Ars moriendi and all of these manuscripts is that if you want to die well, you have to live well. What do you understand this to mean? How has this episode changed the way you think about death?   4- Roberts says that when people die today, we expect doctors to be more involved than clergy or family. What should be the role of community in death, and what should constitute this community? What does it mean to die alone versus to die lonely? What does Dugdale mean when she says, “…we need to practice being a burden on others and we need to practice receiving the burden that others impose on us,” and to what extent do you agree with her?   5 Roberts and Dugdale discuss the role of ritual related to death and the power of connection to the past. Dugdale reminds us the root of the work “ritual” is “rite,” as in a rite of passage, a transitional moment, not a practice. How can ritual help us to address our existential angst, or death anxiety. Must ritual always be an appeal to the Divine? How might ritual assist us to think about our own impending deaths in the ways that Roberts and Dugdale suggest?   (0 COMMENTS)

Some highlights from reading blog posts, articles, and tweets this week. Interesting Vincent Geloso thread on tax cheating according to income groups. Bottom line: As a percent of income lower-income people cheat more. I’ve always suspected this. If someone makes $30k a year and makes another $10k off the books, that’s easier to do than someone making $200k a year and making another $67k off the books. In the latter case, we get 1099s. He gives some indirect evidence but his reasoning is similar to mine. Happy Yeltsin Supermarket Day. A powerful story by Scott Lincicome about how Yeltsin dropped his view that Communism creates plenty. I remember hearing in a speech by the late Barry Asmus about 30 years ago that Harry Truman had said that if every Soviet citizen got a Sears catalogue in his mail on Friday, by Monday Communism would be dead. To use that line myself, of course, I wanted to see if it was accurate. I couldn’t track it down and so I called the Truman library. The person I talked to had no evidence that Truman had said that. But he should have. The problems with relying on regulated electric utilities to build the huge amount of infrastructure required to bring about a less-carbon-intensive electrical future. This is by the Conversable Economist. He consistently delivers quality. As I’ve seen saying for years in talks, the middle class has been disappearing: upward. By Daniel Griswold. An economist who became an important bureaucrat in the Philippines vents, with one graph, shown above, about the destruction caused by price controls. (0 COMMENTS)

The Economist has an excellent piece on the link between nationalism and corruption: Tunisia reflects a global trend: more leaders are using nationalism as a tool to amass power—and to abuse it (see chart 1). Whereas nationalism was once a means to dismantle deplorable colonial empires, it is increasingly becoming a device to remove legitimate constraints on government power. Leaders who chafe at checks and balances need a pretext to scrap them. They cannot admit that they want to muzzle the press and purge the courts because they find it irksome to follow the rules and would prefer to rule with unfettered authority. So they accuse journalists and judges of being traitors, or agents of foreign powers. After declining during the neoliberal era, nationalism has been increasing since 2012: They discuss a University of Gothenburg Study that found a link between rising nationalism and rising levels of corruption: We combined our measure of how nationalist governments are with data on perceptions of public-sector corruption from Transparency International (ti) for the years 2012 to 2021. Using a statistical model, we found that where governments rely on nationalist rhetoric to stay in power, experts think the public sector is much more corrupt (see chart 2). Moreover, comparing countries with themselves over time, going back to 2012, we find that more nationalist rhetoric has been associated with more corruption, and less nationalism with less corruption. Both these findings remain true after controlling for average incomes, and changes in them, and worldwide trends in nationalism and corruption. Nationalism also reduces the quality of governance, and makes a country more violent: A paper co-written by Abhijit Banerjee, a Nobel prize-winning economist, found that when voters pick candidates by ethnicity instead of, say, probity or competence, they end up with less honest, less competent representatives. Andreas Wimmer of Columbia University crunched data from nearly 500 civil wars and found that when political parties are ethnically based, civil war is nearly twice as likely. And instability is perhaps 30 times as likely if the country in question is neither a dictatorship (which can crush unrest before it escalates) nor a full democracy (where disputes are typically resolved peacefully). In short, when a leader invokes blood and soil, expect things to get bloody, or soiled.  There is only one point on which I disagree: Nationalism can be positive or negative. The positive sort—love of one’s country—can be a force for good.  I’d call love of one’s country “patriotism”, not nationalism: 1.   A patriot believes free trade makes their country richer.  A nationalist fears dependence on foreigners. 2.  A patriot believes immigration makes their country stronger.  A nationalist fears immigrants will change the culture. 3.  A patriot supports equal rights for women and gays.  A nationalist views women’s rights and gay rights as a suspicious foreign idea. 4.  A patriot wants to teach children a true version of their country’s history.  A nationalist wants schools to conceal their country’s crimes. 5.  A patriot views all citizens as being of equal worth.  A nationalist sees minority groups as being less than equal citizens. 6.  A patriot wishes to work peacefully with other nations.  A nationalist is suspicious of international agreements to promote peace and trade.  In the future, I believe 2012 will come to be seen as the year when the world started a long period of political decline—much like 1913 in the previous century.  A period of rising statism in economics and rising nationalism in politics.  I fear that we are still in the early stages of this new era. (1 COMMENTS)

