Katherine Tai, the US Trade Representative in the Biden administration, is one of the many lawyers tasked with understanding and running the economy. Last May, she gave a speech to celebrate the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and PacificIslander Heritage Month. She told her audience: You are not invisible. I see you and I hear you. The President sees you and hears you. And we’re fighting like hell for you. Because you belong. What does that mean? What does “you belong” mean? In a liberal-individualist society, that is, in a free society, there is no way for an individual to belong but by choosing which group not to belong to, for he (or she) is a member or potential member of a practically unlimited number of groups with different degrees of abstractness and compatibility. “Belonging” to everything, belonging in general, is impossible in a free society. In an unfree society, it is different. I can think of three sorts of “belonging.” In a tribe, one does indeed belong in general, because there is little choice but to adopt the belonging uniformity imposed by customs and the fear of being banned. In a more structured society, we meet the second kind of belonging: to belong to “society,” which means to its government, which may or may not be a majoritarian democracy. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Lenina expresses this in her simple way: “Everyone belongs to everyone else.” The “Dear Leader watches you and will take good care of you” that one can see in Ms. Tai’s lyrism is very consistent with that way of belonging. The third way to belong is slavery, the ultimate form of belonging; if you really want to belong, that’s the way to go. One objection is that “belong” can be used not in its property-right sense but in a derived symbolic sense such as “to be attached or bound by birth, allegiance, or dependency … they belong to their homeland;” or “to be a member of a club, organization, or set … she belongs to a country club.” (See the online Merriam-Webster.) But note that “slave” also has figurative meanings, which do not totally defang its literal sense. Ms. Tai should have said more precisely how her audience belongs. Ms. Tai might emphasize her use of the intransitive form of the verb, which conveys the more fuzzy meaning of “to be suitable, appropriate, or advantageous … to be in a proper situation” (as Merriam-Webster writes). But this could also suggest that one must stay in his place, or he will be put in his place by the power that be. In a free society, the individual largely chooses not only what he “belongs to,” but also which idea he espouses, what is “suitable, appropriate, or advantageous” for him to believe and to do. Another way, perhaps more practical, to look at the problem is to consider a recent statement by a Starbucks spokesman: We remain committed to creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome. A free society is not a big Starbucks. It includes even those who don’t like Starbucks or don’t want to be watched and taken care of by some Dear Leader. In such a general context of liberty, Starbucks itself, of course, should be free to do what its owners decide. Absent a general context of liberty, Starbucks would not be able to define for itself what is “a culture of warmth and belonging.” I doubt that the current USTR, who is philosophically a 17th-century mercantilist (just as her predecessor in the Trump administration, Robert Lighthizer, was), meant that an individual is free to “belong” or not as he decides. (Say you don’t want to belong to the minimum-wage “beneficiaries” or to belong to a union.) All this leaves open the question of the minimal rules, legal or moral, on which a free society might depend. Political slogans and incantations about belonging cannot answer this question. It is, in my view, difficult to think about it without reading Nobel economists James Buchanan and Friedrich Hayek—and for that matter Anthony de Jasay, who showed that the Dear Leader is an illusion, for he is only dear to part of the population. (0 COMMENTS)

I’ve said before it’s worth noting that while loss of employment is the most common downside brought up about increases in the minimum wage, it’s far from the only downside. Employers can cut costs among multiple margins – perhaps avoiding cutting jobs by cutting hours and benefits or putting less effort into ensuring a pleasant work environment. But a newly published paper takes another look at a deleterious consequence of minimum wage increases.  The author, economist Seth Hill, starts by making the same observation – that while “employment might be the consequence of minimum wage laws most often evaluated…economists have also looked at alternative effects” such as: An increased minimum wage might drive declines in nonwage compensation such as fringe benefits, job flexibility, or incidental experience at the workplace. An increased minimum wage might influence prices or customer service, might cause substitution of higher-skill for lower-skill labor, and might lead to increased loitering or petty crime from young males losing hours or employment. Hill also points out that these negative effects are not evenly distributed – they most heavily impact the people who are struggling the most: If there are negative distributional consequences of minimum wages, they most likely fall on the lowest-skilled workers whose marginal revenue product falls below the wage floor. The causes of low-marginal revenue product – low skills, drug