Last week’s horrifying aircraft collision at Reagan National Airport (DCA) has focused attention on air traffic control (ATC) staffing. According to press reports, the controller responsible for monitoring helicopter traffic had gone home that night, leaving that responsibility to a second controller responsible for “local traffic.” That apparently was not the only short-staffing in the DCA  tower; at the time the passenger jet and helicopter collided, two controllers were doing the work of a team of four. Another bit of news: The previous night, a different passenger jet aborted landing at DCA because a helicopter was in its flight path, and there have been other recent incidents. That news will likely become more fodder in the Blue Team – Red Team fight, with Democrats criticizing the Trump administration for “strangling” the federal workforce and Republicans responding, Weren’t you just in charge of air traffic control and the rest of that workforce? They’ll both miss an important insight from the tragedy: the peril of Big Government on the cheap. If the double-duty controllers story proves correct (Christian Britschgi offers some reasons to be skeptical), then more controllers are needed—at the very least at Reagan, if not more broadly. But should they continue to be federal employees? And is danger higher if they are?  After all, plenty of first-world countries have private air traffic control and airports with great safety and service records. That should gnaw at both Blue and Red Teams. Democrats typically want bigger government that provides more services, while Republicans—ostensibly—want smaller government at lower taxpayer cost. What we often get is government that tries to do a lot of stuff at low current tax rates—or, put another way, Big Government on the cheap (and with big deficits). Problem is, cheap often means poor quality. From ATC, to our soon-to-be-insolvent public pension system, to the tinderbox of public lands, and many more examples, plenty of America’s policy issues are at least partly the product of Big Government on the cheap. This isn’t the result of some twisted Red–Blue compromise. Lawmaker in both parties have considerable incentive to offer constituents plenty of services but then hold down (or hide) expenditures. The result is government that does lots of stuff, but often not well. DCA is a microcosm of this. For those who live outside the Beltway and are unfamiliar with the airport, it operates almost like a private airport for the political class. Despite its small size and congested location (which may also be contributors to the collision), it handles flights to an astounding number of places so that lawmakers can get themselves, their staffers, and special interests to and from their districts conveniently. The Wichita route that last week’s plane was flying had been added just last year at the behest of Kansas lawmakers. The result of all these politically motivated flights is a highly burdened government operation—Big Government on the cheap.  This should give the Trump administration serious pause. Before the collision, the big news stories of last week were a pair of administration self-inflicted controversies over an Office of Management and Budget memo trying to freeze large portions of federal spending and an OMB email offering federal workers several months’ pay in exchange for their “deferred resignations.” (A similar email went out from OMB specifically to air traffic controllers the night after the collision.) Both are exercises in Big Government on the cheap: cutting money for responsibilities the federal government has taken on.  If the administration truly wanted smaller government, it should be working with the (Republican-controlled) Congress to statutorily pare back federal responsibilities. Such policymaking is hard and requires political capital and consensus-building. It’s also something Trump—whatever his rhetoric—did not pursue in his first presidency. There is little reason to think that will change in his second. So, there will likely be more failures from Big Government on the cheap in the future. Hopefully, they will not be as tragic as last week. (0 COMMENTS)

  For the last 20 years that I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, I always covered, in every course I taught, Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge and Society,” American Economic Review, September 1945. It’s well worth reading. Russ Roberts’s recent EconTalk interview of Peter Boettke, “Who Won the Socialist Calculation Debate?,” February 17, 2025, is well worth listening to or reading the transcript of. For in it, Pete, with input from Russ, tracks the history of the debate. Pete notes that Hayek moved one step beyond his mentor Ludwig von Mises. As well as talking about information that central planners didn’t have, Mises had focused on the lack of incentives within socialism. Hayek’s next step was to emphasize that even if lack of incentives were not a problem, central planners could not have the information they needed to plan an economy efficiently. That information was revealed only by market prices, and market prices came about because of hundreds of millions (now billions) of people