If governments really believed that anthropogenic CO2 emissions will seriously harm their citizens or subjects, and if they were really pursuing the general welfare, isn’t it prima facie obvious that reducing these emissions would be their first priority, as opposed to competing priorities based on debunked, prescientific economic theories? Looking at what is happening in practice provides a good introduction to how governments actually work and what they pursue. Western governments are “protecting” their subjects from less costly imports of solar panels and other “green” products, in order to reduce competition and keep prices higher for domestic producers. Joe Biden’s “smart” investments favor inputs “Made in America” for green projects. He has maintained most of Trump’s solar panel tariffs.  With a view to increasing tariffs on EVs made in China, the European Union government just announced an “anti-subsidy investigation” into the extent to which they are subsidized by the Chinese taxpayers. The US government also impose tariffs on Chinese EV. (See “China Attacks EU’s ‘Naked Protectionist Act’ on Electric Cars,” Financial Times, September 14, 2023; “Chinese Carmakers Are Under Scrutiny in Europe,” The Economist, September 14, 2023.) Chinese, American, and European EVs are all subsidized by their manufacturers’ governments. In passing, it is a strange argument that subsidies from one’s own government, that is, from one’s fellow taxpayers, are deemed good, while subsidies from foreign taxpayers are bad. This idea is based on the same 17th-century mercantilist and dirigiste theories. But why subsidize with one hand and push up prices through custom tariffs with the other? Either the US and EU governments don’t believe in the large risks officially attributed to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, or else they are not benevolently pursuing the general welfare, or both. Much economic theory and historical evidence suggest that governments as we know them (“the state”) do not pursue anything like the “general welfare,” if this expression has any meaning. Instead, they pursue power and, for that purpose, favor the cronies and clientele on which they depend for support and propaganda, such as domestic manufacturing lobbies, to the detriment of the general public. Public-choice analysis (including Anthony de Jasay’s theory) tries to explain the state as it is, as opposed to how it should be in the mind of such or such philosopher-king, social engineer, or armchair ideologue. It is true that the state’s corporate cronies pay a price for their subsidies and protection against foreign competitors. They are subject to government mandates to increase their production of EVs. For example, the Wall Street Journal reports that “Ford lost nearly $60,000 on each EV it sold in 2023’s first quarter (“An Auto Strike Made in Washington,” September 15, 2023). This churning—subsidizing domestic producers, protecting them against foreign competitors, bossing them around and undermining their profitability—is paid by American taxpayers, consumers, and shareholders. That the earth is reportedly burning does not seem to be a real priority for governments; they are just in the business of power as usual. If half of that is true, it would be a tragic illusion to let governments grab more power to fight another trumpeted emergency that is quite certainly less threatening than the preservation of a free society. (0 COMMENTS)