addictions, mental illness – likely also cause other hardships meaning that negative consequences of minimum wages might more often fall on those already struggling at the economic margins. There could be different and compounding negative consequences of minimum wage increases for Americans at the margins. Low-skill workers could lose employment; could retain employment but see hours or benefits reduced; could have others in their support network experience employment disruptions; or, could face higher prices in the goods and services – for example housing – consumed by low-wage workers. Employment or support network disruptions might be particularly challenging for those with mental illness or drug addiction, two factors that harm marginal revenue product and relate to housing insecurity. And housing insecurity is the consequence this new paper seeks to examine. Many activists cite the cost of living and the expense of housing as urgent reasons to drive up the minimum wage. But might this backfire? Could it be the case that higher minimum wages actually increase rather than reduce the incidence of homelessness? Hill examine this question using three different statistical methods. The results? According to the first method, Municipalities that increased minimum wages by up to $2.50 per hour from 2013 to 2018 saw an average increase of 14 percent in homeless counts in the years 2014 to 2019 relative to municipalities with no nominal change in the minimum wage (real decline) or with changes pegged to inflation (real no change). Municipalities that increased minimum wages by more than $2.50 per hour from 2013 to 2018 saw an average increase of 23 percent in homeless counts in the years 2014 to 2019 relative to municipalities with no change. The second method of analysis uses a stacked regression estimator method which “creates event-specific data sets to eliminate the staggered treatment problem.” According to this test, Increases of $0.75 or more in local minimums increased relative homeless counts by about 25 percent in the years following the increase. All results hold with controls for changes in local income and local population. The third method of analysis uses “a local projection difference-in-differences model” in order to “estimate the effect of continuous changes in the minimum wage rather than breaking changes into categorical treatments as required by the event study and stacked regression approaches.” The result? This estimator suggests that when cities raise their minimum wage by 10%, relative homeless counts increase by three to four percent. The overall conclusion: Overall, these findings imply that minimum wages have negative distributional consequences not limited to disemployment. If a higher minimum wage causes economic harm more often for individuals with characteristics that cause hardship – low skills, lower education, mental or physical disabilities, criminal records, drug addiction – minimum wages could push some at the bottom of the economic ladder into housing, health, or physical insecurity. It’s also worth noting that the minimum wage is not the only bad policy to blame here. The paper also contains the following observation: While homelessness declined in most American cities from the end of the Great Recession up to the Covid-19 pandemic, in a small number of cities such as New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, homelessness surged. O’Flaherty (2019, section 6) calls this one of the “mysteries” of scholarly understanding of homelessness. Minimum wages increased in these cities by 110, 98, 71, and 63 percent from 2006 to 2019. My evidence suggests these increases could have been an important factor driving increases in homelessness. Another important factor is that these are cities where NIMBY policies are firmly entrenched. It seems very likely that the negative effects of NIMBYism and the negative effects of mandating wages above their market-clearing level are additive, and they can very well create results worse than the sum of their parts. And this is why its important to remember that job losses are just one of the ways minimum wages can inflict harm on the least well-off. Even if a minimum wage results in no net job losses, it can still cause lower skilled workers to be substituted for higher skilled workers, obscuring the full consequences of the policy: The evidence presented here implies that focus on net employment could mislead evaluation of minimum wage policy. Aggregate employment might move very little in response to an increase in the minimum wage yet individual consequences for some of the lowest-skilled workers could be large, particularly if such workers are already on the economic margin or if loss of wages leads to loss of income-based subsidies. Bastiat warned us not to look only at what is seen, but also what is unseen, when considering the consequences of a policy. This data helps shine a light on how the people who are the worst off can be made to suffer by minimum wage policies, in a way that would be rendered invisible by remaining focused solely on net employment changes.  (0 COMMENTS)

