A Book Review of The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, by Thomas Philippon.1 The Great Reversal defends a provocative and surprising thesis: the United States has given up on free markets while Europe has embraced them. As a result, Europeans pay less and get more in a lot of industries, like telecommunications and air travel. Throughout the book, New York University economist Thomas Philippon explains why the United States is no longer the seat of dynamic, innovative capitalism that it once was. It resonated with some of my recent experiences. In August, I visited the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark for a week and gave a few lectures. One of my lectures applied some of the insights Deirdre McCloskey and I explored in our 2020 book2 to the Danish retail sector. I was surprised when I was doing some research for the talk and learned that according to OECD data, Danish retail shoulders a smaller regulatory burden than American retail even though Danish land use laws make it so that grocery stores there are inefficiently small and Danish consumers pay higher prices.3 “Philippon makes a convincing case that we would do well to revise our belief that the American economy is a free market while European economies are not.” In fifteen clearly written, easy-to-read chapters plus an introduction, a conclusion, and a technical appendix, Philippon shows why some of my Danish audiences should have stifled their laughter when I described their country as a free-market paradise compared to the United States. He defends his thesis by exploring numerous data sources, including the Mercatus Center’s database4 working to quantify the intensity of regulation in the United States (pp. 94-96). They tell the same story: European markets have gotten freer while American markets have gotten less free. As he explains with respect to occupational licensing, the United States and Europe are moving in opposite directions, with the United States moving toward more tightly controlled labor markets and Europe moving toward freer labor markets (p. 283). Philippon makes a convincing case that we would do well to revise our belief that the American economy is a free market while European economies are not. He goes industry-by-industry to explain where and how European markets have become freer than American markets. He also looks at the data to see how “new” and “unprecedented” firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are, and he finds that while they definitely represent important new technologies, they aren’t really that different from other superstar firms of the past, relative to the rest of the economy. Philippon is a self-described “free market liberal” who approaches his subject with a set of arguments and tools that are straight out of the neoclassical mainstream. Philippon writes explicitly that by “free markets,” he means “markets are free when they are not subject to arbitrary political interference and when incumbents are not artificially protected from competitive new entrants” (p. viii). From what I can gather, he believes with most economists that free markets work wonderfully in most instances, fail miserably in some instances, and can be fixed with appropriate regulations, taxes, and subsidies. I’m less sanguine about “our” ability to fix markets by relying on experts, no matter how much data they are able to assemble. In 2009, I asked, “is the definition of the market too important to be left to the market?” in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to block the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger.5 I think Philippon, like many economists, does take the implications of F.A. Hayek’s argument about the use of knowledge in society as seriously as he should. Hayek isn’t arguing that markets calculate more efficiently than central planners. He argues that the knowledge problem is of a wholly different kind than the problems experts can solve with enough data and powerful enough computers. There is a great deal of often tacit, rarely articulated knowledge of “the particular circumstances of time and place” that cannot confront an expert or regulator as meaningful data. Forsaking the market necessarily substitutes the regulator’s imagination for the combined but unarticulated wisdom embodied in prices and evolved rules. Political economy gets about fifty of the book’s roughly three hundred pages, and Philippon concludes that American markets are not as competitive as they would have been without lobbying and rent-seeking. I’m reminded of my late friend Steven Horwitz’s first law of political economy: “no one hates capitalism more than capitalists,” and a point Donald J. Boudreaux made once: “if rents can be created, they will be sought.” It would be useful, I think, for future work building on Philippon to focus more on the supply side of the market for economic rents a la Randall Holcombe in Political Capitalism and Fred McChesney in Money for Nothing: The Political Economy of Rent Extraction. It warmed my heart to see Philippon bring Mancur Olson’s analysis into the conversation, but I would have preferred that he carry the public choice analysis further and more clearly highlighted the difference between how coercion and cooperation work as crucibles in which social knowledge is tried and authenticated. He argues that “(t)olerating well-intentioned mistakes is therefore part of good regulation, provided that there is due process and that there is