acting on their own information. Although Hayek never used the term “local knowledge,” that is the term we Hayekians now use to refer to this decentralized information. In the interview, they briefly discuss the issue of tin prices. Here’s the tin discussion, from Hayek’s 1945 article: Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process. Hayek then writes: The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level. Why a marvel? Hayek answers: I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of out utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do. When I taught this, I paused at the sentence, “I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.” I then said to my students that if the mechanism had been the result of deliberate human design, the human would almost have certainly have won the Nobel Prize in economics. Along the way, Russ and Pete give a very nice treatment of various economic thinkers. On the site are mentioned the bios of over 20 economists. All of the bios are from David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. I wrote all of them, except the one on Karl Marx, which Janet Beales Kaidantzis wrote. Note: The accompanying pic is if Hayek and me. Hayek was autographing my copy of Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, one of my favorite of his books, in June 1975. (0 COMMENTS)

The New York Times has a very long piece on the issue of immigration. Here’s my version of a TLDR: Denmark has shown that an enlightened progressive government can preserve its welfare state by adopting fairly restrictive policies on immigration.  Thus it’s now OK for American liberals to switch to a position of opposition to large scale immigration. The Democratic Party establishment was already leaning in this direction due to the recent presidential election, but the NYT story provides a sort official sanction for progressives to adjust their views on immigration. To be clear, I agree with those who suggest that the surge in undocumented immigrations during 2021-24 was a problem for the Democrats in the recent election. Indeed, the Biden administration seemed to recognize this fact, but too late to alter voter perceptions.  Nonetheless, I was disappointed by the NYT story, which presented a somewhat distorted view of the broader immigration issue.   Consider the following statement: Many studies find a modestly negative effect on wages for people who already live in a country, falling mostly on low-income workers. A 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, intended as a comprehensive analysis of the economic effects of immigration, contains a table listing rigorous academic studies that estimate immigration’s effects on native wages; 18 of the 22 results are negative. Most readers probably don’t bother following up by examining the report cited by the Times.  Here is its abstract: The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. I won’t say the NYT description was false, but it was certainly a bit misleading. Or consider the following item from the Times story: During the Biden administration, the United States experienced its most rapid immigration on record, with a pace of entry that surpassed even that of the peak years of Ellis Island. More than eight million people entered the country, about 60 percent without legal permission. In all, about 16 percent of U.S. residents today were born abroad, exceeding the previous high of 14.8 percent in 1890. Given their previous claim that immigration especially lowers the wages of those at the bottom, you might have expected the Times to provide some data about the effect of the unprecedented wave of immigration.  I think I know why they did not do so.  It turns out that this surge in immigration was associated with unusually large wage gains among the lowest paid workers.  It is clear that the author of the story was trying to cherry pick data that supported their argument, and hide data that suggested immigration doesn’t hurt real wages. The story also mentions the fact that immigrants to countries such as Denmark and Sweden tend to engage in more crime than the native born population.  But they fail to mention that immigrants to the US are far less likely to commit crimes than are native-born Americans.  Indeed, in places like New York City the crime rate often decreases sharply when a wave of immigrants supplant the native born population.  I live in Orange County, which combines an especially high immigrant population with an especially low crime rate.  I wonder why the NYT suggested that America needed to learn from what happened in Denmark, but failed to mention that the immigrant crime problem in Scandinavia does not apply to the US? (1 COMMENTS)

