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(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Steve Landsburg expresses his justified dismay at Joe Biden’s support for raising the minimum wage. Here’s Steve’s opening:

For nearly four years, I’ve looked forward to voting against Donald Trump. But Joe Biden keeps testing my resolve.

It isn’t only that I think Mr. Biden is frequently wrong. It’s that he tends to be wrong in ways that suggest he never cared about being right. He makes no attempt to defend many of his policies with logic or evidence, and he deals with objections by ignoring or misrepresenting them. You can say the same about President Trump, but I’d hoped for better.

Also in today’s Wall Street Journal, Christopher Rufo exposes “critical race theory” for the racist nonsense that it is. A slice:

As I document in detailed reports for City Journal and the New York Post, critical race theory training sessions in public agencies have pushed a deeply ideological agenda that includes reducing people to a racial essence, segregating them, and judging them by their group identity rather than individual character, behavior and merit.

Although originally published 30 years ago, this essay on American ‘decline’ by Deirdre McCloskey remains relevant today.

Here’s a virus update from Arnold Kling. A slice:

What if the virus had made its appearance in 1990?

–I don’t think people would have self-quarantined. We didn’t have the infrastructure for low-cost direct-to-home delivery. We didn’t have the technology to allow people to work from home.

–I don’t think we would have had lockdowns. We didn’t have a generation of people raised to believe that it was unsafe for children to play without adult supervision. Shelter-in-place orders from the government would have been too unpopular for elected leaders to contemplate.

–We would not have been promised a vaccine. No one could have announced “We already sequenced the virus genome!” as if that meant a vaccine was coming any day now.

–We would not have had all of the treatment options available today.

–Our population would have had a lower proportion of high-risk individuals–fewer elderly, obese, and diabetic individuals.

–We would not have had social media to fill our heads with statistics and model forecasts and expert pronouncements to keep the virus foremost in our minds.

In short, I suspect we would have come out about the same in terms of population death rate, maybe a little more or maybe a little less. The economic consequences would have been much less. And it would not have blown up into a national trauma. For the trauma, we can thank the fact that we now live in the Digital City.

Timothy Taylor tweets out some of GMU Econ alum Scott Drylie’s research on Adam Smth’s views about the government’s role in elementary education.

David Henderson succinctly explains why cuts in the rates of taxation on income and capital gains raises real wages. (Hint: The reason has nothing to do with the simplistic Keynesian story about causing spending – and, hence, aggregate demand – to rise.)