Tweet

Bryan Riley, applauding the reductions in some of Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports from China, points out that it would be even better for Americans if Trump cut all U.S. tariffs.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy, talks with GMU Econ alums Dave Hebert and Julia Cartwright about tariffs and other policy matters.

Scott Lincicome reports that Trump continues to want to ban exports of diesel.

Barry Brownstein is correct: The price of admission to civilization is humility.

Justin Wolfers discovers merit in what his libertarian friends have been saying. Two slices:

I count Greg Mankiw — a Harvard economist who was one of George W. Bush’s economic advisors — as a dear friend and mentor. Michael Strain at the center-right American Enterprise Institute is a good mate. Jonathan Meer texts me anytime he thinks I’m wrong about something (frequently). I’ve long enjoyed agreeing and disagreeing with libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok in a conversation that has stretched over decades (and it’s no less fun — though a bit less frequent — that I tangle with his Marginal Revolution co-blogger, Tyler Cowen). I’ve learned a lot about trade from Scott Lincicome at Cato, and about fiscal issues from Jessica Reidl who was once at Heritage, but is now at Brookings. One of the great things about economics is that we have a shared language. We can talk and figure out what leads us to to see the world differently.

Except it turned out that everyone I’d been talking to seems to have ended up on the never-Trump side of the Republican fence.

…..

My libertarian-leaning friends have consistently argued against a powerful federal government in favor of individual freedoms. I had — somewhat naively — never taken their views seriously enough. My friends who worked in government were good people, I reasoned, and surely that’s true more broadly.

But I’ve had to admit to my libertarian friends that they were right. Concentration of power can be abused. We’re seeing it happen right now.

And that’s led me to become more small-c conservative. The old conservative idea was that we have rules of the game that have served us well for generations. We should be slow to change them. Our children should be handed the same set of opportunities we had, if not better ones.

The foundation of American prosperity is our institutions — the rule of law, respect for contracts, and deep engagement with the rest of the world. Markets that work, rather than favors for those in power. A democracy. A democracy means that when our leaders do a bad job, we can kick the bums out.

I don’t think that’s a deeply controversial position. But it’s the foundation of our prosperity, and it’s worth defending.

George Will ponders the decline of the book. Two slices:

Supposed menaces multiply rapidly as technologies — smartphones, artificial intelligence — mutate. But the most menacing development involves no exotic technology, so it is disregarded.

But not by James Marriott. This British thinker warns us: An artifact that enabled modernity — skepticism, rationality, science, democracy — is now of rapidly dwindling importance. This artifact, which onlookers said “addicted” its early adopters, was: the book.

…..

“On the page,” Marriott says, “invective quickly becomes tedious.” On screens, “intransigence and madness” proliferate. We are attempting “to run a democracy without a grown-up conversation.” We are learning this: Reason, tolerance and progress are contingent, not inherent, facets of humanity’s story.
Is it possible, Marriott wonders, “to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society”? He notes that, in proposing a grotesquely gargantuan Arc de Trump, “the first post-literate president reached instinctively for a visual style that defined autocratic politics before the age of mass literacy.”

Jeffrey Blehar reflects on the sorry story of Jason Arday and Cambridge University. A slice:

It ought to be the end for Cambridge’s credibility. Realistically, we know it will not be. But once more I am reminded of emeritus Cambridge don (and former chair of the school’s Politics department) David Runciman’s archly resigned take on the scandal, written back in August: Of course Arday was a transparent fraud who deserved exposure, Runciman writes, but all in all nothing of great value was lost by him holding his position because nothing of value has ever been created by departments like Arday’s; it’s merely a question of who wins the lottery and gets to fill out the academic position. (Somebody is going to do it.)

Tweet

… is from page 9 of the 2024 4th edition of Henry Butler’s, Joanna Shepherd’s, and James Cooper’s Economic Analysis for Lawyers:

Individuals are creative. They are able to conceive of changes in their environment, foresee the consequences thereof, and respond by creating new opportunities.

Although an individual’s opportunity set is limited at any instant in time by his or her knowledge and the state of the world, that limitation is not immutable. Human beings are not only capable of learning about new opportunities, they also engage in resourceful, creative activities that expand their opportunities in various ways.

Tweet

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal wisely refuses to swallow Democrats’ claims that their policies will reduce Americans’ cost of living. A slice:

Both parties contributed to the initial burst of inflation during the Biden years with their spending splurge in late 2020. But Democrats in March 2021 fueled the fire with their $1.9 trillion spending blitz, largely for transfer payments and for states and localities. The Federal Reserve made the mistake of accommodating the spending binge. Yet as inflation heated up in 2021, Democrats urged the central bank not to raise interest rates.