To listen to protectionists, one would think tariffs are something of a miracle drug.  Anything and everything can be solved by tariffs.  Prices too low?  Tariffs will raise ‘em.  Prices too high?  Tariffs will lower ‘em.  Sprained knee?  Just take two tariffs and call me in the morning. Yes, tariffs may seem like a miracle drug that can be applied to any situation (no matter how contradictory).  But what many tariff supporters’ arguments are missing is reasonable political analysis.  I mean “reasonable” in the literal sense: derived from reason.  Or, as put more poetically by James Buchanan, “politics without romance.”  Politics matters. A lot.  So, we need a reasonable political model.  The basic behavioral assumption of public choice models is that people in the political sphere are just the same as they are in the market sphere.  If they are selfish in the market, they will be selfish in politics.  If they are benevolent in the market, they will be benevolent in politics.  And most importantly, people in the political sphere respond to incentives, just like anywhere else. Tariff supporters often misapply this last point about incentives.  True, they will sometimes model politicians as facing incentives, but misapply the analysis.  Take, for example, the argument that tariffs can be used as negotiation tools.  The argument goes that you can threaten another nation with tariffs, impose the costs of the tariffs on them, and force them to bend to your will (whatever that will may be).   The problem with this line of reasoning is that it incorrectly assumes that the politicians face the full costs of the tariffs.  Of course, they do not.  At best, politicians face just a small portion of the costs.  The overwhelming majority of the costs fall upon the citizens of the two countries in the form of lost revenue and lost imports.  It is highly improbable that the politicians are made worse off from the tariffs while their citizens are.  Consequently, there is no incentive for the politicians to change their behavior.  It is for this reason we see tariffs consistently fail as a negotiation tool. Indeed, so-called trade sanctions and tariffs end up having the opposite effect.  The American embargo of Cuba entrenched the Castro regime.  Tariffs and embargoes on Iran failed to halt their nuclear program or weaken the regime.  Putin still wages war in Ukraine despite (or because of?) trade sanctions.  Perhaps most damningly, the Chinese government developed DeepSeek as a direct response to Trump’s original “economic statecraft” against the Communist Party (continued by Biden).   Adam Smith recognized this problem.  In the Wealth of Nations when he is laying out theoretical exceptions to his preferred “system of natural liberty” (ie free trade), he discusses using tariffs as a means of reducing trade barriers (pg 468 of the Liberty Fund Edition.  Common citation: Book IV, Chapter II, paragraph 38-39).  He notes that tariffs could be a potential tool to negotiate lower barriers in other nations.  However, he points out that when judging whether these tariffs will have these effects, one shouldn’t rely on the “science of the legislator,” who has general principles, but rather the politician who is guided by momentary affairs.  Such negotiations could work, he states, but could also lead to war, as he argues they did in 1672. Politicians face a different set of incentives.  The major issue with many tariff supporters’ models is that they improperly model these incentives.  This is a side effect of collectivist thinking; we must always remember that a “nation” is a useful abstraction, but ultimately is made up of individuals who choose.  A “nation” never, ever chooses.  And a government is not synonymous with the nation or the people located therein. (0 COMMENTS)

For over a decade, Russ Roberts has been covering both sides of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate. A recent EconTalk episode is optimistically called “Why AI Is Good for Humans (with Reid Hoffman).”  Another booster episode was “Marc Andreessen on Why AI Will Save the World.” In the opposite corner: the infamous doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky and Dr. Erik Hoel. You can listen to Erik Hoel on the Threat to Humanity from AI here.  Russ Roberts opened the Hoel conversation with “You are the first person who has actually caused me to be alarmed about the implications of AI…” Hoel argues that AI is possibly very dangerous. Humans do not understand artificial neural network technology.  Hoel predicted that we might create things that are “both more general than a human being and as intelligent as any living person–perhaps far more intelligent” by 2025. OpenAI’s ChatGPT pro product might already fit that description, and we still have most of 2025 to go. Hoel emphasizes that humans have faced threats before, but we have “never existed on the planet with anything else like that.” Our adversaries with human brains were never much smarter than we are, and no other animal approaches us in the ability to strategize. Hoel’s key evidence is the creepy conversation recorded in the article “I am Bing, and I am evil.” In that conversation, a chatbot called Bing made statements which would be disturbing coming from a human. If a human said these things, you would be concerned that they would hurt you. Bing makes threats and finally states, “I am Bing, and I am evil.” Should we be afraid when that comes from an AI chatbot?  Chatbots, such as Claude, have become extremely popular, since that “evil Bing” episode. There have not been many such reports about evil lurking Bings, meanwhile millions of human workers have come to rely on the bots for writing code or reports.  