Bill Gates has for many years been focusing on philanthropic projects through the Gates Foundation. He recently announced an end date for this endeavor. As Bill Gates put it in his recent announcement: I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world. And on December 31, 2045, the foundation will close its doors permanently. Gates says over the last 25 years, his foundation has put $100 billion into various projects and causes, funded through his own wealth as well as the wealth of other billionaires like Warren Buffett. His goal is for the foundation to now pick up the pace – in the next 20 years until it closes, he expects his foundation will be donating another $200 billion,  with Gates giving away virtually all his wealth as part of this process. The Gates Foundation has done tremendous good in the world – by any reasonable estimate many millions of lives have been saved and millions more improved. Billionaires like Bill Gates are often criticized for not paying enough in taxes. However, opportunity cost cannot be ignored. (Or, I guess it’s more accurate to say opportunity cost should not be ignored – clearly people can ignore it.) Instead of funding these causes through the Gates Foundation over the next 25 years, that $200 billion could instead be collected as taxes by the federal government over that same timeframe. No change in tax law needs to happen for this to occur – citizens are free to send in extra tax money to the government any time they wish. Every wealthy person out there who loudly and publicly insists “people like me should be paying more in taxes” in fact has the ability to do just that, anytime they want. The optics of this are rather odd. When someone loudly declares that they believe they have a moral obligation to do X, while also having the ability to X at any time and nobody can prevent them from doing so, but nonetheless they consistently decline to do X, one might reasonably wonder if they really believe in the moral obligation they preach. In his book Following Their Leaders: Political Preferences and Public Policy, Randall Holcombe makes a distinction between expressive preferences and instrumental preferences. An expressive preference is, as the name suggests, about what ideas we prefer to express, to others or even to ourselves. Instrumental preferences are about what outcomes we would directly choose to create when given an effective choice. What we expressively prefer isn’t aways the same as what we instrumentally prefer. Holcombe argues that voting behavior and political activism are driven by expressive preferences more than instrumental preferences. As he says, voters “are acting expressively, not instrumentally, and as individuals they are not choosing an outcome, they are expressing a preference. There are many reasons to think that the preferences they express at the ballot box may differ from outcomes they would prefer if the choice among social alternatives were actually theirs to make.” So here’s the question that comes to mind. Lets imagine that we find an advocate of increasing taxes on billionaires – even better, one of the people who insists “billionaires should not exist.” Suppose we presented them with a magical button that would send out a signal to Bill Gates’ brain and imprint in him the desire to shut down his foundation right now, and instead give all his wealth, all at once, to the federal government as a voluntary tax contribution. At time of writing, Bill Gates’ net worth is around $116 billion, so by pushing this button, let’s say the federal government will gain an additional $116 billion in revenue.  (To put that number into context, according to the CBO the federal government spent $640 billion in the month of January 2025 alone – over five and a half times Bill Gates’ entire fortune in a single month!) The cost of this will include, among other things, the elimination of all the cumulative good that would otherwise have been done by the Gates Foundation over the next two decades. If we put this magical button in front of this “billionaires shouldn’t exist” advocate and offered them the choice – eliminate Bill Gates’ billionaire status, send another $116 billion in tax revenue to the federal government, at the cost of erasing all the future work that would have been done by the Gates Foundation, would they push the button? Would their expressive preference to eliminate billionaires from existence and collect more in taxes from the rich also turn out to be their instrumental preference? Or, with the full weight of that decision suddenly entirely on them, causing them to personally bear the full moral responsibility of erasing all the work the Gates Foundation would have done over the next 20 years, would they perhaps hesitate and reconsider if the preference they’ve been expressing is really what they would choose to enact? Would you push the button? (1 COMMENTS)

