Some Links - Cafe Hayek

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Some Links

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy isn't impressed by Trump's proposal to give many Americans a 'holiday' from paying payroll taxes. A slice:

I understand that people don't like to pay the payroll tax. But it should go without saying that if you stop paying the tax that funds the Social Security system, you should pair it with an equivalent reduction in benefits. If that doesn't happen, then the benefits for Social Security will have to come from the general funds, which is what happened during past payroll tax holidays. That means that the federal government will have to borrow the money and expect future generations to pay the bill plus interest.

Mike Munger chalks up one in the win column for Mises.

My colleague Dan Klein writes about the WalkAway movement. A slice:

One way to think about it is that because leftists have fallen into terribly wrongheaded beliefs, and become committed to them, they cannot tolerate civil discourse and civil social interaction: They have grown fragile, and as they replicate themselves in academia and elsewhere, increasingly more fragile all the time. Thus they rely on incivility to shield them from any stress that would expose their wrongheadedness.

Another way to think about it is that they choose to believe leftist ideas, and that choice is itself socially irresponsible and unbecoming. Adam Smith taught that justice is trilayered, and the most extensive layer is estimating objects properly.

In the Wall Street Journal Dan Akst profiles the wonderful writer Lionel Shriver. A slice:

"We've never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries," she observes. The pandemic and lockdown created fear, isolation and a holiday from normal rules, which built a pyre: "The far left's consuming obsession with race has been building for years. Then for months these same folks have been cooped up, fuming over their computers. The 2020 explosion of Black Lives Matter was enabled by Covid." Floyd's killing "just lit the match."

From George Will's latest:

In the current disorders, [Martin] Gurri says, mayors and governors have succumbed to "infantile panic": Many state and local officials are liberal Democrats who share the ideals of the protesters and are "paralyzed by fear of doing anything that might transform them into villains of the narrative."

Pierre Lemieux laments the economic ignorance that lead people – especially people possessing power – to support government-imposed controls on prices.