1. The great Scott Wheeler on Stephen Sondheim (Free Press).

2. Is space the most underrated policy area?

3. On the USAID and deaths debate.  Hardly the final word, but an injection of sanity into what has been a low quality debate.  Here is commentary from GPT Pro.  In a few years we might have some accurate estimates.

4. Using LLMs in economic history.

5. Measuring economic growth through the valuation of human life.

6. Brooklyn Coffee Shop showcases my book The Complacent Class.

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Rent control is in the news again. Check out my new website, Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap. Here is just one bit:

Norway abolished its rent control in 1982, and the economist Are Oust realized the newspapers had been quietly recording the whole experiment. He collected housing classifieds from Oslo’s Aftenposten from 1970 to 2008 and watched the market turn inside out.

Under rent control, Oslo’s listings pages looked nothing like a housing market. It was tenants who advertised, pleading their qualities to landlords — “housing wanted” ads outnumbered “housing for rent.” Ten to fifteen percent of those ads were placed by the tenant’s employer, vouching for them the way a bank vouches for a borrower. Tenants offered babysitting, gardening, snow-shoveling, and janitorial work on the side to sweeten the deal. Landlords, for their part, could demand a tenant of a particular gender, age, occupation, region of origin — some ads specified “strong Christian beliefs.” Deposits commonly ran to 50 or 60 months’ rent, occasionally 100 or more: tenants effectively lent the landlord the equity of the flat, interest free. And only about 20 percent of “for rent” ads dared print the rent, much of which would have been illegal.

Then the ceiling lifted. Within a few years the page flipped: landlords advertised to tenants, roughly 80 percent of listings printed an asking rent, the mega-deposits vanished, and the demands for snow-shoveling Christians of specified gender dwindled to nothing. The price went back to doing the rationing — so nothing else had to.

Check out the whole thing–it’s fabulous.

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How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi is a good piece in the Atlantic by Idrees Kahloon filled with colorful anecdotes of a nation in decline:

The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680. In April, amid the Iran conflict, the Daily Mail pounced on Prime Minister Keir Starmer for vacationing in Valencia, Spain, at what the tabloid described as a luxury hotel, costing £200 a night.

Americans are likely to come away a bit smug, especially as Independence Day approaches and Europeans are enjoying our giant stadiums and central air conditioning. Look deeper, however, and Britain’s story becomes more uncomfortable. Does this sound familiar?

Recent plans to transform the country have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…. HS2 has been delayed for so long that two swiftly built towers near the terminus now themselves look derelict and in need of demolition.

…Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes.

Upon closer inspection, the United States looks a lot less like a shining city on a hill and a lot more like a declining Great Britain, appendaged with one or two dynamic sectors, most notably AI. The similarities are especially obvious in the retrograde solutions Britain has lumbered into, namely attacking immigrants and trade—Brexit being the equivalent of a high tariff regime. Nations in decline, like people, tend to lash out at others rather than deal with their real problems. Needless to say, neither immigrants nor trade explain Britain’s—or California’s—inability to build high-speed rail or other infrastructure.

It is discomforting to watch the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, individual rights, and free speech—the nation that once built the railways, the steam engines, the factories that remade the world—lose the capacity to build much of anything, or even to tolerate people speaking their minds. In parallel, instead of dealing with our real problems—almost all of our creation—the right gets literally hysterical over symbolic culture-war questions like birthright citizenship, while the left nominates candidates with Marxist-Leninist sympathies. The abundance and progress movements are some of the few shining lights. It’s not too late. But Great Britain is a warning.

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Last week, the Supreme Court held in Pung v. Isabella County that when a home is taken by the government and sold at a tax foreclosure auction, the sale proceeds satisfy the constitutional requirement for “just compensation” to the owner. This unanimous decision appears to be a loss for homeowners and property rights. But the justices stopped short of sanctioning the County’s actions, leaving some of the most important questions for another day.

As Justice Thomas said in his famous Kelo v. New London dissent, “property is a natural, fundamental right.” This right is protected by the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the government from taking private property for “public use” without “just compensation.” As a legal matter, this case focused on whether just compensation in the context of a tax foreclosure is determined by the home’s fair market value rather than the amount it fetched at the foreclosure sale. On this issue, the justices say no, the auction price is the proper measure for this constitutional requirement.

