Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My colleague Dan Klein, writing at National Review, defends Adam Smith from the ignorant or lying woke mob. Here’s his conclusion:

The same is happening in the United States, of course. Leftists are making quick work of towering figures from our past. But for the sake of our culture and of ourselves, we shouldn’t let them lie about history.

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds is correct: “To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are.”

George Will rightly cheers a college student who is resisting the tyranny of the woke monsters. A slice:

It is difficult nowadays to be on the cutting edge of academic absurdity, but Gwinnett [College]] got there two ways. First, it stipulated that the First Amendment covers only wee slivers of campus: “free speech expression areas” available only four hours Monday through Thursday, and two hours on Friday, and which individual speakers could reserve only once every 30 days. Then Gwinnett argued that Uzuegbunam’s discussion of gentle Jesus meek and mild was “contentious” language with “a tendency to incite hostility,” and hence constituted “fighting words” unprotected by the Constitution.

Thomas Chatterton Williams encounters (the work of) Thomas Sowell. Here’s his conclusion:

And that is the revelation in a nutshell: reading Thomas Sowell has this déja-vu quality. The most important realization you are left with is not that he possesses the final word on every subject but that he wields profound insight and reams of data and comparative research into many of the very debates that still consume us. As a conscientious liberal it leaves you with a nagging question: Why haven’t you or anyone you know ever so much as acknowledged the existence of his output? If we are lucky, this documentary and Riley’s biography will be part of the necessary and overdue work of rectifying the oversight. I suppose I owe my aunt an apology.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, GMU Econ alum Alex Salter makes the case against more “stimulus.” A slice:

Both supply and demand problems plagued the economy last spring, but only the former persist. Last year’s Covid relief packages put plenty of money into consumers’ pockets. In fact, households are awash in cash. Private savings rates are about as high as ever. The problem isn’t a lack of purchasing power, but a supply-side bottleneck: Many business restrictions remain in force, and the labor force is limited by the pace of the vaccine rollout. To fix this, it is reasonable to dedicate federal resources to increase vaccine production and distribution. ARPA does a little of this, devoting $16 billion to vaccine distribution and another $50 billion to virus testing and contact tracing. But this is far from satisfactory, given its $1.9 trillion total.

Spending packages such as ARPA can’t fix supply-side problems. Since the economy no longer suffers a demand shortfall, the main effect of the law will be to redistribute resources from productive, market-driven activities to unproductive, politically driven ones.

Jack Nicastro and Ethan Yang warn against going down the dangerous path of economic isolationism urged on Americans by Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

David Henderson describes some economists’ tin ear regarding inflation.

On Lanny Friedlander.