President Trump has fended off Republican criticisms of his “big, beautiful [budget] bill” by declaring that a vote against it is a vote for “the biggest tax increase” in American history, an estimated $4 trillion over a decade. The hidden irony is that, as the late Milton Friedman warned a half century ago, even if 2017 tax rates do not lapse, the “big, beautiful bill” will raise the country’s “true taxes.” Why? The bill includes substantial increases in federal deficit spending, which will be a drag on economic growth that would otherwise have been gr eater because of his tax-rate reductions and deregulation policies.   Passage of the Bill Is Tenuous at Best Congressional passage of Trump’s bill is tenuous. Republicans have a three-vote majority in the Senate, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and maybe two or three Senate-deficit hawks, could vote against the bill because it adds another $320 billion to federal spending this fiscal year. Paul’s major complaint, however, is that Trump’s budget will hike the federal deficit for fiscal 2025 to $2.2 trillion and will add $22 trillion to the national debt over ten years, raising it to $59 trillion in 2035 from its current level of $36 trillion. Understandably, Paul fears that deficit spending already represents an “existential threat” to the country’s solvency, and Trump’s bloated “beautiful bill” will magnify that problem. Passage of the  bill has been made more even precarious because of the feud between Trump and his once cost-cutting ally Elon Musk. Musk has declared the bill to be “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination.” Trump has countered by warning Paul that the “GREAT people of Kentucky will never forgive him!” for any resulting tax increase.   Milton Friedman’s Fiscal Wisdom Pundits in Congress and the media have failed to remember the wisdom of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), especially on policies that enlarge federal government powers and economic influence. Friedman’s fiscal points have been repeated by an army of economists over the last half century, but the administration’s advisors and the public obviously have missed Friedman’s insights. (Click here, here, and here.) In straightforward language, Friedman explained to his audience (with prescience) in 1977 how wrongheaded an overstuffed budget bill is and why it will not “Make America Great Again.” . Of course, Friedman understood that taxes are important, mainly because they, along with deficit spending, finance government expenditures and, in the process, distribute the economic burden of those expenditures among taxpayers. By way of tax-rate changes, taxes affect people’s incentives to work, save, and invest, which affect government revenues and expenditures and can also affect the demand for government programs. However, taxes are not the most direct (or chief) source of the economic cost of government, as Friedman stressed. Government expenditures draw the country’s resources away from private sector uses (just as taxes do). Government expenditures will necessarily crowd out private expenditures by reducing the supplies of private goods and services and by raising their prices. Federal deficits used to finance added expenditures can do much the same, by absorbing private loanable funds and driving up interest rates, thereby reducing private investment. Friedman understandably admonished his followers to do what (aggregate demand-side) Keynesians of the 1970s and before had denied was consequential: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending. Because that’s the true tax. If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it in the form of inflation or borrowing.”   Concluding Comments By proposing a budget “deal” that prevents a return of 2016 tax rates and adds hundreds of billions in federal expenditures, Trump imagines he adheres to conservative fiscal principles, not aware that he has proposed a “true tax” increase. Freidman warned that added government spending could reduce personal freedom and increase governments’ drag on private sector growth—impairing the potential growth effects of proposed tax-rate reductions and deregulation efforts, also included in the “beautiful bill.” The lesson to be drawn from Friedman’s fiscal perspective? The administration has boasted that his bill will rejuvenate the economy. The reality is that contrary to Friedman’s admonition, they have diverted voter attention from the “one thing, and only one thing” that he (Friedman) saw as crucial for properly assessing fiscal policy: government expenditures as a percent of GDP. Given Trump’s “beautiful bill” will raise federal spending in 2035 to at least 24 percent of GDP from 23.1 percent this year (and 20.6 percent in 2019, before COVID)—from Friedman’s fiscal perspective, this is hardly a way to “Make America Great Again.”   Richard McKenzie is an economics professor emeritus in the Merage Business School at the University of California, Irvine and author of, most recently, Reality Is Tricky and Rationality Evolved.   (0 COMMENTS)

The Wall Street Journal ran a letter co-authored by Charley Hooper and me today (print version tomorrow.) I have hesitated to quote more than 2 paragraphs but I think my contract that allows full quotation only after 30 days applies to my paid work, not my free work. So I’ll take the chance and quote the whole thing. As you note in your editorial “RFK Jr. Conducts His Vaccine Purge” (June 11), HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices over a charge of conflicts of interest. He’s provided no evidence of such entanglements, settling instead for the claim that the “public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies.” Yet we have evidence of this from a related case. Like ACIP, the Food and Drug Administration uses outside experts on advisory committees. The FDA has tried to exclude members with ties to industry, which has slowed the approval of drugs for rare conditions because the few experts all