Ozempic and Wegovy Don’t Cost What You Think They Do

Drug companies are making billions from a new class of in-demand weight-loss treatments. But the prices are not what they seem

By Gina Kolata of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"A recent paper published by the American Enterprise Institute revealed that the net prices for the new obesity drugs are just a fraction of the published annual list prices.

And while the drugs’ prices remain out of reach for many, economists anticipate they will soon be driven down. More than a dozen companies are developing obesity drugs. As they enter the market, greater choice is expected to make prices plummet, as has happened with other expensive drugs.

“My prediction is that as competition increases, prices will decrease accordingly,” said Jalpa Doshi, professor of medicine and director of the economics evaluation unit at the University of Pennsylvania."

"Wegovy’s net price is about half of its list price, Ozempic’s is nearly two-thirds lower and Mounjaro’s net price is nearly 80 percent lower than its list price."

"even Wegovy, which so far has the market for the new obesity drugs to itself, has an unexpectedly low net price, Amitabh Chandra, a health care economist at Harvard, said.

“One might have naïvely thought that these are new medicines that are in great demand, so rebates would be small to nil,” Dr. Chandra said.

“I was shocked,” he said, “by the extent of the rebates.”"

"Competition may lead to lower prices.

That happened, for example, with drugs for hepatitis C. An effective cure for the liver disease initially cost as much as $84,000, leading to dire warnings that the cost would be comparable to “total spending in the United States on all drugs.”

The list price of the hepatitis C treatment plunged, as competitors entered the market. Pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate with drug makers, had more leverage as companies competed. Net prices fell accordingly."

Even Short Runs Have Major Health Benefits

Jogging a mile or two a few times a week can help you live longer and reduce your risk of disease

By Markham Heid of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"One might assume that in order to reap the biggest rewards, you need to regularly run long distances, but there’s strong evidence linking even very short, occasional runs to significant health benefits, particularly when it comes to longevity and mental well-being.

“We’ve found that going for something like a two-mile run a few times a week gets you pretty much the full benefit of running in terms of lower mortality,” said Dr. James H. O’Keefe, the director of preventive cardiology at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo."

"Dr. O’Keefe . . . Compared to nonrunners, people who ran between one and 2.4 hours per week at a slow or moderate pace enjoyed the greatest reductions in mortality — greater even than among runners who logged more miles at a faster pace."

"Other researchers have come to similar conclusions."

"running just five to 10 minutes per day at a slow pace (under six miles per hour) was associated with “markedly reduced risks” for all causes of death. It was also enough to extend a person’s life by several years."

"Even running for less than a mile — assuming a person is running at least a few days a week — is enough to meaningfully improve cardiovascular health and longevity"

"brief bouts of vigorous exercise — such as short runs — are enough to trigger some of these exerkine-related benefits.

Short runs can bolster your mental health, as well."

"adults who got the widely recommended 2.5 hours of moderate physical activity per week had a 25 percent lower risk of depression compared to people who didn’t exercise at all. But those who completed just half of the recommended 2.5 weekly hours still had an 18 percent lower risk of depression compared to people who didn’t exercise."

"“The growing consensus in the field is that the benefits of running start to accrue within minutes,” said Dr. Rajesh Vedanthan, an associate professor of population health at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine who has studied the relationship between running and longevity.

“The key message here,” he added, “is that any physical activity is much better than none.”"

Related posts:

What if the Most Powerful Way to Live Longer Is Just Exercise? (2023) 

Exercise Helps Blunt the Effects of Covid-19, Study Suggests (2023)

Carry Your Groceries, Take the Stairs: Short, Intense Movement Can Improve Your Health (plus non drug ways to fight diabetes and Covid) (2022)

Almost half of cancer deaths globally are attributable to preventable risk factors, new study suggests (2022)

New research leads to doubt over the extent or even existence of the ego‐depletion effect (the theory of the exhaustible willpower muscle) (2019)

How lifestyle changes can reduce the risk of dementia (2019)

Good health begins with individual decisions (2018)

Nearly half of U.S. cancer deaths blamed on unhealthy behavior (2017)

Regular Exercise: Antidote for Deadly Diseases? (2016)

When ‘Critical Social Justice’ Rules on Campus

Fight anti-Semitism by ditching toxic forms of DEI

Letter to WSJ. 

"Let me put a finer point on Barton Swaim’s argument in “The Marxian Roots of Campus Anti-Semitism” (op-ed, WSJ.com, Oct. 13): DEI drives anti-Semitism on the college campus.

I say this as a former diversity, equity and inclusion director who was fired by California’s De Anza College earlier this year. When I started in 2021, I made it a priority to create an inclusive learning environment for all students, including Jews, only to be stymied by some colleagues and administrators who were fully bought into “critical social justice.”

I was repeatedly told that fighting anti-Semitism and promoting Jewish inclusion don’t matter. Why? Because Jews are “white oppressors” and it was our job to “decenter whiteness.” Besides being willfully ignorant of the diversity of the Jewish diaspora, such racist language reflects an obsession with dividing people of different racial groups into categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed.”

My colleagues at campuses nationwide have told me about similar experiences. Schools captured by DEI agendas stoke hatred toward Israel and, more concerning, toward individual Jews. That frightening fact should be front and center as student groups and faculty continue to hold protests celebrating terrorism as bravery against systemic oppression and write screeds lambasting the Jewish people and state for being evil. If we’re going to get anti-Semitism off campus, we should start by ditching toxic forms of DEI.

Tabia Lee

Senior fellow, Do No Harm

Sacramento"

Why Bidenomics Isn’t Popular

Minority families have fallen behind, a new Federal Reserve report says

WSJ editorial. 

"Voters in swing states disapprove of Bidenomics by a two-to-one margin, according to a poll last week. And Democrats keep wondering why more black and Hispanic voters are showing interest in the GOP. A possible explanation arrived last week in a new Federal Reserve report showing how minorities in particular have struggled in the Biden years.

