Some Links
David Henderson explains why trade should be free. A slice:
Indeed, most shifts in employment are caused by technological change. When I was a full-time economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, I taught this point by showing the students a table of the number of US long-distance phone calls made in 1970 (9.8 billion) and 1996 (94.9 billion), along with the number of calls per day per operator (64 in 1970 and 1,585 in 1996). I told them that I wouldn’t reveal the title of the table until we were finished. I also showed the amount of time a typical worker needed to work to pay for a five-minute call (2/3 of an hour in 1970 versus 1/8 of an hour in 1996). The difference is due to technological change, which automated the process and saved on operator time. I then showed them the number of operators who would have been required to handle the number of calls made in 1996 if there had been no technological change versus the actual number required: 4.1 million operators versus the actual 164,000. (Of course, this is a little artificial: if the technological change hadn’t occurred, the price wouldn’t have fallen, and people would have made way fewer than 94.9 billion calls. But I was making a broader point.)
I then told them the title of the table: Why We Have Starbucks. I pointed out that a lot of the people who would have had jobs as telephone operators if technological improvements hadn’t occurred were freed up to get jobs at Starbucks, Peet’s, and other coffee shops.
That’s the story of technological change. It also explains how we get increasing well-being. We produce more and more using the same number of people. If we didn’t, an economy would stagnate.
Mike Munger busts five myths about tariffs. Two slices:
The US government could tax people, and then pay subsidies to producers it likes, and whose unions will support them at the ballot box. Tariffs do the same thing, but trade protection “cuts out the middleman”! Instead of the government taxing consumers, and then giving the money to favored producers, the government forces consumers to give an artificial bonus to domestic producers directly, in the form of higher prices caused by foreclosed competition from abroad.
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The poorly informed arguments for trade protection remind me of the fifth, or twentieth, movies in the Terminator series: you think the monster is dead, but it seemingly can’t be killed, only suppressed until the next bad movie. Given the tightly focused political and economic benefits, targeted on key industries or powerful labor groups, perhaps this is understandable. I have tried to outline five of the most egregious myths, because there is no reason to be taken in by old, debunked claims.
Let’s remember that economic freedom isn’t about abstract ideology — it’s about real people enduring the consequences of real choices made by government officials about their lives. The index doesn’t just measure economic statistics; it measures human potential, and that’s something worth protecting.
Trump is one of the worst people ever to become president — crude, bigoted, unhinged, paranoid, egomaniacal. He lies, fabricates, and hurls accusations with abandon. He regards any opposition as intolerable, and describes his critics as enemies who should be prosecuted or suppressed.
As president Trump engendered such a carnival of chaos and conspiracy-mongering that many of his top advisers and Cabinet secretaries resigned in disgust. He is the first president in history who not only refused to accept the results of an election he lost but incited a mob to “stop the steal.” I shudder to think of the policies a second Trump presidency would bring, from the deportation of millions of peaceful immigrants to a ruinous trade war to the abandonment of Ukraine. I could never vote for that.
And Harris? She may not be as erratic and vulgar as her opponent, but she is singularly unimpressive, uninformed, and unserious. As vice president, she was distinguished only for what The Atlantic called “top-to-bottom dysfunction” among her staff and the incompetence with which she handled her role as the administration’s point person on the migrant crisis. Her frequent retreat into gibberish and inanities was cringe-inducing even before she became the Democratic nominee.
Harris won’t answer the most basic questions about the policies she would pursue.
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With Trump and Harris heading their respective tickets, disillusionment with our political system may be at a peak. The proper response to that disillusionment is not to tell citizens they must vote, even if it means picking a candidate or party they cannot abide. My fervent hope is that millions of other citizens will, like me, refuse to help elect candidates who are unfit for the job. Not voting is always a legitimate choice. This year it’s the best choice.
Payments from government entitlement programs — transfer payments — are the fastest-growing major component of citizens’ personal income. Such transfers are the third-largest source of personal income: In 2022, the average citizen received almost as much from government transfers ($11,500) as from investments ($12,900), and more than one-quarter as much money as was obtained from work. This average citizen received six times more (adjusted for inflation) in government transfer payments than in 1970, during which span income from other sources increased less than half as much. Transfers’ share of total (inflation-adjusted) personal income has more than doubled since 1970, from 8.2 percent to 17.6 percent in 2022.
Ethan Yang ponders Adam Smith and antitrust.
This event at the Cato Institute promises to be great.
“Britain’s new Labour government whacks the middle class.” A slice:
Labour is taxing middle-class wages because that’s where the money is to pay for its extravagant spending promises. This is an epic political bait-and-switch, as British voters thought they were voting for taxes on “the rich.” Their American cousins have been warned.
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