The Biden team also relaxed mortgage underwriting standards, which enabled borrowers to qualify for bigger mortgages and turbocharged the surge in home prices. Housing prices rose 5.3% a year on average during the Biden years, compared to 2.7% during the first Trump term and 3.7% so far in the second.

Prices initially shot up more in Sun Belt areas during the pandemic owing to a demand shock from population migration. But as housing supply caught up, prices have stabilized in these markets. By contrast, home prices and rents are now growing fastest in the Northeast, West Coast and areas of the Midwest where local zoning regulations and burdensome permitting make it harder to build. Rent control and “just cause” eviction laws in progressive cities also deter new housing.

Over the last year, housing prices have grown significantly faster in metro areas like Boston (4.4%), New York City (4.4%), Minneapolis (3.7%) and Los Angeles (3.4%) than Dallas (1.9%), Atlanta (1.4%), Houston (0.3%) and Tampa (-0.6%).

It costs on average about 2.8 times as much to build an apartment in California as in Texas, according to the RAND Corp. Some “affordable” housing projects in the Golden State cost more than $1 million per unit to build. One reason is state and local prevailing wage mandates, which Democrats want to require for all projects that benefit from federal funds.

Democrats also want to raise the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage to $15 or higher. Most Democratic-run states already impose minimum wages of at least $15 an hour, so this would mainly slam states with lower wage mandates, many of which have contested Senate races this year like Texas, Iowa and New Hampshire (all $7.25) and Ohio ($11). Businesses pass on higher wage costs to consumers to the extent they can.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board continues to warn of the dangers of the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence. A slice:

To be credible, fiscal reforms must have bipartisan buy-in. Bondholders will not treat reforms as serious if they believe they’ll be repealed when the other party retakes power, and they’ll price that risk into interest rates.

Also warning of the dire consequences of the U.S. government’s fiscal incontinence is Doug Bandow.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kyle Smith rightly applauds the demise of “land acknowledgments.” Two slices:

Anguished white liberals tend to get society to rearrange itself to manage their neuroses regardless of what others think. That’s how the Washington Redskins lost their name; polls showed actual indigenous folks didn’t find it insulting. But it’s starting to sink in, even among the strenuously sensitive, that actual indigenous folks find these sanctimonious “We gather on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, Tataviam and Chumash peoples, the traditional caretakers of this water and land”-type statements to be somewhere between cringey and insulting. The writer Lionel Shriver notes that progressives want to be seen as good, whereas conservatives want to be seen as right. Land acknowledgments can’t be very good if indigenous people hate them.

As for whether land acknowledgments are right: of course not. Every piece of land on this planet has been conquered, reconquered and re-reconquered innumerable times going back to when Thok first hit Bok over the head with a club and stole his cave. It can’t be the case that all land belongs, morally, to whatever group was the second-to-last one to occupy it. Moreover, all cultures across civilizations and all the way back in time agreed, until very recently, that conquest was simply a law of nature. The indigenous inhabitants of North America, who were in many cases extremely warlike people, never disputed that.

…..

Instead of land acknowledgments, I offer another way to display gratitude for what came before us. What follows is my bank acknowledgment.

We produce this newspaper in a building that was recently recapitalized with a loan from Apollo Global Management. I write in an apartment financed by the JPMorgan Chase bank. We honor and respect these firms, who are wise ancestral caretakers of the streams of money.

In so doing, we channel the cooperative spirit in which businesses needing offices and people needing housing don’t need to put up the entire value of a building up front, but rather work together with a lender to agree on a rate of interest that each party believes will lead to a beneficial result. Neither side does this because of coercion, but out of self-interest. To quote Adam Smith on the actions of a hypothetical businessman, “he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an Invisible Hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

So we could replace land acknowledgments with invisible-hand acknowledgments. People fulfill each other’s needs simply by looking after their own: one gets a building, the other gets profits. Isn’t that spirit of working together a nicer thing to contemplate than the history of conquest?

Good news reported by Reason‘s Jacob Sullum: “The 5th Circuit rejects qualified immunity for cops who searched a driver after a bogus traffic stop.”

The Daily Dish is correct: (HT Scott Lincicome)

It is time to stop treating the outcome of tariff policy as a hypothetical. The experiment was run in 2001 and failed. It was re-run on a grand scale since 2017 and failed. It is not good economic policy. And in a month it will prove to be poor politics as well.

