In recent decades, the Federal government has steadily expanding the reach of regulation.  A very good Jacob Sullum piece in Reason magazine points out that this power allows the government to put informal pressure on companies in a way that restricts the freedom of speech: Why is Paramount so eager to settle this comical excuse for a lawsuit? Needless to say, it has nothing to do with the legal or logical merits of Trump’s complaint. The New York Times reports that Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, “supports the effort to settle” because she “stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount.” The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is now chaired by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, has the power to queer that deal by refusing to approve the transfer of the broadcasting licenses held by CBS-owned TV stations. . . . Trump, for his part, argues that the editing of the Harris interview is sufficient reason for the FCC to “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” . . . Trump can extort that outcome because of the FCC’s antiquated and constitutionally dubious authority over the content of broadcast journalism, which the government treats differently from journalism disseminated via print, cable, satellite, the internet, or any other nonbroadcast medium. That is just one of many ways that a president can try to punish or suppress speech he does not like. Other levers of executive power include the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IRS, antitrust enforcement by the Justice Department, privacy and financial regulations, and presidential support for new legislation. Trump has even suggested that the Justice Department “should” be policing the press to make sure it is telling the truth, an idea that is legally baseless and starkly at odds with the First Amendment. This sort of abuse of power has come from both sides of the political spectrum: Trump and other Republicans rightly complained when the Biden administration persistently pressured social media platforms to suppress speech that federal officials viewed as a threat to public health, democracy, or national security. That pestering, they plausibly argued, violated the First Amendment because it carried an implicit threat of government retaliation against companies that refused to comply. Yet Trump is doing essentially the same thing in this case by pressuring Paramount to assuage his wrath by settling a lawsuit that was bound to fail on its merits. We have seen a recent backlash against the excesses of “woke ideology”.  I welcome the weakening of cancel culture, DEI, and other counterproductive forms of social engineering.  But I do worry that the recent backlash might lead some people to swing too far in the other direction.  The fact that it should be legal to express offensive ideas does not imply that it’s a good idea to do so.  With freedom comes responsibility.  In recent months, I’ve seen an increase in tweets that are in very poor taste.  The fact that the woke police wrongly accused many people of racism or sexism does not mean that there is no such thing as bigotry.  The following Aella tweet suggests that she has seen a similar overreaction to the loosening of woke restrictions: In a recent post, I encouraged people to think about how they would have behaved in some earlier period of history, say China in 1966 or Germany in 1932.  Based on what I’ve been seeing on twitter, many people would have failed the test. (0 COMMENTS)

Scott Sumner offers an argument that liberalism can be a vaccine against authoritarianism. I’m inclined to believe that committed liberals can’t be authoritarian because authoritarianism is illiberal. It’s not so much that liberalism is a vaccine as it is definitionally true that someone who endorses wholesale illiberalism forfeits the liberal label in the process.  That’s a quibble, though. Sumner’s exploration of what makes liberalism robust to the appeal of authoritarianism is worthwhile.  Sumner uses Nazis and Maoists, defined narrowly, to illustrate. Sumner is talking not only about early-20th-century German Nazis and mid-20th-century Maoists in China, but those movements as we think of them now, knowing the worst of what they did. In this sense, not everyone who voted for the NSDAP in 1932 or 1933 was a Nazi in the way he means it. Sumner argues that a strong commitment to one’s principles and the cause of freedom would have precluded support for either of these extreme parties. “Freedom” as a standard isn’t enough, though. Almost everyone—even many non-liberals—will profess a commitment to freedom and believe some constraints follow from that concept. Liberal freedom does not include the freedom to steal what you want, and we think that’s fine because we’re liberals. We see this defence of individuals against one another as valid.  Collective versions of freedom are concerned with defending the favoured group against potential disruption by individuals. This conception of freedom is also concerned with protection from outside intervention and criticism—the collective’s ability to suppress the individual needs to be protected. Anne Applebaum points out that this is what modern-day China means by “sovereignty” and what Russia advocates for when it demands international “multipolarity.”  Nor are liberals immune from endorsing what is not yet but will turn out to be authoritarianism. Liberals have never endorsed Nazism or Maoism as we think of them now, defined by the worst things they led to. But some liberals made excuses for Hitler and Mao in their time, and I suspect plenty of liberals voted for the NSDAP. At least some liberals trusted or hoped that Hitler would not do the worst things he had ever advocated while hoping he would put a stop to communism. Good people make mistakes, even truly terrible mistakes.  There is a debate within liberalism about which freedoms matter. Here, the narrowness of Sumner’s examples of authoritarianism might obscure more than it helps. Liberals don’t entertain support for slavery and can write out of the project anyone who does. It is less obvious to classical liberals whether we can automatically write out of liberalism those who opposed or neglected the extension of political rights, for example, to women in the Gilded Age or Black Americans in the Civil Rights era. It is less obvious to welfare liberals that we can write out of liberalism New Deal Democrats whose regard for economic freedom was so low.   To the extent that some liberals have been willing to disregard or set aside some rights for individuals because of the groups they inhabit, those liberals have found it easier to see common cause with non-liberals who are nonetheless concerned about, for example, property rights over political rights (among classical liberals) or political rights over property rights (among welfare liberals). This shouldn’t be seen as a call for greater purity when classifying liberals. It’s not that every liberal who didn’t stubbornly demand trans rights in the 1990s would have gone along with Hitler. It just recognizes that liberals are not immune when it comes to taking a turn toward authoritarianism. Liberalism is not just freedom. The rhetoric of freedom and institutions that protect the freedom of only some people cannot inoculate us. Liberalism aspires to inclusive freedom and institutions that protect everyone. Liberalism’s universalism, not only its emphasis on freedom, is needed when looking for an effective predictor of someone’s ability to resist authoritarianism.   (0 COMMENTS)

Every once in a while, one will hear an argument for protectionism that protectionist tariffs will ultimately lead to lower prices.  The argument they make is an adjusted form of the infant industry argument:  domestic firms do not expand because of the presence of foreign competition.  Tariffs will force foreign competition out of the market.  Prices will rise, causing new domestic firms to form.  These new firms enter the market and push prices down to the pre-tariff level (or even below the pre-tariff level).  In short, tariffs allow firms to expand their scale and push down prices.   Like the infant industry argument, one can make an internally coherent prediction for tariffs along these lines.  But, like the infant industry argument, it suffers from the same fatal flaw: tariffs are not needed to accomplish these goals.  If it was profitable for firms to operate at such a scale as to match or beat the free-trade price, they would already be doing so.  The presence of capital markets ensures the profit opportunities of those firms can be realized.  Given all the political issues with tariffs, it’s quite improbable that the political marketplace would be better suited to realize those profit opportunities than the firms themselves and investors; I just have a hard time believing these people who are profit-seekers would leave billions of dollars in profit on the table.  In short, if firms could match the free-trade price, they already would.   Financial markets allocate resources through time.  By borrowing, firms and individuals can sacrifice some consumption in the future for consumption now.  Firms in particular borrow to expand, fund new technology, fund new projects, etc., that could take years to payoff.  These sorts of transactions occur all the time, to the tune of trillions of dollars per day.  How could politicians properly identify profit opportunities those in the know do not know?   Relatedly, imposing tariffs is a long, public process.  There are debates, votes, public hearings, etc.  If, by some miracle, the political process was able to identify profit opportunities better than the market participants, once the tariff is announced, it would become public knowledge.  Investors of all stripes would rush to the affected markets, eager to seize the profit opportunities.  The tariffs would be rendered moot. In short, while it is possible for tariffs to lower prices, it’s quite unlikely.  Best case scenario, the tariffs simply recreate the status quo, but with more steps.  Since tariffs are not costless (there are administrative costs such as collection and enforcement), this suggests that using tariffs to lower prices would still be a worse outcome than the free-market outcome.    (0 COMMENTS)

In a post last week, I stated that the deadweight loss from a tax is proportional to the square of the tax rate. So doubling the tax rate, for example, quadruples the deadweight loss. I stated on Facebook that I used basic algebra to prove this to my students. An economist friend asked me to do it. So I did. Here’s the proof. For simplicity, start with a horizontal supply curve, as in the graph above, and compute the Harberger triangle loss. It’s C in the above graph, which is one half the base times the height. The height is the tax, t. The base is computed as delta Q, the drop in amount demanded. So we need to compute the base. Let elasticity = n. n = delta Q/Q divided by delta P/P. So delta Q/Q = n times deltaP/P. delta Q = n times delta P/P times Q. But delta P = t. So delta Q = n times t/P times Q. So triangle loss = 1/2 t times n times t/P times Q. So triangle loss = 1/2 t^2 times n/P times Q. QED. Note: If, as is usually the case, the supply curve is upward-sloping, the formula for deadweight loss is more complicated but the square relationship still holds. (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s Gideon Rachman in the FT: “Our strategy on tariffs will be to shoot first and ask questions later.” That was what one of Donald Trump’s key economic policymakers told me late last year. That kind of macho swagger is currently fashionable in Washington. Macho swagger?  Where have we seen that before? Back in 2004, the Bush administration was very confident in its ability to shape reality: In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Unfortunately, reality often has its own agenda.  And as we saw in Iraq, it’s not always what one might wish to occur.   I often see pundits discussing the economic implications of tariffs.  Anyone who’s taken EC101 already knows that tariffs reduce efficiency, and I have little to add on that question.  In addition, it’s not always easy to know what sort of policy is being proposed.  Does the government intend to impose tariffs, or merely threaten tariffs in order to bully our allies into kowtowing to our government with symbolic gestures of subservience?    In my view, the most important question today is not the technical aspects of economic policy, it’s not the deadweight loss from tariffs, rather it is the global political climate.  What explains the recent surge in authoritarian nationalism?  Economics is downstream of politics. (0 COMMENTS)

