Phil Gramm praises Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 today. Two slices:
Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, doesn’t get enough credit for the quarter-century economic boom from 1983 to 2008 and the underlying resilience of the economy since. Without Mr. Carter’s deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads, energy and communications, America might not have had the ability to diversify its economy and lead the world in high-tech development when our postwar domination of manufacturing ended in the late 1970s. The Carter deregulation helped fuel the Reagan economic renaissance and continues to make possible the powerful innovations that remake our world.
The Airlines Deregulation Act of 1978, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 unleashed competition and spawned the invention and innovation that gave America the world’s most efficient transportation and distribution system. The cost of flying a mile declined by half and air travel became a mainstay of American life. The logistical cost of moving goods shrank as a share of gross domestic product by 50%. The leader of that effort, recently retired FedEx CEO Fred Smith, describes Mr. Carter’s “underappreciated leadership” as follows: “The reduction of logistics costs in the late 20th century was profound, largely unreported and underappreciated. These farsighted changes were the great achievement of the Carter presidency.”
…..
By 1979, when I came to Congress, the Carter administration was desperately trying to cope with inflation and interest rates that were both in the double digits and rising. As a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a co-author of the bipartisan conservative alternative budget resolution of 1980, I had back-row standing space in the room as Mr. Carter sought to hammer out a program with a Democratic Congress to deal with the energy crisis and the exploding inflation rate. Mr. Carter never struck me as a micromanager in over his head. At every turn in trying to expand energy production and stop the inflation, he ran into the entrenched old guard of the Democratic Party, which wanted no part of a new competitive world or any fiscal restraint.
Russ Roberts talks with Mike Munger about the great Italian autodidact Bruno Leoni.
George Leef describes California as leading the way “in undermining freedom of speech.”
But also a threat to freedom of speech is Donald Trump.
Jon Miltimore looks into Kamala Harris’s political opportunism and media bias.
Andrew Byers explains that “spreading democracy may not be in the United States’ best interest.” A slice:
The United States has a dismal track record of imposing democracy. Two cases in particular — West Germany and Japan — are usually held up as successes, the exemplars of what can be achieved by forcibly transforming autocracies into democracies. Unique factors present in both those societies are present in few others since World War II. Both were orderly, disciplined, homogeneous societies already interested in liberalization, reform, and embracing Western values and institutions. Contrast those cases with the two most recent ones attempted by the United States: Afghanistan and Iraq. Both efforts failed catastrophically and have not resulted in the creation of Western-style liberal democracies. The key problem is that many states and societies don’t currently want to be democratic. To impose democracy on these countries would be an unwanted imposition, and one likely to require the use of US military force.
Sheldon Richman decries “the preoccupation with income and wealth inequality.” A slice:
To start with the basics, we are not talking about inequality. We’re talking about income and wealth differences. Substitution of the term inequality is an appeal to emotion, a cashing in on other senses of the word. “You oppose equality? Don’t you believe that ‘all men are created equal’?” That’s demagoguery not argument.
In a market-oriented economy, most income is not distributed. There’s no distribution to describe as equal or unequal, fair or unfair. (What the government does is another story.) As Ludwig von Mises, wrote 102 years ago in Socialism: As Economic and Sociological Analysis, “Under Capitalism incomes emerge as a result of market transactions which are indissolubly linked up with production.” That’s not distribution or allocation.
Eric Boehm is correct: “The government monopoly on donated kidneys is killing Americans.”
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