a mechanism to learn from these mistakes” (p. 4), but there is nothing analogous to profits and losses in the regulatory world, and few of those making the rules have much skin in the game. Since they don’t enjoy large rewards for being right or suffer large losses for being wrong, they are likely biased toward errors. Consider antitrust policy, which is in theory about protecting gains from trade, but which is in practice often about protecting incumbents’ rents. Judge Learned Hand’s decision in United States v. Alcoa (1945) is instructive. Without irony, he excoriated Alcoa for hustling to innovate, lower prices, and produce more whenever and wherever the company’s executives saw opportunities. In short, he denounced Alcoa as a monopolist for doing the exact opposite of what monopolists do. I think Philippon and would both agree that organizations like the Food and Drug Administration and various licensing boards should lose their power to block entry and thwart competition. I for one would love to see a reciprocal approval agreement where (say) any drug approved in any OECD country is automatically approved for sale in the United States. It falls short of the free market utopia I would like to live in, but it’s a definite improvement over the status quo. Similarly, Philippon points out that foreign airlines are not allowed to fly U.S. domestic routes. There is no compelling economic or even security reason for this, and we would see lower prices and better service if airlines like Etihad and RyanAir could carry passengers from New York to Los Angeles and back. I would also like to see more reciprocal licensing agreements among licensed professions in the United States along with permission for people trained in foreign medical schools to practice in the United States. I’m not going to hold my breath, though, given what I know about the dynamics of the rent-seeking society. For more on these topics, see “Occupational Licensing,” by S. David Young. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. “The Regulator’s Calculation Problem,” by Arnold Kling. Library of Economics and Liberty, Apr. 6, 2015. Michael Munger on Antitrust. EconTalk. While I have various disagreements with what is otherwise a fine book, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that we fundamentally agree that markets work and that if a government is going to do anything, it should work around the margins to make markets work better. It’s easy to forget that this widely-shared consensus among professional economists is most definitely not shared by the general public or by many intellectuals and scholars who are not economists. Philippon explains why we should embrace competition, and if more people do so after reading The Great Reversal, he will have done an important job. Footnotes [1] Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets. Belknap Press, 2021. [2] Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World. University of Chicago Press, 2020. [3] Art Carden, Why Free Market Economies are Superior to Centrally Planned Economies. Lecture delivered at the Centre for Political Studies, August 17, 2022. YouTube. [4] See QuantGov.org. [5] Art Carden, “Defining the Extent of the Market: The Whole Foods Case.” The Mises Institute, June 2, 2009. *Art Carden is Assistant Professor of Economics at Samford University in Birmingham, AL, a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics in McLean, VA, a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland, CA, and a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee. For more articles by Art Carden, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

This book is our story, an unlikely account of how two outsiders—a charter school principal and defrocked philosopher… are now fortunate to preside over one of the most successful early-stage funds in the business… in the top one or two percent of all funds in its class… I do not write as a disinterested outsider but as a crazed participant gone berserk. If the Rust Belt has come to define the hollowed-out industries of the Midwest, in the next ten years the Paper Belt will come to define the paper-based industries from Washington, D.C., to Boston. In D.C., they print money, visas, and laws on paper. In Delaware, companies incorporate on paper. And in Boston, Harvard and MIT print diplomas on paper. I am dedicated to lighting the Paper Belt on fire. —Michael Gibson, Paper Belt on Fire.1 The first quote is from the prologue, and the second quote is from chapter 8, “The Nakamoto Consensus” Michael Gibson’s Paper Belt on Fire weaves together a memoir and a manifesto. Without the memoir describing his accomplishments and how he achieved them, the manifesto might seem deluded and grandiose. Without the manifesto, the memoir would lack passion. Together, they make for a compelling read. Lessons from the Memoir Gibson was hired by Thiel Capital in 2010, primarily to assist Peter Thiel in teaching a course. But immediately Gibson became involved with the Thiel Fellowship, an initiative to pay select young people $100,000 a year for two years to do something other than attend college. A few years later, Gibson and his co-worker, Danielle Strachman, broke away to start a venture capital fund called 1517, that would back very young entrepreneurs, including teenagers. Screening candidates for the Thiel Fellowship and then searching for young entrepreneurs gave Gibson and Strachman a unique experience finding unusually gifted