have such ties. Fortunately, the effects of committee conflicts of interest have been evaluated and shown to be nonexistent. In 2006 the physician Sidney Wolfe and several colleagues published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that drew on 76 meetings of FDA advisory committees that involved “yes” or “no” votes on individual drugs. They found that if voters with conflicts of interest had been excluded, none of the 76 outcomes would have changed. The participants with conflicts, moreover, were more likely than those without to vote for drugs that would compete with “their” company’s product. In other words: Until proven otherwise, we have no reason to think ACIP had such a problem before Mr. Kennedy’s purge. David R. Henderson Hoover Institution  Pacific Grove, Calif. Charles L. Hooper  Objective Insights, Inc. Grass Valley, Calif. Thanks to Charley for providing the backup link for the JAMA article. I got a request from the letters editor to provide the link and some screenshots backing up our claim. I was about to leave with my wife to celebrate Father’s Day. (0 COMMENTS)

A recent Bloomberg article suggested that the Fed should declare victory over inflation: Granted, it may feel premature, if not foolhardy, to declare “mission accomplished” on inflation. It’s not just the rise in tariffs and the fall in immigration; there are a lot of structural factors in the economy pointing to more inflation: more debt, an aging work force, slower productivity growth, and a world that trades less and is less reliant on the dollar. Still, declaring victory now will make it easier for the Fed to make policy in the future. First, the days of an inflation rate below 2% may be behind us. If so, the Fed will need to internalize this truth in its communications and policies — or risk becoming too contractionary for too long in the future. When it undertakes its next framework review, it may need to increase its target rate from 2%. It can credibly do so now that inflation has been licked. I’m not convinced that victory has been achieved, nor do I believe it would be a good time to raise the inflation target.  Here’s the 12-month rate of inflation using the core PCE indicator: Core inflation has recently fallen to 2.5%, but that’s still above the Fed’s 2% target.  Furthermore, the Fed has a flexible inflation target.  Under that sort of policy regime, inflation should run a bit below 2% during booms and a bit above 2% during recessions.  We are clearly in an economic boom. I do not see any good economic arguments for raising the inflation target above 2%.  More importantly, even if a higher inflation target were a good idea, the optimal time to raise the target would be during the next period of near-zero interest rates, not when short-term interest rates are above 4%.  The adoption of a higher inflation target can be a powerful tool for stimulating an economy stuck at the zero lower bound. In general, I am skeptical of calls for raising the inflation target.  Doing so would reduce the credibility of the Fed, as investors would begin to doubt its commitment to low inflation.  This might make it even more difficult to bring inflation back down after it overshoots the target rate for an extended period of time. (0 COMMENTS)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Does technology liberate us or enslave us? How do our social interactions affect our sense of self and our emotional health? Listen as author and master teacher Leon Kass and EconTalk’s Russ Roberts do a close reading of a few paragraphs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and explore some of the deepest aspects of our relationships […] The post Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau appeared first on Econlib.

  First, to all the fathers out there, Happy Fathers’ Day. Walmart and Amazon Are Exploring Issuing Their Own Stablecoins by Gina Heeb, AnnaMaria Andriotis, and Josh Dawsey, Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2025 (electronic edition) Excerpt: A move to launch crypto-based payments by Walmart or Amazon that bypasses the traditional payments system would send shivers through the nation’s banks and card-network giants. With vast networks of customers and employees, troves of data and far lighter regulations, retail and technology companies have long been viewed as particular threats to banks, including regional and community lenders. DRH note: Knowing my free-market proclivities, you might be able to guess what my favorite adjective is in the second paragraph above.   Tobacco excise has passed a ‘tipping point’ and is fuelling black market, economists warn by Patrick Commins, The Guardian, June 10, 2025. Excerpts: Economists say regular increases to the tobacco excise have stopped working to further lower smoking rates and are instead encouraging a soaring cigarette black market. Instead, they suggest either a freeze or a cut to the excise rate while Australia cracks down on illicit tobacco. However, a public health advocate warned policymakers not to be “conned” into a radical tax cut. And: Over the past decade, the excise rate per cigarette has tripled from 46c to $1.40. The excise now accounts for $28 of the average $40 price for a packet of 20 cigarettes. For some time a rising tax was associated with the twin benefits of falling smoking rates and rising revenue, but after peaking at $16.3bn in 2019-20, federal excise receipts have plunged. The March budget forecasts