If you’re looking for adventures, for the extra thrill, then visit Germany and travel with Deutsche Bahn. The German railway service is always a great adventure. You never know whether your train will actually depart and whether you will catch your connecting train or, instead, find yourself lost in some small German village in the middle of nowhere. The service has become so bad that you become increasingly suspicious when there is no delay on your trip and everything seems to go well. In numbers, in June 2023, only 63.5% of the long-distance trains of the Deutsche Bahn were on schedule, which is taken to mean that they are on time or have at most a delay of 5 minutes and 59 seconds. In comparison, the Swiss Federal Railways can proudly point to 91.4% of long-distance services being on schedule until now in 2023. The Deutsche Bahn, or DB, is a state-owned enterprise. While in principle a private company, the German state owns 100% of it. Naturally, the current disastrous state of the German railway services has prompted calls for privatisation. The advantages of privatisation will be familiar to EconLog readers. As a private company, operating under the threat of losses and with the lure of profits, there are incentives to improve the product and cut costs. Moreover, there can be genuine competition with new entrants innovating and developing yet unknown, but superior, ways to deliver the goods. The market process and competition work wonders. But in this article, I don’t want to examine the advantages of privatisation. Instead, I want to look at an objection that sceptics of the market economy often raise. Perhaps the most prominent fear is that privatisation will lead to services being poorer. Thus, the argument goes, some places may no longer be served, trains may be less comfy, the infrastructure may deteriorate, and trains may go less often. As private companies want to make profits, they may well save money by compromising on the quality of the service! There is some truth to such views. Nationalising industries can mean that the services provided will become worse, purely in terms of quality. This is, for instance, one of the big fears with privatising the health sector, as can be witnessed in the UK with the NHS. And it is also an oft-voiced critique of past privatisations, such as the privatisation of the British railway system. But this is a poor argument against the privatisation of the industry. At its core is a confusion of quality with desirability. While higher quality of a good is, by definition, preferable, it is not unconditionally preferable – because it is costly. That higher quality comes at a price, and this means that we have to forgo something else if we want to have our trains to be very comfy and run frequently. A train with spacious legroom will be more expensive, as will a good infrastructure. Perhaps we then must forgo our trip to the cinema to watch Barbie and Oppenheimer. Living in a world of scarcity, we need to make sacrifices. Whenever we act, we implicitly concede this need to make compromises. I suspect that privatisation reveals people’s true preferences. Once an industry is privatised, it becomes evident that the citizens are not willing to pay for higher quality, for comfy trains, for high frequency. As such, the privatisation may indeed result in services of a lower quality in the specified industry. But this is apparently what people want; after all, there is no free lunch, and they can spend the money saved on the quality of the services or goods on things they value higher. Often, the dissatisfaction with the way things are after privatisation as well as the fear of future privatisation betrays the classical disapproval that some people have of the choices of others. But, as Mises said: “A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.” And if some people still felt justified, by justice or whatever else, to ensure the higher quality of service, or something similar, the much more efficient way to ensure this would be the tax-based buying of the corresponding services, not the nationalisation of the industry.   Max Molden is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg. He has worked with European Students for Liberty and Prometheus – Das Freiheitsinstitut. He regularly publishes at Der Freydenker. (1 COMMENTS)

There’s been a great deal of recent handwringing about declining birthrates. The world population (currently 8 billion) is expected to peak at roughly 10 billion in the late 2000s, and then begin declining. In the past few years, already low birth rates have declined even further in many countries.I don’t share this anxiety about population trends. I have no idea as to the optimal world population. Is it five billion? Ten billion? Fifteen billion? How would we go about proving that one figure is better than another?  I cannot even begin to imagine how this question could be answered.Nor do I believe we have any ability to predict population trends in the 22nd century. Most demographers failed to predict that birth rates would fall so sharply over the past five years—why would anyone take long-term forecasts seriously? It is true that falling birthrates are associated with rising affluence. But we don’t know if this will always be the case. I could imagine a 22nd century where almost every family had a highly skilled robot that could do housework and provide education, eliminating the need for schools. These robots could also take children to play areas to socialize with other kids. Parents would presumably continue to spend time with their kids, but only when they wished to. No longer would large families represent a big financial and time burden.Do I believe this prediction for the 22nd century will come true? Absolutely not—just as I don’t believe in any of the current long run predictions of anxious demographers. Recall that a few decades back this group was in a panic about “overpopulation”, and now they have the opposite fear. (In the late 1960s, my mom took me to hear a talk by Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb”.) Who knows what the worry will be in the 22nd century, when China’s population is projected to have fallen in half and housing costs will likely be extremely low in all but the biggest Chinese cities.  