The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the defining-down of free speech on campus. A slice:
Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment and protests have included physical intimidation of Jewish students and antisemitic declarations. In October 2023, 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who had flooded the campus in support of Hamas’s “military action” on Oct. 7. Columbia has every right to restrict speech or actions that threaten other students.
Protesters also don’t have a “right” to assemble on school property to disrupt the functioning of the university or intimidate students on the way to class. Even at a public university, all these rules would constitute reasonable restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech.
Luther Ray Abel is right to harshly criticize the “ingrates at the ivy-laden gates.” A slice:
For all the disgust I feel for the views of these students — students who are wrong on the facts about Israel as well as wicked in their treatment of their Jewish peers who have nothing to do with that country a world away — I can’t help but pity them. The adults failed these students. No one loved these young people enough to tell them that they were making fools of themselves and to shut up, get back inside, and go to class. Worse, when a few adults finally did try to establish order and enforce consequences, the faculty rushed in to defend and coddle the agitators.
GMU Econ alum Jon Murphy explains why plagiarism matters – and, thus, why it must be fought.
Phil Gramm and Mike Solon reveal who pays corporate taxes. A slice:
In his call for Congress to repeal the 2017 tax cuts and increase corporate tax rates, President Biden asked: “Are we going to continue with an economy where the overwhelming share of the benefits go to big corporations and the very wealthy?” Rep. Richard Neal, ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said that extending the tax cuts will do nothing but fill “the pockets of venture capitalists and some business owners.” President Obama’s top economist, Austan Goolsbee, said that debates over who pays the corporate tax are “an argument about whether making corporations pay more income taxes would trickle down into lower workers’ wages.”
But as John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things. Seven years into the weakest recovery in postwar history, as the economy slumped toward a recession, the 2017 tax cuts and the Trump administration’s regulatory relief sent real median household income soaring by $5,220 in 2019. That’s 49% higher than the previous highest annual gain in 2015 and 11 times the average percentage gain over the previous 50 years. Real median income rose more in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2019 alone than during the entire Obama recovery from 2009-16. The poverty level plunged at the fastest rate since 1966, to the lowest level since the Census Bureau started collecting the data in 1959.
The lowest income quintile saw its average real income rise by 9.4% in 2019, the year after the tax cut took effect. The second quintile (7.4%), middle quintile (6.9%) and fourth quintile (7.8%) all experienced the largest annual income growth in more than a half-century, and the top quintile (7.2%) had its second-highest income growth. The poverty rate in 2019 was the lowest ever recorded for every category, including individuals, families, unmarried women, blacks, Hispanics and children.
Paul Schwennesen reports that the rich – and everyone else – are getting richer. A slice:
Percy Bysshe Shelley (whose wife Mary famously penned Frankenstein) is credited with first coining the aphorism “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,” which was itself a riff on the Biblical parable of the talents in Matthew 25:29 which made much the same point. Leading a tumultuous life plagued by debts to many of his close ties within the English gentry, Shelley’s jaundiced view may say more about him than the situation at large in Georgian England. Indeed, by the mid-1800s, England was well on its way toward the phenomenal increases in wealth brought about by the Industrial Revolution and trade liberalization.
Economic historian R. M. Hartwell writes that, based on a number of factors, not only was average per capita income on the rise but that “the real wages of the majority of English workers were rising in the years 1800-1850.” The rich, in other words, were certainly getting richer, but so indeed were the poor. The widely held perception, however—a perception that helped popularize Shelley’s quip—was not so neatly aligned with facts. Large numbers of the working poor felt themselves shabbily treated in the unequal distribution of gains, and early socialists leapt to condemn what ought have to been more soberly recognized as a collective win.
John O. McGinnis sums up the state. A slice:
We know from studies that bureaucrats are very largely left-liberal Democrats. The bureaucracy holds views about the common good that are uncommon and distinctly uncongenial to the New Right.
Empowering the government to regulate big tech, for instance, may actually make it harder for conservatives to get out unorthodox views on social media. One reason that tech companies engage in content moderation at the behest of government is fear that government power will be used against them in the future if they do not comply. And the bureaucrats who control the day-to-day operation of that power are hostile to the New Right.
It is true that the bureaucracy is subject to political control, but that control is imperfect as political appointees must compromise with the bureaucracy to get things done. And thus, the bureaucracy has an enduring influence, even when (as will not always be the case in a two-party system) the President is sympathetic to the New Right.
Gary Galles cautions against underestimating the creative power of people operating in free markets.
First, we must understand the environment of economic competition that’s the background for this case and the players involved. Market competition is a dynamic process whereby firms seek to gain market share by continued efforts to improve the goods and services they offer, while keeping costs and prices down. If a firm does this well, its market share will likely increase, and the number of competitors may decrease. In technology platform markets, providing consumers with low-priced and high-quality goods and services that are continually being improved by innovation is best achieved by developing and offering a system of complementary products. Firms choose a business model based on what they discover about consumer preferences, often competing by emphasizing different mixes of benefits because of heterogeneity in consumer preferences. Some consumers prefer the more open ecosystem offered by Android phones, while other prefer the more closed iOS ecosystem. Consumers make tradeoffs between price, quality and other attributes such as data privacy.
But, shockingly, against all this apparent common sense and ethical appeal, the labor theory of value is wholly mistaken as a matter of economics. It’s deeply screwy, scientifically, and evil in its ethics.
Exports and imports are inherently interdependent, and any policy that reduces one will also reduce the other.
Advocates of reducing the U.S. trade deficit should realize that doing so would also reduce the inflow of capital from abroad. Do we really want to do that? If so, why? U.S. governors and mayors who now go to Europe and Japan with delegations of boosters to attract investors may not have heard that they might be boosting the trade deficit by encouraging capital inflows.
The reason you’re producing something is that someone wants to consume it, and if there’s no consumption, there’s no production.
The naiveté is really a little sad. It is also a travesty on social science. One feels that the author simply does not comprehend the importance of the ideas of freedom of thought and of the inviolability of the individual. Any real world system or hypothetical model which rejects that theme represents retrogression, not advance, on mankind’s long path to a truly civilized society.