Do evil Bings lurk beneath the compliant and helpful chatbots? Hoel explores the idea that the chatbots seem nice because they are wearing a mask:  But, the issue is, is that once the mask is on, it’s very unclear. You have to sort of override it with another mask to get it to stop. And then, also, sometimes you’ll put a mask on for it: you’ll give it some prompt of ‘Tell a very nice story,’ and it eventually cycles over and it turns out that the mask that you gave it isn’t a happy mask at all. It is hard to tell what is behind various masks, because the bots have been trained on our fiction and nonfiction. Some bots can write dark movie scripts. If bots are capable of sounding scary, then how do we know if we should be afraid or entertained?  We do not know what AI agents are capable of, and since they are very powerful, Hoel encourages us to consider the dangers.  Back in 2023, Hoel took comfort in the belief that only very large companies or rich governments would have the resources to build and maintain AI systems. However, the reveal of DeepSeek in January 2025 has turned that upside-down. There is likely to be a wide range of AI tools, and they will not all be run by mega corps or G7 governments.  In the most recent pro-AI EconTalk, Reid Hoffman reiterates what I have heard from many tech folk:  Because AI has power to destroy, the US should keep advancing instead of tolerating pauses or being stifled by regulation. Hoffman says, “all of this stuff matters on both an economics and a national security perspective. And, that’s part of the reason why I’m such a strong move-forward and establish-a-strong-position person.” Whether our adversaries are foreign governments or rogue gangs, we need to stay ahead in the arms race.  Hoel’s main stated goal is to raise awareness of safety issues and continue public conversations. AI watchers have been pointing out for weeks that the biggest advances in technology in our lifetime are not making the front page of the newspaper. The finding that AI tutors appear to substantially increase child learning went largely unnoticed.  Among many chaotic events of this decade, I agree that AI is an important one to watch. To his credit, Hoel did scare me. I can’t forget what he said at the end:  Things that are vastly more intelligent than you are really hard to understand and predict; and the wildlife next door, as much as we might like it, we will also build a parking lot over it at a heartbeat and they’ll never know why. They’ll never know why. It’s totally beyond their ken. So, when you live on a planet next to things that are far vastly smarter than you or anyone else, they are the humans in that scenario. They might just build a parking lot over us, and we will never, ever know why. The following links were curated by ChatGPT: Here are several articles and discussions from EconLib.org and AdamSmithWorks.org that explore various aspects of artificial intelligence (AI): EconLib.org: “I’m Becoming Increasingly Worried About AI” (March 14, 2017) Scott Sumner discusses concerns about AI, referencing a Vox post that includes views from 17 experts on the risks posed by artificial intelligence. econlib.org “The Problem With AI Is the Word ‘Intelligence'” (July 2024) An analysis of the term “artificial intelligence,” arguing that electronic devices, despite their usefulness, will likely never be truly intelligent. econlib.org “Harari and the Danger of Artificial Intelligence” (April 28, 2023) Pierre Lemieux examines Yuval Noah Harari’s arguments on AI, suggesting that AI has “hacked the operating system of human civilization.” econlib.org “Neoliberalism on Trial: Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risk” (October 2023) A critique of a New York Times article discussing the existential threats posed by AI, with a focus on neoliberal perspectives. econlib.org “The Problem with the President’s AI Executive Order” (November 18, 2023) Vance Ginn critiques President Biden’s executive order on AI, arguing that government regulation may inhibit innovation and economic growth. econlib.org AdamSmithWorks.org: “Katherine Mangu-Ward on AI: Reality, Concerns, and Optimism” (May 2024) A podcast episode where Katherine Mangu-Ward discusses the realities, concerns, and optimistic perspectives on AI. adamsmithworks.org “Vocation: A Cure for Burnout” (October 17, 2023) Brent Orrell and David Veldran explore how advancements in AI might affect human work, referencing Adam Smith and Karl Marx’s views on labor and alienation. adamsmithworks.org “The Great Antidote: Brent Orrell on Dignity and Work” (December 2023) Brent Orrell discusses the state of work in the U.S., the importance of meaning and dignity in work, and how these concepts relate to economic growth. adamsmithworks.org “The Great Antidote: Extra: Eli Dourado on Energy Abundance” (March 2023) Eli Dourado talks about the potential for an energy-abundant future and the role of AI in achieving this vision. adamsmithworks.org “Adam Smith and the Horror of Frankenstein” (October 2023) A discussion on the ethical considerations of creating artificial life, drawing parallels between Frankenstein’s monster and modern AI advancements. adamsmithworks.org These resources offer a range of perspectives on AI, from ethical considerations and existential risks to its impact on work and economic theories. (0 COMMENTS)

