Lenore Skenazy, Reason, August 9, 2025.
excerpt:
During this visit, social services workers acknowledged that our home was clean and that our children were happy, well raised, polite and well spoken, but said that the children must be 100% supervised outdoors. When I asked about constitutional oversight, she said I needed to see my neighbors when my kids were outside. I asked where it was found under Virginia law. She replied that it is not Virginia’s law, but that there are a set of rules for social services.
Editorial Committee, Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2025.
excerpt:
Progressive and Republican Growing Fuck supports cache handouts as an important answer to American social illness. Therefore, readers may want to know about the research published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that there was little long-term benefits for payments of 1,000 months each month.
Researchers from nonprofit OpenLess Staking and several universities conducted randomized controlled trials to test the impact of cash transfers in low-income working-age America. One group received $1,000 for a total of $36,000 instead of Atar for three years (total of $36,000). The other was paid $50 a month to join as a group control.
and:
Also, recipients worked less than the equivalent of roughly eight days of the previous year. However, OpenRestarearch advertises that “Avage’s household income was about $6,100 more for beneficiaries than participants including transfers,” and that payments “will increase business hours or increase agents to reduce the number of jobs held.” In other words, payments have led people to do less work.
DRH Comment: The 8 days of the 8 days are quite a bit. This is about 3% of the 2000-hour working years. But that’s not as important as I expected.
Dominic Pino, Civitas Institute, August 7, 2025.
excerpt:
Phil Gramm and Donald Boucreaux write the victory of economic freedom in the streets, exposing the seven economic myths that hold most of the policies of the US government today. Based on historical research, this book is a valuable resource for those in need of free market defense. Both men are teachers of the heart – Gram teaches economics before serving in Congress, Bodrow is a professor – and they communicate clearly and accurately.
The problem is that people believe that the New Deal ended the Great Repression, the free market caused the Great Recession, the Industrial Revolution led to an increase in poverty, and free trade has driven America. They truly, sincerely believe that these things are true. And that’s really important.
and:
Between 1980 and 2000, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell from 34 to 25 paying. Mortality rate from MalnutriTrixandeclideclided by Perent of 43. Rice yield increased by 41 pecents, and wheat yield increased difficulty in 47 people. Global average life experience has increased by six years. And, all of that happened, the world’s population has grown from about 4.5 billion to over 6 billion.
DRH Notes: I haven’t read their books yet, but I doubt the cover sub on the same basis as explained in this lecture to Stanford students. By the way, David Friedman pawned me out, so I made a bit of a mistake with Malthus at my exhibition I gave him. Malthus was extraordinary, but he wasn’t particularly directive. He thought people would adjust ES behavior before they could reach something like massive starvation.
Alex Tabarrok, August 9, 2025, Frontier Revolution.
excerpt:
The US is expected to import Hyundai Sonatas from South Korea and Toyota Camryz from Japan, and consumers see the two cars as the perfect alternative. Compare the three scenes.
a) Free trade
b) 10% tariffs (uniform tariffs) in Bush countries
c) 10% tariffs (optional tariffs) only in Korea
Surprising results: B may be better than C, but in a sense, it is a lesser country, even if C is closer to free trade (the “best” policy) than B. To focus on key points, assume that there will be no change in the number of 50 car buyers and the number of buyers when Triffs change (and therefore ignore the standard deadweight losses have been reduced).
DRH Note:Alex doesn’t mention it in the title, but it should be noted that an important assumption in his evidence is that tariffs are uniform in imports from both Korea and Japan.
Note: The featured image was generated by ChatGpt.