Justice Alito, writing for the Court, reasons that history counsels against the petitioner’s argument: for centuries, English and American law have permitted the seizure and sale of property as a means of collecting taxes, provided that the government doesn’t keep the windfall and returns the surplus to the debtor. In light of this history of tax sales, Justice Alito concluded that the auction price is the proper baseline “at least when the procedure is fair”—a qualifier that is bound to be explored in subsequent litigation.

To the Pung family, the process was far from fair. The government took their $195,000 home due to a delinquent tax of approximately $2,200, which the Pungs assert they were neither notified of nor required to pay. The foreclosed home was their primary residence, yet the local tax assessor claimed they were subject to an additional property tax typically imposed for second homes. After a legal fight in a Michigan tax tribunal, which sided with the Pungs, the tax assessor nevertheless imposed the tax after the 2012 bill was sent, making it more likely that they would miss it. The legal hurdles continued, and ultimately the house was foreclosed at auction for about $76,000—less than 40% of its fair market value. The County even kept all of the sale proceeds until they were required by a federal court to return them.

The County took extreme measures for a small problem. Legal doctrine aside, instinctively, a $2,200 tax debt doesn’t seem to justify the seizure and sale of a $195,000 home.

This is why the Court, while unanimously siding with the County on the question of just compensation, was careful to provide a path forward for the family. Justice Alito wrote that the Sixth Circuit, on remand, may decide whether the procedural arguments can proceed. Likewise, Justice Sotomayor highlighted in her concurrence that she “does not read the Court’s opinion as identifying the contours of a fair auction,” and Justice Thomas wrote separately to argue that personal property or only part of the property should have been pursued first, rather than the entire home.

As Justice Thomas concluded, “What Isabella County did to the Pungs was wrong, and on my initial view, likely unconstitutional.” The government should not be able to add a covert tax and then foreclose an entire home for such a small debt. While the history of tax sales may justify the foreclosure, it must do so with fair procedures.

I would be deeply appreciative if you would share this essay far and wide. To that end, I’m making the audio version of this essay available to all subscribers, paid and unpaid.

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The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, though well known, does not receive the attention it deserves. Let us remind ourselves of the words and ominous cadence of the Declaration’s all-too-neglected opening sentence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The better-known second sentence, the one that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ” receives most of the attention in any serious discussion of the Declaration’s core philosophic principles. The first sentence is, however, quite extraordinary in that it announces the moral impulse and moral logic that caused the American people to declare their independence from their mouther country and the world’s greatest military power.

The first sentence introduces in abstract form the Declaration’s purpose and the actions that follow therefrom. Its purpose is to identify and “declare” to the world the “causes which impel” the colonists to separate from Great Britain, and its actions are defined by the necessity to dissolve their connection to the mother country. By publicly declaring the “causes” which impel them to the separation and by showing their “respect to the opinions of mankind,” American revolutionaries demonstrated that their actions were to be guided by reasoned discourse and moral principles. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Americans appealed to nature (i.e., to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God) as the standard of moral and political right, and they appealed to man’s reason as the means of knowing and demonstrating those principles.

According to the Declaration’s first sentence, man’s reason is capable of apprehending three important things: first, the evidentiary facts that prove a design on the part of British imperial officials to enslave them; second, the moral standard against which these unjust acts are to be judged; and third, the necessity of separation. The overarching principle of the Declaration’s first sentence is that reason can distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust, freedom and tyranny.

The main burden of the Declaration was to demonstrate that the actions of King George III and the British Parliament necessarily amounted to despotism. From the beginning of the imperial crisis, the most impressive American minds charged British authorities with a “design” to enslave them. As early as 1765, John Adams raised the alarm in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law in response to the Stamp Act: “Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for us, by somebody or other in Great Britain. There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.” Likewise, Thomas Jefferson warned in his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British-America that “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, and pursued, unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” And according to the Declaration, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

To “prove” to a “candid world” the charge that there was indeed a design to impose a tyranny over the American colonies, the Declaration enumerates twenty-seven injuries and usurpations allegedly committed by the king. Each of the charges refers to a specific action taken or not taken by the king. The list of injuries and usurpations can be divided into three main sections.