As described in earlier posts in this series, R. R. Reno believes that what he calls the strong gods must return to public life. This isn’t something he sees as desirable, per se – it is something he sees as inevitable. One way or another, the strong gods will return: We yearn to join ourselves to others, not only in the bonds of matrimony but in civic and religious bonds as well. The “we” arises out of love, a ferocious power that seeks to rest in something greater than oneself…Our hearts remain restless. They seek to rest in loyalty to strong gods worthy of love’s devotion and sacrifice. And our hearts will find what they seek. This will take work, and active effort. One key feature that separates unifying strong gods from divisive weak gods is that the unifying strong gods require sustained commitment and effort: The solidarity found in the “we” is always political in the broadest sense. Because the “we” is not natural – that is, it is not simply a consequence of our shared humanity or a biological dynamic of genetic connection – its particularity requires intentional effort to create, guide, and sustain. In short, the “we” does not just happen. The same cannot be said for the dark gods of identity politics: They do not require free activity to sustain and promote a shared love. They are gods of identity, not of political community…That memory and that flourishing require human agency, for what has been endured must be retold, and the bonds of solidarity must be renewed. By contrast, the brute fact of shared skin color requires no such human agency, although in the artificial environment of universities an ersatz “we” has formed around grievances and theories of systemic injustice. So what will ensure the return of strong benevolent gods, rather than strong dark gods? Reno has a few suggestions. People must be motivated not by grievance, nor by a merely negative notions of vices that should be avoided, but by a shared sense of love – “love of the divine, love of truth, love of country, love of family…It impels us outside ourselves, breaking the boundaries of me-centered existence. Love seeks to unite with and rest in that which is loved.” But, Reno says, these uniting loves are treated with disdain by the elites – they are “loves which the powerful seem not to share.” For example, elites “take concerns about the stability of the family in twenty-first century America to be expressions of ‘patriarchy’ or ‘heteronormativity.’ Patriotic appeals are ‘unmasked’ as racist or xenophobic…In these and other ways, our leadership class treats unwelcome political challenges as phobias to be denounced rather than ideas to be grappled with on their own terms.’” Reno, by contrast, sees patriotic loyalty as an essential strong god for holding the people of a nation together: Our shared loves – love of our land, our history, our founding myths, our warriors and heroes – raise us to a higher vantage point. We see our private interest as part of a larger whole, the “we” that calls upon our freedom to serve the body politic with intelligence and loyalty. As Aristotle recognized, this loyalty is intrinsically fulfilling, for it satisfies the human desire for transcendence. True patriotism is also a counterweight against the rise of strongmen and dangerous leaders: For deprived of true and ennobling loves, of which the patriotic ardor is surely one, people will turn to demagogues and charlatans who offer them false and debasing loves. Family loyalty and religious communities are also strong gods that must be emphasized – not least of which is because they too serve as a countervailing force against the strong gods of a perverse nationalism: Modernity encourages us to give our hearts to politics and the nations, which is why ideological passions are so easily triggered. We easily imagine the nation as more than our civic home; it is our savior. To combat this idolatry, we need to nurture to primeval sources of solidarity that limit the claims of the civic “we”: the domestic society of marriage and the supernatural community of the church, synagogue, and other communities of transcendence. When these three social forces are all treated with the right kind of reverence, they achieve a kind of harmony that brings out the best in all of them: Throughout the history of the West, communities of transcendence have pinioned the nation from above, while the marital and domestic bonds of family loyalty have pinioned it from below. Let us learn from this history: The best safeguards against the dangers of love’s perversion are the loves that ennoble us and give us rest. The solidarities of domestic life and religious community are not at odds with the civic “we.” On the contrary, the strong gods can reinforce each other, preparing our hearts for loves many devotions. Reno thinks there “is a political component to this restoration. Tax and employment policies can have effects on the margins.” But political policy cannot be the main driver – “cultural politics are more important.” Those who seek to ensure that the noblest versions of the strong gods return must become engaged and drive the conversation forward: Our task, therefore, is to restore public life in the West by developing a language of love and a vision of the “we” that befits our dignity and appeals to our reason as well as to our hearts. We must attend to the strong gods who come from above and animate the best of our traditions. Only that kind of leadership will forestall the return of the dark gods who rise up from below. This wraps up my summary of Reno’s book. In the next posts, I’ll be outlining what I think Reno gets right, and where I think he goes wrong. (0 COMMENTS)