News coverage of the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances has noted that the typical family’s net worth increased 37% between 2019 and 2022 amid the run-up in equity and housing prices. But while Americans overall have become wealthier during Mr. Biden’s tenure, many don’t feel that way because they are cash poorer.

After adjusting for inflation, the typical white family’s income rose 1.3%, the report says. But it shows declines for black and Hispanic families of 1.6% and 1.1%, respectively. Wages for minorities didn’t keep up with inflation, and those for whites barely did.

Black and Hispanic households “benefited more from government support, including extraordinary pandemic-era programs,” such as sweetened food stamps, stimulus checks, rental assistance, enhanced unemployment benefits, and larger child-care tax credits. But Covid relief is now in the rearview mirror, and Congress’s spending binge on those benefits fueled the high inflation that has hurt consumers whose real earnings have stagnated.

“While families can also cover expenses using wealth, particularly for Black and Hispanic families the gains in wealth were concentrated in housing, which is somewhat illiquid,” the Fed report adds. “Real average liquid wealth, which includes assets such as cash, checking, and savings accounts, did not grow much for Hispanic families and fell for Black families.” The fact a family’s home might be worth 20% to 30% more than before is no consolation in the grocery checkout line.

All of this explains why Americans, and especially minorities, are sour on Mr. Biden’s economic policies. “We see a broad-based increase in economic pessimism that was especially strong for non-White families,” the Fed says. Americans of every race report more uncertainty about their incomes than they did in 2019, but “the step-up in uncertainty for Black and Hispanic families was especially strong—14.2 percentage points and 10.9 percentage points.”

The share of Americans who expect the economic future to be worse “skyrocketed in 2022 across all races and ethnicities” and was “at or near record highs,” surpassing levels “in the aftermath of the Great Recession.” While unemployment is relatively low at 3.8%, people’s bills have increased at the same rate or faster than their paychecks. They might also worry that economic downturns tend to follow rapid rises in housing and stock prices.

Mr. Biden’s poor marks on the economy are driven by reality. The enduring mystery is why Mr. Biden won’t change. His climate and energy policies are raising costs for consumers and employers, and a regulatory avalanche is creating business uncertainty. This is one reason that polls keep showing Mr. Biden losing to Donald Trump in 2024 swing states. Americans might not miss Trump the man, but they miss the Trump-era economy."

How the Car Helped Restore New England’s Forests

A lesson on environmental impact versus aesthetics 

By Malcolm Cochran. Malcolm Cochran is the Digital Communications Manager at HumanProgress.org.

"Two years ago, I bought my parents a trail cam for their house in Vermont. We set it up on the edge of the forest, where it snaps photos at the slightest movement. So far, it’s spotted countless deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and raccoons, a few foxes, an opossum, a woodchuck, a bear, and a bobcat. These are lush woods. After a heavy summer rain, the dark parts grow thick with gnats and mosquitos, and all kinds of mushrooms pop up from the leaf litter. Certain places crawl with so many newts that you have to watch every step to avoid crushing them.

When fleeing from the bugs, it’s not unusual to come across an old mossy stone wall, left from a time when Vermont, and the rest of New England, was mostly field and pasture. The common story is that in the mid-19th century, farmers went west for flatter, richer land or to the cities to work in new industries. The railroad brought cheaper produce east, and New England’s farms were reclaimed by tenacious pine, cedar, and birch. It’s a true story—but not the whole story. Another part involves the automobile.

Before we had cars, we relied on horses and mules—millions of them. In cities, they carried riders, delivered goods, and pulled cabs, wagons, omnibuses, and fire engines. On farms, they cleared land, plowed fields, and turned mills. As America’s cities rapidly expanded, so too did their stables and those of the farmers that fed them.

Greene, Ann Norton. Horses at Work. Harvard University Press, 2008.

Horse populations were growing so rapidly that, even as most agriculture moved west, New England’s hay fields stuck around. Between 1880 and 1909, total cleared farmland in New England fell by almost half, from 13 million acres to 7 million, while land used for hay production fell just 11 percent, from 4.2 million acres to 3.7 million. Nationally, the number of acres used for hay production grew from 30 million in 1880 to 72 million in 1909 and has since declined to around 55 million.

This was mostly because hay has a relatively low value for its volume, making it less economical to transport long distances than something like grain. As long as there were horses in New England’s cities, much of their hay would be grown locally.

Horses began to decline in the early 20th century as cars and trucks (and, to some extent, electric streetcars) replaced the legions of draft and riding horses in cities. Farm horses were gradually superseded by tractors and trucks but persisted in large numbers until mid-century.

As Anne Green writes in Horses at Work, “Horse populations dropped off from east to west. After 1910 the states with the largest horse populations were all west of the Mississippi.” By 1949, there were just over two million acres of hayfields left in New England, and by 2017, fewer than one million.

From a conservationist’s perspective, cars beat horses because of energy density. A well-worked draft horse could eat 30,000 calories of hay and oats each day, or the output of four acres of fertile 1930s cropland. A modern delivery van driving 100 miles a day (doing the work of multiple teams of horses) might consume 10 gallons of diesel fuel, refined from a tiny fraction of a typical oil well’s daily production. Each gallon of diesel contains around 35,000 calories (if only horses could digest it) and comes from underground reservoirs, leaving the surface mostly untouched.

Cars also don’t have to be kept alive. An idle horse needs 10,000 to 15,000 calories per day just to keep breathing; an undriven car needs none. Electric vehicles have the potential to spare even more land. With a footprint of 12 acres—enough land for just three horses—California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant can power over four million Teslas driving 40 miles a day (roughly the American average). That should hammer in how incredibly perverse it is that we use over 50 million acres of U.S. farmland to grow feedstock for biofuels.

