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Jon Murphy is an assistant professor of economics at Nicholls State University.
In his book Minority Report, H.L. Mencken writes: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel [sic] to foreign parts.”
With a little rewriting, we can update the quote for protectionism:
“The urge to defend the nation is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all protectionists seek: not the chance to serve.”
National defense is a common justification for protectionist tariffs, and it has been driven to absurd extremes: clothespins, sugar, and baby food have all been described as vital to national defense and subject to tariffs.
In a particularly goofy example, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has called for a ban on Chinese-grown garlic on the grounds it threatens national security. Now, perhaps if we were a nation of vampires, this claim would make sense. But it’s hard to see how garlic, even garlic that is potentially tainted, is a threat to national security. Scott argues that the garlic poses a potential health threat, but that is not the same as a national security threat.
What is weird about the argument Scott is putting forth is that he does not need to ban Chinese garlic as a national security threat if it is as dangerous as he claims. We already have a food safety program here in the US, and foreign goods are also subject to it. If Chinese garlic is a public health threat, the FDA has the authority to act by issuing recalls and otherwise effectively banning the tainted product if it poses a threat to human or animal health. It’s unclear why Senator Scott’s act is needed.
To go back to a theme I have been harping on in recent posts, any intervention needs to be justified beyond just some hypothetical musing. Simply showing that some intervention could accomplish some desired outcome does not mean the action is justified or desirable. We need to examine the current state of laws and legislation to see if the intervention is actually justified, or if it is just rank corruption hiding behind a false-face. One question Senator Scott (or others who defend this intervention) must answer is: why is the current legislation inadequate? It is already illegal to sell tainted food in the US. If Chinese garlic is such a threat, why hasn’t the FDA shut it down?
National defense is one of those justifications that people don’t seem to think about that much. It is invoked and simply not questioned. Indeed, this is probably why “national defense” is such a successful false-face to rent-seek: few look too closely at the mask. Perhaps, like the partygoers at Poe’s masquerade in the Masque of the Read Death, the people who support spurious national defense claims are afraid to see what lies beneath that mask.
The post Beneath the Mask appeared first on Econlib.
Any conviction obtained at the so-called "trial" of former President Donald Trump's alleged alteration of financial records will be reversed on appeal, if necessary by the U.S. Supreme Court, because altering financial records is only a crime in New York if you do it to conceal some other crime. Paying Stormy Daniels money is NOT a crime. The purpose of this whole case was just to give Daniels a megaphone to blast her allegations into nationwide. It is an outrage that the District Attorney brought this case and that the judge did not declare a mistrial.
The one thing that could really cause this case to destroy Donald Trump is if he testifies truthfully at this Kangaroo Court trial. Lying liberal District Attorneys, liberal Democrat jurors, and the judge will give Donald Trump the "Michael Flynn treatment." Michael Flynn was Donald Trump's first National Security Advisor who gave a truthful deposition to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and he was then indicted and kicked out of the White House for it. And that is exactly what will happen to Donald Trump if he testifies at this mockery of a trial. Trump should treat this trial as if it was a smutty street art presentation and say that it is beneath him to respond to such garbage.
The post Trump Should NOT TESTIFY at MANHATTAN WITCH HUNT OF A TRIAL appeared first on Reason.com.
The only way the jobs can go is if the machines are now doing the work formerly done by humans. Which means that we gain the same output without the human labour input. That’s an increase in the productivity of human labour – the main driver of increases in human wealth.
What fucking value destruction?
… is from page 47 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and important 1937 book, The Good Society:
Then, too, the conception of democracy changed. Once the popular movement had been chiefly concerned with the Bill of Rights and other limitations on the sovereign, but the rapid enfranchisement of the masses resulted in the belief that popular sovereignty must not be restrained, that the meaning of free government was the dictatorship of the majority.
DBx: We human beings have produced during our time on this orb an abundance of bad ideas, ranging from the nitwitted to the calamitous. Closer to the latter than to the former end of this sorry spectrum is the anthropomorphizing of ‘the People’ and then treating this imaginary being as being almost godlike. Unfortunately complementary to this terrible idea is the notion that ‘the People’ have a will, and that this will is both sacred and clearly revealed by majoritarian voting.
The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.
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