Tweet

… is from page 65 of the 2006 Liberty Fund edition of Ludwig von Mises’s 1956 volume, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality:

Freedom must be granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered.

DBx: Yes, although Mises misses by describing those who use freedom for the benefit of humankind as “few.” In a free society, they are most people. Everyone who performs honest production in the market, without special privileges granted by the state, uses his or her freedom to benefit not only himself or herself – and not only his or her family – but also countless strangers.

It’s true that some individuals use their freedom to create especially large benefits for strangers. Think of Gustavus Swift, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos. But most of us, known only to our families, friends, neighbors, and co-workers, also use our freedom to benefit others. Think of the person who picked the cabbage you’ll have for dinner, the clerk at Burger King, the accountant at Home Depot, the receptionist at your dentist’s office, the pilot for FedEx, the pilot for United Airlines, the supervisor at an Amazon warehouse, a maintenance technician at a data center, the security guard at a nearby strip mall…. the full list would be, literally, billions of individuals. Each and every one of these individuals, operating in the market, uses his or her freedom to benefit himself or herself by benefitting others.

…..

Mises was born on this date – September 29th – in 1881.

Tweet

GMU Econ alums Ed López and Jon Murphy provide a balanced treatment of the Trump administration’s unbalanced treatment of the balance of payments. A slice:

A country’s overall BOP must sum to zero. That is by accounting definition. When domestic buyers send money out to bring imports in (the current account), foreign exporters return money domestically as investment (the capital & financial account). The BOP is a form of double-entry bookkeeping applied to international trade.

But it also means that the current account—composed mostly of trade in goods and services—can be in deficit, while the capital & financial account is in surplus. When Americans run a current-account deficit, foreigners are simultaneously acquiring more dollar-denominated assets: Treasury bonds, corporate equity, real estate, and direct investment in U.S. commerce. The United States remains, by a wide margin, the world’s top destination for foreign capital. Inflows run several times those of the next-largest country recipient of foreign investment.

This reality is difficult to square with the concerns raised in Section 122. So-called “sudden stop” or currency crisis scenarios, both emphasized in the CEA report, were the types of exigencies that gave “balance-of-payments deficit” its urgency under the Bretton Woods currency peg regime. Whatever is happening in the modern U.S. economy, it isn’t a drawdown of reserves in defense of a currency peg. The U.S. formally abandoned the Bretton Woods system in 1976.

The CEA’s [Council of Economic Advisors’] argument is selectively assembled. It cites reputable studies, claiming that they endorse using the current-account deficit is a reasonable and reliable measure of a BOP deficit. But the cited studies don’t say that. In fact, they argue the opposite. The two studies, both published by the Federal Reserve in 1975, argue that fixating on any single balance, including the current account, is likely to mislead policymakers into unnecessary trade restrictions. One of the sources goes further, warning that expecting a construction of the basic balance to provide reliable insights of balance of payment conditions is “doomed to disappointment.” A reader who checks the footnotes finds the literature arguing against the report’s central premise, not for it.

As filing deadlines for the administration’s appeal arrive soon, the Courts and the public are being asked to treat the CEA report as neutral economic expertise rather than as advocacy manufactured for litigation. But it is a reverse-engineered definition to fit a legal conclusion already reached, and it falsely portrays its arguments as having support from reputable studies. The courts, and the rest of us, should notice the difference.

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady reflects wisely on U.S.-Mexico trade, and on the destructive disruption of that trade by “Tariff Man.” A slice:

This is a dangerous moment for continental free trade. Mexico may get some tariff relief. But odds are that the Trump administration will want to extract a pound of flesh in return: Mexican acquiescence to the end of zero-tariff trade in North America and an increase in its own tariff barriers with the rest of the world. Such a bargain would undermine the economic freedom that has made North America the envy of the world.

Mexico wants the U.S. to lower the Trump duties of 50% on Mexican steel, aluminum and manufactured derivatives (like household appliances) and the 25% tariffs on finished autos from Mexico.

Obviously washing machines, refrigerators and sedans don’t threaten American sovereignty. Mr. Trump is blatantly abusing the 232 statute and violating the USMCA. In response Mexico might have imposed punitive tariffs on American goods coming from politically sensitive congressional districts. Trade wars hurt everybody, but ahead of the U.S. midterm elections it would have been the fastest way to end the shooting coming from across the Rio Grande.