individuals. Like Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross in their book Talent, Gibson and Strachman were looking beyond the standard indicators of intelligence to find intangible qualities. Gibson’s chapter “Intelligence Redefined,” is at least the equal of the Cowen-Grossman book. For Gibson, the key quality is a sort of wily resourcefulness. The great founders are the ones who always find a way. This is their highest virtue. What does it take to “find a way” in the world of tech start-ups? Gibson lists five abilities founders need: First, the ability to confront unknowns and uncertainty without being either too tentative or too overconfident. Gibson calls this “edge control.” Second, the ability to adapt as a company grows from a handful of people in a room to a giant corporation. I myself have noticed that small firms can and should be managed informally, but when you get past the Dunbar number of about 150 employees, you start to need formal mechanisms—organization charts, company manuals, internal training programs, and so the like. Third, what Gibson calls “hyperfluency.” The founder must have superior knowledge of a technology/market niche but also must be able to communicate that knowledge to ordinary people unfamiliar with the niche. Fourth, … founders of a company have to have the social and emotional intelligence to make hires, work with customers, raise money from investors, and gel with co-founders. The complexity of this total effort is incredibly demanding and emotionally exhausting. Finally, The initial motivation for starting a company is often the excitement of doing something new and risky… but the sustaining motivation to keep going year after year, through all the twists and turns, has to be tied to something deeper, something richer in meaning. “Previously, working in a large organization, my experience had been that when an idea of mine became a corporate project, someone else was put in charge.” When I started one of the first commercial sites on the Web, I had something to prove. Previously, working in a large organization, my experience had been that when an idea of mine became a corporate project, someone else was put in charge. That was deeply frustrating. Going out on my own allowed me to try to implement an idea myself. But once the Web-based business became successful enough to provide me with sufficient validation, there was no sustaining motivation for me to stick with it. I also appreciated another chapter of the memoir called “The Cram-Down,” which describes how as early-stage funders the 1517 Fund could get mistreated by later investors. I had a similarly bitter experience when I attempted an angel investment, and until I read this chapter, I thought that in getting screwed over I was uniquely inept. The Manifesto I wonder whether writing this book means that Gibson has lost a bit of his sustaining motivation for running the venture fund. Perhaps his heart is now in what I am calling the manifesto. Finding a score of geniuses to be Thiel Fellows and then founding an investment fund to steer wily, resourceful young people into entrepreneurship is just a start. The beginning of the manifesto can be found in the prologue. It makes four claims: The first is that science, know-how, and wisdom are the source of almost all that is good: higher living standards; longer, healthier lives; thriving communities… The second is that the rate of progress in science, know-how, and wisdom has flatlined… since about 1971… The third claim is that the complete and utter failure of our education system, from K-12 up through Harvard, is a case in point… The last, chief point is that the fate of our civilization depends upon replacing or reforming our unreliable and corrupted institutions, which include both the local public school and the entire Ivy League. Gibson’s final chapter, “Coda: The Invisible College,” is even more expansive. It is essential that we find solutions to the top unsolved problems in the following fields: energy creation, transportation, health, education, freshwater abundance, increasing crop yields for less, cleaning the air, and, lastly, human flourishing. He proceeds to enumerate various teams—ranging from obscure start-ups to project groups in leading corporations—that are working on these problems. Most people are in favor of scientific progress. But the mainstream approach is to give more money to universities and government funding programs. In the chapter “Intelligence Redefined,” Gibson writes: Grant-making bodies cover their ass by awarding research funding only to the established over the new, the prestigious over the experimental. The National Institute for Health, for example, allocates just two percent of its funding to scientists younger than thirty-five, while 98 percent of its money goes to scientists older than thirty-six. If scientists and inventors are more creative in their twenties and thirties, then this funding policy has things completely backward. In his “Coda” chapter, Gibson writes: To accelerate progress, we need young people working at the frontiers of knowledge sooner than they have in the past. They also need greater freedom. What that means is institutions that trust them to take risks and demonstrate some edge control with their research. For more on these topics, see Michael Munger on the Future of Higher Education. EconTalk. Tyler Cowen on Talent. EconTalk. The blend of memoir and manifesto in Paper Belt on Fire appealed to me. The