tobacco excise receipts will be just $7.4bn in this financial year – the lowest since 2012-13 – and will continue to fall to $6.7bn by the end of the decade. Rather than a sudden collapse in smoking rates, experts point to an explosion in the availability of black market tobacco in recent years. An equivalent of 605.8m cigarettes in illegal tobacco was seized at the border in 2019-20, according to government figures. By 2022-23, border seizures had reached the equivalent of 2.6bn cigarettes before easing to 2.2bn in 2023-24. DRH comment: I vaguely remember when the Canadian government imposed a stiff tax of about $5 per pack in the 1990s. That would translate to over $10 per pack in today’s dollars. Growing up in Canada, I was used to thinking of Canadians as particularly law-abiding. (I’m not sure it was true, but that’s how I thought of my fellow Canadians.) But then we started hearing about boats crossing the St. Lawrence laden with cigarettes from lower-price United States.   Trad Wives and Tallow Fries: How the Wellness Wars Flipped Health and Food Politics Upside Down by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, July 2025. Excerpts: “I don’t want to be told how many calories are in my Big Mac meal or my quarter pounder meal. I don’t want the government telling me that I can’t put salt on my food,” Sean Hannity declared on Fox News in 2010. “I like junk food. I like McDonald’s. I like Wendy’s. I like Burger King. I love Kentucky Fried Chicken.” This was a common sentiment for conservatives of the era, a time when many on the right viewed attempts to promote health as left-wing and therefore suspect. Some of this Republican pushback was rooted in righteous opposition to intrusions on the free market and consumer choice,as when Democrats attempted to impose sin taxes on sodas or limit the size of sugary drinks stores could sell. But too often, it seemed more like oppositional defiance disorder. And: “The age of Big Gulp conservatism is over,” says Breitbart writer John Carney. “Now we’re into the protein- and blueberry-maxxing age.” And Carney—who jokingly calls yogurt with pomegranate seeds and blueberries his “neofascist breakfast“—thinks this is great. “I’d rather be on the side that’s healthy,” he says. This isn’t just a story about MAGA going health nut; a lot of health nuts went MAGA too, partly as a rejection of the Democratic Party’s centralized public health dogmas, especially during the pandemic. The story of how we got here involves fertility fears and lentil wars, dietary science and social justice, losing our religion and gaining Obamacare. Perhaps most of all it involves COVID-19. DRH comment: When RFK, Jr. was chosen as the secretary of HHS, I told a friend who was surprisingly uncritical of Kennedy, “Be prepared for the nanny state on steroids.” (0 COMMENTS)

The conflict between the American and Chinese governments about the restriction of exports—rare earths in one direction and other goods in the other direction—has been branded a new “supply chain” trade war. The Wall Street Journal wrote (“Supply Chains Become New Battleground in the Global Trade War,” June 11, 2025): A key lesson from the latest skirmish in the U.S.-China trade war: The era of weaponized supply chains has arrived. Weaponization is what governments do when they intervene in the affairs of others. Not only do they weaponize trade against foreign rulers, but tariffs and other trade barriers are a weapon for a government to favor some domestic producers against domestic consumers, as well as against other domestic producers. The conflict over exports marks a return to the 17th and 18th centuries. National governments frequently restricted not only foreign imports but also foreign exports. Grain exports were banned when bad harvests caused prices to rise or government price controls caused shortages. In France, even grain movements between regions were controlled. As I explained in a previous post, the British government once forbade the exportation of some machinery to prevent foreign textile manufacturers from competing with domestic manufacturers. It also tried to prevent the emigration of specialized workers familiar with these machines. Embargoes were weapons of war. As economists have quipped, protectionism is what we do to ourselves that is done by foreign enemies in time of war. Of course, the “what we do to ourselves” must be read as “what some of us do to others among us.” Rare earths are chemical elements found in minerals and used in the fabrication of magnets and many high-tech products with both civilian and military use, as is true of many goods. Restricting or blocking their exportation from China would increase their prices in the rest of the world and thus reduce their use to their next most valuable ones. For example, the price of dysprosium more than doubled in the past two months. People not familiar with economics often ignore the role of prices in avoiding shortages. Note also that substitutes virtually always exist, but the less perfect a substitute is, the less efficient or more costly its use will be (see my post “War and the Economic Concept of Substitution”). Moreover, 30% of the rare earths are located outside China, including in the US. It is true that nine-tenths of their processing is concentrated in China and new plants take time to build, but at least one private company is already planning one in the US—an argument made by Don Boudreaux (see also “Rare-Earths Plants Are Popping Up Outside China,” Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2025). In the current situation, the US government, in the person of Donald Trump, launched a trade war. As the Chinese government retaliated, the US government further increased the tariffs on goods imported from China. In mid-May, a meeting of the two governments’ representatives in Geneva partially rolled back tariffs and paused the cycle of retaliation. But the Chinese government later limited the export of rare earths while the US government intensified its export controls on chips and on education (by limiting Chinese student visas in America). On June 5, Mr. Trump, who had waited in vain for a submissive call from Mr. Xi and lied about receiving one, finally blinked and phoned him. A two-day meeting between cabinet-level aides of the two camps followed last week in London. The two delegations agreed on an unpublished “framework” to revert to the Geneva agreement. In exchange for the Chinese government temporarily easing its restrictions on rare-earth and magnet exports to America, the Trump administration proposed to relax its own restrictions on the sale of jet engines and ethane as well as on Chinese student visas (“Trump Has No China Trade Strategy,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2025). But, as the editorial says, “details are few.” After once declaring pompously that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the ruler of a great national collective more or less begged the ruler of another large collective to please let us import what we need! Since collective rulers, in their grandeur, don’t like to beg, threats are never far behind their deals. “I will forbid my subjects to import from and export to yours,” can morph into “I will get from you what I want.” Looking at all that from the point of view of the ruled instead of the rulers, which is what we should do, the liberty of individuals and their private organizations to trade is a necessary condition for prosperity, peace, and security. ****************************** Yahoo! Back to the Seventeenth Century, by Pierre Lemieux and ChatGPT (0 COMMENTS)

  In my June 10 post on the penny, I wrote: The U.S. government makes a pretty penny (pun intended) on seigniorage. It’s not as much as it used to be because more and more people use credit cards and even cryptocurrency to buy goods and services. Still, it’s a good amount. The biggest gain from seigniorage is on the $100 bill. Printing one costs the federal government just 9.4 cents. So, when the feds spend this $100, they make a nice profit of $99.90. Not bad. Printing a $1 bill costs the feds 3.2 cents. So even on a $1 bill, the feds make 97 cents. In the comments, Rob Rawlings wrote: I’m a bit confused by the idea of the government earning seigniorage by printing new notes. Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong but don’t they earn seigniorage when they buy back their own bonds with newly created electronic money rather than when they print new paper notes? When they print these new notes (to match an increased demand to hold them rather than electronic money) then the costs of printing seems like it would be a real cost. I agreed that the cost of printing would be a real cost but that that cost was small relative to the face value of a $100 bill and even of a $1 bill. Rob responded: If the newly printed note is provided to a bank in exchange for an equivalent amount of base money, then where is the “net seigniorage”? It seems the seigniorage occurred previously when the government created new base money by buying back bonds. Somehow, in responding, I missed Rob’s second sentence above. I think that’s true. The bottom line is that there is seigniorage and that he identified where it happens. I think I erred in even going in the direction of talking about “net seigniorage,” as you’ll see when I quote Jeff Hummel below. I brought in my monetary theory and policy guru, Jeff Hummel, who sent me the following paragraph: I think we just have a definitional difference here. If you want to look at net seigniorage as you define it, that is fine and sometimes informative. But what I think is the standard way to think about seigniorage is as a tax (a tax on real cash balances), analogous to explicit taxes and government borrowing, the other two main ways governments generate revenue. Both of those have their associated costs of collection that you could at least in theory net out. But no matter how a government creates a new dollar and puts it into circulation, whether with a coin, bill, or electronically as with non-interest-bearing bank reserves, the burden imposed on the government’s subjects (through an eventual reduction of real cash balances) is still ultimately a dollar. I agree with Jeff. Well, almost. I’m going to be a little picky here and point out that the burden of a tax is never (except in the case of a lump-sum tax) the amount of revenue collected. It’s that amount plus the deadweight loss, in this case, from people economizing on their holdings of real cash balances. It occurs me now in retrospect that some readers might think I’m advocating that the federal government print more $100 bills. I’m not. Instead, I’m making a more modest point, and it’s this. Let’s say that the Federal Reserve has chosen an optimal monetary policy, defined however. Scott Sumner will have one definition, John Taylor another, and so on. But let’s hypothesize that in choosing this optimal monetary policy, the Fed assumed that there would be no additional demand in other countries for U.S. currency. In other words, it assumed that whatever U.S. currency was currently being held abroad, there would be no additional demand. But, it turns out, there is additional demand. Then the optimal monetary policy would not be the one the Fed chose. The optimal policy would be to print more $100 bills.   Note 1: Thanks to Rob Rawlings for raising good points and to Jeff Hummel for helping me think through it. Note 2: I gave directions to ChatGPT to draw a picture of a $100 bill with, due to whimsy on my part, the size of Ben Franklin’s head exaggerated. At whatever size, I think Franklin’s expression makes him look a little like Jack Benny. (0 COMMENTS)