The first section—counts one through twelve—enumerates the king’s abuse of his executive powers. His offenses include disallowing or suspending colonial legislation, dissolving colonial legislatures, obstructing the colonial system of justice, corrupting the separation of powers by making judges dependent on his will, and keeping standing armies. The second section—counts thirteen through twenty-two—details the king’s collusion with Parliament to subject the colonies “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws.” His offense here was having not vetoed Parliament’s abuses, such as: quartering British troops in America and putting them above criminal law, restricting American trade, restricting trial by jury and other common law rights, imposing taxes without the consent of the governed, and destroying the colonists’ right to self-government. Of special significance is the charge that Parliament has declared its power to be arbitrary in America through the passage of the Declaratory Act of 1766. The third section—counts twenty-three through twenty-seven—identifies those abuses that amount to an undeclared state of war. The king’s abuses include what might be described as war atrocities: he has initiated the use of physical force by turning his navy and army against the lives and property of the colonists.

In sum, George III had violated the British constitution, the colonial charters, common-law rights and liberties, and, most importantly the colonists’ natural rights to life, liberty, property, and their pursuit of happiness. In response, the Americans did not view these actions as discrete and separate events unconnected from each other. They were not concrete-bound pragmatists. The Americans studied, weighed, and measured the separate actions of king and Parliament (i.e., the evidence of the crime); they integrated the totality of British actions and drew the conclusion that king and Parliament had a “design” (i.e., the motive) to reduce them under absolute despotism (i.e., the ultimate crime itself); and then they contrasted the actions of British imperial officials with their own moral principles (i.e., the standards of natural justice).

In 1768, John Dickinson in his famous Letters from a Farmer described perfectly the Americans’ mode of reasoning: “Ought not the People therefore to watch? to observe facts? to search into causes? to investigate designs? And have they not a right of Judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?” The revolutionaries’ Enlightenment moral principles provided the touchstone by which to judge the actions of king and Parliament, and their principles necessitated the nature of their response.

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The American Spirit of Liberty

Returning now to the Declaration’s first sentence, let us ask: Why in the course of events from 1765 to 1776 did it become “necessary” for the Americans to dissolve their political connection to their king and mother country?

To say that separation is necessary is to say that it must be, but why must it be? Imagine how the meaning of the Declaration would have changed if Jefferson had not written “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . .” but instead substituted “optional,” “possible,” “expedient,” “preferable,” or even “prudent” for the word “necessary.” To repeat: Why was separation said to be necessary?

Our entry point for examining why this was so is a phrase the Americans of the 1760s and 1770s invoked repeatedly: the “spirit of liberty.” The phrase “spirit of liberty” united theory and practice for America revolutionaries; it implied an action in defense of a principle; it was characterized by certain virtues in defense of liberty. The spirit of American liberty is a sentiment, a mindset, a disposition, a virtue. As a sentiment, it loves freedom and hates slavery. As a mindset, it is watchful, suspicious, and skeptical. As a disposition, it is active, jealous, restless, resolute, protective, and, most of all, vigilant. And as a virtue, it is defined by integrity, fortitude, perseverance, courage, and patriotism.

The American spirit of liberty was virtually synonymous with the colonists’ moral constitutions, and it provided them with a worldview through which they interpreted and responded to the cascade of events between 1764 and 1776. No theme ran as broadly or deeply through American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. The colonists’ spirit of liberty served as a kind of moral and psychological tripwire that was first triggered by the passage of the Stamp Act and kept active with the passage of every piece of British legislation aimed at the Americans in the decade leading up to 1776. During these years, American Whigs developed objective standards by which to measure the justice and injustice of British legislation. These standards, when combined with their spirit of liberty, provided the Americans with an early-warning system that alerted them day or night to the abuse or growth of arbitrary power. That early-warning system was most famously expressed in Paul Revere’s galloping words—“The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming!”—during his midnight ride on April 18, 1775, to warn American minutemen of British troop movements before the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Rekindling and stoking the spirit of American liberty became a central theme repeated countlessly in the writings of leading American Patriots. Let us consider just one example of how American revolutionaries thought about the spirit of liberty.