memoir is well-paced and tells colorful stories of famous figures, such as Peter Thiel and Vitalik Buterin, along with colorful but lesser-known characters. The manifesto is more than a mere complaint about the sorry state of key institutions. It is a bracing attempt to chart a new course. Footnotes [1] Michael Gibson, Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University. Encounter Books, 2022. *Arnold Kling has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care; Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work; Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy; and Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics. He contributed to EconLog from January 2003 through August 2012. Read more of what Arnold Kling’s been reading. For more book reviews and articles by Arnold Kling, see the Archive. As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases. (0 COMMENTS)

  I watched substantial parts of the Stanford academic freedom conference on Friday and a little on Saturday. (I didn’t go because after being in a car, an airplane, and a bus for a total of over 20 hours to visit a friend in New Hampshire, my left leg was hurting, and I couldn’t imagine driving 2 hours to Stanford and then sitting for hours more.) Overall, the parts I saw were excellent. I thought some of the best talks were by Jay Bhattacharya, Tyler Cowen, John Ioannidis, John Hasnas, Peter Arcidiacono, and Solveig Gold. Arcidiacono’s talk reminded me of a wonderful poem called “The Paradoxical Commandments.” I posted about it some years ago here. There was one discordant note, though, in a speech by Peter Thiel. Thiel was laying out what he sees as the failure of STEM. He thinks that we just have not made the amount of technological progress that we should have made in the last few decades and he attributes that, in part, to the failure of universities in the hard sciences. I have no opinion on that; he knows more than I do about technological progress and so he may well be right. After making that point, he stated that with 4% economic growth annually, a lot of our economic problems would go away. I agree with that. Then he said that the Boskin Commission, which was appointed by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in the mid-1990s to evaluate how good a measure the Consumer Price Index is, lied (his word). Instead of getting 4% growth, said Thiel, they handled the issue by claiming that 2% growth is really 4% growth because the CPI overstates inflation by understating quality improvements. They didn’t lie. That was a scurrilous attack by Thiel. First, the Commission stated that the CPI overstated inflation by 1.1 percentage points, not 2 percentage points. Second, it had good grounds for that. Later, Mike Boskin actually laid out the grounds for thinking that the CPI systematically overstates inflation by 0.8 to 0.9 percentage points per year. It’s in “Consumer Price Indexes” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Here’s what the Commission said in its report: Our Interim Report of September 15, 1995, presented initial estimates of biases in the CPI. We estimated that the overall bias had been 1.5 percentage point per annum in recent years, but changes in the CPI methodology then in prospect from BLS would eliminate as much as 0.5 percentage point per annum of this bias, reducing the bias going forward to 1.0 percentage point per annum. We have now revised our estimates to reflect changes in the CPI announced by BLS on March 29, 1996, and new estimates of the impact of biases due to the introduction of new products and changes in the quality of existing products. The BLS has eliminated some of this bias totaling 0.24 percentage point per year, raising our estimate of the bias going forward by one-quarter of one percentage point. In addition, we have revised our estimates of new products/quality change bias upward by 0.10 percentage point per year. I get a little lost in the weeds here but whatever the exact bias, the point is, with regard to Thiel’s claim, that the Commission had a good basis for its conclusions. Moreover, quality improvements were only part of the story. Another part was substitution bias. Yet another was outlet bias. Boskin explains it all here. If there was a liar, and I’m not saying there was because I don’t know if Thiel is simply ignorant, it was not Mike Boskin or the Boskin Commission. Thiel wound up this part of his discussion by saying that the economists were saying (and I’m quoting as exactly as I remember) that we should tell grandma that because her cell phone is a little thinner, that makes up for the fact that she’s eating cat food. I’ll leave you to judge whether that’s close to an accurate conclusion based on what economists are saying about quality changes, new products, substitution bias, and outlet bias. The picture above is of Mike Boskin. Disclosure: During the extreme Santa Clara county lockdown, Mike Boskin had some very pleasant interactions by email, to the point where he has become somewhat of a friend. (0 COMMENTS)

When everyone is carrying a camera in their pocket, what raises the act of taking pictures to the level of fine art photography? Jessica Todd Harper, the award-winning portrait photographer, says that it’s equal parts mindset and technique–and lots of setting the stage to seize that perfect light. Listen as Harper speaks with EconTalk host […] The post Jessica Todd Harper on Beauty, Family, and Photography appeared first on Econlib.