The Polities of The Odyssey In the previous article, I outlined what an economic approach to reading Homer’s epic, The Odyssey,1 might look like. I also noted that what most strikes me about The Odyssey is Homer’s treatment of comparative political regimes. Looking at the wide variety of regimes Odysseus encounters is the focus of this article. Given that human behavior, at least in The Odyssey, can be understood in terms of the non-standard assumptions described in my previous essay, what are then the possible states of affairs? Which polities might we look to for arranging human interactions and maintaining political order? Utopia is not readily achieved, not only because of material constraints, but also because human behavior is too restless and too desirous of alternative states of affairs. A straightforward order based on political virtue is also beyond human grasp, again because it clashes with the nature of human beings as we understand them. What then might fit with a vision of humans as restless, intoxicating, deceiving, and self-deceiving creatures? The travel explorations of The Odyssey can be understood as, in part, an attempt to address this question. I will now consider the major and some of the minor polities described by The Odyssey, roughly in the order they appear in the story. Pylos and Sparta Ithaca aside, the first two polities we encounter are through Telemachus. After he leaves home to find news of his father, he stops first in Pylos [Book 3]. His arrival in Pylos and later Sparta will foreshadow the later narratives of Odysseus. Telemachus meets a king (Nestor), is welcomed into a court as a stranger, feasts on meat, is asked to tell his personal story, and other details which mirror many of Odysseus’ stories. The parallels here are obvious and deliberate. Compared to the later narratives of Odysseus, what is striking about Pylos is how little we understand of it. Much of the talk with Nestor is about how Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon, and how Telemachus hopes to take comparable revenge on the suitors of Penelope. The account is Telemachus-centered, and we receive little insight into how Pylos works. It seems to be an orderly kingdom with steady rule, but we do not get a sense of Telemachus viewing it with the eyes of an inquisitive traveler as we experience with Odysseus. Later in The Odyssey, when we look back upon Pylos, it doesn’t seem quite so peaceful and sparkling. In Book 15, Telemachus encounters Theoclymenus, who is on the run and taking refuge from Pylos, because powerful men there wish to kill him. Theoclymenus admits that he killed “a man of my own tribe.” [15: 274] It is not obvious who is in the right from the tale of Theoclymenus, but Telemachus lets him board the ship as a guest and allows him to travel onwards [15: 280-282]. Perhaps Telemachus has learned not to trust the polity of Pylos anymore, and that his original understanding of it was flat and lacking in insight, revised after he has now seen more of the world. A second possible episode of ex post realization about Pylos comes in Book 16, when Penelope is reunited with Telemachus in Ithaca. She exclaims: “Telemachus! Sweet light! I was so sure that I would never see you anymore after you sailed to Pylos secretly, not telling me, to get news of your father.” [17: 41-44] On the one hand, Penelope simply may have been distraught because Telemachus disappeared without warning. Yet she ends up aware of where Telemachus visited, and her words suggest some note of danger for the foreigner visiting Pylos, again the notion of dangerous foreigner visits being a recurring theme in the narrative. Perhaps we are being told that Pylos really isn’t so much safer than the other locales portrayed in The Odyssey. Returning to the narrative of Telemachus’ visit, from Pylos the sons of Nestor take Telemachus to Sparta, to set him further on his journey [Book 4]. In Sparta they go first to the house of Menelaus, the King, and again there are features of the story that reflect the adventures of Odysseus, such as a feast, an introduction to a king, the inhabitants of Sparta processing the introduction of a stranger, and other elements. Once again, this polity seems well-ordered, but it doesn’t quite seem happy. As described by Robert Schmiel “the mood… is one of melancholy remembrance” and “domestic strife beneath the surface.”2 There is, however, prosperity. Early in the encounter we are told that: “Neighbors and family were feasting gladly under the king’s high roof.” [4: 16-17]. We also hear from Telemachus that the halls of Menelaus are “as full of riches as the palace of Zeus on Mount Olympus!” [4: 74-75] Helen, the Queen (and closely tied to the origin of the entire war), opts for intoxication for the group. At the ceremonies “Helen… decided she would mix the wine with drugs to take all pain and rage away, to bring forgetfulness of every evil.” [4: 220-223] Arguably this is a deliberate contrast with Ithaca. Both polities have been deeply scarred by the war. Ithaca has fallen into unruliness and civil war, whereas Sparta has returned to order, but with sadness, and it is an order kept in place by powerful intoxicants. It is not obvious that Sparta is to be preferred, as it seems to offer less genuine and authentic lives. We are told that Helen is familiar with powerful magic drugs from Egypt, and that these narcotics are “some good, some dangerous,” [4: 231] a statement leaving open the possibility that Sparta has erred in its reliance on intoxication. The reader is not entirely surprised when, later in the book, Telemachus expresses his desire to return to Pylos [4: 590-600]. His apparently effusive praise of Sparta does not seem entirely positive, such as when he notes, “You have made me stay too long.” [4: 599] There is perhaps a parallel between Odysseus’s conversation with King Alcinous and how Telemachus talks with the King who is keeping him resident, Menelaus in Sparta. In this back and forth, Telemachus does not show himself to be much of a storyteller. Menelaus tells him he does not wish to keep him there [15: 70-80], echoing the language of King Alcinous with Odysseus. Telemachus simply asserts that he wishes to go home [4, 590-600; 15: 88-92]. He doesn’t have much in the way of tales to tell, or any of Odysseus’ mixed feelings about returning home. He lacks both curiosity and the narrative art. This is perhaps related to his relative lack of resources in imagining how the suitors might be vanquished, as he is fundamentally passive in his approach. In sum, the polities of Pylos and Sparta are shown as wealthy and orderly, yet not entirely successful. Pylos is a black box that appears less attractive with time. Sparta is sad and has chosen intoxication, rather than continued conflict, to deal with the legacy of war. Ogygia, or the polity of Calypso We encounter the traveling Odysseus in Book 5, when he is stranded on the island of Ogygia, better known as the home of Calypso. Early on we read that “Calypso forces him to stay with her.” [5: 14]. Yet as the portrait of Ogygia proceeds, it has many comforts, at least superficial ones. The island has a “scent of citrus and of brittle pine,” with a “luscious forest” and “a ripe and luscious vine,” and springs of sparkling water. It has “sights to please even a god.” [5: 60-74]. Calypso claims to have a better body than Penelope and she is ageless [5: 211-214]. Odysseus also has regular sex with Calypso, a goddess, and she sings and weaves with a shuttle made of gold. Calypso offered him immortality if he would stay [5: 136-137]. “The first lesson of the polities explained by Odysseus is that there is no utopian answer as to how men should live, as the lack of scarcity is experienced as intolerable. This illustrates Odysseus valuing his discovery process and quest, rather than simply wishing to maximize the level of his material consumption.” Yet Odysseus is far from happy, “sobbing in grief and pain,” [5: 83] and “longing to go back home” [5: 152-153]. The first lesson of the polities explained by Odysseus is that there is no utopian answer as to how men should live, as the lack of scarcity is experienced as intolerable. This illustrates Odysseus valuing his discovery process and quest, rather than simply wishing to maximize the level of his material consumption. Calypso seems to recognize this when she utters, “Odysseus, son of Laertes, blessed by Zeus—your plans are always changing.” Odysseus never seems daunted that his journey back to Ithaca will involve a lot of danger along the way [5: 221-224]. Unfortunately, Odysseus’s exit from Ogygia does not proceed smoothly, though he ends up swimming to safety on Phaeacia, to which we now turn. The polity of Phaeacia In Books 6-8, the reader encounters a new polity, Phaeacia on the island of Scheria, again as mediated through the travels of Odysseus. This narrative is one of the central episodes of the book, and the Phaeacians receive the best-developed portrait of any civilization besides Ithaca. They are the main plausible alternative to the homeland of Odysseus. At the beginning of Book 6 we are told that the Phaeacians formerly inhabited Hyperia, “a land of dancing.” But their neighbors, the Cyclopes, kept looting them, and they were driven out to this new home, “a distant place,” which you can take as one description of what I earlier called a deglobalized setting for the story. No longer could the Phaeacians specialize in dancing; they built a wall around the town and built temples to the gods. They describe themselves as “much beloved by the gods.” [6: 203] As we learn more about the Phaeacians, they seem at first remarkably normal, perhaps the first (ostensibly) normal polity we encounter in The Odyssey. They do not care for archery but prefer “sails and oars and ship” [6: 270-271] and they love to cross the ocean. We are told that, “The people in town are proud….” [6: 273]. The Phaeacians seem skilled, orderly, patriotic, and full of vigor and love of life. Odysseus is very positively impressed by his initial stroll through town [7: 44-47] But as the narrative proceeds, cracks show in the façade. Odysseus himself offers commentary on Phaeacia. Immediately after waking he sees the beautiful girl Nausicaa; he wonders what kind of place he has landed in, and he asks: “What is this country I have come to now? Are all the people wild and violent, or good, hospitable, and god-fearing?” [6:119-121] When Athena describes the Phaeacians to Odysseus, she gives him instructions for entering town: “But you must walk in silence. Do not look at people, and ask no questions. People here are not too keen on strangers coming from abroad.” [7: 30-34] As Odysseus moves toward town, Athena pointedly addresses him as “Mr. Foreigner,” [7:48] perhaps to remind him he is not exactly in friendly territory. There is also more than a hint of arbitrary power, namely that to be able to leave the kingdom, the Queen must look kindly upon the visitor [7: 73-77]. The revelations continue as we learn that the origins of this polity lie in incest and violence. The King and Queen it turns out are uncle and niece, and “No woman is honored as he honors her.” [7: 68-69] Furthermore, the line of ancestry involves a king, Eurymedon, who ruled over “the Giants,” and killed them, and was killed in turn [7: 56-60]. It is a bit like a science fiction horror movie where what first seems to be a paradise is revealed as a dystopia. That the Phaeacians had their origins near the Cyclops no longer seems like such a coincidence. The reader starts to wonder if there is any polity with noble origins—it would seem not. The attitude of the Homerian texts toward slavery is never clear. Nonetheless, we learn a bit later that “The King had fifty slave girls in his house;” [7:104], again a sign of hierarchy and domination. Odysseus finally decides to reject the polity and the life of the Phaeacians. The King makes him a generous offer to marry his daughter and become the King’s own son, and he offers Odysseus a home and wealth to boot [7: 313-316]. But Odysseus is not interested, and he decides to move on, stating merely that he wishes to reach his home [7: 334]. Yet Odysseus does not immediately begin his voyage. King Alcinous decides to inaugurate a festival in his honor, cooking a feast and packing the halls and porticoes with people [8: 50-62].3 After feasting and the lyre, there are contests in every sport, designed to show the visitor, Odysseus, that the Phaeacians are “the best at boxing, wrestling, high-jumping, and sprinting.” [8: 100-104]. There is a periodic insistence that visitors are free to come and go, but suddenly instead of leaving Odysseus is caught up in a long celebration and series of contests. The Phaeacians come across as passive-aggressive, insecure, and wanting guests to leave on the terms set by the Phaeacians themselves, namely a recognition of Phaeacian superiority, but done in a manner which raises doubts about that same superiority.4 Once the option of the games and competitions are presented, Odysseus demurs, stating that he wishes to return home [8: 150-160]. In turn he is taunted by Euryalus [“… the best in all Phaeacia, after Laodamas” 8: 114-117]; who tells him he is ignorant of athletics and a mere sailor [8: 159-165]. Odysseus responds that Euryalus is arrogant and decides to compete, and with the help of Athena he fashions a decisive victory [8: 166-200]. Odysseus continues to showcase his talents, causing the Phaeacians to stress how good they are at sprinting, ships, the feast, the lyre, dancing, and “hot baths and bed.” [8: 245-249]. Odysseus is then given gifts and allowed to leave. In sum, what are we to make of the Phaeacians? They have arguably the most normal society and government in all The Odyssey. It is not destroyed, wracked with war, ruled by ogres, or caught up in imprisonment. It is a society with some very real strengths—most of all sailing and the storytelling of the lyre—and a number of weaknesses, including a certain mysteriousness and passive–aggressive arrogance, combined with some rather unpleasant origins. It seems to insist that its ways are better than those of other societies, but Herodotus later will tell us such a presumption is quite normal and that all cultures, one way or another, hold a similar attitude. The most striking fact about Phaecia is that Odysseus does not desire it, and he is not tempted to stay there, even in a story where unwise temptation is a major theme. It is an “insiders only” option, less hospitable to outsiders than it pretends to be at first. It seems that for the curious, the ordinary polity simply is not very alluring. The Lotus Eaters With Book 9 we return to tales of the more directly bizarre. Odysseus, in response to the musical and poetic narratives of the Phaeacians, responds with his own tale, one of imprisonment. On the tenth day of Odysseus’s tale, he tells of landing on the island of the Lotus Eaters [9: 84-85]. The Lotus Eaters seem to be passive, they enjoy their fruit, and they hand this fruit out to visitors. Those who taste the fruit in turn become passive and show no desire to leave the island. The visitors forget home altogether, another example of intoxication. Odysseus—at least by his own account—shows no sign of temptation. In fact, he drags his men back, pushes them under the ship decks, and ties them up to prevent them from returning to the Lotus Eaters. This model of the polity doesn’t receive much treatment in the story. Virtually everyone wants it, it seems to make people happy, and it must be forbidden. Perhaps there is just not that much more to be said. Nothing heroic happens in this society, and no one has any prospect of achieving fame or historic renown. As with Odysseus’s eventual rejection of life with Calypso, the utopian is being taken off the table, and at the very least is not a tempting permanent option for Odysseus. The Cyclopes Odysseus and his crew then sail along to the anarchistic community of the Cyclopes, where “They hold no councils, have no common laws, but live in caves on lofty mountaintops, and each makes laws for his own wife and children, without concern for what the others think.” [9: 112-115] Here, we get a look at anarchy as an option. But the anarchy we observe is not very impressive. The Cyclopes have no boats or ships, and no capacity to build them, and thus their island remains poor rather than turning fertile. There is a very good harbor, but no explicit reason offered as to why boats are not built—is it a lack of desire or simply that there is not enough cooperation in the society of the Cyclopes? Or is the problem a lack of division of labor, as it is stated that there is “no shipwright among them”? [9: 125-126]. It also turns out that the polity of the Cyclopes is far from stable or secure. For instance, it is easy pickings for Odysseus and his men to use their ships to grab goats from the island for purposes of food. The rest of this story is well-known. One Cycloeps imprisons Odysseus and kills two of his men and eats them. He asserts along the way that he is stronger than Zeus and does not fear him. Odysseus nonetheless manages to defeat the Cyclopes. He tells him his name is “Noman,” and later manages to poke the Cyclopes in the eye with a hot spear, while the Cyclopes is drunk on wine. The Cyclopes screams that “Noman” is killing him, but his compatriots do not respond, waving off the problem by asserting that “no man” is killing him. This deliberately stupid construction serves as a parable for the broader lack of cooperation in the society of the Cyclopes. For all their brute physical strength, the Cyclopes are ultimately not formidable adversaries, and they are not capable of imprisoning the men of Odysseus in the manner that Circe or the Lotus Eaters might attempt. The polity based on pleasure does not work, and now we learn that the polity based on pure autonomy does not work either. The Cyclopes tries to throw a rock at the ship of Odysseus and his men, while the ship is leaving the vicinity of the island, but a lone person throwing a rock just does not have enough violent destructive power to stop the escape. Aeolus, the closed polity The “floating island of Aeolus,” introduced in Book 10, is well-loved by the gods and protected by sheer cliffs and an impregnable wall [10:1-4]. Twelve children live in the ruling palace, six boys married to six girls, who are in fact their sisters. With their parents, they feast at a never-ending banquet, a surfeit of plenty. It is stressed that the husbands and wives love each other [10: 1-12], and once again we are introduced to what is possibly a utopia. Aeolus does not hold the main scene of action for long, but we do learn that Odysseus is made to stay there for a month [10: 15]. After he leaves, a blast of wind returns him and his ship back to the island. Aeolus shows his anger at Odysseus, calls him a “nasty creature,” and demands that he leave the island. He also calls Odysseus a man “deeply hated by the gods,” a description which is arguably true. Aeolus is the ultimate closed polity, it is a very small mini-paradise, and it does not brook much interference from outsiders. It is an example of how a happy and stable polity has no scale, no future, and no real ability to interact with the outside world. It is also based on the practice of incest, which deviates from the norms elsewhere. Laestrygonia Next in the book comes Laestrygonia, a town on the cliffs [10: 80-82]. There is a deliberate hearkening back to the Cyclopes. There is talk of herds, the inhabitants are giants, and the king grabs one of Odysseus’s men and eats him. The Laestrygonians also threw boulders from the cliff at the ships of Odysseus. Odysseus and his ship sail away, but with many crew members lost and perhaps eaten [10: 126]. This whole account does not change the story much, so if we read parts of The Odyssey as a catalog of polities, it seems to be suggesting that the world of the Cyclopes (and perhaps many of the other strange island societies) are not entirely aberrations, but rather they represent general patterns which will be repeated, albeit with differing details, around the known world. Circe of Aeaea and her seductions The bulk of Book 10 covers the arrival of Odysseus and his remaining men in Aeaea, the home of “the beautiful, dreadful goddess Circe” [10: 136], and this is one of the best-known sections of The Odyssey. Circe can turn men into pigs, and she does this with the crew of Odysseus. She does this with “potent drugs,” another form of (involuntary) intoxication. Odysseus doesn’t seem to mind this. He goes to bed with Circe, albeit under the condition that she swears an oath that she will no longer make plans to hurt him. There is no hint of actual intoxication in this segment [10:336-348], yet perhaps the reader wonders whether Circe exerts some kind of intoxicating influence simply through her beauty, power, and magic. At one point in the book, Odysseus even suggests that the men stay with Circe, “eating and drinking,” with “food enough to last forever.” [10: 423-428; the men rebel against this suggestion]. Again, we see that Odysseus is a wanderer, determined to take in as much of the world as he can, not just a loyal guy who just wants to return to his home and wife. Odysseus, however, eventually decides to leave, and Circe requires him to visit the underworld, to which I will turn shortly. As for the polities in Aeaea, there are two and they are intertwined. The first is the bed of Circe and living under her rule, and the second is the life of the pigs, who are fed “some mast and cornel cherries,” which pigs like [10: 243-245]. Nonetheless, these porcine lives are experienced with the minds of men. This is intoxication of the body rather than the mind, and it is not presented as a pleasant prospect. The gloomy city of the Cimmerians At the very beginning of Book 11, before the entrance to the Underworld, there is a further (very brief) description of yet another polity, namely the Cimmerians. We learn only that the land is “covered up in mist and cloud,” never sees the sun, and it is dark and gloomy and God never looks upon it [11: 12-19]. It is difficult to infer much from this very brief description, but arguably the Cimmerians reflect a kind of default assumption about polities: if nothing happens, they simply will not shine or prosper. The implied question may be to what extent do the other polities portrayed succeed in doing better than the Cimmerians? The Underworld