Instead President Claudia Sheinbaum did nothing. You can see why. She’s battling organized crime, funded by America’s voracious appetite for illegal narcotics. It’s in her interest to maintain a cooperative relationship with the U.S. on security. A trade war also would damage the economy and cost her politically. So rather than demand that Washington meet its USMCA free-trade obligations, Mexico is in search of half a loaf.

The USMCA already requires that duty-free passenger-vehicle imports contain 75% North American content and 70% North American steel and aluminum. The car’s core components also must be made in North America and at least 40% of its labor has to be valued at $16 an hour or more—in other words, American. But that isn’t good enough for the geniuses running Trump trade policy.

Chatter from behind the closed-door talks with Washington suggest that Mexican negotiators are hoping U.S. tariffs on Mexican steel might be reduced to 25% and Mexico might get the same 15% auto tariff that Japan and Europe now enjoy. If the U.S.-made content of the car (normally around 40%) remains duty-free, cars finished in Mexico would then be subject to an effective 9% or less tariff when entering the U.S.

While this might help restore some of North America’s edge globally, it would also mark the end of the zero-duty era launched under the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. And those aren’t the only concessions Tariff Man wants for his friends in the steel and aluminum industries.

The USMCA isn’t a customs union. It has no restrictions on how much metal Mexico can import from around the world for use in its domestic market or the tariff rate it charges. Mexican companies manufacturing for the domestic market are known to use non-North American metals. Remember too that 30% of the metal contained in duty-free USMCA cars from Mexico can be from outside the region.

This helps U.S. auto manufacturers remain globally competitive. But it’s a problem for American steel and aluminum protectionists. To solve it they want a North American common-market tariff for metals.

David Henderson makes the case that Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports will hurt the North American automobile industry. A slice:

The new tariffs won’t hurt the auto industry directly. Although the 50 percent tariff rate is in the nosebleed seats of the tariff arena, that 50 percent rate applies to only about US $20 billion of Canada’s approximately $400 billion of annual exports.

The problem is that Trump has shown himself to be a volatile decision-maker who will change his mind from week to week. If you’re a manufacturer trying to decide whether to produce parts in Canada for the huge US auto market, what do you need? The opposite: some degree of certainty.

The beautifully integrated North American auto industry is likely to be a casualty of this latest rejection of relatively free trade. Justin Wolfers is an economist at the University of Michigan. The auto industry matters a lot to that state. Here’s how Wolfers recently put it:

Around a city like Detroit, a cluster of automotive specialists grew up that straddles the border and draws on American and Canadian ingenuity at once. The bet was that a cluster like that could beat any purely American or purely Canadian city on earth, and it did.

Now run a tariff wall through the middle of it. American factories can’t get the parts they need at the price they need, so they use costlier parts, or worse ones. Canadian factories lose their American customers. Both sides get weaker.

But take one super competitor and split it into two smaller ones, and the deeper loss isn’t that each half is smaller. It’s that neither half is competitive.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal decries Tariff Man’s new punitive taxes – a.k.a. tariffs – on U.S.-based biotech firms’ purchases of imported inputs for their operations. Three slices:

Beijing this month rolled out a five-year plan to dominate the global biotech industry. Hard to believe, but President Trump is assisting Xi Jinping at the same time by hitting U.S. biotech companies with new tariffs. This will raise drug prices for Americans and drive more investment to China.

…..

The tariff threat is intended to push small biotech companies to strike similar deals. But most of these companies fund research and development from the sales of one or two medicines that treat small numbers of patients. Sharply discounting their drugs would make it harder to invest in new cures.

They also can’t easily “on-shore” manufacturing. More than 90% rely on third-party manufacturers. It’s not economic for companies with small product portfolios to spend billions of dollars on manufacturing plants. Contract manufacturers have expanded abroad in recent decades because of lower costs and less burdensome regulation. In the U.S., it typically takes about seven years to build a new bio-manufacturing facility, compared to two in China and three in Ireland. Blame the U.S. permitting morass and Food and Drug Administration red tape.

…..

One small company says tariff compliance could consume 2% to 4% of its working capital before it commercializes its first medicine. That means less money for research. It’s hard enough developing a new drug. Tariffs add more uncertainty that will discourage investment in U.S. biotech. Another win for Mr. Xi.

Mr. Trump is invoking national security under Section 232, but his tariff exemptions for companies that agree to “most-favored nation” pricing deal show his real motivation is lower drug prices. His biotech tariffs will raise them. America doesn’t want to rely on China for critical medicines like antibiotics, but industry-wide tariffs resemble the medieval treatment of applying leeches to bleed a patient.