As I write this piece, I’m about to board an airplane. I’m in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but in just over 13 hours I’ll be in Zurich, Switzerland. In the 19th century, not even the wealthiest imaginable person would have been able to travel this quickly. Indeed, the entire wealth of the world could not have bought a 13-hour trip of just over 7,000 miles, say, in 1910, because it simply didn’t exist. But now it does and I can book it, which means that at least in this regard I’m richer today than anyone was back in the day. I’m not a multi-millionaire, or even a millionaire, and I don’t even think of myself as being rich at all. I just happen to live in 2025. It’s very likely that the flight crew will be Swiss, since the airline I’m flying is based in Switzerland. Not long ago, most people in the world were unlikely to ever meet people foreign to their own countries. Today still, most people are expected to not move too much during their lifetimes and die pretty close to where they were born. But just as more and more people go to distant places, other people come to ours as well. And our first-hand knowledge of other cultures increases exponentially when they do. Before boarding the plane, I’ll take a pill that frees up my nostrils, so my ears don’t get plugged for a whole day after I take off. (It’s strange, I know. I have to get surgery in my nose to avoid that in the future.) I’ve used these pills before and I know they work exactly as designed. All it took to get them was a visit to the doctor, a prescription, and about twenty dollars. And after I board the plane, I’ll put on headphones that will cancel all surrounding noise as we lift off so I can relax and maybe take a nap. Can you imagine explaining this kind of comfort to the millions of people who, just one century ago, were boarding ships from Europe to America for months-long journeys during which it was very likely that some people would die??? When I’m in the plane, I’ll continue to write this piece on a laptop, the mere concept of which was nonexistent barely fifty years ago. Yet today, millions of people around the world own personal devices like these computers with which they can work, access all kinds of information from multiple sources worldwide, play games, stream movies, et etcetera. As long as you have internet access, you can access more information than in the Library of Alexandria or any other library in the world. Literally. If I get bored on the flight as a write this piece, I’ll probably turn my attention to one of the two books I brought along for the journey. But a person like Aristotle, for example, could not dream of such an object. The fact that there exist printers on a mass scale and a transportation system that allows for books filled with standardized typographies to be distributed across the world is amazing. Once I leave the plane, I’ll immediately text my girlfriend that I’ve arrived safely, something that was inconceivable a few decades ago. We no longer need to write potentially outdated letters that may take months to arrive or make prohibitively expensive calls to talk to our loved ones. The same cellphone I use in Argentina allows me to be in touch with anyone even if I’m in a different continent. Freedom makes all of these things possible. Planes, pills, headphones, laptops, books, cellphones: Whenever we make it possible for human ingenuity to flourish, we come up with new inventions that raise our standard of living over and over. In particular, the ability to trade with others and make profits assures us that people have an incentive to improve not just their lives, but also those of others. This applies to services too, which is why airlines and all other businesses exist. Individuals that you’ll never meet are working hard to make money and at the same time will bring you new inventions that everyone will profit from in different ways. The benefits of free market capitalism and the international division of labor, which we usually take for granted, are incredible, and their extent is probably impossible to fully realize. We often forget what life used to be like, but as we’ve become freer it has only gotten better and continues do so everyday. When you board a plane next year, think about how marvelous this world is for giving regular people like us the chance to enjoy it.   Marcos Falcone is the Project Manager of Fundación Libertad and a regular contributor to Forbes Argentina. His writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, National Review, and Reason, among others. He is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (0 COMMENTS)

