Some Links
David Henderson reminds us of GMU Econ alum Ben Powell’s splendid essay on the first Thanksgiving.
The distorted priorities of American academia often have roots in the federal government. The National Institutes of Health pours millions of dollars into universities for large-scale hiring efforts based on diversity, equity and inclusion. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, can put an end to it.
The NIH’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First, bars universities who receive its grants from hiring on the basis of race, but my reporting shows that many schools do it anyway. In one galling example, a grant recipient stated bluntly via email: “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.” The First program is modeled on the NIH’s own “distinguished scholars program.” Through a Freedom of Information Act request, I acquired records that show how the NIH makes these selections. Application reviewers repeatedly highlight candidates’ sex and minority status and favor those fluent in the vocabulary of progressive identity politics.
Almost every single person who attended and participated in the Great Barrington Declaration conference in October 2020 faced professional harm for their involvement. The three principle authors – Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta – incurred a full organized vilification on multiple fronts, as did Scott Atlas for facilitating their meeting the next day with the HHS secretary. We only learned later that Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci were personally involved in launching a campaign to suppress the document’s message by smearing its authors. As this example and others like it revealed, our own government was a primary instigator of the adversity in the months and years that followed.
The dozen or so of us who were there in attendance all faced similar hardships of varying degrees. Almost all were ostracized by former friends and colleagues across multiple professions and settings. Some lost their jobs over it, or found their career trajectories upended. Some of us discovered that people we thought we could depend on were not so dependable after all, and fled from the slightest controversy.
I believe every one of us faced harassment and abuse of some sort. Motives were disparaged and reputations were defamed. Social media accounts were targeted for censorship. Some faced organized harassment campaigns to target their livelihoods and scholarly freedom. More than a few received credible death threats that necessitated getting law enforcement involved, myself included. And most who were there have had significant changes in their lives because of it.
And as I think back to that moment in 2020, I cannot help but conclude that the worst of it traced back to the moment that Collins and Fauci signaled to the media and their followers in the public that anyone involved in the GBD was deserving of a “take down.” It certainly served as an accelerant to the worst impulses of our critics.
Almost 4 years later, I think we can now say the tide has turned. Fauci is gone and his reputation is in tatters. The Covidian fanatics of the press and academia have had been discredited, and are rightly viewed with suspicion by the majority of the public. And now the work is beginning on the long task ahead of rebuilding trust in public health – a trust that the Covid regime obliterated through their own disastrous actions.
Arnold Kling offers three short thoughts on “Trump transition issues.”
GMU Scalia Law professor Michael Greve assesses “the state of competitive federalism.”
GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino writes insightfully about the welfare state. A slice:
The Wealth of Nations is primarily a book about the division of labor. That’s Smith’s answer to the title question: Nations become wealthy because of specialization and trade. As the division of labor progresses, “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” Smith had a presumption of liberty in policy. That presumption could be cleared, but the burden of proof would fall to the advocate of liberty-reducing policy.
Welfare-state policies are, in general, liberty-reducing in Smith’s framework. Insofar as they rely on redistributive taxation, they involve state coercion. You cannot pursue your own interests in your own way when saving for retirement, for example; Social Security is compulsory. Welfare programs almost always involve the government deciding what beneficiaries’ interests are. Food stamps can only be used on certain products. The scope of government health-insurance coverage is determined by the bureaucracy that administers it. Examples abound, but you get the point.
This is an important point because many on the Left are still guided by the FDR view that welfare programs increase liberty by contributing to “freedom from want.” Smith would reject that argument, and conservatives should, too. To the extent welfare programs exist, they should be considered a necessary evil, not an enhancement of personal freedom.
Eric Boehm identifies yet another unnecessary burden likely to be created by Trump’s tariffs.
Joe Lancaster reports that protectionism creates jobs in the rent-seeking industry. Two slices:
During his first run for the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump pledged to “drain the swamp”—ridding Washington of the corruption and lobbying that make politics so distasteful.
But ironically, lobbying was one of the few industries to benefit from his protectionist trade policy. Now, with Trump promising across-the-board tariffs on all imports—including from Canada and Mexico—lobbying firms are loading up on clients hoping to petition the government for relief.
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Companies hoping to cozy up to the new administration are simply acting in their and their shareholders’ self-interest, using legal remedies to hopefully circumvent financial penalties imposed by executive decree. But when the system can be gamed so simply, it undercuts the argument that across-the-board tariffs are necessary.Clearly, the best maneuver is to remove all tariffs and let the market decide which products and companies to reward. But failing that, it looks like the legacy of Trump’s terms in office will be turning lobbying into a growth industry.
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