Pun Salad

An excerpt from Monday's WSJ "Free Expression" newsletter by Matthew Hennessey: (WSJ gifted link)

Yes, I will take any excuse to plug Monsieur Bastiat! His translated "Broken Window" essay: That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.

Also of note:

• A Cheerier State Motto? Andy Kessler is optimistic: Live Free and Prosper. (WSJ gifted link)

  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) wants to confiscate, er, “tax” 50% of the stock of artificial-intelligence companies—the dumbest idea since Karl Marx picked up a pen. Meanwhile, his mind-meld mini-me, millennial Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), said in 2019 that an entire generation “came of age and never saw American prosperity,” and then whined, “I have never seen that, or experienced it, really, in my adult life.” Really? She must be distracted with only five years to go on her climate-mongering, “world is gonna end” prediction.

  Meanwhile, in the real world, the free market is a prosperity dynamo. Has Ms. Ocasio-Cortez heard of Verve-102? Last month’s trial results of Lilly’s one-time gene-editing therapy showed it can lower LDL, “bad cholesterol,” by almost two-thirds. Could this be a heart-attack vaccine? It’s certainly a sign of a prosperous society.

  Speaking of gene editing, Columbia University researchers successfully demonstrated base editing of “early human embryos” to replace specific genetic letters. OK, there’s a boatload of moral implications on how this is used. No one wants genetic breeding of 7-foot-4 humans. But the ability to identify and eliminate debilitating diseases—for example, hereditary blindness—is nothing short of amazing.

  Hoping that Glenn Reynolds hasn't copyrighted the phrase: "Faster, please."

• Once you have embraced "progressive" taxation, you've already betrayed any pretense of fairness. But J.D. Tuccille says we've gone even that: Rich Americans pay a higher share of taxes than the wealthy in most countries.

  Like his progressive comrades, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an ambitious big-government agenda he proposes to fund by forcing "rich" people to pay their "fair share." While the word billionaires is often thrown around, smart people understand that wealth will have to be defined generously to pay for everything proposed, and that "fair share" always means more. Even so, lots of Americans are on board with the idea of forcing people they consider rich to pay higher taxes. What they don't understand, and what progressives won't acknowledge, is that the U.S. already puts a heavier burden on high-income people than do most countries.

  Skipping down to the facts:

  "The United States places an unusually heavy share of the tax burden on higher earners," the Cato Institute's Adam N. Michel commented in January. "You wouldn't know this from hearing some politicians claim that the rich escape next to tax-free or deserve to be taxed at higher rates."

  Michel drew on a 2025 study by Canada's Fraser Institute, which compared tax progressivity across 33 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. For those with federal systems (except Canada, for which all provinces were examined), the study looked at one high-tax and one low-tax jurisdiction for a full range of progressivity. Tax-hungry California and Texas, which has no state income tax, represented the U.S.

  "California (US) (10.00) maintains the most progressive tax system out of the 45 OECD jurisdictions analyzed in this study, followed by Newfoundland & Labrador (Canada) (9.68), Korea (9.43), and Texas (US) (9.03)," observed the authors. "On the bottom end, Hungary (0.00) maintains the least progressive tax system, followed by Estonia (3.25), Slovak Republic (3.36), Latvia (3.59), and Sweden (4.33)."

  I will throw out, once again, the quote from Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty:

  That a majority, merely because it is a majority, should be entitled to apply to a minority a rule which does not apply to itself is an infringement of a principle much more fundamental than democracy itself, a principle on which the justification of democracy rests.

  That principle "died in darkness" over a century ago, sadly.

• Is government ownsership the answer to AI anxiety? I hear you asking; Cato's Jennifer Huddleston and Tad DeHaven have the answer: Government Ownership Isn’t the Answer to AI Anxiety.

  Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy shouldn’t begin with the presumption that an emerging technology requires new forms of government control. In fact, the history of American technology policy shows that a light-touch approach allows consumers and innovators to find the best uses for technology. The light-touch approach enables companies to respond to the problems and demands of their consumers rather than those of the government, helping American companies become industry leaders.

  Yet concerningly, a new bad policy idea intended to support American leadership in AI is emerging on both the Left and the Right. President Trump has floated a possible federal “partnership” with major AI companies, in which the public could receive “pieces” of those companies and benefit from their success. The details are unclear, but all signs point to the administration seeking to acquire equity stakes, which it has done with over 20 companies starting last year. 

  On the Left, Senator Bernie Sanders has been more explicit. His proposed American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would impose a one-time 50 percent tax on the largest AI companies, paid in stock. The government would then use voting shares and board representation to block decisions it deemed harmful and push decisions it deemed beneficial.

  If AI is so darn smart, how come it can't figure a way out of this mess?

• How much would you have to pay me to see this musical? Kevin D. Williamson reviews Luigi: The Musical ("a current off-Broadway production about the handsome young prat who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson"): Hell Is Other People, Especially Diddy. (Dispatch gifted link)

  Luigi: The Musical has been so roundly denounced as a moral failure that someone must point out—and I suppose it falls to me—that it also is an artistic failure.

  That isn’t the indictment it might sound like: Most plays and musicals are artistic failures. Even the masters only rarely strike gold. Bob Dylan has written, by some counts, around 1,000 songs, and there’s a reason you know only four of them. Luigi offers several moments of real intelligence, wit, and charm. Unfortunately, these are too few and too far between, the dried cranberries in some otherwise pretty bland trail mix. Every show of this kind is a blend of the real stuff and filler, and the better ones are the ones with the better proportions in the mix. Comedy is very hard to write and harder still to write quickly—there is a reason that so little humor stays funny for more than a few months. And I tip my hat to the authors here for even attempting to write satire in times such as these, which seem to me to be quite beyond parody. I don’t know that even Tom Wolfe would have been up to it.

  KDW's review is long, insightful, and (very) entertaining. More entertaining than the musical, I'm pretty sure.

  For the record (heh), I like about a dozen Bob Dylan songs. Not a lot, but more than four.