In 1767, John Dickinson penned his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which many historians regard as one of the most influential pamphlets of the Revolutionary period. Dickinson’s Letters present a powerful analysis of the ways in which unchecked power asphyxiates liberty. The letters also provide the best analysis of the American spirit of liberty written during the Revolutionary period.

Dickinson’s primary concern in the Letters was to sound the alarm against the Townshend Acts, particularly the New York Suspending Act and the Townshend duties. The Americans, he warned, must be vigilant and exert “the most watchful attention” against Parliament’s subtle designs; they must prevent a creeping form of slavery under the guise of legalities, otherwise “a new servitude may be slipped upon us, under the sanction of usual and respectable terms.” He goes on to warn against those “artful rulers” who attempt to “extend their power beyond its just limits” by subtly manipulating language and legal technicalities. And with every passing generation the noose tightened just a little bit more. Every usurpation, whether large or small, eventually requires additional usurpations to keep all prior usurpations in force: “A free people therefore can never be too quick in observing, nor too firm in opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality, respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of alteration leads to the last: Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more certain, than that the forms of liberty may be retained, when their substance is gone.” Thus, it was necessary, Dickinson argued, that the people should always be on guard to protect their liberty as they protect their property. He encouraged them to “watch,” “observe facts,” “search into causes,” and “investigate designs,” and of course he insisted that they assert their “right of judging from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness.” He implored his fellow Americans to be ever vigilant. Quoting from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Dickinson reminded his readers that “slavery is ever preceded by sleep.”

Dickinson equated the American spirit of liberty with jealousy, watchfulness, and vigilance. “A perpetual jealousy, respecting liberty is,” he told the American people, “absolutely, requisite in all free states.” They must keep up the “utmost vigilance,” and they must be “watchful of their liberty.” He went on to remind his fellow colonists of Machiavelli’s famous chapter in Discourses on Livy, which “prove that a state, to be long lived, must be frequently corrected, and reduced to its first principles.” The lesson of all history proves “that every free state should incessantly watch, and instantly take alarm on any addition being made to the power exercised over them.”

Dickinson attacked the Townshend duties precisely because they were so comparatively small. It would be a “fatal error,” he warned, to disregard and therefore to acquiesce in these new duties because of their trifling amount. In fact, the “smallness” of the duties is a trap. No matter how inconsequential the tax, no matter how reasonably and equitably applied, the colonists should regard the act with “abhorrence.” He suggested that the Townshend duties were intentionally designed to be small so that the Americans would not notice or object and a noose-tightening precedent could therefore be established. He went on to posit that the British were testing the moral disposition of the colonists. He then raised the very real possibility that the goal of the British imperial officials in establishing such a small tax was to establish a “precedent, whereupon the future vassalage of these colonies may be established.” Once the precedent was established, Dickinson argued, Parliament might then levy any amount of tax on the colonists. Thus, it was imperative that the colonists resist every attempt to tax them without their consent regardless of the size or amount.

The Townshend Act “is founded,” according to Dickinson, “on the destruction” of the colonists’ “constitutional security.” If members of Parliament “have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us,” Dickinson noted, then “they have a right to levy a million upon us.” What this means, of course, is that the possession and control of American property depended not on the will of the colonists and their rights but on the pleasure of Parliament. The Townshend duties are clearly a tax, Dickinson concluded, and “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—slaves.” The logic of Dickinson’s moral reasoning was simple, compelling, motivating, and explanatory. It’s what made the American revolutionary mind unique and distant from the twenty-first-century way of thinking. This idea of preserving natural liberty in its pristine form and so resisting even one small precedent against it had come close to the center of the American consciousness. This idea is precisely why the colonists viewed the rather trifling stamp tax and Townshend duties so ominously: they viewed each as the entering wedge of a broader campaign to deprive them of rights and liberties.

