Tweet … is from page 716 of the late Paul Heyne’s excellent Winter 1983/84 Cato Journal article, “Do Trade Deficits Matter?” (ellipses original to Heyne; footnote deleted: I think Adam Smith was right. “Nothing … can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.” It is a concept originally devised and promulgated by merchants in order to promote their special interests under the pretense of protecting the national interest, And a government that tries to watch over the balance of trade has embarked upon a task that is intricate, embarrassing, and fruitless. The post Bonus ..read more

Tweet Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Glenn Hubbard calls for putting economic growth back on the policy agenda. Two slices: In a campaign season dominated by the past, a central economic topic is missing: growth. Rapid productivity growth raises living standards and incomes. Resources from those higher incomes can boost support for public goods such as national defense and education, or can reconfigure supply chains or shore up social insurance programs. A society without growth requires someone to be worse off for you to be better off. Growth breaks that zero-sum link, making it a poli ..read more

Tweet … is from Leslie Ford’s April 19th, 2011, essay “Paul Revere Sounded the Alarm and At Lexington They Stood”: The colonists understood their obligation to defend their families, their homes, and their town. Fathers and sons, young and old, the men of Lexington were the first to pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. They hoped to prevent a war, but they would not surrender their liberties. It was their duty and so they stood. DBx: One year from today will be the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Haye ..read more

Tweet Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal: Editor: You report that, in response to Google’s firing of 28 workers who protested that company’s affiliation with the Israeli government, a spokeswoman for the group that organized the protests said about the firings that “this flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers – the ones who create real value for executives and shareholders” (“Google Fires 28 Employees for Protesting Company’s Cloud Deal With Israel,” Ap ..read more

Tweet George Will continues to warn of the dire consequences of the U.S. government’s worsening fiscal incontinence. Two slices: This nation, tobogganing swiftly down a steep slope of fiscal irresponsibility, barely notices a blur of alarming milestones. Last week, we sped past this one: A $1.1 trillion deficit in the first six months of fiscal year 2024 that began Oct. 1 resulted in almost as many dollars spent on debt service ($429 billion) as on defense ($433 billion) This, at the most menacing geopolitical moment since 1945, makes one hope that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was radicall ..read more

Tweet … is from page 291 of GMU Econ alum Liya Palagashvili’s superb 2024 paper “Dynamic Pricing Can Benefit Consumers,” which is chapter 24 in The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy (Ryan A. Bourne, ed., 2024): A counterintuitive point here is that sharp price increases associated with high-demand periods provide a signal to improve long-term supply too. Just as surge pricing for rideshares at the end of a baseball game encourages more drivers both now and after future sporting events, the price signal from a bowling alley being fu ..read more

Tweet In my latest column for AIER, I argue that the all-volunteer nature of the U.S. military ensures that the burden of America’s military provision falls where it belongs – on taxpayers rather than on military personnel. (Well, by not falling on soldiers and sailors this burden falls closer to where it belongs; because today’s citizens-taxpayers use deficit financing to push off onto future citizens-taxpayers much of the cost of providing government outputs and services, some people – tomorrow’s citizens-taxpayers – are indeed unjustly burdened with a large chunk of the cost of providing f ..read more

Tweet Although I detest everything about the NatCon ‘philosophy,’ I’m proud to be among the signers of this letter denouncing the effort to prevent NatCons from speaking in Brussels. Writing on this illiberal effort to silence the illiberal NatCons is the thankfully liberal Stephanie Slade. Tom Palmer makes the moral case for globalization. Four slices: To seriously consider globalization, it’s best to avoid definitions that contain the conclusions of complex arguments. A fruitful discussion of globalization requires a nonmoralized and operational use of the term. The definition is ..read more

Tweet … is from page 422 of Robert Bork’s masterful 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox: Competition in open markets reflects the ideal of equality of opportunity, while antitrust’s longstanding and growing concern for the small and less efficient reflects a preference for equality of outcome. Outcomes are not equal in open competition, hence the pressure for more intervention by law. Nor can equality of outcome be achieved by making the slow faster, that being beyond the powers of legal compulsion, but only by holding the faster back. DBx: In part because of the influence of Bork’s work, anti ..read more

Tweet Richard Epstein and John Yoo call upon the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Honolulu’s unlawful assault on oil producers. A slice: Federal courts have limited the Biden administration’s authority to set nationwide standards regulating emissions from power plants. But some cities and states are pushing to meet stringent climate goals by other means. In October, the Hawaii Supreme Court allowed the city and county of Honolulu, along with the local water utility board, to claim that oil and gas companies failed to disclose the risks their products posed to the environment. As a result, the suit ..read more