Back in the 1930s, lamenting the horse’s decline and its economic effect on farmers, the Horse Association of America extrapolated from the 1900 horse-human ratio and calculated that 54 million acres of U.S. farmland had been spared by the automobile. The country’s population has nearly tripled since then, and we live much richer lives. If our cities were fed by horse plow and our packages delivered by horse cart, hundreds of millions of acres of our forests would now be meadow.

My parents don’t live in the deep wilderness, but the houses are far enough apart that you won’t see the neighbors unless you go out looking for them. At night, the only reminder of the rest of humanity is the occasional flash of headlights through the trees. Those lights often frustrate me, breaking my sense of solitude amid wild nature. But that feeling is entirely an illusion. The forests of New England sprung from modern civilization and its great symbol, the car."

It’s the Worst Possible Time for a Link Tax

By Paul Matzko.

"Link taxes are a flawed policy idea under even the best of conditions, as I recently wrote in a policy analysis. Legislation like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) would bail out struggling news outlets by compelling online platforms such as Google and Meta to pay whenever they surface links to news articles for consumers. It doesn’t take an economist to realize that raising the costs of linking to the news will ultimately mean fewer articles from fewer news outlets reaching fewer consumers. And doing so just might break the internet.

But these are not the best of conditions.

Last week the New York Times ran an insightful article about the slow motion break up between the news industry and online distributors (Google, Meta, etc.). Google has laid off dozens from its Google News team, Facebook News is extinct, and Twitter (now X) is increasingly hostile to allowing any users off‐ platform.

This is bad news for news outlets given that these platforms have provided a valuable distribution service. Bear in mind that in the pre‐​digital era, distribution costs were the largest single item in a newspaper’s budget, more even than the cost of the actual journalism. While Craigslist tanked classified ad revenue for newspapers, at least Google et al provided a superior (and costless!) substitute for the old network of newsstands, newsies, and other distribution functions. But with a quarter of Gen Z already getting their news and search from TikTok, the mutual value of that complementary relationship is in decline.

Which means that this is the worst possible time for the reintroduction of the JCPA or any other link tax. It will force tech executives to ask hard, practical questions about the precise value of the news to their online ecosystems. The fact that both Google and Meta were willing to pay $200 million to Australian news companies after the country passed a link tax in 2021 was a sign that these links are worth quite a lot. But the willingness of Google to pull out of Spain after its snippet tax in 2015 and out of Canada this summer is a reminder that the value of the news organizations to tech companies is not infinite. Raise the functional price of links too high, and news aggregators will stop sharing links altogether.

Even in the link tax optimal scenario, in which news aggregators don’t pull out of news entirely and instead strike deals with news producers for access, it’s inevitable that fewer news articles from fewer newspapers will reach fewer consumers. What tends to happen is that the companies limit bargaining costs by making deals with only a few, larger conglomerates—maybe placing them behind a paywall a la Apple News—and then no longer provide links from smaller, independent news outlets with niche audiences. It’s “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” journalism edition. 

Regardless of how you feel about these tradeoffs, the reality is that the price point for traditional online news from legacy news outlets is falling. Which means that imposing a link tax now would have an even larger, negative effect on total online news distribution as well as greater informational deadweight losses for consumers than it would have even a year or two ago. Policymakers should respond accordingly.

As a final thought, I’d like to highlight the insight that the NYT article closes with. It notes that newspapers are rapidly expanding into “branded newsletters,” which has apparently boosted the subscriber base for outlets like The Atlantic substantially. As The Atlantic’s executive editor Adrienne LaFrance put it, “In a way, this decline of the social web—it’s extraordinarily liberating.”

Legacy news outlets are responding to the decline of the Internet 2.0 by experimenting and innovating with new products and new business structures. We’re transitioning into a “new news” media landscape in which professional journalists surf the web and act as guides to user‐​generated news and expertise. But a link tax, even to the limited extent it works as a cross‐​subsidy from Big Tech to Big Ink, will only delay that transition and discourage experimentation."

An Economic View of Corporate Social Impact

By Hunt Allcott, Giovanni Montanari, Bora Ozaltun & Brandon Tan.

"The growing discussions of impact investing and stakeholder capitalism have increased interest in measuring companies' social impact. We conceptualize corporate social impact as the welfare loss that would be caused by a firm's exit. To illustrate, we quantify the social impacts of 74 firms in 12 industries using a new survey measuring consumer and worker substitution patterns combined with models of product and labor markets. We find that consumer surplus is the primary component of social impact (dwarfing profits, worker surplus, and externalities), suggesting that consumer impacts deserve more attention from impact investors. Existing ESG and social impact ratings are essentially unrelated to our economically grounded measures."

Crime and Punishment

 By Scott Sumner.

"Here’s an interesting sentence about prison sentences:

Although crime has broadly fallen since the 1990s, imposing longer terms for serious offences means the incarcerated population has doubled, from around 40,000 to 85,000 (see chart).

What would happen if we removed the word “although” and added the word “because”?

Although Crime has broadly fallen since the 1990s, because imposing longer terms for serious offences means the incarcerated population has doubled, from around 40,000 to 85,000 (see chart).

The sentence is from an article in The Economist, which also included the following graph.  What if we removed the word “Not” from the title?:

I don’t have strong views either way—but it’s worth thinking about different possibilities.

File under “never reason from a change in the prison population.”"

Capitalism and the Jews, by Jerry Z. Muller

Steven Menashi reviews Jerry Z. Muller's book Capitalism and the Jews. 

"the persecution or exclusion of Jews is a strong sign that the moral case for capitalism is under attack" (excerpt from the review which is below). But first some data:

Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom ranking for selected countries.