“Immigration crackdown hits Kansas, disrupts beef processing.” (HT Scott Lincicome)

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what nevertheless does – need explaining to the Trump administration: “Treating adversaries better than allies is a recipe for isolation.” A slice:

America’s adversaries, especially those with nuclear weapons, sometimes seem to be treated more kindly by President Donald Trump than the country’s oldest friends. Such U.S. unreliability risks encouraging nuclear proliferation by pushing countries to look out for themselves.

GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller and my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein make clear that Adam Smith wrote wisely about how people should consume.

Nick Gillespie and Stephanie Slade ponder “why the right is embracing state power.”

Jeff Luse is correct: Trump’s joke about how he – Trump – would be “the greatest communist in history” is no laughing matter.

Michael Strain is a fan of Eric Zwick’s and Owen Zidar’s new book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There. A slice:

The reaction of many economists and journalists to the new book by Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar has been darkly comic. When these professional students of society discover that the wealthy are often engaged in activities considered unglamorous by coastal elites — building a hot dog empire, presiding over a fleet of car dealerships, or manufacturing and installing gutters — their reaction seems to be something like, “Hey, everyone, check out this new book; millionaires aren’t who you think they are!” Well, no, professor — millionaires aren’t who you think they are.

Bob Graboyes warns against falling for seemingly plausible false information.

Tweet

… is from pages 344-345 of William Bernstein’s excellent 2008 book, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World:

Inveighing against any further tariff increases, [Léon] Say argued that the struggle was not just between protection and free trade, but rather a mere facet of “that great combat of the individual against the state.”

DBx: Yes. Protectionists, including Trump and his MAGA crowd, are for the state and against the individual.

Léon Say (1826-1896) – French finance minister in the Third Republic – was the grandson of Jean-Baptiste Say.

Tweet

Mr. Vance:

On Thursday, over at X, you declared that “Our message to corporate America is simple: We’re not going to let you lay off American workers so you can replace them with cheap foreign labor.”

Because you greatly admire Thomas Aquinas, who endorsed human reason as a gift “imparted to us by God,” you’ll undoubtedly wish to embrace all that reason reveals to be implied by your premise that American workers should not lose their existing jobs to lower-cost means of production.

Obviously implied by your premise, as you’re aware, is a policy of excluding imports and immigrants who displace American workers from their existing jobs. But your premise implies much more. To be consistent you must also insist that government prevent improvements in all labor-saving techniques. A worker who loses his job to a foreigner who works more cheaply than him is no more distressed than is a worker who loses her job to a machine that works more cheaply than her.

You should, therefore, persuade Pres. Trump to join with Sen. Bernie Sanders to impose a moratorium on the development and use of AI. But not only that. You should persuade Americans to be grateful that the wars in Iran and Ukraine are raising the cost of energy. Because energy fuels labor-saving mechanization, the higher the cost of energy, the slower is the development and use of new labor-saving machines.

Indeed, you’ll want to block all expansion and improvement in America’s capital stock – expansion and improvement that historically have increased worker productivity. By your logic, we must avoid a future in which six American workers can produce what today requires ten American workers to produce. Stagnation of worker productivity demands that you and your party put an end to new investment in America.

And you’re not yet done. You should also oppose all research and development, including for health care. After all, every medical advance that reduces the severity of diseases and injuries puts some physicians, nurses, and caregivers out of their particular lines of work. By your logic, we cannot risk discovering the likes of a cure for cancer, as such a development would destroy the jobs of most oncologists.

Happily for you (if not for Americans generally), many of the policies that you and your party now practice – including tariffs, mass deportation of immigrants, government ownership of corporate shares, and fiscal profligacy – are certain to slow, and perhaps even to halt, economic growth and the inevitable destruction of particular jobs that accompanies such growth. You’re already well on your way to achieving your desired utopia.

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

Tweet

GMU Econ alum David Hebert explains that “tariff exemptions are big business for big business.” A slice:

What Apple and scores of other companies make clear is that extra profits from excluding foreign competition (costs paid by American buyers) isn’t the only prize industry lobbyists are after. The largest companies run through the exact same rent-seeking process again. The second time through, they argue for exemptions from the very tariffs they backed. And this is where the real money can be made.