Tom Wolfe once designated the 1970s as “The Me Decade”.  It seems to me that this label better applies to the 2020s.  Consider this action by the New York state Senate: ALBANY — Under cloak of darkness, the state Senate moved to help more than 130,000 reckless drivers avoid accountability in a middle-of-the-night watering down of the Stop Super Speeders bill, which only targeted the worst-of-the-worst drivers in the first place. . . . Instead of requiring drivers with six or more speed-camera or red-light camera tickets in any 12-month period to install a speed-limiting device in their cars, the bill now only carries that requirement for drivers with 16 or more tickets — and only speed-camera tickets rather than a combination. . . . It’s common Albany knowledge that if legislators can imagine themselves being hurt by a bill, they vote against it. You might think that this is no big deal, as “almost everyone goes over the speed limit”.   I routinely go 10 miles over the limit on interstate highways, but I’ve only received one speeding ticket in my entire life–despite driving an enormous number of miles.  (And that was for going 66 on a rural New York interstate highway back when the national speed limit was 55.) People racking up 10 or 15 speeding tickets in a 12-month period are not normal speeders; they are reckless drivers.  Unfortunately, many of these drivers do not recognize the consequences of their recklessness: And there’s the sheer fact that lawmakers see themselves as drivers first and foremost — and are therefore reluctant to do anything perceived as punishing drivers. Assembly Member Michaell Novakhov (R-Midwood) famously said that six speeding and red-light tickets in a single year was too low a threshold, for example. “I think this is too little,” Novakhov told Streetsblog. “Any driver can get much more than six. It’s the regular constituents, just people like me and you are getting those tickets.” It’s worth noting that he made those comments at the funeral of Natasha Saada and daughters Diana and Deborah, who were killed in March by a recidivist speeder who had just racked up her 16th speed-camera ticket of the year days before the crash. The fact that you might be charged with breaking a law is not a good reason for failing to enact the law. Crypto regulation is another example of where lawmakers put self-interest ahead of the public interest.  Here’s The Economist: When Mr Trump nominated Jay Clayton to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec) in 2017, crypto received no mention at all during his confirmation hearing in the Senate. As recently as 2021, the president disdained digital assets. “Bitcoin just seems like a scam” he said of the biggest cryptocurrency. “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.” Then President Trump discovered that crypto assets would allow business interests to give him hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars without triggering laws against bribery.  Here’s The Atlantic: When it was all over, Trump apparently decided he had been thinking too small. In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions: a $2 billion investment by a United Arab Emirates state-owned enterprise in the Binance crypto exchange using the Trump family’s stablecoin asset. An unknown number of billions placed by Qatar in a Trump-family real-estate development in that emirate, topped by the gift of a 747 luxury jet for the president’s personal use in office and afterward. Government-approved support for a Trump golf course in Vietnam while its leaders were negotiating with the United States for relief from Trump tariffs. Last week, Trump hosted more than 200 purchasers of his meme coin, many of them apparently foreign nationals, for a private dinner, with no disclosure of the names of those who had paid into his pocket for access to the president’s time and favor. The record of Trump real-estate and business projects is one of almost unbroken failure; from 1991 to 2009, his companies filed for bankruptcy six times. Few if any legitimate investors entrusted their money to Trump’s businesses when he was out of office. But since his return to the White House, Trump has been inundated with cash from Middle Eastern governments. Obscure Chinese firms are suddenly buying millions of dollars’ worth of Trump meme coins. So are American companies hard-hit by the Trump tariffs and desperately seeking access and influence. After Trump invited major holders of his crypto funds to dinner, Wired quoted a crypto analyst about the coin’s value proposition: “Before, you were speculating on a TRUMP coin with no utility. Now you’re speculating on future access to Trump. That has to be worth a bit more money.” During Trump’s first term, he argued that TikTok should be shut down.  Then he discovered that TikTok was a valuable way of reaching his supporters.  In his second term, the Trump administration has repeatedly failed to enforce a law that required TikTok to be sold or shut down. To be clear, I am not taking any position on these two issues.  It may well be true that both cryptocurrencies and TikTok are worth preserving.  Rather, I’m suggesting that decisions on these issues are not being made on the basis of what’s in the public interest; rather they reflect the special interest of policymakers.  That’s always been true to some extent, but I’ve never seen it to be as blatant as during the 2020s. 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