Israel 34
Bahrain 68
Jordan 93
Oman 95
Saudi Arabia 98
Egypt 151
Pakistan 152
Lebanon 164
Iran 169
Afghanistan Not ranked
Iraq Not ranked
Libya Not ranked
Syria Not ranked
Yemen Not ranked

"Early in the Christian era, the church fathers found themselves compelled to explain the persistence of the Jews. Continued Jewish fidelity to the Mosaic law challenged the Christian teaching that the law had been fulfilled and abolished through the Christian faith. The famous solution devised by Augustine was that the Jews had survived, in exile and abjection, as witnesses to the historical authenticity of Old Testament prophecy and the error of failing to see its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. It must therefore have embarrassed those who held this view when, in modern times, Jews came to rank among the most prosperous people in the liberal capitalist West.

It makes sense that partisans of the Augustinian teaching found it necessary to question the methods of Jewish merchants and financiers and the influence of commerce generally. At the same time, the apostles of what would come to be known as liberal capitalism had good reason to see the Jews as fulfilling a providential, one might even say a chosen, mission. Through the ingenuity of the Jews, wrote Montesquieu in 1748 in The Spirit of the Laws, “commerce was able to avoid violence and maintain itself everywhere.” Capitalism, even in its nascent form, “broke through the barbarism of Europe.”

According to Jerry Z. Muller, professor of history at Catholic University, capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. In 2002 he published The Mind and the Market, a study of the idea of capitalism in Western thought. “Jews,” he wrote, “served as a kind of metaphorical embodiment of capitalism.” In his new book, Capitalism and the Jews, Muller focuses squarely on the relation between them in four interlocking essays that explore, respectively, Western thinking about Jews and capitalism, the Jews’ own responses to capitalism, Jewish involvement in Communist movements¹, and the rise of ethnic nationalism that came about as a response to capitalism’s relentless march in the 19th century and onward.

To be sure, capitalism has affected the course of the entire modern world, not only that of the Jews, but “Jews have had a special relationship with capitalism,” Muller explains, “for they have been particularly good at it.” Among Jews, economic success has been a source of both pride and embarrassment. Among their neighbors, it has prompted both affection and abhorrence.

_____________

Muller gives the impression of a long and deep dispute, but while anti-Semitic anticapitalists and philo-Semitic capitalists each placed a different gloss on the social values of modern capitalism, all seemed to acknowledge that the Jews carried those values wherever they went. Anti-Semites denounced Jews as rootless cosmopolitans whose commercial activities undermined traditional ways of life, while capitalists praised Jews for fostering the creative destruction and social dynamism characteristic of free markets. Anti-Semites condemned Jewish merchants for promoting self-interested egoism at the expense of Christian fellowship.

For their part, capitalists welcomed Jews for promoting liberal individualism and rights of private property against clerical establishments and state regimentation of moral norms. To the anti-Semites, Jewish commercial influence undercut the passion and vitality of human life in favor of soulless economic calculation. To the capitalists, the Jews illustrated how commerce could counteract socially destructive prejudices and passions by promoting gentle manners and civil intercourse.

German anti-Semites called Jews Luftmenschen, “people of the air,” who lacked a firm grounding in agriculture and industry and produced nothing of material value. Capitalist thinkers correspondingly credited Jews with creating financial innovations—-letters of exchange, the stock market, and the strategic use of public debt—that promoted rationalism and efficiency in economic life.

Muller insists that historical circumstance, rather than any quality inherent in Judaism, explains the capitalist inclinations of Western Jewry. Yet he later calls his own judgment into question. In his first chapter, Muller discounts the argument of Werner Sombart, the anti-Semitic German sociologist (1863-1941), that the Jewish faith inclined its adherents to capitalism because it was given to abstraction and promoted a legal-contractual conception of their relationship with God.

In his next chapter, however, Muller explains the Jews’ facility for commerce by making reference to their “religious intellectualism.” Judaism “was a religion oriented to continuous contact with texts,” writes Muller, which “cultivated the habit of finding commonalities and distinctions in arguments, and of thinking in abstractions.” He observes that Talmudic law is “replete with debates about economic matters, including contracts, torts, and prices,” and even cites a passage from the Babylonian Talmud to demonstrate that “the rabbis had an acute appreciation of the benefits of the division of labor.”

Again in his first chapter, Muller condemns an anti-Semitic lecture delivered in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes in which the economist blamed the Jews for polluting capitalism by promoting deferred gratification, the focus on means over ends, which led people to discount the quality and enjoyment of life in favor of future profit. Yet in the following chapter, Muller explains that the Jews’ high valuation of educational study “reflected a long time horizon, in which the economic payoff would be deferred for years.”

Perhaps, notwithstanding the hostility with which anti-Semites formulated the Jewish connection to capitalism, their arguments cannot be so easily dismissed. For at the very least, Judaism did provide fertile ground for the cultivation of modern commercial life. As a religion of laws governing worldly conduct, Judaism does not have the innate suspicion of commercial activity that is among the originating concepts of the Christian tradition, with its Gospel account of Jesus’ rage at the money changers working on the grounds of the Temple. Theologically, Christianity has always emphasized spiritual preparation for the afterlife rather than earthly endeavors.

_____________

Yet Christianity is also a product of Judaism and echoes Judaism’s teachings even when it seeks to supplant them. In denouncing deferred gratification as the attempt “to secure a spurious and delusive immortality,” Keynes averred that “it is not an accident that the race which did the most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done the most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this most purposive of human institutions.” Keynes’s caricature notwithstanding, he was on to something. For Judaism did originate the promise of immortality—“I will make you a great nation and I will bless you,” God tells Abram in Genesis 12, guaranteeing him descendants as numerous as the stars—and that promise remains at the heart of Judaism’s daughter religions, including Christianity.

Sombart portrayed the triumph of capitalism as the replacement of a concrete, particularist Christian community with an abstract, universalistic society. But Judaism has always stood above all for the maintenance of a concrete, particularist community—the Jewish people. Christianity had to spread Jewish values as a universal faith before they could find expression in modern liberal capitalism.

