Canada has a system of agricultural marketing boards; they regulate the sale of dairy, eggs, poultry, and grains. At a Federal and Provincial level, they control the food supply. They fix prices and manage imports. Our Wheat Board has recently had a few of its wings clipped, but it is still in business, interfering with the free enterprise system.

Ordinarily, in the absence of such market interferences, free trade would be the policy most conducive to prosperity. We produce the products for which we have a comparative advantage, and interfere with the international division of labor as little as possible.

However, matters change with marketing boards. Is it possible that a second economically illiterate regulation may benefit us by (partially) reducing the impact of the first? Yes, without marketing boards, free trade is the ticket to economic well-being. But with them, is there a case for tariffs on grounds of economic development?

Here is the argument in favor of such a paradoxical hypothesis. We would be better off, actually, if we obtained from abroad products covered by these regulatory models, such as the aforementioned dairy, eggs, poultry, and grains. We could get them for less than the prices they are currently offered in Canada. We could then pay for them in effect with goods and services which were not so smothered by marketing boards. This new optimal but problematic change in purchasing patterns cannot be ruled out.

Let me clarify. Assume that without any milk or other such marketing board interferences, the optimal arrangement would be for us to drink 20 liters of this made-in-Canada fluid, and import 5 liters of it. But we have with this marketing board shot ourselves in our economic foot; we have purposefully rendered this industry less efficient than it otherwise would have been. Now, then, the optimal allocation between domestic and imported milk might become something in the order of 15 of the former and 10 of the latter.

How would we get to this better state of affairs, where we reduce our consumption of the home-grown variety? One way to do so would be to set up a subsidy on milk imports. Ordinarily, this would be economic anathema. However, all’s fair in love, in war, and now in international trade. To promote prosperity, we have to ameliorate the effect of these marketing boards. I do not favor this course of action. Two wrongs do not make a right. This subsidization policy brings with it the usual inefficiencies. But, as an insight as to just how bad marketing boards are, this constitutes food for thought.

Here is an analogy from a different realm of economics that makes a similar (paradoxical) point. Imagine you want to help tenants find more, better, cheaper accommodation. The socialist would say that the answer is rent control. Yet this, as we have seen time and again, has the opposite of your intended effects. It reduces the incentive of entrepreneurs to invest in rental housing. This reduces housing stock, and, as should surprise no one, raises rent levels and decreases space that tenants can occupy for a given dollar. Rather control the prices of everything else under the sun except residential rental units. Then, capital will come flowing into this one sector of the economy, to the benefit of tenants.

The point is that rent controls (like marketing boards) are so counterproductive that you can help tenants by doing the very opposite of them.

But what about the poor newly unemployed Canadian dairy farmers (and cows) if we buy more of our milk elsewhere? There are two solutions. The easy one: eliminate the milk and other such marketing boards, and render the Canadian dairy industry more efficient, more competitive, and its products less expensive. Other countries, too, interfere with their dairy industries. We cannot change that; but we can put our own economic house in order.

The tougher one: if conditions change, and our comparative advantage shifts away from milk toward something else, say, maple syrup, then the cows will have to “retire” and the ranchers shift to this other industry. There is precedent for that. We moved our economy away from horse and buggy products, away from manufacturing typewriters (remember them?) with no increase in unemployment; no chaos.

The logic of this argument, if not absolutely clear, is at least discernable. Ordinarily, Canada might well have a comparative advantage in these agricultural products. So, we should be importing very few of them, according to correct economic theory. But, now, with marketing boards, our efficiency in producing these items is lessened. So, we should be relying on more imports of them.

NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Zohran Mamdani has strongly condemned New Yorkers for making Muslims throw improvised explosive devices at them.

HOUSTON, TX — Out of a job after his primary defeat, Dan Crenshaw has officially joined up with the crew of the infamous "Pirates Who Don't Do Anything."

Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.

(Via Simon Willison.)

"The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking of their excesses; and to learn how to recognise and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear amongst us."

~ French philosopher & mathematician Marquis de Condorcet, from his 1794 book Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind [hat tip Matthew H]