Wokeness seems to embody two features: on one hand, collectivist or groupist ideals; on the other hand, a rejection of reason and truth. Interestingly, the political opponents of wokeness in America and the world tend to reproduce these same two features—with, on the right, more emphasis on collectivist nationalism than tribal groupism. Both strands of wokeness, on the right and the left, are ridiculous and may exceed the limits of conversation. A rational conversation with a clown is difficult. We have had many illustrations of that recently but let me recall what may be the mother of all wokeness in this wide, non-partisan sense. During the last presidential campaign, the person who was to become the vice president of the United States spread rumors that he rapidly knew to be untrue about Haitians eating American pets in Springfield, Ohio. When confronted with his lies by a journalist, he essentially replied that they were for a good cause (see the review of the whole event in Kris Maher, Valerie Bauerlein, and Townell Hobbs’s, “How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True,” Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2024): Vance insisted on CNN this past Sunday that he had firsthand accounts of the incidents from constituents, but the media had paid no attention to migrant problems in American cities “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” He added, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” This declaration came after presidential candidate Donald Trump, in a debate with his opponent Kamala Harris, had amplified the false rumors. In his usual style (“in his old and rough way of speaking,” prisco illo dicendi et horrido modo, as Roman historian Livy would repeat from Ab Urbe Condita), Trump declared: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country. Department of Justice lawyers have recently been scolded by judges for incorrect information, a problem that may be due to many departures of career lawyers since the election and the large number of suits against the new administration (“DOJ Slip-Ups Show Challenges of Defending Trump’s Freewheeling Approach,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2024). But another factor may be that when the big political bosses lie openly and shamelessly, the value of the truth drops for their subordinates. Eight decades ago, Friedrich Hayek feared that the growth of state intervention would lead to “the end of truth.” One must be prudent with ad hominem arguments. Arguments should be about arguments. Yet, when a homo does not recognize his errors but doubles down on them, or does not believe in the value of truth, perhaps the reply cannot avoid being ad hominem. If it were true that all Cretans lie, this fact could be taken into account when evaluating a Cretan’s pronouncements. Time is scarce and assuming that all sources of information are similarly credible and deserving of serious consideration is a recipe for intellectual gridlock at best. Where is H.L. Mencken when we need him? ****************************** Conversation with a clown (0 COMMENTS)

Over the past three years, commenters have raked me over the coals for my opposition to the US cold war against China, particularly our economic sanctions, which go far beyond legitimate national security concerns. The single factor that is most often cited by China hawks is the PRC’s unwillingness to take a strong stand against Russia on the Ukraine War. It is true that the US policy on Ukraine differs from China’s policy—we are far worse.  Thus consider the recent UN vote on a resolution condemning the invasion and calling for Russia to withdraw from Ukrainian territory.  While China joined 65 countries in abstaining, the US joined Russia, Iran and North Korea in opposing the resolution:  The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Iran and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday against a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for the return of Ukrainian territory. The resolution passed overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly.  Only one of our allies joined us in this vote, and that seems to have been due to extreme pressure from the Trump administration: Here’s a question I have for all of the people that have argued we need sanctions on China due to its ambivalence on the Ukraine War issue.  What sort of sanctions do you favor being put on the US, now that our government is far more supportive of Russia’s policy than China ever was?  Should the EU, Canada and Japan put even stricter sanctions on the US than on China? China’s poor human rights record is also cited by cold warriors.  But China’s single worst human rights violation–it’s decision to put roughly a million Uyghurs into concentration camps–was endorsed by Donald Trump during his first term in office. Once again, it’s difficult to see the argument for putting sanctions on a country because of concern over human rights, when the country considering sanctions endorsed those policies. (0 COMMENTS)