Christianity did not purport to apply such values to the government of society. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus tells his followers. So Christians had to borrow from Jewish law. The early church incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian Gospels, though it was not at all obvious that the Old Testament should have been permitted to survive the New. In the early modern period, the Hebrew Bible again informed Christian views of society, as in the English jurist John Selden’s The Law of Nature and of Nations According to the Hebrews (1640). Christians also depended on Jews themselves, serving as a kind of shabbos goy in reverse, to engage in those commercial activities that were socially beneficial but religiously forbidden to them. In the 12th century, the church resolved to prevent the evil of Christian usury by allowing Jews to engage in moneylending and other financial activities—which made the Jews of Europe contemptible, but also indispensable, to Christian society.

Gradually, their skills in commerce were acquired by the surrounding Christian communities. So it may be said that capitalism, to some extent, Judaized Christian life. Karl Marx made the point most vividly in his essay “On the Question of the Jews,” which denounced the “Jewish spirit” of capitalism but also argued that capitalist society turned everyone into Jews. Under capitalism, he wrote, “money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.”

Of course, Muller is right to argue that the Jews embraced commerce in part as a result of their treatment by the Christian West. Always under the threat of expropriation or expulsion, it made little sense for Jews to acquire land or other immovable goods; one could more easily relocate wealth gained from trade or finance. Politically dispossessed, Jews employed financial influence. As sojourners, Paul Johnson has written, “they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as a whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being demolished without a pang.” That made them natural innovators and capitalist entrepreneurs.

_____________

By and large, Jews embraced these roles. With impressive historical detail, Muller refutes the notion, common to leftists eager to enlist the faith in the cause of collectivism, that Jews have been generally hostile to capitalism. While Jews have been prominent ideological spokesmen for socialist and Communist movements, those movements have enjoyed little support among the Jewish rank and file. The chief rabbi of Moscow in the early 20th century, Jacob Mazeh, is said to have told Leon Trotsky, né Lev Bronstein, “The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay for it.”

Indeed, the fate of the Jews has long been tied to the fate of capitalism. Jews of the early-modern period pleaded for political toleration on the grounds of the economic benefit it would bring—and thus the case for accepting the Jews was often mixed with the case for embracing commerce. In 1655 the Dutch rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel appealed to Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the newly formed English Commonwealth, to readmit the Jews to England. England stood to profit, he argued. “It is a thing confirmed, that merchandizing is, as it were, the proper profession of the Nation of the Jews,” wrote Ben Israel. “They do abundantly enrich the lands and countries of strangers, where they live, not only with what is requisite and necessary for the life of man; but also what may serve for ornament to his civil condition.” A century later, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn argued that Jews should enjoy civil equality in Germany because the merchant “is a real benefactor to the state” and helps “to render the comforts of life more known, and more generally serviceable.” Another century on, Theodor Herzl predicted that Arabs would welcome Jewish settlement in Palestine because when the Jews brought “their intelligence, their financial acumen, and their means of enterprise to the country, no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.”

_____________

But the result has not always been so happy. Not every society wants commerce. Capitalism represents certain moral choices about the good life—-choices that more aristocratic, theocratic, nationalistic, or agrarian societies resolve differently. At the birth of modern capitalism, the Jews came to symbolize a moral system that actually did threaten the traditional social order.

In his last chapter, Muller tries to explain why the triumph of capitalism did not end anti-Jewish hatred but in fact intensified it. Whereas Jews once performed economic functions Gentiles would not, in the modern era they became competitors with Gentiles. Given their already formidable economic training, Jews were bound to outperform other groups and to provoke new resentments. Moreover, Muller suggests, the capitalist state weakened traditional ties and fostered new forms of identification with the political community of the nation, which excluded other ethnics such as Jews.

Again, this explanation seems at odds with an earlier part of the book, in which Muller observes that the Jews were most accepted where capitalism was most firmly established. “Both in Europe and America, a fundamentally positive view of commerce within the larger society tended to lead to a favorable or at least neutral disposition toward the Jews,” he writes. “Here we find the greatest difference between continental European societies, on the one hand, and British and American society on the other.”

Muller points to the influence of Lockean liberalism in the U.S. Anglo-American society inherited a natural-rights tradition according to which capitalism produces not only a rich but also a good society. In this view, capitalism complements religious teaching; it shows due respect to the rights of liberty and property with which individuals “are endowed by their Creator”; and it calls forth distinctive virtues such as honesty, diligence, sobriety, and thrift. Capitalism thus understood forms a political community in which all are welcome who play by the rules. Continental Europe, by contrast, developed a more nationalist tradition in which the law expresses the spirit of a people. Capitalism, it follows, may be a useful means of organizing economic affairs, but it must express, and be constrained by, the national ethos. It is no surprise that ethnic and religious minorities present greater difficulties for such a society.

In this way, then, the fate of Western Jewry has been bound up with the moral case for capitalism and the bourgeois society. The case is a strong one: modern capitalism has produced greater individual liberty, peaceful coexistence, social mobility, and material prosperity than history had previously known. But because capitalism has so thoroughly eclipsed its alternatives, the moral argument on which it rests is often invisible. Muller quotes the Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets as saying, “Given the kind of human capital that the Jews represent, the majority in any country, if it wished to maximize long-term economic returns, should have not only permitted the Jewish minority the utmost freedom, but in fact should have subsidized any improvement in the economic and social performance of promising individual Jews.” Yet not every society is interested in maximizing long-term economic returns. Indeed, the persecution or exclusion of Jews is a strong sign that the moral case for capitalism is under attack.

Capitalism and the Jews have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship, albeit a rocky one. “In the long run,” writes Muller, “capitalism was good for the Jews. And the Jews were good for capitalism.” It was a relationship largely thrust upon them; as agents of modernity, the Jews were a chosen—not a choosing—people. As in society at large, there was a cost to embracing capitalism because it treats religion as a private matter, divorced from nationality and political rule.