In 2021, I predicted that the mood of the public would become increasingly gloomy, partly due to the removal of stimulus. This past June, I cited a Michigan survey that showed record low consumer sentiment. A new article in The Economist cites evidence that this phenomenon is affecting most OECD countries, and provides some reasons. The Economist notes that sentiment is even worse than what a model would suggest based solely on the inflation figures, and cites a number of factors including slow productivity growth.  But this caught my eye: The second relates to the comedown from the stimulus bonanza. In 2020-21 rich-world governments doled out trillions of dollars to households, boosting disposable incomes by an unusually large amount. This year governments have largely stopped the handouts. Average disposable incomes are now falling, even without accounting for inflation. Nobody likes that. The third relates to the stimulus bonanza itself. A new working paper by Ania Jaroszewicz of Harvard University, and colleagues, finds tentative evidence that people who get modest cash payments of up to $2,000—the sort of amounts given out during the pandemic—actually become unhappier. These payments are not big enough to be life-changing, and may simply highlight what recipients are unable to afford. The fiscal response to covid, it seems, has a sting in its tail. I am becoming more and more convinced that much of the fiscal stimulus was a mistake.  Even if it made people happier (which seems increasingly doubtful), society will have to pay a price over the next few years in terms of painful austerity.  Once again, there are no free lunches.   (0 COMMENTS)

“Your vote counts” is an empty slogan or an illusion or a lie. In virtually all cases, it does not count at all. I am always surprised to find intelligent people thinking that an ordinary voter, by using his single vote, has a significant chance of influencing the results and consequences of an election. We meet this idea again, in a slightly different form, in Simon Kuper’s Financial Times column (“The Most Powerful Voters Aren’t Who You Think,” October 3, 2022). Many people seem surprised when an economist or political scientist tells them that an ordinary and rational voter has no reasonable hope of deciding an election, that is, of changing who is elected (or which proposition is adopted in a referendum) compared to what would have been the case had he voted differently or not at all. These people either have never reflected on the mathematics of the claim, or have never wondered where they can observe elections when one vote made a difference, or they are so engrossed in a simple, not to say simplistic, democratic ideology that they just imagine a reality that matches it. The basic math are relatively simple. Consider a committee of three persons, including you, who vote to choose one of two alternatives. If the probability that each of the other two committee members votes for either alternative is 0.5, the probability that your voice will be decisive is given by the ratio of the two possible results with a tie to the total number of four possible outcomes, that is, 0.5 also. But if the committee has 4 persons besides you, your probability of being decisive decreases to 0.375. If the committee is a group of 1,000 voters plus you, the probability that you will be decisive drops to 0.0189. These probabilities decrease dramatically if the probabilities of any other voters’ voting one way or the other changes only slightly. For example, if this probability is respectively 0.49 and 0.51 for the two issues, we can calculate that, in an electorate of 1,000 plus you, the probability that you will break a tie goes down to 0.0155; in an electorate of 100,000,000 plus you, it is astronomically lower that the inverse of the number of particles in the observable universe. (See the sidebar “Does Your Vote Really Count?” in my “The Public Choice Revolution,” Regulation, Fall 2004; based on Dennis C. Mueller, Public Choice III [Cambridge University Press, 2003], pp. 304-306.) Let me answer a standard objection immediately: “But all together, we make a difference.” Of course, if one voter controlled the votes of 50%+1 of the electors, he would be certain to be decisive. But the probability would drop dramatically if he only controlled 25% of the votes or 10% or, ultimately, just his own vote. QED. Another objection is that rare events do happen. Yes, but not often. Following the November 2017 election for Dictrict 94 of the Virginia House of Delegates, the Republican candidates first had a 10-vote lead on 23,215 votes. A recount changed the result to a one-vote lead for the Democratic candidate. A three-judge panel then found a vote incorrectly disqualified, which produced a tie. After further litigation, a random drawing was held on January 4, which gave the victory to the Republican candidate. At best, every Republican voter can claim to have produced a tie, and that was in one relatively small district. This simple mathematical approach has been improved, for example, by considering that before voting the voter knows, notably through opinion polls, that a certain number of his fellow voters have made their minds for a candidate or a party, which decreases the effective size of the decisive set in which he is competing and increases his chances to be decisive. Yet, the probability that a single voter changes the result of a large election remains very low. So low that it virtually never happens. Considering more complications of the real world, the districts and the electoral college, Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, and Aaron Edlin used the 2008 presidential election to evaluate what probability the average American could have reasonable formed that he could elect the president, i.e., that without his vote another president would be elected. It was at most 1 in 10 million depending on locations, and 1 in 60 million on average over the United States. (See “What Is the Probability Your Vote Will Make a Difference,” Economic Inquiry 50:2 [April 2012], 321-326.) Gelman et