by John Berlau, Law & Liberty, March 20, 2025.
Excerpts:
The phrase “regulation without representation” also connotes the battle that George Washington and other American patriots fought against taxation without representation. But in researching my book George Washington, Entrepreneur, I found that “regulation without representation” is more than just linguistically connected to the causes of the Revolutionary War. It was an actual grievance of the colonists that was almost as important as taxation in turning George Washington and other patriots against the rule of Great Britain.
In my book, I document George Washington’s amazing entrepreneurship and innovation. Starting out from a background that was humble compared to the other Founders and lacking resources for a college education, Washington became an apprentice surveyor for the neighboring Fairfax family at 16. He quickly built a lucrative freelance surveying practice and speculated in real estate by purchasing or asking for compensation in some of the undeveloped land he surveyed.
Decades later—after he acquired Mount Vernon due to the untimely deaths of his older brother Lawrence and Lawrence’s family—Washington abandoned tobacco as the farm’s cash crop, diversified into wheat and dozens of other crops, and built a grist mill to sift flour that he would export throughout the colonies and to the West Indies and Great Britain. Washington would put his name on these bags of flour, essentially trademarking the flour with the “G. Washington” imprint on the bags to differentiate it from his competitors, pioneering the practice of branding that we have today. In addition, he turned Mount Vernon into what historian Harlow Giles Unger called in his book, The Unexpected George Washington, “a vast agro-industrial enterprise” that included a blacksmith shop to make tools such as horseshoes and nails and a mini textile factory to make clothing, the latter of which was run largely by Martha Washington. Mount Vernon, by the way, has rebuilt the grist mill and whiskey distillery that Washington placed near the grist mill after he was president.
And:
In the 1760s, when the British started aggressively levying new taxes on the colonists, they also started ramping up the anti-manufacturing edicts. In fact, the taxes and regulations sometimes worked hand in hand. The Stamp Act, for instance, not only taxed the colonists’ paper imports, but also required that colonial printers make all their products, from legal documents to political newspapers and even decks of cards, with paper stamped in Britain. And even if no law specifically forbade the manufacture of a product, entrepreneurs knew that their new mill or factory could be closed at the whim of British officials if domestic manufacture of the product made the colonies less of a captive market. As business and social historian Lyman Horace Weeks wrote in A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1690–1916, “As soon as there were indications that manufacturing industries were likely to develop in the colonies, the jealousy of the British manufacturers was aroused, for they had always regarded America as an altogether exclusive market for their goods.”
DRH comment: I, like John Berlau, am an admirer of George Washington. I hadn’t known about the extent of his entrepreneurialism. I do think that there should have been at least one sentence, in an article titled “A Revolution Against Regulation” on a site called “Law & Liberty” about the fact that Washington had slaves and did his utmost to keep them enslaved. That substantially qualifies my admiration of him.
by J.D. Tuccille, Reason, March 17, 2025.
Excerpt:
“Epidemics also contribute to a coarsening of society,” security expert and RAND Corporation adviser Brian Michael Jenkins wrote in his 2022 book Plagues and Their Aftermath: How Societies Recover from Pandemics. “Civility has been declining for decades for a variety of reasons, and the pandemic has added new layers of edginess…. There is not just a loss of comity, but an increase in aggression.”
According to Jenkins, “the observed increase in antisocial behavior” can be blamed on “prolonged isolation, which heightens anxiety, increases irritability, promotes aggression, and diminishes impulse control.” Unfortunately, he adds, “the effects may be hard to reverse.”
Why are the effects hard to reverse? Well, a lot of trust in institutions is lost. “Suspicion of government is a recurring theme,” Jenkins notes after serious civil liberties violations, mandated disruptions of normal activity, and extensions of state power into unprecedented areas where such intrusions are unwelcome and resented. But isolation and closures also breed new social habits as people adapt to a more insular world—and prevent people still learning their way in society from experiencing normal interactions.
by Eric Boehm, Reason, March 20, 2025.
Excerpts:
On Jerce Reyes Barrios’ arm, there is a tattoo of a soccer ball with a crown and the Spanish word Dios.
Is that proof that Reyes Barrios is a dangerous member of an infamous Venezuelan drug gang, or merely that he’s a fan of the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid?
That’s the sort of question that an immigration court might be able to settle. It won’t get the chance. Reyes Barrios was one of about 200 people deported to El Salvador, without due process, last weekend.
And:
A hearing like that is meant to determine whether someone like Reyes Barrios qualifies for asylum—that is, was he fleeing a foreign regime that had arrested and tortured him, as his attorney claims, or was he part of what the Trump administration has called an “invasion” of the United States by the Tren de Aragua gang?