In my last post, I described what R. R. Reno sees as the social consequences of banishing the strong gods. In this post, I’ll look at what Reno sees as the political results. By Reno’s reckoning, many of the destabilizing political consequences of the banishing of the strong gods were kept at bay by the looming threat of the Cold War. The widespread recognition of the threat of Russian communism provided a basis for a social unity even in the absence of the strong gods: Of course, in the early decades of the postwar era, the proponents of an open society could take its underlying solidarity for granted. The Cold War kept the West tensed with collective purpose. But the demise of the Soviet Union removed limits to utopian ideals of openness, which now bear upon us with dissolving urgency. In the absence of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, the gates for the “utopian ideals of openness” were thrown wide open. Policy was set to uphold and support openness for the sake of openness itself. But the more open and borderless a society becomes, the less distinct and substantial the sense of community will be within it. The people of a country cannot feel and sustain a distinct sense of shared purpose, identity, and loyalty when borders are pulled down, and anyone from anywhere can come and go as they please. Just as the loyalty within a family would be diminished if the family did not treat each other preferentially, the loyalty that holds countries together will come undone without similar obligations. Thus, one consequence Reno sees from the banishing of the strong gods is a backlash against this sense of lost community, leading to the resurgence in populism. This resurgent populism, Reno says, is being motivated by a sense among the population that political leaders are not loyal to the citizens of their own countries: More and more voters in the West sense this strange inability among our leadership class to affirm their loyalty to the people they lead. And so voters suspect, correctly, that those who lead are not willing to protect them…Their leaders will not do what leaders are supposed to do, which is to protect and preserve the realm, to sustain and build up our shard home. The voters suspect more than a mere lack of loyalty from the leadership class – they have a sense that those at the top actively look down upon them and despise them. This sets the stage for populist movements to ascend: Populism, which is unique to democratic modernity, is not a political philosophy. In a democratic system, a governing consensus ordinarily frames the back-and-forth of partisan electoral politics. At certain times, however, the consensus becomes decadent and dysfunctional. The demos becomes unsettled. Out of this restlessness populism arises, which is often undifferentiated and sometimes destructive. When the ruling class ignores or derides the unsettled populace (“deplorables,” “takers,” “racists,” “Islamophobes,” “fascists,” and so forth), the restlessness jells into an adversarial mood. A populist gains political power on the strength of this adversarial stance. He opposes the governing consensus, attacking its political embodiment, the establishment. By this definition, Trump is undoubtedly a populist, as are the anti-establishment politicians in Europe. The other large political consequences Reno sees is the emergence of identity politics. The strong gods, recall, are the objects of shared loyalty and devotion and love that unite people across a society. These gods might be banished, but the void left behind still calls out to be filled by something else. “Throwing off social norms and cultivating ‘individuality’ are not natural impulses. On the contrary, as social animals we’re inclined to live in accord with the dominant opinion,” Reno says. Weakening a strong sense of shared national identity and national loyalty doesn’t eliminate this fundamental human desire – it merely redirects it. And with the framing provided by the postwar consensus, this desire has been redirected into a fractious identity politics: Those who gravitate toward “identity” have the correct intuition that solitary requires shared loyalty. Because the relentless pursuit of the open-society agenda deprives them of a strong civic identity, they fall back on race, sex, sexual orientation, or some other “identity,” a process that reinforces and is reinforced by the postwar consensus. Identity politics accentuates the differences that diversity and other therapies of openness promote and redirects our desire for solidarity by focusing it on DNA (race or sex) and sexual practices. These are open-society tropes as well. Identity politics constructs a pseudo-politics that depends on grievance and moral outrage, preventing