Book 11 presents the tale of Odysseus to the underworld, one of the most-discussed sections of The Odyssey. This is another polity where everyone is sad and indeed, they are dead. Under Odysseus’s own account: “Other dead souls were gathering, all sad; each told the story of his sorrow.” [11: 542-543] Earlier, Achilles had said that he would prefer to be a workman on a peasant farm, rather than to “rule as king of all the dead.” [11: 489-491] He mentions that “numb dead people live here, the shades of poor exhausted mortals.” [11: 475-476] That is obviously not an inspiring picture, but once you get past the fact that everyone (but Odysseus) is dead, it is striking how normal and matter of fact the Underworld is. It is the one place where Odysseus has honest, non-confrontational, and matter of fact, non-strategic conversations. No one is trying to drug him or enslave him, nor does he face any particular temptation. There is plenty of talk about- the rest of the world, most of all women, being full of cheaters and liars. It is also the place where Odysseus can ask his mother how matters are evolving in Ithaca. He receives correct and to the point answers [11: 170-203], which is more than what you can say for the broader tradition of Greek oracles. His deceased former crewman, Elpenor, also gives him some pretty clear answers as to how things are going in Ithaca, while criticizing Odysseus for leaving his men and his son Telemachus [11: 66-69]. In sum, Homer’s portrayal of the Underworld is making a broader statement about artifice. The only time artifice and deceit disappear are in the land of the dead; they are inevitable in the various polities and lands of the living. The more you think about it, yes, the Underworld is sad, but it is sad for reasons that go well beyond the obvious reflections on human mortality. Ithaca Ithaca itself—after Odysseus’s return—is the final polity considered in the story and one of the most important, dominating the latter part of The Odyssey, of course being “home” as well. One way of understanding Ithaca is through a relatively objective lens. Recall that when Odysseus wakes up there, he does not at first know where he is. His initial descriptions of the place are less than flattering. His initial thoughts are skeptical, mostly as an expression of his own temperament and experience: “Are those who live here violent and cruel? Or are they kind to strangers, folks who fear the gods? Where can I carry all my treasure? And where can I go wandering?” [13: 200-204]. Odysseus then segues into wishing he were still in Phaeacia [13: 204-205], perhaps suggesting Ithaca is not so superior after all, and that Odysseus does recognize the merits of other polities, one lesson he has picked up from his travels and his curiosity. As the narrative progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the most fundamental feature of Ithaca is war. In the last book of The Odyssey, the polity is locked into a cycle of ongoing revenge, consistent with the broader portrait offered in The Iliad, an entire story about violent conflict. Besides war, Ithaca is marked by a radical lack of trust. For instance, in Book 14, Odysseus-in-disguise remarks to a swineherd that he sees he will not be trusted [14: 394]. The swineherd in turn replies that he would receive local renown if he pretended to befriend the new stranger but instead took him inside his home and then murdered him [14: 403-407]. The lack of trust is so fundamental that even Odysseus and Penelope do not trust each other. Telemachus reports that “She [Penelope] does not refuse the awful prospect of remarriage.” [16: 126-127]. Odysseus has no trouble understanding this point, and he makes it clear that Penelope is not to be trusted, not “until we have determined the women’s attitude,” lumping her in with the slave girls [16: 305-307]. Odysseus has wandered for a full twenty years, so it is hardly a surprise that he is not entirely welcome. He notes later that he knows that when he is dirty and dressed in rags, Penelope will neither acknowledge him nor treat him with kindness [23: 114-115]. If we consider Penelope’s behavior with the suitors, this lack of trust should not surprise us; in fact, we might wonder whether anyone should trust her. Antinous describes her behavior to Telemachus as follows: “She [Penelope] is cunning. It is the third year, soon it will be four, that she has cheated us of what we want. She offers hope to all, sends notes to each, but all the while her mind moves somewhere else.” [2: 90-95]. Nor is Telemachus especially loyal to his father, or what he thinks might be the memory of his father. He is a mediocre man, weak, and steered by the course of events rather than taking charge. In the scene of the last banquet, the real views of Telemachus shine through. He lets on that his father may be “lost far from Ithaca” rather than dead; in any case, it is time for his mother Penelope to pick a new husband. He, Telemachus, expresses his intent to provide a lavish dowry [20: 338-345]. Odysseus is by no means an innocent bystander in this picture. Eupeithes, father of the slain suitor Antinous, delivers a speech where he puts forward a not entirely untrue negative portrait of Odysseus: “This scheming man, my friends, has done us all most monstrous wrong. First, he took many good men off to sail with him, and lost the ships, and killed the men! Now he has come and murdered all the best of Cephallenia.” [24: 424-430]. He then shifts quickly to talk of revenge and raises the possibility that Odysseus will leave Ithaca again, this time with no choice in the matter. A debate ensues as to whether a civil war should be pursued, and “more than half jumped up with shouts,” in support of Eupeithes and the idea of an ongoing conflict [24: 402-410]. The forces supporting Odysseus start to arm as well, and conflict appears inevitable [24: 495-496]. Finally, at the very end of the book, Athena intervenes and tells the Ithacans to stop fighting and to go their separate ways [24: 530-535], acting as a literal deus ex machina. She also tells Odysseus to stop the war, citing the will of Zeus, and he is glad to obey her [24: 543-549]. Athena makes the warring sides swear an oath of peace for the future. What are we to make of this ending? Is it truly an enduring peace? Or are we left with the lesson that war is the natural state of mankind? For this reader, it is hard to avoid coming away pessimistic about the future of Ithaca. The principles of war seem to be stronger than the principles of peace. Syria and Crete as coda Within the final narrative of the return and revenge of Odysseus, there is another polity introduced, the island Syria, narrated to Odysseus by the swineherd Eumaeus [15: 390-485]. We are told that Syria has few inhabitants, but that it is “rich in sheep and wine and grain,” and lacking in famine [15: 407-408]. It sounds pretty good! The reader perhaps wonders whether the actual Syria, if it exists at all, is so wonderful. Syria seems to be a deliberate contrast with Ithaca itself. Syria was split into two provinces, with King Ctesius ruling over both, but “avaricious merchants”—the Phoenicians—came and created disorder. They worked through an untrustworthy Phoenician woman who worked in the house of the king; they seduced her with sex, arguably a contrast with Penelope. This all turns into a roundabout story of how Eumaeus came to Ithaca, namely on an escaping ship, which ended up shipwrecked, and Eumaeus was bought by Laertes as a slave. The lesson seem to be that even initially attractive polities are vulnerable, and fate can readily lead to a loss of freedom. Better polities are hard to find. There is a second within-a-narrative polity, namely that of Crete, introduced when Odysseus-in-disguise is narrating his story to Penelope [19: 172-204]. Odysseus-in-disguise describes Crete as his homeland, a fertile island, and with many different people and languages, spread out across ninety cities. Odysseus-in-disguise tells a story of how (the ostensible) Odysseus arrived in Crete with his men, received a lavish and friendly welcome with no talk of suspicion, and on the thirteenth day (the ostensible) Odysseus and his men sailed on. Homer then immediately refers to this story as “lies,” [19: 205] and it is arguably the most fantastical polity of them all. Crete as described simply may not be real. It is a society with no trust problems, and Penelope’s response to the narrative is to mistrust whether it happened at all. She gives the stranger a test and asks him if he can describe the clothes and men of Odysseus [19: 217-220]. Odysseus-in-disguise gives a detailed and impressive response, referring to clothes Penelope had prepared for Odysseus before his departure. Of course, Penelope still should not be trusting this stranger, because he is not letting on his true identity as Odysseus. For more on these topics, see “Homer’s Odyssey: Reason vs. Desire,” by Alexander Schmid. OLL, Reading Room, November 15, 2022. Claudia Hauer on War, Education, and Strategic Humanism. EconTalk. Alexandra Hudson on the Soul of Civility. EconTalk. There are many lessons we can take from this grand tour of epic polities. In my next and final article in this series, I will focus more om the politics and economics of some of these lands and consider the larger question of power in Homer’s narrative. References Ahrensdorf, Peter J. Homer on the Gods & Human Virtue: Creating the Foundations of Classical Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Alvis, John. Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1995. Aronen, Jaakko. “Genealogy as a Form of Mythic Discourse. The Case of the Phaeacians.” 2002, 89-110. Bresson, Alain. The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States. Cowen, Tyler. “Is a Novel a Model?” In The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism, edited by Sandra Peart and David M. Levy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 319-337. Dobbs, Darrell. “Reckless Rationalism and Heroic Reverence in Homer’s Odyssey.” American Political Science Review, June 1987, 81, 2, 491-508. Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Dougherty, Carol. The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Germain, Gabriel. “The Sirens and the Temptation of Knowledge.” In Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by George Steiner and Robert Fagles. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962, 91-97. Kearns, Emily. “The Gods in the Homeric Epics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Homer, edited by Robert Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 59-73. Levy, David. The Economic Ideas of Ordinary People: From Preferences to Trade. London: Routledge, 2011. Louden, Bruce. “An Extended Narrative Pattern in the Odyssey.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 1993. Osborne, Robin. “Homer’s Society.” In The Cambridge Companion to Homer, edited by Robert Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 206-219. Raaflaub, Kurt A. “Poets, lawgivers, and the beginnings of political reflection in Archaic Greece.” In The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.23-59. Redfield, James M. “The Economic Man.” In Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Homer’s Odyssey, edited by Lillian E. Doherty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.265-287. Rinella, Michael A. Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Rose, Gilbert P. “The Unfriendly Phaeacians.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 1969, 100, 387-406. Schmiel, Robert. “Telemachus in Sparta.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association.” 1972, 103, 463-472. Scully, Stephen. Homer and the Sacred City. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. Seaford, Richard. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Segal, Charles. Singers, Heroes, and Gods in The Odyssey. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994. Whittaker, Helène. “The Status of Arete in the Phaeacian Episode of The Odyssey.” Symbolae Osloenses, 1999, 74, 140-150. Footnotes [1] Available at the Online Library of Liberty: The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, translated by Thomas Hobbes. Available for purchase: The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles at Amazon.com. [2] Schmiel (1972, p.470, referring to 4: 81-119]. [3] At this point there is even an appearance of a blind poet, a possible reference to Homer himself [8: 62-65]. [4] On the passive-aggressive nature of the Phaeacians, see Rose (1969). *Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. 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Human beings are inherently pro-social creatures. Aristotle went so far as to refer to us as political animals, driven by our nature to create associations that culminate in the broader community of the polis. And our capacity for reciprocity, trust, and cooperation has deep evolutionary origins. These big brains of ours developed, in part, to handle the growing size and complexity of our social networks. We are wired to connect. It is no surprise, then, that research continues to demonstrate that social bonds are essential to human flourishing and well-being.1 Adam Smith seems to have tapped into this truth about human nature. While acknowledging mankind’s selfish tendencies, Smith noted that, “there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”2 This is why “man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.” Because of this natural endowment, we humans are able to expand our circle of trust and cooperation beyond our kin to a far greater extent than other animals. This has in turn helped shape our cultural institutions, including, perhaps surprisingly, commercial markets.3 Commerce, therefore, is pro-social. Markets are relational in nature. Enlightenment Heavyweights and Others in Favor of Commerce Historically, merchants and markets have more often than not been on the receiving end of suspicion and disrepute. But an alternative view of market exchange—doux (gentle) commerce—began to develop among various thinkers during what has become known as the Enlightenment.4 Perhaps the most well-known proponent of this “gentle commerce” was the French political philosopher Montesquieu: Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores. Therefore, one should not be surprised if our mores are less fierce than they were formerly…. Commerce… polishes and softens barbarous mores, as we see every day. The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace. Two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally dependent; if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are founded on mutual need…. The spirit of commerce produces in men a certain feeling for exact justice…. By contrast, total absence of commerce produces the banditry that Aristotle puts among the ways of acquiring.5 Other Enlightenment era thinkers (including Smith) lifted their voices in support of the gentleness and civilizing effects of markets, arguing that commerce is not just a force for economic prosperity, but a catalyst for a bundle of habits and values that lead to social cooperation. Commerce, they believed, can make friends out of enemies and build trust with those who we would otherwise view with suspicion. Social Capital Is at the Heart of Commerce Trust may vary from transaction to transaction, but we’re generally pretty trusting of people we do business with. Think about your own transactions. When you buy something at the store or online, how much do you actually worry over the trustworthiness of the person on the other side? Is it enough to make you not make the purchase? Better yet, what was the name of the cashier that checked you out at your last supermarket visit? Do you even know how many hands handled your last Amazon purchase? In many of these cases, you are trusting total—and sometimes faceless—strangers to come through for you without a second thought. The “commercial society”—as Adam Smith called it—is ultimately a cooperative endeavor, facilitating trust across great distances and different people. It both relies on and produces social capital. And it does so by making cooperation valuable. For Smith, a commercial society was one in which “the division of labour has been… thoroughly established” and “it is but a very small part of a man’s wants which the produce of his own labour can supply.”6 No longer do we produce everything we need ourselves; no more isolated, atomistic self-sufficiency. Instead, we specialize, we produce, and we trade. We become economically interdependent with one another. In a commercial society, “every man… lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant,” and we prosper together through mutually beneficial trade. To even risk interdependence requires a trusting, cooperative spirit. But actually practicing interdependence can further cultivate this spirit. For Smith, the “division of labor… is not originally the effect of any human wisdom,” but instead “the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature… to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”7 Commerce is an extension of humanity’s social nature. The Social Nature of Business Market exchange within a commercial society implies market competition. And many believe that cutthroat, winner-takes-all competition creates skepticism and distrust for those who participate in it. Competition fuels greed, leading to cut corners and shady business practices to get ahead. It seems only natural that this would be the outcome of a system built on the profit motive. When the bottom line is all that matters, trustworthiness goes out the window. Trust is sure to crumble under the weight of such perverse incentives. Right? But these assumptions, like many made about the commercial society, are also mistaken. And they are mistaken because they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of market competition. What makes an entrepreneur or business competitive in a market economy is not of the might-makes-right variety. It’s not even due primarily to the lone-wolf nature of eccentric innovators (though that may play a role). And while efficiency matters, dishonest cost-cutting isn’t the way to market success either. What makes a market actor competitive is their ability to identify and supply the wants and needs of society through persuasion. The entrepreneur’s insight, according to the late economist Don Lavoie, is not because of “his separateness from others but, indeed, to his higher degree of sensitivity to what others are looking for.” The successful entrepreneurs “are especially well plugged into the culture.” Lavoie called this the “capacity to read the conversations of mankind…. What makes entrepreneurs successful is their ability to join conversational processes and nudge them in new directions.”8 A business competes with other businesses by pitching to consumers, “I can serve you better.” A business competes by trying to out-serve its competitors. And if it doesn’t want to lose the trust of consumers, the business has to live up to its promises. This is why management expert Peter Drucker thought the “profit motive” was such an impoverished explanation for business activity: Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity. If archangels instead of businessmen sat in directors’ chairs, they would still have to be concerned with profitability, despite their total lack of personal interest in making profits.9 “To be competitive in the market is to be serviceable. To be competitive in the market is to be trustworthy. The entire process is a trust-building exercise.” So profit is a necessary signal of the success of business activity. But it is not the ultimate purpose of business activity. The “one valid definition of business purpose,” according to Drucker, is “to create a customer.” Consumers “demand that business start out with the needs, the realities, the values, of the customers” and “that business define its goal as the satisfaction of customer needs.” Creating a customer is the result of creating value and engaging in mutually-beneficial exchange. Or, as one group of business ethicists put it, “The business of business is business.”10 The entire process of market competition consists of discovering ways to serve society, persuading others to trust that you can serve them well, stewarding resources wisely in the name of that service, and then delivering satisfactory results. To be competitive in the market is to be serviceable. To be competitive in the market is to be trustworthy. The entire process is a trust-building exercise. A commercial society lowers the barriers to exchange and association. This allows people who are different from one another to engage in positive-sum interactions with each other. Value for the participants is thus created through the exchange, but value also begins to be assumed of the participants themselves. The circle of trust begins to expand. Social capital begins to grow. Doux Commerce Has Empirical Backing There has been an incredible amount of empirical work done on this topic. Sadly, it seems that few are aware of it. The literature is scattered across various disciplines and academic journals, typically tucked away from the average person. But even scholars may not be aware of the size of the literature. What does the empirical literature reveal about the pro-social nature of commerce? It reveals that commercial societies are in fact more trusting and cooperative.11 Both survey data and various lab experiments demonstrate that market exposure can increase trust and stigmatize untrustworthy behavior. And despite concerns that markets erode civil society (institutions such as churches, schools, neighborhood organizations), it turns out that greater state ownership of the economy leads to repression of and lower participation in these civil society organizations. The commercial society provides space in which civil society thrives. Commercial societies are more honest. Corruption levels are lower in more economically free countries. Factors such as economic freedom, decentralization, globalization, secure property rights, and trade openness have been shown to decrease corruption. High levels of regulations are a strong predictor of corruption. Citizens in market societies are also less likely to justify or engage in dishonest behaviors such as cheating or bribery. Even within communist countries such as modern China, more market-oriented regions are less corrupt. Commerce promotes and is associated with a more universal outlook towards others. It leads us to treat people more fairly and equally. Experiments with small-scale agrarian societies have shown that groups who are more heavily immersed in market exchange with outsiders are more fair and generous in their treatment of fellow participants. We shouldn’t be surprised then to learn that economic freedom has a positive relationship with charitable giving, gender equality, the expansion of civil liberties, and the durability of democratic governance.12 Commerce also makes us a more tolerant bunch. Economic freedom is associated with greater tolerance towards people of another race, homosexuals, communists, and atheists. Pro-trade attitudes have been shown to be negatively associated with isolationism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, prejudice, and a high attachment to one’s neighborhood. Liberal economic institutions breed liberal attitudes. Finally, commerce