al. also calculated that if a voter in New Mexico could have brought 5,000 of his fellow voters to switch to his side, he would have had a 1.3% chance of flipping the state and a 1 in 6,000 chance of changing the nationally-elected president. But no ordinary voter influence as many votes, although a very popular pundit or media personality or popular singer may. To give some perspective, the estimated 1 in 60,000,000 chance of an average American to elect the president he wants is still five times higher than his odds of winning the jackpot in a Powerball drawing (apparently 1 in 292,000,000). We do occasionally see somebody winning the jackpot, but an ordinary voter has never been decisive in a presidential election. The best that Kupel can find is the Bush-Gore 2000 election, when the difference was of “537 possibly miscounted” votes in Florida; Wikipedia would have provided him with better examples in smaller elections. It is true, of course, that we would need a large number of such elections before we can test the 1/60,000,000 probability. Finally, note that the single voter hypothetically decisive after perhaps thousands of presidential elections may end up disappointed because “his” president would break the single promise that motivated the lucky voter. To be fair to Mr. Kuper, his column was more about the fact that a double citizenship, which both he and his wife have, allows one to vote in two different countries. But note that twice a minuscule probability of having an influence in two different countries still means a minuscule probability of having an influence. He should instead have emphasized that the great benefit of double citizenship is not a double vote but the possibility of voting with one’s feet, which counts much for an individual’s liberty. I am not denying that there are moral reasons for an individual to vote, at least for a candidate who is very likely to contribute to the maintenance of a free society. I am not denying either that democracy has advantages. I am just reiterating the basic argument that an individual who votes to influence the outcome of an election in anything but a small committee must suffer from a cognitive limitation, or be an inveterate gambler, or must enjoy expressing his opinion to the winds. (See also Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral preferences [Cambridge University Press, 1993].) (2 COMMENTS)

The Miller’s Organic Farm Case: Part 1 Why write about a disturbing misfortune when to all appearances nothing can be done? In the Amish village of Bird-in-Hand in a remote area of Pennsylvania, Miller’s Organic Farm has been in business for a century. Today, it supplies organic foods—grass-fed beef, raw milk and eggs, dairy from grass-fed water buffalo, and all types of produce—to a private food club of 4,000 members who pay top dollar for high-quality whole food. Members want food from a farmer who doesn’t process his meat and dairy products at U.S. Department of Agriculture facilities. Aaron Miller,  the owner, chooses to defend his preparation of food as the way God intended it. He himself has run the farm for a quarter of a century with no electricity, no fertilizer, and no gasoline. Observers are impressed with crop yields he achieves by the oldest and 100 percent organic methods. The farm’s website says:  “…we are proud to be entirely chemical, cruelty, and GMO-free. The animals are born and raised without antibiotics or hormones, and they spend their entire lives naturally and stress-free out on pasture. All the farm’s food is traceable, pure, and grown on nutrient-dense soil, under traditional time-honored methods.” Sounds to me like the consolidated dream about a dozen environmentalist organizations: opposing animal cruelty, GMO, and use of chemical fertilizers—not to mention eliminating fossil fuels (no gas, no electricity). Last summer, armed federal agents sent by the USDA demanded that Miller cease operations and prepared to hit him with more than $300,000 in fines. That would shut Amos Miller down. They demanded that he stop selling meat until he comes under federal agencies that regulate it. Miller responds that such regulation “hurts the nutrition of the food…you wash it in these things, you’re given these vaccines, and the cows get all types of medicine, I don’t do any of that…your regulatory process will actually hurt the quality of my food and that’s what I’m being paid top dollar for…” Federal agents camped at the farm to take inventory of his meat, dairy, and other food to make sure he is not selling anything and not increasing his production. Miller took the case to the U.S. District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania, which ruled in favor of the USDA. The USDA dictated the following text required to be posted on the farm’s website: “To the Members of Miller’s Organic Farm: Please be advised…Miller’s Organic Farm violated the Court’s Injunction Order and Consent Decree. Accordingly, we will not provide fresh or newly slaughtered amenable meat, meat food products, poultry, and poultry products for sale or purchase unless and until Miller’s Organic Farm liquidates its existing…frozen meat and poultry inventory and complies with other requirements of this Order and other orders of the Court… “…We are working diligently with the government to find some long-term solutions…” But what “long-term” (or even short-term) solution? Miller’s farm is in violation of what might be called “bedrock” USDA regulations. The court order listing violations is an outline of the USDA’s Food and Inspection Service regimen. Farmer Miller’s own judgment of how to produce the highest quality food is a flat-out rejection of regulation. A decision of the court suggests the government’s position on Miller’s methods. On July 21, 2021, Federal Judge Edward G. Smith signed a 39-page order imposing sanctions on  Miller and the farm, including a $250,000 fine and other penalties “to effect defendants’ future compliance, by making them aware  of the seriousness of their violations and the consequences of future violations…” The farm was ordered to pay the fine within 30 days or face further penalties “including imprisonment of Amos Miller.” The farm is ordered not to slaughter any animals in violation of the order or face a $25,000 a day penalty. Miller is ordered to cease and desist all meat and poultry retail operations, except to get rid of inventory. In summer, 2022, Amos Miller, continuing his six-year legal battle with the USDA (represented by the U.S, Justice Department), filed papers with the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania. Miller also has taken some of the decision-making to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, including an appeal to change attorneys (which has been denied).   