Like modern historians, British imperial officials never understood the principles, temperament, and character of the American revolutionaries, which meant they never understood their deepest motives. They had no way to know that the revolution’s trigger was embedded in the spirit of American liberty. British officials therefore could never understand why it was necessary for the Americans to dissolve the political bands that had connected them to Britain for over 150 years. Likewise, twenty-first century Americans who still revere the revolutionaries’ spirit of liberty are beckoned to recover the moral impulse and moral logic that drove their ideological ancestors to independence and freedom.

Happy Independence Day!!! Long live the United State of America!

Alan Greenspan, a friend and associate of Ayn Rand, has died, at the age of 100. He is known to the public as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for almost two decades, and known to Objectivists for his excellent articles that Ayn Rand included in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Antitrust,” “Gold and Economic Freedom,” and “The Assault on Integrity.”

But this is not a eulogy, because while Alan Greenspan started out as a basically good man, he ended up as a traitor to capitalism, Objectivism, Ayn Rand, and his own soul. He went to Washington, and began to play the game. He chose the road of power.

Here are some points of acceleration in his decline. He “saved” Social Security by expanding its range of destruction. At a State of the Union address, he rose up–next to Hillary Clinton–to join in giving a standing ovation to the call for universal (socialist) medical care. After the fall of communism, he refused to recommend capitalism to the newly freed regimes.

In the end, he abjured capitalism and, indirectly, Objectivism, as the logic of his premises required. He was an inexcusable blend of Ayn Rand’s pathetic Peter Keating and traitorous Robert Stadler.

In October 2008, Greenspan testified before Congress that he had been “partially wrong” in his push for deregulation. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” said Greenspan, a conservative acolyte of philosopher Ayn Rand, a leading advocate of free-market capitalism. [Politico]

He added: “I’d been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

That’s his idea of “evidence”–statistics. Forget your knowledge of economic principles. Forget your knowledge of man’s nature and of the nature of a mixed economy. Blame man, blame principles, blame “irrational exuberance”—in order to escape blame for the Fed’s cheap money policy, the policy that arguably led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Greenspan was arguing, in effect, that we should blame greedy, selfish capitalists, not the kindly, naive regulators, like him. He was shocked, shocked to learn that when the Fed hands out easy money, people take it.

And notice that what he had thought to be “working exceptionally well,” is the mixed economy/welfare state, because we haven’t had anything remotely like capitalism in a century or more. He once knew that it is impossible according to first principles for a mixture of freedom and controls to “work” at all.

In July 1966, Greenspan wrote,

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
[“Gold and Economic Freedom” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal]

I’m proud to say that I decided Greenspan was not our friend back in 1969, when Barron’s published as its page-one editorial Greenspan’s speech to the National Association for Business Economics, the very prestigious organization he had just been elected president of.

I knew that Greenspan was in “the Collective.” I knew he had published very good articles in Ayn Rand’s publications. I had taken, on tape in Boston, his NBI course on economics, which was pretty good. I expected his speech to be a clarion call to understand and defend laissez-faire capitalism. I expected some references to Ayn Rand and an appeal to these business economists to read Atlas Shrugged and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Instead, what I read in Barron’s was a lame, boring explanation of what he referred to as “fiscal constituencies”—the idea that politicians had become beholden not to the general public, whom they are supposed to represent, but to campaign donors, lobbyists, and those getting government funds.

Where Ayn Rand called the welfare state an “institutionalized civil war” among pressure groups, Greenspan was faulting the (unnamed) system for luring politicians away from representing “the people” and, presumably, “the common good.”

At that stage of history, the peak of New Left rampages and bombings, when we were to expect “The Age of Aquarius,” when Herbert Marcuse gained fame by advocating “polymorphous sexuality” combined with censorship, when LSD trips and Che Guevera posters were popular among the young, and communism “with a little c” was de rigeur on campus—the fact that Greenspan would not speak out for capitalism even to business economists told me all I needed to know about his moral character, or lack of it.

I put him down as a statistics-captured coward. I didn’t know then that he was to become far worse. I kept alive for many years the hope that he would use his position and then his post-Fed retirement to publicize Ayn Rand, her novels, and Objectivism.

Not only did he fail to ever do that, he wrote a positive blurb for the back cover of Barbara Branden’s ugly and distorted “biography” of Ayn Rand.

He will not be missed.