leads to less violence and more peace. Commercial societies are less likely to go to war with others or erupt into civil war. Governments within commercial societies harm their citizens less, with greater protection of political and physical integrity rights and reduced chances of genocide. Greater economic freedom is also associated with less terrorism, organized crime, and homicide. For more on these topics, see “Adam Smith on Capitalism and the Common Good,” by Erik Matson. Library of Economics and Liberty, December 7, 2020. David Rose on the Moral Foundations of Economic Behavior. EconTalk. Kerianne Lawson on Equal Economic Freedoms. Great Antidote Podcast, Nov. 2023. And all of these aspects interact with one another. Violence can be a manifestation of intolerance or perhaps a reaction to unfair treatment by corrupt systems. Unfair treatment can be a manifestation of prejudice toward certain groups. And so on. All of these are manifestations of a breakdown in trust and cooperation; a breakdown in our ability to relate to one another. “The most successful societies,” economist David Rose has written, “are those that support the greatest scale and scope of cooperation. To get the most out of large-group cooperation we have to be able to trust each other in large-group contexts.”13 The commercial society is a successful society. And it is successful because we learn how to relate a little bit better with one another through market exchange. Footnotes [1] See Tyler J. VanderWeele, “On the Promotion of Human Flourishing,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 31 (2017): 8148-8156; Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Fleche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh Powdthavee, George Ward, The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course (Princeton University Press, 2018). [2] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Liberty Fund, 1982). [3] For the connection between our evolutionary past and the market system, see Paul J. Zak (ed.), Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Princeton University Press, 2008); Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, Revised Edition (Princeton University Press, 2010); Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton University Press, 2016); Rojhat Avsar, The Evolutionary Origins of Markets: How Evolution, Psychology, and Biology Have Shaped the Economy (Routledge, 2020); Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). [4] Albert O. Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?” Journal of Economic Literature 20:4 (1982): 1463-1484; The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 2013 [1977]). Traces of doux commerce can be found among ancient Greeks like Plutarch and the Stoics. See Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996), Ch. 1. [5] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 338-339. [6] Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, ed. R.K. Campbell, A.S. Skinner (Liberty Fund, 1981). [7] Emphasizing the very human aspect of trade, Smith noted, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog” (p. 26). [8] Don Lavoie, “The Discovery and Interpretation of Profit Opportunities: Culture and the Kirznerian Entrepreneur,” in Culture and Economic Action, eds. Laura E. Grube and Virgil Henry Storr (Edward Elgar, 2015), 62-63. [9] Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker (HarperCollins, 2001), 18-19. [10] Jason Brennan, William English, John Hasnas, and Peter Jaworksi, Business Ethics for Better Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2021), Ch. 2. [11] See Eelke de Jong, “The influence of the market economy and economic freedom on culture,” in The Handbook of Research in Economic Freedom, (Niclas Berggren, ed.). Edward Elgar, 2024. [12] Joseph Henrich (ed.), Robert Boyd (ed.), Samuel Bowles (ed.), Colin Camerer (ed.), Ernst Fehr (ed.), Herbert Gintis (ed.). Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small Scale Societies. Oxford University Press, 2004. [13] David C. Rose, Why Culture Matters Most (Oxford University Press, 2018), 7. * Walker Wright is the manager of Academic Programs for a public policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to this role, he was a program manager for Academic & Student Programs with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Walker also spent a decade in logistics, working in both operations and linehaul departments. In Winter 2025, he became an adjunct faculty member at Brigham Young University-Idaho. (0 COMMENTS)

… [those] who score high on the authoritarianism scale agree that (italicized words are direct quotes from the scale) our country needs a mighty leader; that the leader should destroy opponents; that people should trust the judgment of the proper authorities, avoid listening to noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds, put some tough leaders in power who oppose those values and silence the trouble-makers, and smash the beliefs of opponents; that what our country needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush the evil; that society should strongly punish those they disagree with. They also deny that an opponent has a right to be wherever he or she wants to be, and support the statement that the country would be better off if certain groups would just shut up and accept their group’s proper place in society. —Luke Conway, Liberal Bullies: What Psychology Teaches Us About the Left’s Authoritarian Problem—and How to Fix It1, p. 160 In his book, Liberal Bullies, Luke Conway decries the illiberal conduct that can be found in the contemporary progressive movement. What differentiates his perspective from others who share his dislike for the behavior of radical progressives2 is his claim that personality psychology provides insight into authoritarianism and how to address it. In the aftermath of the Second World War, psychologists developed the theory that there is an authoritarian personality type. They wanted to understand the support for fascism in their day, and they assumed that authoritarianism was a characteristic of people with right-wing political beliefs. Psychologists eventually arrived at a scale that could be measured using a questionnaire. Someone who scores high on the authoritarian scale will have responses that reflect a belief that bad people need to be controlled, suppressed, and punished. What Conway and others have found is that high-scorers on the authoritarian scale are prevalent on the political left as well as on the right. They have been digging further to try to understand the authoritarian personality. Authoritarians tend to display what Conway calls intellectual apathy. When given a slightly challenging mental exercise (having nothing to do with politics), they tend to answer quickly, without the patience for finding the correct answer. They have cognitive rigidity. High-rigidity persons ignore evidence and rational argument; instead, they focus on lazy, quick-and-easy heuristics that are functionally irrelevant to the argument itself. p. 54 Conway argues that intellectual apathy and cognitive rigidity are contagious to some extent. Some of this is unconscious imitation. However, it also can be due to authoritarian repression of dissent. People just come to accept that it is wrong to question established narratives. Why should you bother listening to your opponents’ arguments when you can simply ignore them, knowing that they will be punished by an authority figure sooner or later? p. 59 Another authoritarian characteristic is an obsession with misinformation. Conway attributes this to an inability to handle ambiguity. In practice, many issues, such as whether COVID came from a lab leak or arose naturally, are contestable. Freedom of speech is necessary in order for people to have a chance to arrive at the best approximation of the truth. Someone who cannot tolerate ambiguity reacts to contestable situations by trying to shut down opposing views, labeling them as misinformation. Authoritarians really, really dislike uncertainty. The don’t like ambiguous ideas; they don’t like ambiguous poems; heck they don’t even like ambiguous pictures. p. 85 Conway cites a study that showed that people on either the political left or the political right who have a low tolerance for uncertainty respond to political debate in a more polarized fashion. Another study, which looked at the extent to which people admitted to “mixed feelings” about a topic, found that liberals were actually less likely than conservatives to manifest ambivalence. “[P]eople who cannot tolerate uncertainty are not only intolerant of what they perceive to be misinformation. They are more prone to believe misinformation themselves.” He points out that people who cannot tolerate uncertainty are not only intolerant of what they perceive to be misinformation. They are more prone to believe misinformation themselves. Conway argues that another characteristic of authoritarians is the use of double standards. They overlook authoritarian behavior on their own side while accusing the “other” side of authoritarianism for lesser transgressions. Another characteristic of authoritarians is what Conway calls simplicity. We did a linguistic analysis of over 6,000 people ourselves using many different linguistic variables, and for both left- and right-wingers, simple language was one of the most consistent predictors of authoritarianism. p. 128 What to do about authoritarianism? Conway says that the obvious answer is to fight intellectual apathy, intolerance of ambiguity, and other characteristics of the authoritarian. He argues that many people, perhaps most, are neither strongly authoritarian nor anti-authoritarian. Unfortunately, these moderates often find it easier to go along with authoritarians rather than take them on. I wonder if moderates who are unwilling to stand up for professors with unpopular viewpoints enable the radical authoritarianism that one finds on college campuses today. Conway says that resistance to authoritarianism can be self-defeating if it takes on authoritarian forms. I think that this was shown in the late stages of the U.S. Presidential election of 2024, which took place several months after his book appeared. In October, both sides made statements that sounded authoritarian to the other side. Conway asks, Do you want the temporary satisfaction of crushing you enemies or do you want your children to grow up in a free society? Because ultimately, you cannot have both. p. 239 In his final chapter, Conway offers a set of six principles for fighting authoritarianism. These principles, such as “win gracefully,” struck me as vague and general. What I was waiting for was a way to apply the insights of personality psychology. If authoritarianism is something that is ingrained in someone’s personality, then that suggests that to remain free we have to make a determined effort to identify and fend off the authoritarians. For more on these topics, see Fascism, by Sheldon Richman. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling). EconTalk. Anne Applebaum on the Twilight of Democracy. EconTalk. Conway seems to lean in the direction of believing that authoritarianism arises in people based on social context. If so, then how can we guide people away from intellectual apathy, intolerance for ambiguity, and tribal double standards? It seems to me that this used to be the function of education, especially higher education. That realm is where things have gone badly wrong, and where we need to focus if we are to fix things. Footnotes [1] Luke Conway, Liberal Bullies: What Psychology Teaches Us About the Left’s Authoritarian Problem—and How to Fix It. Pitchstone Publishing, 2024. [2] Fifteen years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism, in which he pointed out that in the 1920s liberalism and fascism resembled one another. Conway seems to be unaware of Goldberg’s book. Arguably, Goldberg foresaw the attraction of progressive ideology to someone with an authoritarian personality. You are welcome to go back and read my review, although it is not one of which I am particularly proud. Available online through the Wayback Archive, from TCS Daily, January 23, 2008. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