Perhaps big families will be back in style. In addition to anxiety over trends in total population, many pundits have concerns about the racial mix of the world’s population.  When I was younger, there was a lot of anxiety about threat posed by Asia, which contains most of the world’s population.  Fear of a rising Japan reached hysterical proportions in the 1980s, as seen in films such as Rising Sun.  After Japan faded from the scene, concern switched to the rise of China.  In recent weeks, that fear seems to have abated a bit with news that China’s economy is stagnating and its birth rate has plunged to the almost unbelievably low level of 1.09 births per woman.  Perhaps India will be the next bugaboo. As population growth has slowed sharply in the West and in East Asia, a new sort of alarm has spread among pundits—fear of a black planet.  Of course it’s not politically correct to express this fear.  Instead, we see lots of ominous looking graphs and pundits exhorting white and East Asian women to bear more children.  Even Africa is now experiencing rapid declines in fertility rates. I suspect that many of these anxieties reflect the current dominance of Western pundits.  Even if only subconsciously, each culture tends to view its own practices as normal and foreign cultures as abnormal.  Thus Westerners might tend to view one culture as too lawless and another as too obedient.  One culture is viewed as not studious enough; another is viewed as being too studious.  It’s hard to shake off one’s own upbringing, and see the world as others see it.   Don’t take this post as being anti-natalist.  While I don’t favor policies explicitly aimed at boosting fertility, I do favor policies aimed at addressing other problems that might incidentally lead to higher birth rates:    And this: (0 COMMENTS)

Anthony Gill is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, adjunct professor of Sociology at the UW, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and a Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. On this episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts hosts Anthony Gill for a conversation on the economics of religion. A fascinating question explored in the episode is, how do religious institutions interact with political institutions and religious liberty? A friendly reminder that incentives matter, brought to you by this EconTalk episode from our archives. Any thoughts on religious liberty in the current political economy? Let us know below, we would love to hear from you! 1- Gill seems to think that economists and political scientists are not as involved in studying religion because it seems difficult to quantify. Of particular interest to him and others, though, is the longevity of the Catholic Church, which is 1700-2000 years old- the longest standing institution in history. Why do you think religion is a less popular object of study in the political economy? What other ways can you think of to apply political economy principles to the study of religion? 2- Gill contends that even though faith and religious practice are alien in terms of measurability, religious institutions act logically and are subject to economic criticism. For example, Gill argues religious liberty requires that clergy members compete as entrepreneurs to gain an audience to evangelize and to preach doctrine to. In the absence of appropriate tithing, Gill and Roberts discuss churches (all kinds) appealing to the government to catalyze growth with more resources. How can churches make themselves attractive to both the government and potential parishioners? (And should they???) To what extent can religious competition harm the viability of religious liberty for individuals? Explain. 3- Property rights are another variable which presents an intersection between political and religious institutions under the structure of religious freedom. Gill provides the hypocritical example of government zoning restrictions prohibiting the development of churches in rural areas because of “congestion,” while suburban housing and shopping malls are allowed to build in the same areas. Politicians are looking for tax revenue, he explains, and points out that most churches have a form of tax-exempt status. Should churches be taxed? Why or why not? Like Roberts and Gill, are you in favor of a more formal tax structure instead of a flexible, Pandora’s box type structure that taxes all groups and institutions differently? If not, for what reasons should different types of institutions’ revenue be taxed at different rates- or not at all? How can the interaction between church and state lead to  rent-seeking? 4- To what extent do you find truth in the William Penn/Hayek belief that toleration promotes economic flourishing? In the current economy, do you see big corporations proving to be susceptible to tribalism or are they promoting toleration to maximize profits? Brennan Beausir is a student at Wabash College studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and is a 2023 Summer Scholar at Liberty Fund. (0 COMMENTS)

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.