In a sense, then, capitalism also Christianized Judaism. It did so by severing religious belief and worship from the national identity of the Jews and from the laws that are intended to govern their social conduct. Peaceful trading for profit falls somewhat short of the prophetic vision of a restored Jerusalem under divine sovereignty. “In that day,” the book of Zechariah tells us, “there shall be no more traders in the House of the Lord.” Of course, the House of the Lord has yet to be rebuilt, and until it is, Jews must still reside among the nations."

Gaza is plagued by poverty, but Hamas has no shortage of cash. Where does it come from?

Hamas has an investment portfolio of real estate and other assets worth $500 million, say experts, and an annual military budget of as much as $350 million.

By Dan De Luce and Lisa Cavazuti of CBS. Excerpt:

"The unemployment rate in Gaza is 47% and more than 80% of its population lives in poverty, according to the United Nations. Hamas, however, has funded an armed force of thousands equipped with rockets and drones and built a vast web of tunnels under Gaza. Estimates of its annual military budget range from $100 million to $350 million, according to Israeli and Palestinian sources. 

As the U.S. House and Senate will be asking in separate hearings Wednesday and Thursday, where does all that cash come from?

Since coming to power in the Gaza Strip 17 years ago, Hamas has filled its coffers with hundreds of millions in international aid, overt and covert injections of cash from Iran and other ideological partners, as well as cryptocurrency, taxes, extortion and smuggling, according to current and former U.S. officials and regional experts.

Much of the money is public and legal, including large sums of financial aid from Qatar via the United Nations, an arrangement encouraged and approved by Israel. The Qatari aid covers the salaries of civil servants, buys fuel for the power grid and provides cash to needy families.

Some of it is less than legal, according to experts. In addition to levying taxes on Gaza’s businesses and residents, Hamas imposes unofficial fees on smuggled goods and other activity, for a combined income of up to $450 million per year. Hamas also has real estate and other investments around the globe, despite international restrictions, and uses cryptocurrency to mask some of its transactions.

Some of it may be fully illegal. A small portion of its budget seems to come from smuggling in South America, including drug smuggling.

Experts, enemies and Western governments have questioned whether Hamas mingles the money for its military operations with money meant for civilian use. Hamas could not be reached for comment. But Hamas representatives have said previously that the group strictly separates funding for the administration of Gaza from funding for its military wing, also known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people, some former Treasury Department officials and experts argue that the United States and its European allies need to crack down on the group’s global financial network.

“There will need to be a policy review,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a former Treasury official now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. 

The Iranian connection

The size of the Hamas budget and its sources have both morphed over time.

Iran has been a consistent financial and military patron of Hamas since the 1990s, long before the group achieved control of Gaza. The funding has gradually increased, and is now at about $100 million annually, according to the State Department.

Hamas leaders have publicly acknowledged Iran’s ongoing financial and military support. 

In an interview this month that appeared on Russia Today TV, senior Hamas official Ali Baraka said that “First and foremost, it is Iran that is giving us money and weapons.” Last year, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh told Al Jazeera that Iran paid $70 million to the group to support its defense plan. 

In addition to Iran’s support, Hamas has long relied on funds from other ideological allies, including private donations and groups in Turkey, Kuwait and Malaysia, former U.S. counterterrorism officials said.

Hamas also has donors in other parts of the world, including the U.S., according to Treasury reports. From 1995 until 2001, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development operated as the chief U.S. fundraising arm of Hamas, sending more than $12 million “with the intent to willfully contribute funds, goods, and services to Hamas,” according to federal court documents and government assessments. 

Cash in suitcases

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas gained another major benefactor, the Qatari government.

Hamas won an election over Fatah, the Palestinian ruling party, in early 2006, in part because residents believed the existing authorities could not be trusted to administer funds properly. Hamas ultimately seized complete control of Gaza and has ruled without an election since 2007.

As conditions continued to deteriorate for residents of the enclave, Israel, the U.S. and the international community turned to gas-rich Qatar to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.

Qatari officials began carrying millions of dollars in cash in suitcases through Israel’s Erez border crossing into Gaza, with the permission of the Israeli government.

For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for much of the time after Hamas began ruling Gaza, the policy was meant to bring some degree of stability to Gaza and bolster Israel’s security. It also, however, helped fuel the bitter rivalry between Hamas and Fatah, which continued to govern the occupied West Bank."

"Muhammad Shehada, a Gaza-born Palestinian analyst and writer, rejects claims that aid has been diverted by Hamas. He points to a 2017 Australian government probe that found no evidence that taxpayer money was misused by the nongovernmental organization World Vision in the Gaza Strip, following allegations by Israel that Hamas had siphoned off millions of dollars a year from the charity to the Islamist group. 

“Given the tough circumstances in Gaza, the group would have faced a rebellion from their civil servants and the population had there been any evidence of them using government revenue to fund their militant wing,” Shehada said.

But skeptics say the U.N. was unable to exercise strict control over how the money was allocated, and that it enabled Hamas to use tax revenue and other funds to build up its military arm.

“All the funds that were supposed to go to the public, most of it went to their military capability,” Neumann said.

After its takeover of Gaza, Hamas also “developed the capability to tax and extort,” said Matthew Levitt, who worked as a senior Treasury official focusing on countering terrorist financial networks. Hamas began to rake in taxes and kickbacks from salaries, sale of goods and smuggling, a sum that now reaches up to $300 million to $450 million a year, said Levitt, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank.

Although the U.S. and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, “they’re not effectively cut off from the international financial system,” said Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director of the Counter Extremism Project. “They actually are able to invest funds in companies and in real estate.”

Hamas’ leadership has invested its income in an international investment portfolio worth $500 million in real estate and other assets from companies in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which it uses to conceal and launder its money, according to a Treasury announcement."

Jews, Like Palestinians, Are 'Indigenous' to the Middle East

The Hamas-embraced idea that Jews have no place in Israel fosters extremism on both sides.