After every presidential election, including the most recent, the new majority wants to repeal a list of previous regimes’ policy enactments. Political observers always look to the next two years, wondering what to expect from the party in power. With the 2024 elections delivering unified Republican control of the national government, a lot of attention is on the White House and how Donald Trump will use executive orders and other administrative actions. But what about the legislative branch? Specifically, will Trump and his Republican allies in Congress succeed in their effort to reverse laws enacted by prior congresses? From the Affordable Care Act and CHIPS to the Inflation Reduction Act and others, Republicans have promised to repeal several laws enacted by prior Democratic congresses. According to conventional wisdom, when one party wins control of the White House and Congress, they quickly dismantle the policies enacted by their rivals. Such a view is central to how politicians and pundits discuss elections and policy outcomes. On the one hand, candidates often campaign on a promise to reverse the laws enacted by their rivals. On the other hand, we often think of the two parties as unified teams engaged in a tug of war over the nation’s policies. I argue the conventional wisdom is not so simple and that Republicans will find it surprisingly difficult to repeal Democratic laws enacted by prior congresses. A large portion of what follows is based on my book with Nate Birkhead Congress in Reverse: Repeals from Reconstruction to the Present published in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Our book is the first to examine when and why repeals occur. Although volumes have been written about law creation, few examine the opposite: efforts to undo legislation. What little exists has explored federal programs and reauthorization efforts (Berry, Burden, and Howell 2010), the survivability of general interest reforms (Leighton and Lopez 2013; Patashnik 2008), and amendments (Adler and Wilkerson 2012). Repeals Are Difficult If there is one central thesis in our book, it is that repealing legislation is not simply the mirror opposite of enacting legislation. Although they face the same constitutional and procedural requirements, repeals are different in that they are uniquely difficult to enact. We are certainly not the first to note the challenges of repeals. For example, Bryan Caplan made this very point in a 2021 EconLog post appropriately titled “The Apologies of Repeal.”1 What is novel about our book, however, it that it draws on theoretical work in both political science and economics to understand why this is true. Specifically, our thinking is heavily informed by the public choice tradition (for an overview see James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Rowley 2004) and our theory has three components. First, enacting a new law gives lawmakers considerable flexibility over the location of the policy outcome, which is advantageous when trying to build a majority to support a bill. Notably, this flexibility allows lawmakers to engage in log rolling—where members trade votes to ensure the passage of their preferred legislation. Simply put, flexibility over the location of the policy outcome and the opportunity to engage in log rolling allows for the passage of legislation by a diverse coalition of lawmakers. But when it comes to repealing a law, the range of policy choices is limited at the outset. Strictly speaking, a repeal can result in either failed negotiation, which preserves the status quo, or a known reversion point: the policy before the law was enacted. Opportunities to log roll and build a winning coalition are heavily constrained when the vote is essentially take-it-or-leave-it. Second, laws often exhibit a feature known as “path dependency” (Pierson 1994). Path dependency posits that after a sufficient time elapses, policies become entrenched and thus difficult to undo. Public choice reasoning plays a role here as well. New laws often create interest groups that have a stake in the law’s continuation, resulting in opportunities for rent seeking (for an overview see Tullock and Rowley 2005). Lobbying is an example of rent seeking (Tullock 1967), and in this context, groups that benefit from a new law will work hard to resist repeal efforts. At the same time, new laws often activate citizens that will oppose the “loss” of a government benefit (Tversky and Kahneman 1991). A classic example is social welfare legislation, better known as entitlement programs. House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously called social security the “third rail” of politics saying: “touch it and you die.” Passing new legislation is made easier because the benefits often accrue to a concentrated group of actors who push hard for the proposal while the costs are distributed widely across society (Olson 1965). Social welfare policy is a classic example yet again—a small subset of the population enjoys substantial benefits while the costs are paid by the population as a whole. Reversing this calculation with a repeal is no recipe for success and can cause a backlash among voters. Indeed, a repeal may result in “concentrated costs and diffuse benefits.” A third reason why repeals are difficult is party politics and our constitutional system. A canonical view in the literature is that parties work to develop ownership over certain issues (Cox and McCubbins 2005). As a theoretical matter, a party’s “brand” serves as a public good: when one party gains ownership over an issue, every member of the party benefits in the next election from their collective reputation in that domain (Aldrich 1995). What happens when lawmakers try to repeal part of the other party’s brand? Logically, the party that created the law will resist such efforts, irrespective of whether the policy change will result in better legislation or fix a defective statute. Doing so maintains the party’s commitment to that policy while simultaneously denying the rival party a “win” in the next election. Given that America’s political institutions have a strong status quo bias, the group seeking to block some action have a big advantage. A simple empirical exercise helps validate our core claim about the challenges of passing repeals. For our research, Nate and I examined every bill introduced in Congress over a 60-year period, classifying each based on whether it was (1) a reauthorization, (2) an amendment, (3) an appropriation bill, or (4) a repeal. Critically, each has some bearing on an existing policy or statute. We then created a final category for bills that have no obvious effect on an existing law; we call this fifth type a “new law” for simplicity. Of the five types of legislation in our sample, repeals are the least likely to pass either chamber and are also less likely to be ultimately enacted into law (controlling for numerous other features of the bill in question). Repeals Are Partisan What, then, explains when and why repeals succeed? Our book proposes that repeals are best explained by partisan theories of lawmaking. As a starting point, it certainly helps if one party has unified control of the federal government. It perhaps goes without saying, but one-party rule removes a key veto point from the legislative process. However, other veto points and obstacles remain, and in our analysis, unified government is only a weak predictor of repeal success. Far more important are two other factors: (1) whether the party in power is ideologically cohesive and (2) whether the party in power is newly ascendant. By “ideological cohesion,” we mean if the majority has few internal factions. Although there are aways ideological divisions within parties, for example policy differences between conservative Blue Dog Democrats and the progressive wing, some factional policy disputes are more intense than others. Our measure of cohesion is based on how often members of the same party vote against one another over a two year congress. Ideological cohesion is important for two reasons. First, and most obvious, when the majority is cohesive, less time is wasted managing internal disagreements. Second, with ideological cohesion the caucus can be expected to empower their leaders to set the agenda, exploit the chamber’s institutional rules and procedures, and compel members to support the party’s policy goals (Rohde 1991). When a party is ideologically diverse, however, the rank-and-file will be less likely to delegate power to party leaders. Our second key partisan factor is whether the majority is newly ascendant. By “newly ascendant” we mean the majority party won control of Congress after a long period out of power. Due to the fact they were in the minority for a considerable length of time, there will be a backlog of policies the new majority wants to reverse (Dodd 1986). Furthermore, newly ascendant majorities often campaign on repealing statutes enacted by their previously entrenched rival which further incentives the rank-and-file to empower party leaders (Rohde, Stigliz and Weingast n.d). For a good example of when these two conditions are met, consider the three Republican congresses from 1995 to 1999 (the 104th, 105th, and 106th congresses). In the 1994 midterm the GOP won control of both chambers for the first time in nearly 50 years. Not only did the election give Republicans control of Congress, but the caucus shifted sharply to the right after that election. Pundits referred to this era as the “Republican Revolution.” Being newly ascendant and more ideologically conservative, the GOP rank and file empowered Speaker Newt Gingrich and his allies to act decisively on the party’s priorities. In the end, the GOP succeeded in repealing several landmark laws—Glass-Steagall, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and the National Maximum Speed Law. A somewhat optimistic view of repeals is that they are sincere efforts to “fix” policies by repealing defective laws. Unlike the partisan factors in our analysis, we find little evidence that repeals are explained by genuine problem-solving efforts. Although lawmakers often say they want to repeal bad legislation, we view these claims as cheap talk designed to obscure their partisan and ideological motivations. “[P]olitical actors are self-interested agents focused on their own priorities rather than altruists interested in the greater good. We think this is an apt characterization of when and why repeals occur.” On this last point our results once again fit within the public choice tradition. James Buchanan famously referred to public choice as “politics without romance.” By this he meant that lawmakers, bureaucrats, and other government officials behave just like private citizens when making market decisions (for an overview see Buchanan et al. 1999). Simply put—political actors are self-interested agents focused on their own priorities rather than altruists interested in the greater good. We think this is an apt characterization of when and why repeals occur. What to Expect in the 119th Congress? Our book suggests that repeals will be difficult to enact in the 119th Congresses. Although there will certainly be some, it is likely that