The next time someone asks what we mean when we say ‘Islamo-left’, I’m going to show them footage from yesterday’s protest in Whitechapel in East London. What a morally suicidal schlep that was. What an unholy union of witless leftists and menacing Islamists. ‘Refugees welcome here!’, cried the granola-fed grads of the limp-wristed left. ‘Allahu Akbar!’, barked the masked mob of religious hotheads. Rarely has the lethal idiocy of the left’s bed-hopping with Islamism been so starkly exposed.

– Brendan O’Neill

Price controls are when you solve the loud noise your smoke alarm is making by removing the battery.

– Peter Hague

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… is from pages 191-192 of my GMU Econ colleague Mark Koyama’s, and his co-author Jared Rubin’s, superb 2022 book, How the World Became Rich (references omitted; links added):

In fact, the existence of slavery slowed Southern industrialization and urbanization. Southern elites held their wealth primarily in the form of slaves. Investing in slaves was profitable, and it took resources away from other, industrial, pursuits. This limited local market size, making industrial production all the less attractive. As [John] Majewski notes, “slavery severely limited the size of markets for southern manufacturers. Cities such as Richmond, Norfolk, and Charleston, serving sparsely populated hinterlands, lagged behind northern rivals. The southern economy certainly generated substantial profits for the region’s many planters and farmers, but slower growth of cities, industry, and population created a sense of relative decline.”

The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

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Here’s a letter to a long-time reader of my blog.

Mr. W__:

Thanks for your email.

You ask what you can tell your “pro-tariff Trump supporting friend” who “contends that tariffs in the 80s to protect Harley-Davidson worked.”

You can ask your friend to support his contention by offering evidence. And the evidence that he must offer is not that those tariffs helped Harley-Davidson; no one doubts that particular producers can reap net benefits when government grants those producers some measure of monopoly power by restricting consumers’ options to shop elsewhere. The evidence your friend must offer is that net benefits were reaped by Americans as a whole. As this 1984 study by my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein suggests, your friend will have difficulty finding and offering such evidence.

Further, even if (contrary to fact) those motorcycle tariffs somehow managed to improve the American economy overall, the economic case for free trade doesn’t require that every instance of protectionism fails to help the economy. Rather, the economic case for free trade rests on the recognition that protectionism as a general rule will damage the economy – and that politicians are neither sufficiently motivated nor informed to identify the rare instances when protectionism might ‘work.’

I’ve always liked this observation by the late economist Harry Johnson: “To the primitive mind, one case of magic’s working (or seeming to work) is sufficiently impressive to confirm faith in magic against a long series of experienced failures.”* Protectionism’s history is a long series of experienced failures.

While I can’t say about your friend, I can say that most protectionists – on matters of trade policy – have primitive minds.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Harry G. Johnson, “Mercantilism: Past, Present, and Future” (1973), as reprinted in Johnson, On Economics and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), page 274.

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U.S. — The American Medical Association announced the long battle with American obesity had finally come to an end thanks to EBT benefits running out amidst the ongoing government shut down.

TULSA, OK — Local dad William Madsen announced he was excited to show his kids some of the horror and action movies he loved from the 1970s, which must be ok because they're rated the same as those Toy Story movies.