 By Jacob Sullum.

"Leftists who openly celebrated the horrifying Hamas attacks in southern Israel argued that the end—the liberation of Palestine "from the river to the sea"—justified the means, including the indiscriminate slaughter of young rave revelers, elderly Holocaust survivors, children, and babies. Although that is a minority position even among harsh critics of Israeli policy, it reflects a more widely endorsed view that Jews, as "settlers" and "colonizers," have no legitimate claim to any of the country's territory and no business living there.

That view, in turn, is based on a simplistic morality tale that pits white European oppressors against "indigenous" people, eliding Israel's demographic roots and the ancient Jewish connection to the land. While this missing context is unlikely to faze people who see mass murder as a noble and heroic act of resistance, it is relevant for anyone who can imagine a less bloody resolution of Palestinian grievances.

In a speech last August, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who supposedly is committed to a peaceful settlement with Israel, asserted that "the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites," meaning it is impossible for them to be victims of anti-Semitism. Abbas was invoking a theory positing that the Jews of Europe descended from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe that supposedly converted en masse to Judaism in the ninth century.

According to a 2016 summary by genetic researchers Ariella Gladstein and Michael F. Hammer, however, "Ashkenazi Jews are not closely related to modern populations that best represent the Khazars." Rather, they "appear equally close to both Middle Eastern and European populations," and they "likely arose from a genetically diverse population in the Middle East."

Notably, Abbas did not address Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who account for about 45 percent of Israel's Jewish population, compared to 32 percent for Ashkenazim. Overall, a 2000 study found, "a substantial portion" of Jewish and Arab Y chromosomes (70 percent and 82 percent, respectively) belonged to the same chromosome pool, results that were consistent with "previous studies that suggested a common origin for Jewish and non-Jewish populations living in the Middle East."

A 2001 study by the same researchers, which found "a high degree of genetic affinity" among Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Kurdish Jews, also found that Jews were "even closer to populations in the northern part of the Middle East than to several Arab populations." The authors suggested that "the Y chromosomes in Palestinian Arabs" reflected "early lineages derived from the Neolithic inhabitants of the area," which "are part of the common chromosome pool shared with Jews," combined with the impact of subsequent migrations from the Arabian Peninsula.

While genetic research belies the notion that Jews are newcomers to the Middle East, it gets you only so far. In particular, it does not address conflicting land claims based on much more recent developments.

Israel's founding in 1948, which most Jews celebrate but most Palestinians remember as the Nakba (catastrophe), involved a mixture of prior land purchases, arbitrary line drawing by the United Nations, and a war in which the nascent state was attacked by the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Some of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled their homes planned to return after the anticipated Arab victory, while others were forcibly expelled.

Israel's defenders have long argued that it could rightly claim land won in defensive wars—in 1967 as well as 1948. They have noted that Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab states and wondered why Arab states could not likewise absorb Palestinian refugees.

While there is something to these arguments, the overall message—that Palestinians should suck it up and start over somewhere else—is less than completely satisfying for anyone who values individual rights and peaceful coexistence. But that no-compromise position is only reinforced by extremists who take a similar view of Jews, whether or not they are prepared to endorse the final solution that Hamas prefers."

It’s Not the Occupation

It is rarely the case that all of the blame for a conflict belongs on one side. But that does not mean blame should be equally divided.

"Not a single state in the Middle East rates even remotely as well as Israel still does in terms of liberal and democratic freedoms. What reason do we have for thinking that a unified Palestine would be any different, especially with antisemitic rejectionists like Hamas in the polity."

By David Benatar. Professor Benatar is a professor of philosophy and director of the Bioethics Centre at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

"Victim-blaming is generally agreed to be unacceptable. But when the crime is a pogrom and the victims are Israelis, many educated people seem to think otherwise. Following the shattering events of October 7th, when Hamas jihadists from Gaza swept into southern Israel and conducted a pitiless campaign of torture and mass murder, many rushed to place responsibility for the mayhem squarely on the shoulders of Israel. Even when the horrors of mutilation, rape, and hostage-taking are acknowledged, we are told that these events must be understood in their proper “historical context.”

The problem with this argument is that the proposed historical context is selectively chosen. The Hamas attack claimed the lives of at least 1,300 Israelis, but its “root cause” was almost immediately attributed to “the occupation,” rather than to the doctrines of its participants. According to this narrative, Hamas is only reacting to life in the pressure-cooker of a besieged Gaza Strip. But placing the pogrom in the historical context of “the occupation” explains nothing unless “the occupation” is also explained in its historical context. Nor is the Israeli response to the pogrom properly contextualised in this explanation. No thought is given to the likely consequences of Israel not striking (or striking inadequately) at Hamas in response to the massacre.

In cycles of violence, any act of belligerence may be seen as a response to what preceded it. The problem is compounded because history and human behaviour are both complicated. There are often misunderstandings, misinformation, and disproportionate responses, combined with a human tendency not to see these. It is therefore rarely the case that all of the blame belongs on one side. But that does not mean the blame should be equally divided. Very often, one side is much worse than the other, even if the better side is far from perfect.

Pinpointing the origin of the Arab-Jewish conflict is not easy, but looking back nearly a century to the 1929 Palestine riots and their origins is instructive. 

In those riots, 133 Jews were killed and a further 339 were injured by Arabs. As in 2023, victims were tortured and mutilated. As a result of the 1929 violence, Jews were evacuated from many areas, including the town of Hebron, where they had maintained a nearly uninterrupted presence since the destruction of the second Jewish Commonwealth in 70CE.

Of course, those riots themselves need to be explained. They arose from Arab fears of growing Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine, against the background of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British had declared their support for the creation of a Jewish state in (part of) Palestine. More immediately, Arabs were alarmed when Jews brought seats and benches (for the infirm) to the Western Wall, along with a divider to separate the sexes, in violation of a 1925 ruling. The Arabs saw this move as a part of the “Zionist project,” which is why it elicited Arab violence. This, in turn, prompted Jewish demonstrations at the Wall, and those demonstrations were among the precipitators of the 1929 riots.