Part of that hearing might have focused on his tattoo of a soccer ball with a crown and the word Dios. Government attorneys could have argued why those symbols might connect Reyes Barrios to the gang and would (one hopes) be expected also to present more significant evidence for why he should be denied lawful entry to the country.
Tobin could then refute those claims with her own evidence. As she explained in the sworn statement filed on Wednesday, Reyes Barrios was a former professional soccer player and a fan of Real Madrid. That explains the tattoo. More importantly, she claimsthat Reyes Marrios had “a police clearance from Venezuela indicating no criminal record, multiple employment letters, [and] a declaration from the tattoo artist who rendered the tattoo.”
DRH comment: Are we living in the United States of America or Jean Valjean’s France?
by Bruce Pardy, Fraser Institute, March 17, 2025.
Excerpt:
But not in practise. Exceptions are so common today as to be ubiquitous. The Human Rights Commission, not the legislature, declares what constitutes discrimination. The police decide whether to enforce court orders. Environment ministry officials determine when environmental impacts are permissible. Cabinet decides when pipelines will be built.
But in these cases, decision-makers at least must keep themselves within the boundaries of their authorizing statute, which was passed by elected legislatures. Under Bill 7, the Eby government will take delegation to the next level. Its cabinet will have the power not just to exercise broad discretion in accordance with legislation, but to override legislation itself. The bill will allow cabinet to make exceptions to the law, modify the law’s requirements, limit the law’s application, or establish powers or duties in place of the law. And not just a specific law, but any enactment on the books. The cabinet’s edicts will be valid for more than two years, until May 2027.
by Maxwell Tabarrok, Maximum Progress, March 14, 2025.
Excerpts:
The basic story over-focuses on social coordination as the solution to externalities. Our institutions cannot be relied on to optimally correct externalities or even to avoid making them worse. Usually, the costs of an externality subside only after we’ve invented a technology which [sic] makes it cheap or privately beneficial to do the socially optimal thing. Most importantly, technology shifts out the production possibilities frontier making it possible to get outcomes beyond what even perfect social coordination could attain.
Economics should emphasize the importance of technology as a solution to externality problems and focus less on social coordination.
And:
Coal pollution is a classic externality problem and indeed the classic solutions were tried. There were political and social campaigns for cleaner air in the city throughout the early 20th century. These culminated in a 1941 law that put some requirements on residential users to use treated coal or other cleaner fuels or special burners that reduced smoke.
But ultimately, the solution to this externality problem came from technology. First, coal-gas burner-lamps were replaced with electric ones. Then, Pittsburgh got a natural gas and petroleum pipeline laid nearby. Revenues from utility sale of natural gas doubled from $67 million in 1938 to $140 million ten years later. The growth of natural gas replaced coal in heat and power generation for Pittsburgh and made more total energy available for its residents. Similarly, coal trains were replaced by diesel trains. In 1955 the Bureau of Smoke Prevention observed that “The Diesel locomotive has solved the smoke problem of the railroads.”
DRH comment: Refreshingly insightful. It reminds me of the classic Arnold Kling line: “Markets fail; use markets.”
Also, Max’s insight reminds me of an insight that environmentalist Amory Lovins and his co-authors had in 2000. This is from David R. Henderson, “Save the Environment and Get Rich,” Reason, July 2000.
Excerpt from my review:
Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, brings some real news to the authors’ presumed audience of hard-core environmentalists. Hawken is an environmentalist and the author of The Ecology of Commerce; the Lovinses are co-founders of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a non-profit consultancy that advises firms on saving resources. Perhaps it’s not as entertaining as a two-headed Marilyn Monroe clone marrying Michael Jackson, but to many greens who associate economic growth with shrinking environmental quality, Natural Capitalism‘s thesis might be even more shocking than the tabloids: Economic growth needn’t coincide with environmental degradation.
The kind of industrial activity that upsets environmentalists involves the wasteful use of huge amounts of natural materials to create products that then dump pollutants back on Mother Nature. Do you see the hidden solution? The authors do, and that’s what they call “natural capitalism,” though the adjective isn’t necessary—it’s exactly the same kind of capitalism that free-market economists have been pushing for about 200 years.
Capitalism—the search for profits through making and selling in free markets—should move us toward both a healthy economy and clean air and water. Why? Because pollution and waste are inefficient and expensive. Is your factory polluting the air? You are wasting money. Polluting the water? You are wasting money. Using too much energy? Still wasting money. Add in the property rights of those downstream and the link between capitalism and environmentalism becomes still clearer. Factor in the true value of the clean air and water that nature produces each and every day for “free,” and it becomes obvious that we will be richer with a cleaner environment.
This is where the greedy capitalists come in. Money can be made preventing the waste that causes resource depletion and pollution. Entrepreneurs clever enough to tap into this massive potential will make themselves and their companies wealthy. The government needn’t order anyone to act.
