Strong evidence for that, noticed by Alex Tabaarrok:
Never trust someone who doesn’t believe in trade offs. https://t.co/migTmEzSHq
— Alex Tabarrok 🛡️ (@ATabarrok) July 31, 2024
And also by Nick Gillespie:
The protectionist mindset is stupid when left-wing or right-wing populists spout it. Factory jobs peaked as a pct of employment in the 1940s (!) and there is no reason to hold the economy hostage so JD Vance or any pol else can be happy. #creativedestruction https://t.co/L25v7tTxLl pic.twitter.com/fHxhqC4N2q
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) August 1, 2024
Trying to force the economy back to some imaginary Edenic era when America had the "right" number of jobs in some arbitrary category is … misguided.
Dominic Pino has more words on this topic: J. D. Vance’s Toaster-Making Dreams Would Burn American Manufacturers. After some amazingly thorough research:
To recap: U.S. food-equipment manufacturers can’t buy steel from abroad at a low price because the government says they can’t. So they turn to American steel companies, who are either incapable of making the right kinds of steel or incapable of delivering it in a timely manner or at a reasonable price. And if the food-equipment manufacturers then complain to the government about that, the American steel companies counter-complain to say they do have the capacity to deliver the steel that they aren’t delivering.
Remember, this whole shebang is supposed to help U.S. manufacturers, politicians such as Vance tell us.
Personally, I’d rather live in a country that imports cheap toasters than produces them. The government could eliminate all tariffs tomorrow, and the U.S. would still import nearly all of its toasters, given the wage rates in different parts of the world. But if Vance cares about manufacturing jobs in general, as he claims to do, he should listen to the toaster-makers about tariffs.
It's all quite reminiscent of Soviet-era five-year plans, the notion that Biden/Trump-directed central planners can wisely direct the economy to … somewhere prosperous.
Also of note:
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We're getting the candidates we deserve, I guess. Jim Geraghty sums up the state of play at the beginning of August 2024: Harris Flips, Trump Fumbles in Hard-to-Watch Campaign Reset. After noting Kamala's dizzying retreats from positions she took just a few years ago (fracking, offshore drilling, mandatory gun buybacks, Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, …), he turns to the dumpster fire that is…
The Republican nominee is too dumb, too old, too racially obsessed, too erratic and idiosyncratic in what interests and stirs him. The polls just evened up, and he’s on pace to fumble away a presidential race against a veep who ran a disastrous border — pardon me, “migration” — policy, who’s flip-flopping on every issue, who’s got to defend the highest inflation in 40 years and chaos overseas . . . and Trump thinks his best move before an African-American audience is to doubt whether she’s really black.
We could have picked Nikki Haley. Just sayin'.
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The ghost of Walter Duranty is back at the New York Times. Robby Soave reads it so you don't have to: The New York Times Thinks 'Brutal Capitalism,' Not Socialism, Ruined Venezuela.
Maduro's governing ideology is not a secret: He is a socialist. He is the successor to the leftist tyrant Hugo Chávez. He heads Venezuela's ruling Socialist Party. His policy prescriptions are in line with socialism: His government has instituted price controls, seized assets from private companies, and contributed to the country's hyperinflation problem. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and wrecks the economy with a mixture of centralized planning, repression, and pure theft—well, it's a socialist duck.
So it came as something of a shock when a recent New York Times article that correctly described Venezuela's overall problems—and Maduro's perfidy in particular—nevertheless identified the government's economic policy as "brutal capitalism" rather than socialism. Here was The Times:
If the election decision holds and Mr. Maduro remains in power, he will carry Chavismo, the country's socialist-inspired movement, into its third decade in Venezuela. Founded by former President Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro's mentor, the movement initially promised to lift millions out of poverty.
For a time it did. But in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation's wealth.
Economists say what now? These economists are not identified by The Times; the given hyperlink redirects to a Times article about improvements in the Venezuelan economy. These improvements were due to the introduction of some market reforms, according to economists with actual names.
Soave predicts that apologists will go to the "that's not real socialism" argument. One they've been making for over a century.
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Hysteria works. Bjorn Lomborg takes to the WSJ to recount Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions.
Whatever happened to polar bears? They used to be all climate campaigners could talk about, but now they’re essentially absent from headlines. Over the past 20 years, climate activists have elevated various stories of climate catastrophe, then quietly dropped them without apology when the opposing evidence becomes overwhelming. The only constant is the scare tactics.
Protesters used to dress up as polar bears. Al Gore’s 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” depicted a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to its death. The Washington Post warned in 2004 that the species could face extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund’s chief scientist claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.
Then in the 2010s, campaigners stopped talking about them. After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the mountain of evidence showing that the global polar-bear population has increased substantially. Whatever negative effect climate change had was swamped by the reduction in hunting of polar bears. The population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000.
Similarly for other scares. Including, almost certainly, the ones making headlines now.
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