Tweet 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 in ..read more

Tweet Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal: Editor: Attempting to defend her agency’s ban on noncompete clauses, FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan proclaims that “robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms” (“FTC Bans Noncompete Clauses That Restrict Job Switching,” April 23). Ms. Khan has mastered Newspeak. Noncompete clauses are contractual terms negotiated between employers and employees. Employers who offer noncompete clauses no more ‘rob’ employees who agree to these clauses of their economic liberties than do employees who agree to these clauses ..read more

Tweet … is from page 2 of Douglas Irwin’s excellent 1996 monograph Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy: Exports and imports are inherently interdependent, and any policy that reduces one will also reduce the other. DBx: Doug here relates an elementary truth of economics – yet a truth overwhelmingly ignored by pundits and politicians. How many are the pundits and politicians in America who assert that the U.S. trade deficit can be reduced or even eliminated with higher tariffs and other barriers on American imports more onerous restrictions on Americans seeking to purchase foreign-made g ..read more

Tweet The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries the ‘progressive’ monoculture on (especially ‘elite’) U.S. campuses – a monoculture that today is increasingly openly antisemitic. Two slices: Many protesters on and near campus wear masks or kaffiyehs to disguise their identities. Students have to walk through a gauntlet to get to class. The protesters carry banners calling to “Honor the Martyrs of Palestine” and a sign pointing to pro-Israel counterprotesters as “al-Qasam’s next targets.” Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas. That’s a call to kill Jews. ….. This crisis in libe ..read more

Tweet … is from pages 342-343 of A. James Meigs’s Fall 1988 Cato Journal paper, “Dollars and Deficits: Substituting False for Real Problems,” as this paper appears as chapter 14 of Dollars, Deficits, & Trade (James A. Dorn and William A. Niskanen, eds., 1989): 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 ..read more

Tweet … is a statement made by my Nobel-laureate emeritus colleague Vernon Smith when he was interviewed recently by National Review‘s Jay Nordlinger: The reason you’re producing something is that someone wants to consume it, and if there’s no consumption, there’s no production. DBx: Indeed. And so when advocates of tariffs and industrial policy assert that they want to elevate production over consumption, they are talking gibberish, as the former occurs only insofar as it enables the latter. The post Bonus Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek ..read more

Tweet Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady decries “the Biden-Trump trade war with Mexico.” Two slices: American politicians on both sides of the aisle seem eager to conflate Chinese EV production in Mexico with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. The idea is to denounce anything made in Mexico, as if the U.S.’s southern neighbor and one of its largest trading partners is an enemy. This is a sop to Big Labor and to the grievance brigades in swing states who pine for the protectionism of the 1980s. It’s also dishonest and dangerous and threatens to drag the U.S. econom ..read more

Tweet … is from Royall Brandis’s review, in the January 1979 Southern Economic Journal, of Charles Lindblom’s Politics and Markets: 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. The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek ..read more

Tweet … is from page 55 of the great economic historian T.S. Ashton’s 1951 paper “The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians,” which is chapter 1 of the 1954 volume edited by Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians: Ignorance of the elements of economic theory led historians to give political interpretations to every favorable trend. In scores of books the improvement in conditions of labor in the nineteenth century has been attributed to factory legislation; in hardly any is it pointed out that rising productivity of male labor had something to do with the decline in the number of children expl ..read more

Tweet GMU Econ alum Lawrence McQuillan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains the latest move to reduce the supply of housing in California. Two slices: One California proposal, Assembly Bill 2584, recently introduced by San Jose Democrat Alex Lee, would establish a quota system, banning “institutional investors that own more than 1,000 single-family homes from purchasing additional properties and converting them into rentals.” A second proposal, Senate Bill 1212, introduced by Berkeley Democrat Nancy Skinner, would prevent hedge funds and “other corporate investment entities” from bu ..read more