Walter Donway is an author and writer with more than a dozen books available on Amazon and an editor of the e-zine Savvy Street. He was program officer or director at two leading New York City foundations in the healthcare field: The Commonwealth Fund and the Dana Foundation. He has published almost two dozen articles in the Blockchain Healthcare Review. (0 COMMENTS)

Part of the reason Republicans hadn’t more effectively fought the election integrity battle before now is somewhat shocking. The 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Ronald Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations. For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systematic advantage over its Republican counterpart: The RNC had been prohibited by law from helping with poll watcher efforts or nearly any voting-related litigation. Democrats had accused Republicans of voter intimidation in a 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race. The case was settled, and the two parties entered into a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement in any poll-watching operation. But Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter-appointed judge who oversaw the agreement, never let them out of it, repeatedly modifying and strengthening it at Democrats’ request. Debevoise was a judge for only 15 years, but he stayed 21 years in senior status, a form of semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity. It literally took Debevoise’s dying in 2015 for Republicans to get out of the consent decree. Upon his passing, a new judge, appointed by President Obama, was assigned the case and let the agreement expire at the end of 2018. This is from Mollie Hemingway, “If Republicans Win on Tuesday, Thank, the Election Integrity Movement,” The Federalist, November 4, 2022. I think of myself as someone who pays a lot of attention to U.S. political issues, but I had had no idea that the Republican National Committee had been prevented for almost 40 years from engaging in poll-watching. That’s a huge disadvantage. Another excerpt: The RNC got involved in 73 election integrity cases in 20 states for the midterms, with plans to expand. They won a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers; got Maricopa County, Arizona, to share key data about its partisan breakdown of poll workers; won an open records lawsuit against Mercer County, New Jersey, for refusing to share election administration data; won a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections for restricting the rights of poll watchers; and reached a favorable settlement against Clark County, Nevada, in which the county agreed to share information about its partisan breakdown of poll workers on a rolling basis. The whole thing is worth reading.   (1 COMMENTS)

There is, of course, as Elon Musk suggested, some probability that the aggression against Mr. Pelosi covers some yet unknown reality (Kurtis Lee, “Elon Musk, in a Tweet, Shares Link From Site Known to Publish False News,” New York Times, October 30, 2022): In a reply to Mrs. Clinton’s tweet, Mr. Musk wrote, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye” and then shared a link to an article in the Santa Monica Observer. The article alleges that Mr. Pelosi was drunk and in a fight with a male prostitute. To explore that possibility, though, one should not look at individuals and websites known for inventing facts or accepting them only if they fit with their muddled ideology and implausible beliefs; one should not rely on sources that have demonstrated a lack of rational methodology in the search for the truth. If we believe the NYT story, Mr. Musk, who later deleted his post, is not himself totally immune to that defect: A 2021 editorial in The Los Angeles Times about websites that “masquerade as legitimate local newspapers” noted that the Santa Monica Observer, “owned by onetime City Council candidate David Ganezer, is notorious for publishing false news.” In 2016, for example, the publication advanced a claim that Mrs. Clinton had died and that a body double was sent to debate the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump. But anybody not used to the discipline of research can be easily fooled by doubtful sources. A good story by Robby Soave in Reason gives an idea of how Donald Trump himself thinks (“The Paul Pelosi Conspiracy Theories Are an Embarrassment for the Right,” November 2, 2022). Besides lending credence to the gay prostitute theory, Trump repeated another “alternative fact” that seems to have been invented: You know, probably, you and I are better off not talking about it. The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out and, you know, so, it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out. The “it seems,” uncharacteristic of Trump’s intuitive certainties, looks contradicted by the rest of the sentence. The rise of the Internet and especially of the social media has revealed a disturbing fact: how ignorant is part of the general public and how easily they fall into implausible theories—that Sandy Hook was a government-organized hoax, that the 2020 election was stolen, etc. The woke are not better and generally don’t have the excuse of lacking education—although perhaps “education” should be put in scare quotes. One can, I think, be knowledgeable and intellectually honest on the either side of the orthodox left-right divide; but this is not the current