First, tariffs make importing goods more expensive. This, in turn, allows domestic firms to raise their prices without fear of losing market share. A tariff on steel, for example, leads to higher domestic prices for steel. Then, industries adversely affected by the tariffs lobby for exemptions for themselves. Apple has done this, but so too have other industries. On June 1, President Trump signed a proclamation that adjusted the Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper to help relieve farmers of some of their burden. One industry gets the protection of the tariffs while another gets exemptions, protecting them from the tariffs. A firm that wins an exemption can continue buying its inputs at the lower, world price while their rivals pay the higher, domestic price.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. During President Trump’s first term, the Commerce Department created a process by which firms could request exclusions from the Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum. By January 2021, 153,831 such requests had been filed by just 941 firms. Why such a small number of firms? Consider what it takes to actually file a request. You’ll need lawyers and trade consultants who know how to actually put together a well-formatted request and staff who know their way around a federal docket to make sure that the request reaches the correct person. Larger companies, with their Rolodex of contacts in Washington, can make sure that their requests reach certain people with whom they already have a standing relationship. Smaller firms have none of these. What’s more, domestic producers were allowed to object to a competitor’s request, meaning that not only were firms able to request exemptions for themselves, but they were able to sabotage one another’s requests as well.

Speaking of hypocritical big businesses, Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon call out Nucor Steel for its duplicity.

Emily Ekins and Jonah Messinger report that working-class Americans aren’t sold on tariffs.

My Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon makes clear that the measured fall in workers’ share of national income does not mean that workers are losing. A slice:

But even if we look past the mismeasurement issue inherent in the income share data, there is good reason to be upbeat about what the data is fundamentally pointing towards: a growing capital stock.

Importantly, the period of declining labor share has coincided with rising real wages, higher living standards, greater worker ownership of capital, and significant improvements in technological progress. But sadly, optimism doesn’t sell as well as doomerism.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

CBO just released its latest “Distribution of Household Income” report (for year 2023), and the findings are – as usual – a narrative violation.

Real incomes up across the board.

Income inequality basically flat for decades.

Taxes falling for everyone except the rich.

The Washington Post chats with Reason‘s Stephanie Slade about the right’s wrong turn.

Maud Maron justly criticizes fantasy-writer Nikole Hannah-Jones’s mistaken and dangerous notion of equality. A slice:

My insistence that my children get a good education is neither tawdry nor a bargain. It’s called being a good parent, and Ms. Hannah-Jones could and should have done it for her own child. Now, instead of asking hard questions about why her approach failed, she doubles down on her original thesis: racism.

Ms. Hannah-Jones and I both have children who are juniors in the New York City public schools. I also have two older children who graduated in 2024 and 2026, as well as a fifth-grader, so I have some comparison points Ms. Hannah-Jones lacks. My two eldest graduated from a school system that required Regents exams—subject-matter competency tests that measure students’ baseline proficiency and stress-test whether the system itself is serving students. My youngest two, like Najya, won’t have to take those exams because the “equity” movement Ms. Hannah-Jones champions won the day: The state Education Department has decided that the class of 2027 is the last that will have to pass the Regents to graduate.

I have also seen the effect of replacing state test scores, grades and attendance as admission rubrics for middle school and high school with lottery numbers. It did lessen the number of white and Asian kids in “good” schools and increase black and Hispanic enrollment. It also fueled the exodus of families of all colors from the school system. Ms. Hannah-Jones calls that racism in action. But city data don’t support her claim. The school system asked families why they left. Forty-one percent wanted a more rigorous education than the city’s public schools could provide. Of families who switched to charters, which overwhelmingly serve minority students, 46% cited the need for greater academic rigor. For families moving to private schools, 42% did.

Racial animus is Ms. Hannah-Jones’s blind spot, and it runs through everything else she won’t look at. The Mississippi Miracle—a decade-long, low-cost literacy overhaul that took the poorest state in the country from 49th to ninth in the nation in reading—never makes it into her articles. Neither do the charter schools that routinely outperform their district counterparts with similar students and less money.

If you care about improving outcomes for black students, you ought to ask how that happened. Ms. Hannah-Jones doesn’t, because she is sure she already has the answer to what ails New York’s schools: “wealthy white parents.” Najya figured out that parents like me were on to something when we championed meritocracy and selective schools. Her mother has a lot of lessons to learn.

Tweet

… is from page 39 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

Learning to think, and to know what you are talking about, is a full-time occupation. Nowhere is this more true than in the formative years. Even naturally bright people can turn out to be nothing more than clever mush heads if the discipline of logic and the analytical dissection of many-sided empirical evidence is slighted for the sake of emotional “experiences.”