those repeals will be relatively minor compared to what Republican candidates—including Trump himself—promised during the 2024 campaign. Let’s start with the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare.” When the GOP last won unified government after the 2016 election, they failed to repeal the law despite campaigning on the issue for roughly a decade. Instead, Republican lawmakers were able to amend a key element of the law—the individual mandate—making the penalty for not having insurance $0. Although the Republican caucus is probably more ideologically cohesive heading into the 119th Congress, they do not meet the second condition of being a newly ascendant majority. Not only did they have unified control six years ago, but they were already the House majority coming into the 2024 elections. Equally if not more important is the fact that the ACA is more entrenched now than it was in 2017. No doubt this is why far fewer Republicans are talking about repeal headed into the 119th Congress. However, some commentators have suggested the GOP might repeal a specific aspect of the law: the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Under the ACA states can expand Medicaid up to 138 percent of the poverty level, with the federal government covering a large portion of the cost. Although repealing the Medicaid expansion is certainly possible, the challenge is that doing so would result in “concentrated costs and diffuse benefits.” Critically, these costs would be paid by residents of several red states that expanded Medicaid in recent years. Since 2020, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma, North Carolina and South Dakota all expanded coverage. Modest tweaks to the ACA are more likely in the next Congress. Other possible targets in the 119th Congress are the CHIPS and IRA laws. CHIPS (short for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) provides billions in financial incentives for companies that manufacture semiconductors in the United States. On the campaign trail Trump called CHIPS a “disaster” while House Speaker Mike Johnson at one point claimed Republicans “probably will” try to repeal the newly enacted law. With the IRA (short for Inflation Reduction Act), Trump said during the campaign that he would work to “terminate the green new scam,” referring to the law’s subsidies that go toward the domestic production of clean energy technologies. And yet both laws have a good chance of surviving in the next Congress, even though virtually all Republicans voted against them a few years ago. Why? Unlike the ACA, neither CHIPS nor the IRA are entrenched laws, being only a couple years old. And yet three things make wholesale repeal difficult. First, both have the backing of powerful interest groups whose supporters stand to lose billions in federal subsidies. For example, Intel is one of the largest beneficiaries of CHIPS financing, receiving an estimated $8.5 billion in federal dollars. Second, beneath the surface both issues divide the GOP on ideological grounds. As a matter of policy, some Republicans support subsidies that bring manufacturing back to the United States, particularly when it involves technology and/or national security. And yet other Republicans are opposed to what they see as wasteful federal spending and a disruption of market incentives. A third factor is the location of the benefits: many Republicans represent districts whose constituents benefit from subsidies in the two laws. For example, last fall 18 House Republicans signed a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson asking him not to “prematurely” repeal energy tax credits in the IRA. Notably, these Republicans represent districts with companies that receive substantial clean energies subsidies under the law. Lawmakers care about reelection above all else, and so some will oppose repeal to ensure their own political survival. Looking beyond the 119th Congress, if core elements of CHIPS and the IRA do indeed survive, the probability of repeal in the 120th Congress (2027-28) and subsequent congresses drops dramatically. Indeed, our book shows that repeals are most likely within a ten-year window post passage. After this ten-year window closes, however, the probability of repeal drops dramatically as policies become entrenched. In other words, if repeal does not occur in the next Congress, the subsidies and other aspects of these two laws will become extraordinarily difficult to reverse in the future. One consequence of this policy entrenchment is what many have called layering—the long-term buildup of federal legislation. It is well known that since World War II the national government has expanded its reach into virtually every aspect of American life (Baumgartner and Jones 2015). Although repeals do indeed occur in every Congress, their volume is tiny in comparison to the number of new statutes enacted. Not only has resulted in a complex and inefficient policy environment, but it has caused Congress to delegate its constitutional powers to the executive branch (Jones, Whyman, and Theriault 2019). Both are concerning observers across the political spectrum. For more on these topics, see An Animal That Trades. Econlib Video Series on Adam Smith. “Adam Smith on Capitalism and the Common Good,” by Erik Matson. Library of Economics and Liberty, December 7, 2020. Will DOGE and Musk Make a Difference? (with Michael Munger). EconTalk. Finally, it is important to offer a key caveat about the above—this piece is about repeals and not other forms of policy change. Needless to say, there are many ways to “undo” laws, programs, and policies. As President, Donald Trump can change policy with administrative action. For example, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or “DOGE,” headed by Elon Musk may be able to significantly alter national policy through regulatory recissions and a reduction in administrative staff. Likewise, the Trump tariffs and deportation plan would certainly be a reversal in national policy without needing a repeal of existing legislation. Trump may also repeal Biden’s student loan forgiveness program with executive action alone. Finally, the Congress can effectively “repeal” legislation by amending activity, defunding, or failing to reauthorize a program. But when it comes to formally repealing deeply entrenched federal legislation, the smart money is on these policies continuing in some form. References Adler, E. Scott, and John D. Wilkerson. 2012. Congress and The Politics of Problem Solving. Cambridge University Press. Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why Parties?: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. 2015. “The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America.” Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Berry, Christopher R., Barry C. Burden, and William G. Howell. 2010. “The President and the Distribution of Federal Spending.” American Political Science Review 104(4): 783-799. Buchanan, James M., Geoffrey Brennan, Hartmut Kliemt, and Robert D. Tollison. 1999. The Collected Works of James Buchanan, Volume 1, The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty. Liberty Fund. Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent. Volume 3. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Buchanan, James M., Gordon Tullock, and Charles K. Rowley. 2004. The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, Volume 2, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Liberty Fund. Caplan, Bryan. 2021, June 15. “The Apologies of Repeal” EconLog. Available online at: https://www.econlib.org/the-apologies-of-repeal/ Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. 2005. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the US House of Representatives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dodd, Lawrence C. 1986. “The Cycles of Legislative Change.” In Political Science: the Science of Politics, ed. Herbert Weisberg. New York: Agathon press, 82-104. Jones, Bryan D., Sean M. Theriault, and Michelle Whyman. 2019. The Great Broadening How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leighton, Wayne A., and Edward J. Lopez. 2012. “Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change.” Stanford: Stanford University Press. Olson, Mancur. 1965. “Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.” Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Patashnik, Eric M. 2008. Reforms at Risk Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pierson, Paul. 1994. Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rohde, David W. 1991. Parties and Leaders in the Post Reform House Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rohde, David W., Edward H. Stiglitz, Barry R. Weingast, 2013. “Dynamic Theory of Congressional Organization.” Unpublished manuscript. Tullock, Gordon. 1967. “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs. Monopolies, and Theft.” Western Economic Journal 5(3): 224-232. Tullock, Gordon, and Charles K. Rowley. 2005. The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, Volume 5, The Rent Seeking Society. Liberty Fund. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. 1991. “Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 106(4): 1039-1061. [1] The Apologies of Repeal, by Bryan Caplan. EconLog, June 15, 2021. This article was edited by Features Editor Ed Lopez. *Jordan Ragusa is a professor in the political science department at the College of Charleston. His research focuses on several intersecting topics: American and South Carolina politics, the Congress, political parties, elections, political economy, and statistical methods for the social sciences.  He is the author of two books: Congress in Reverse: Repeals from Reconstruction to the Present and First in the South: Why the South Carolina Presidential Primary Matters. (0 COMMENTS)

  Within a decade, however, both elements of the tax-swap bargain collapsed. Congress quickly discovered that income taxes yielded far more revenue than the old tariff system they replaced. To pay for U.S. entry into World War I, they jacked the top marginal rate up to 77 percent in 1918. Attempts to bring the income tax under control succeeded briefly in the 1920s, but President Hoover raised the top rate to 63 percent and Franklin Roosevelt raised it to 79 percent. Under FDR, Congress also reduced the exemption threshold for lower-income earners. What started as a low “class tax”—a tax on only very high-income earners in 1913—became, by 1942, a “mass tax,” a broad-based tax on most American families. When Congress flipped back to the protectionist-dominated Republican Party in 1920, it restored the average tariff rate to 38 percent. In 1930, Congress again opened its doors to industries seeking government protection from the stock market crash. Its intended “stimulus” became the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which jacked average rates up to 59 percent and instigated a global trade war. The damages from the collapse of this original tax swap took decades to disentangle. Congress recognized its error and ceded its trade policy oversight to the State Department in 1934 as an emergency measure to bypass the tariff system. The liberalization of the global economy since World War II came about through treaties and trade agreements. These measures remain fragile, and they depend on an executive branch that continues to honor international agreements. If Trump abandons our free trade obligations with other countries, the Smoot-Hawley schedule still remains on the books. This is from David R. Henderson and Phillip W. Magness, “Don’t Substitute Tariffs for Income Taxes: You’ll Get Both,” National Review, January 28, 2025. Read the whole thing, which is not long. (0 COMMENTS)