Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Danusha Goska eloquently exposes the illogic, hypocrisy, and evil of wokism. (HT Tim Townsend) A slice:

Woke condemns being “nice” and “polite.” Niceness and politeness were invented by white men to support patriarchy and white supremacy. Robin DiAngelo points out that “niceness” is merely a façade white supremacists have developed to camouflage their evil. To be “nice” is actually to be “violent” and white supremacist, reports the group “Women of Color and Allies.” Women “need to embrace the discomfort, the edges and the messiness of overturning that which has kept us in the number two slot of the power and privilege pyramid for over 500 years … niceness destroys people of color.” Niceness and politeness belong in the same museum with whips and chains.

In reality, of course, it is not oppressed women who can forgo niceness and politeness. When I was cleaning houses, and when my mother before me was cleaning houses, for rich, liberal women, neither my mother before me nor I ever dared to be anything but deferential to these women.

Only the truly privileged can appropriate the victim costume, forgo niceness and politeness, and rage at, and destroy, their alleged “oppressors.” At Smith College the annual cost for students is $78,000. In July, 2018, Student Oumou Kanoute falsely accused low-wage Smith workers of racism. She doxed the accused on social media. One cafeteria worker was so stressed she had to be hospitalized.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady exposes the hypocrisy of woke-infected Major League Baseball. Here’s her opening:

Major League Baseball says “values” compelled it to move this summer’s All-Star Game out of Georgia. But this piety doesn’t square with its long record of collaboration with Cuba’s military dictatorship, one of the world’s most notorious human-rights violators.

George Leef decries wokism on campus.

David Henderson notes that it’s a win-win for Amazon’s workers and Amazon’s shareholders.

Arnold Kling writes wisely about social conventions.

J.D. Tuccille exposes Joe Biden’s insincerity.

Dan Mitchell reports on New York’s fiscal suicide.

Bob Poole offers an excellent proposal.

Tom Palmer rightly writes that “If protectionists were consistent, they should be lauding the captain of the Ever Given for his ability to disrupt trade.” A slice:

Some people see trade across borders as negative. They believe that when you buy something from foreigners, you lose. They should thus be happy when goods are blocked from entering their country. Former president Donald Trump famously stated, “China has been taking out 500 billion dollars a year out of our country and rebuilding China.” In his view, that wealth left the U.S. and went to China, a view that oddly overlooks all the things that producers in China send to Americans, including computers, furniture, integrated circuits, sports equipment, electrical machines and, yes, tea. And it leaves out all the things American producers send to China, from aircraft to soybeans, cars and trucks to optical and medical instruments. The protectionist thinks that if you send money abroad, you’re losing. By the same logic, when I send money to my local grocery store, wealth is leaving my house in order to build someone else’s. I “lose” every time I buy food from the grocery, or electricity from the power company, or medicine from the pharmacy. That view is known as the “balance of trade.”

Adam Smith in his 1776 masterpiece, noted that “Nothing … can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade, upon which, not only these restraints, but almost all the other regulations of commerce are founded. When two places trade with one another, this [absurd] doctrine supposes that, if the balance be even, neither of them either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of them loses and the other gains in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium.”

In the latest episode of The Great Antidote, Juliette Sellgren talks with GMU Econ alum Liya Palagashvili about the Future Economy.