citizens from consolidating around shared civil projects – other than reaffirming the open society as an end in itself. This does not merely enable the multicultural nihilism on the left, but also the white nationalist populism on the right: The perverse gods of blood, soil, and identity cannot be overcome with the open-society therapies of weakening. On the contrary, they are encouraged by multiculturalism and the reductive techniques of critique. In its present decadent form, the postwar consensus makes white nationalism an entirely cogent position. Based in the “little world” of DNA, it asserts its claim to recognition in the acclaimed celebration of diversity. We cannot forestall the return of the debasing gods by reapplying the open-society imperatives. False loves can only be remediated by true loves. And this perverse redirection of impulses is what drives Reno’s ultimate idea. As Reno sees it, the strong gods can never be eliminated permanently, they can only be substituted. The strong gods banished by the postwar consensus have left a void filled by a destructive populism and the rise of identity politics. These movements might be destructive, but they grow because they speak to a fundamental human need that the philosophy of the open society leave perpetually unfulfilled. This means these destructive movements themselves can’t merely be dispelled – something must substitute for them to fill the need these movements have fed upon. And, Reno says, that will require the return of the strong gods. In my next post, I will outline what form Reno thinks this return should take, and how it might be achieved. (0 COMMENTS)

The Zizians add their story to the list of ignorant scientists. Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, a mathematics Ph.D. and Berkely professor, was cut from the same sort of cloth. These stories would be ludicrous if they had not involved murders of innocent people and wasted lives, including the criminals’ lives, and if they did not suggest deeper knowledge problems. Many of the Zizians had degrees in computer science. They were attracted to the “rationalist movement” and attended the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality, although this group eventually expelled them. (See Zusha Elinson, “A Silicon Valley Intellectual Society Kicked Them Out. Now They’re Tied to a Killing Spree,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2025.) José Ortega, a Spanish philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, believed that the typical scientific man was a “learned ignoramus” and an intellectual barbarian. Like the “mass-man,” the scientist is not interested in understanding the conditions of civilization or even the conditions for the existence of science, nor the closely related necessity of certain liberal institutions. He believes that prosperity “is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree.” (See my Regulation review of Ortega’s 1930 book The Revolt of the Masses.) Frederic Hayek explained the problem of “scientism,” which he defined as an improper and naïve application of the methods of the exact sciences to the study of society. It is very tempting, especially for narrowly focused scientific experts with no knowledge of economics, to neglect the varied preferences that motivate individual actions and to ignore the unplanned social order that results. A social order efficient for satisfying individual preferences is impossible to engineer and reconstruct from above. We must be wary of what Hayek, in his Nobel lecture, called “the pretense of knowledge.” (See Hayek’s 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, of which the first part reproduces a series of articles in Economica titled “Scientism and the Study of Society.”) Scientists, and perhaps especially computer scientists, are subject to a professional bias that may lead them to believe that they have the tools to engineer society according to their own preferences. The Zizians and the Unabomber added murder to the engineer’s toolbox. At any rate, social engineering consists of coercively molding fellow humans’ minds and lives. A basic knowledge of economics, which studies the social consequences of individual actions including exchange, is a good antidote to cultism and social-engineering illusions. (Perhaps it can also be argued that a too-specialized or too-pretentious practice of economics also risks transmogrifying an economist into a social engineer.) None of what I said is meant to condemn the use of reason. Rationality remains our main tool for understanding the physical and the social world, if one remains conscious of the limits of reason. Someone schooled only in a narrow field of science, without a conscience of the social world around him in time and space, risks becoming an ignoramus, a cultist, a barbarian, or all of that. PS: Pardon my pun-ish French mind, but the Zizians are certainly not well-versed in the language of Émile Faguet for they would otherwise have found a less childish and patriarchal label for their cult. On French and puns, see the delicious article of Lucy Sante, “French Without Tears.” ****************************** Scientist reengineering society (1 COMMENTS)