state of the public debate. Suddenly, with the Internet and the social media, the proud ignorant have become able, at near zero cost, to express their muddled intuitions for the whole wide world to see. The big difference is this near zero cost. The idea of charging a price for an efficient access to social networks may be part of the (privatly evolved) solution; perhaps charging much more than Musc suggests for Twitter would be even better. The higher the price, the fewer the number of individuals who think that echoing implausible stories is worth it; they will go back to their TV sets. To be clear: these individuals are respectable as long as they don’t use their proud ignorance to impose their preferences and values on others by force. Where does the proud ignorance displayed by both the woke crowd and the conspiracy theorists leave the Enlightenment promises of popular education, the perfectibility of mankind, and the possibility of a free society? On that challenging question, it is useful to read James Buchanan’s small book, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative (or, as a poor substitute, my Regulation review). (0 COMMENTS)

In the 50 years since The Limits to Growth was published in 1972, its grim Malthusian message has gripped the social consciousness. Its central thesis was that since the earth’s resources are finite, it would not be able to support the exponential rates of economic and population growth and would collapse before the end of this century. This proclamation has become the fountainhead behind calls for growing centralization and the establishment of limits to curtail the freedom of individual choices. Global institutions such as the  World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum  have pointed to air pollution, climate change, overpopulation, and water scarcity as some of the biggest threats to human well-being. The consensus among policy-makers, politicians, and environmentalists seems to be that entrepreneurs and firms good will use the cheapest means of production possible, even as they degrade the environment. Therefore,  any reliance on market mechanisms to solve the problem of environmental degradation and to provide sustainability are automatically ruled out. Similarly, the consensus that consumers are driven by personal desires to overconsumption implies consumer sovereignty must be put on hold in pursuit of a sustainable world in which the needs of today are met without compromising on the needs of future generations. It follows from such consensus that the solution must be global, as there are potentially massive consequences for failure, and that a centrally planned approach is the only feasible solution. The centralized approach to solving the problem of environmental degradation assumes rational, well-informed people with massive resources will deal with the massive issues of environment conservation in a well-intentioned and efficient manner for the public good. This approach in practice would mean doing away with civil liberties if they interfere with the plan of environment conservation. But as sovereign individuals who desire a free world and who hold values of liberty and dignity of human beings sacred, we must pause before making such a Faustian bargain. Stop and think carefully about the true nature of environmental degradation, the effects of scarcity on the economy, and how a spontaneously ordered system such as the market might deal with it. Apart from the intellectual stimulation that history provides, it can also provide us with lessons from past experiences, and we have enough evidence from the experiments of centralized planning  to make us intellectually suspicious of it.   Markets Deal with Scarcity. The economy consists of huge numbers of buyers and sellers who respectively supply and demand vast quantities of goods and services. Therefore, there is an enormous amount of information available to them in a decentralized manner- but this information about demand and supply are important for everyone as it impacts the decisions they make in their day to day lives. This is where monetary valuation comes in. Based on competition between buyers and sellers through a bidding process,  prices are formed which convey information about such things. Prices in the market act as coordinating signals which convey information about important economic data  scattered in a decentralized manner. The role of prices in coordinating actions in the market was one of the core arguments advanced by Fredrick Hayek on why centralized planning could never allocate resources as effectively as markets do. When something is scarce in the market, a large number of its users compete in the market over its possession which leads to the increase in its prices initiated by the seller to economize on its existing stock. The increased price is a signal in the market reflecting its scarcity. If the claims of The Limits to Growth are true, then prices of natural resources which are used heavily in energy consumption should increase. This increase in the price is necessary to substantiate the claim that this resource scarcity limits to economic growth, as energy consumption is bound to increase with increases in economic activity. If the resource prices today were exponentially higher than they were in the past, But the reality has been much different. Despite the fall in the purchasing power of the dollar and the cartelization of oil,  an item that cost 50 dollars in 1970 would theoretically cost 335.5 US dollars in 2020 (50 x 6.71 = 335.5). But the increase in the rice of oil is quite low relative to the fall in the value of the dollar, which suggests that the real increase in the price of the oil barrel is negligible. Might this convince people to change their minds?   Vibhu Vikramaidtya is a scholar with research interests in capital theory, monetary theory, and business cycles writing about events in the economy from a legal and economic standpoint. His other works can be found at the Austrian Economics Center, the Libertarian Institute, and beinglibetarian.com.  (0 COMMENTS)