Pun Salad

I don't know if you'll experience the same behavior, but YouTube sandwiched this between political ads (one anti-Nikki, the other pro-Nikki). Good luck.

Also of note:

• Industrial policy? I predict… unintended consequences! Scott Lincicome's Dispatch article, On ‘Making Things’ has one of those nasty little padlocks. But if you're worried about the state of American manufacturing, he has a lot of information, much going against the scary popular narrative..

  Hang around the policy game long enough, and you’ll encounter the argument that government should use tariffs, subsidies, “Buy American” rules, and related policies to protect and expand the U.S. manufacturing sector because it’s special, both economically and in the eyes of the average American voter. 

  In recent weeks, for example, American Compass’ Oren Cass justified Trump-style tariffs because, in his words, “making things matters”—a slogan he repeated when unveiling new (and expressly anti-globalization) polling from his organization showing that Americans overwhelmingly “agree that ‘we need a stronger manufacturing sector.’” Usual tariff and push-poll concerns aside, this sloganeering is nothing new for Cass and certainly not limited to him or other protectionists on the American right. In fact, given the 2024 presidential election, its increasingly certain (alas) participants, and recent U.S. policy history, you can bet that proactively reviving American manufacturing will be a top issue. And protectionists will frequently base their demands on the simple and unstated assumption that the sector has long been a shambles, and that the production of tangible “things” deserves extra government attention.

  Dig a little deeper, however, and the issue isn’t so simple.

  Lincicome notes that (by any measure) America makes a lot of physical stuff. And it also produces a lot of service goods. Having the government decree a different stuff/service mix is likely to make us all poorer, on average.

• Also weighing in is… George Will, noting that the pols are trying to make it a campaign issue: It’s an election year, so here comes a ‘manufacturing crisis’ that isn’t.

  If your constant objective is to expand government’s permeation of society — to enlarge its role in the allocation of capital and opportunity — you have a permanent incentive to invent or misdescribe social problems. So, if you are a progressive, you will embrace the myth of a U.S. “manufacturing crisis.”

  This is a perennial excuse for protectionism and other manifestations of “economic planning” by a supposedly clairvoyant government. Which is socialism, under the anodyne title of “industrial policy.”

  You also might favor government going beyond mere control of imports. You might want it to deport the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow. His report “The Reality of American ‘Deindustrialization’” overflows with inconvenient (for progressives) truths, such as: The United States has the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy, which produces a larger share of global manufacturing output than Germany, South Korea, India and Japan combined. (Remember the 1980s panic, loudly encouraged by a publicity-mad New York real estate blowhard, about Japan eclipsing U.S. manufacturing?) The manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy, which supposedly has withered as the service sector has grown, would, standing alone, be the world’s eighth-largest economy.

  There's an upside to "industrial policy": it will provide the Reason folks with plenty of material for their "unintended consequences" videos.

• Can't live with 'em, could probably live without 'em. Who are the biggest threats to free speech on college campuses? Greg Lukianoff makes the argument that it's administrators. And not necessarily the ones you'd expect. What's the bottom line, Greg?

  The bottom line: DEI administrators — and campus administrators in general — are and will continue to be a threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus. There is no way out of this crisis on campus without either eliminating those positions or repurposing them to ensure that admins defend campus free speech and academic freedom, encourage nonconformity, and value seeking out differing viewpoints in the face of too much campus consensus. Sadly, while I’ve proposed this and other ideas for reforming higher education, I think the likelihood of that actually happening is pretty dang low.

  If we care about less expensive, more equitable higher ed, we have to acknowledge we need cheaper, slimmed down, less ideological institutions than we currently have.

  Those DEI guys didn't hire themselves, after all. The DEI departments didn't spring into existence ex nihilo.

• I'm pretty sure it won't be me. J.D. Tuccille gets in the faces of the class warriors: The World Could Soon Have Its First Trillionaire. Good!.

  The world could soon have its first trillionaire, according to a prominent anti-poverty organization. That's pretty cool. But Oxfam—which started as a famine relief group before mission creep set in—portrays the achievement of a new nominal benchmark in wealth as a bad thing that contributes to the misery of the masses. Through impressive economic illiteracy, the organization's recent report on inequality and poverty manages to misdiagnose the world's ills and prescribe dangerous and counterproductive remedies.

  "Since 2020, the richest five men in the world have doubled their fortunes," huffs Oxfam's Inequality Inc.  "During the same period, almost five billion people globally have become poorer. Hardship and hunger are a daily reality for many people worldwide. At current rates, it will take 230 years to end poverty, but we could have our first trillionaire in 10 years."

  […]

  "Through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are driving inequality and acting in the service of delivering ever-greater wealth to their rich owners," insists Oxfam.

  That seems an unlikely business plan. Did Bezos do anything else—perhaps found an online book store that grew into a global retail giant? And then, during the post-2020 timeframe that Oxfam emphasizes, did governments respond to the appearance of the COVID-19 virus by locking down populations, driving economic activity into online spaces to the benefit of people like Bezos? Yes, on both counts.

  Oxfam also fudges their stats by bemoaning what's happened "since 2020". Gee, what happened in 2020, reader?

• Fun fact. Alex Tabarrok notes a debunking of one of those things "everybody knows": No One's Name Was Changed at Ellis Island. According to a research paper by Rosemary Meszaros and Katherine Pennavaria:

  No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend.

  Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family. The belief persists, however, that the changes were done at the entry point and that the immigrants were unwilling participants in the modifications. Sophisticated family history researchers have long rolled their collective eyes at the “Ellis Island name change” idea. In genealogy blogs and online publications, they wearily repeat the correction—names were not changed at Ellis Island; immigrants changed their own names, usually during the citizenship process. But the belief persists, perhaps because people need to explain surname changes in a way that satisfies them (thinking that their immigrant ancestors made the changes themselves apparently does not do so).

  Just because you saw it in Godfather II doesn't mean it happened.