Some Arabs did shelter Jews, and Arabs were also killed during the 1929 riots. Almost all of the latter were slain by British forces attempting to control the violence, but in a few instances, Jews murdered innocent Arabs in reprisal attacks. But none of this had anything to do with occupation, for the simple reason that there was no Jewish occupation of Palestine in 1929. Of course, there were Jews living there. Many had been born there. Others were refugees or immigrants. Whatever one’s feelings about immigration, this was certainly not a state of affairs to which massacres were a justifiable response.

Those who doubt this might consider the following case. Perhaps there are Americans today who fear that Arab immigration, and the changed political environment it may yet produce, will eventually lead the US to abandon its current support for Israel. Would those Americans therefore be justified in massacring the immigrants and refugees from Arab countries on the basis of those political fears? That would be xenophobic violence and its explanation would not be a justification.

The problem in 1929 was not “the occupation,” but a refusal to accept any Jewish state in Palestine. This refusal stands in contrast to repeated (if not always full-hearted) Jewish acceptance of a two-state solution, including the Jews’ acceptance of the Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947. The Arab rejection of partition then and the Hamas rejection of a Jewish state now are both rooted in the same claim that the Jewish state is a settler-colonial enterprise. But this characterization is simply false. 

First, Israel is not a colony of any country, nor was it established as one. It is not like the British colonies in America and Australia, nor the Belgian or German colonies in what were the Congo and South West Africa. Jews were not sent by anyone, nor did they migrate from a single country or even a single region. In other words, they had no metropole. Moreover, they have ancestral ties to the land. It is the place from which they came, and from which they were exiled. This is not to deny that Palestinians have ties to the same land, but it is not colonization when those who are driven out of their land return to it. Those Palestinian exiles who deny this, might ask themselves whether their own claims to some part of Palestine will evaporate in time, and if so, when?

Second, a very large proportion of the Jewish Israeli population is descended from refugees. These include not only refugees from pogroms and the Shoah in Europe, but also around 650,000 Jews who fled persecution in Arab countries and Iran. Other Jewish Israelis are migrants who have moved to Israel because, for any number of reasons, that is where they prefer to be. Refugees and migrants are not colonialists. Those who reject this distinction will be forced to acknowledge that there is now a substantial Muslim colonization of Europe, America, and other Western countries. That is not a reasonable characterization, nor is it one that Palestinians’ Western supporters will be eager to defend.

So what about “the occupation” in 2023? The Gaza Strip is not occupied, and hasn’t been since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory in 2005. It is true that Israel—along with Egypt—controls Gaza’s borders, but that is not the same as occupation. It is also true that the partial blockade (converted to a full siege following the October 7th massacre) has brought hardship to Gazans, but it is not a gratuitous infliction. The blockade was imposed in an attempt to control the flow of arms into Gaza, which Israelis knew Hamas would then use to attack Israel.

Israel does continue to occupy the West Bank, but responsibility for that conundrum cannot be laid solely at Israel’s door either. It takes two sides to make peace. Anybody who suggests that Israel could resolve the conflict by simply withdrawing from the West Bank should try to understand that the results of the Gaza disengagement demonstrate this to be impossible. That experience has provided a painful lesson in the dangers of vacating disputed land in the absence of (and possibly even with) a peace agreement. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, that area has regularly been used as a launching ground for thousands of rockets into Israel (despite the blockade), and now for the worst massacre of Jews since the Nazis.

None of this makes Israel blameless. There are outbreaks of Jewish vigilante violence and other instances of terror against Palestinians in the West Bank. This is inexcusable, and the State of Israel should ensure that the perpetrators feel the full force of the law. And even though the security wall and checkpoints around the West Bank are a necessary response to the terror that led to their construction, processing Palestinian people through the latter should be done with greater regard for their dignity. Such criticisms are reasonable. 

But those who lay all (or almost all) of the blame for the ongoing conflict and the consequent statelessness of the Palestinians on Israel display either bad faith or naiveté. Lifting the blockade on Gaza and unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank would amount to suicide for Israel’s Jews. The same is true of the suggestion that there could be a unified state of Jewish and Arab citizens from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Those who propose such a state need to explain which country in the region this state would most resemble. Not a single state in the Middle East rates even remotely as well as Israel still does in terms of liberal and democratic freedoms. What reason do we have for thinking that a unified Palestine would be any different, especially with antisemitic rejectionists like Hamas in the polity.

When we ask what each side of the Hamas-Israel conflict could do differently, it is much easier to say what Hamas could do. It could stop attacking Israel. If it stopped behaving like the fundamentalist, repressive, terroristic regime that it is, and used its resources for building a nascent Palestinian state, it would bring greater prosperity to its citizens, gradually ease restrictions on its borders, and demonstrate that Palestine could exist peacefully alongside Israel. But that, of course, is not what Hamas wants."

Examining Competition and Consumer Rights in Housing Markets

Research suggests that the HOUSES Act could have a meaningful effect on housing affordability. 

By Vanessa Brown Calder of Cato.

U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Competition Policy, Antitrust, & Consumer Rights

"Chair Klobuchar, Ranking Member Lee, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Vanessa Brown Calder, and I am the director of opportunity and family policy studies at Cato Institute. The views I express in this testimony are my own and do not represent any official position of my employer.

Accessible, low‐​cost housing is vital to the health and prosperity of America’s families and communities. When housing is abundant, it is more affordable. Abundant housing provides educational and economic opportunities for children and adults.¹ It allows families to be part of the communities that they desire. Policies that support abundant, affordable housing are associated with reduced homelessness and improved homeless policy outcomes.²

Although junk fees, institutional investors, and similar matters have received recent political and media attention, inaccessible, high‐​cost housing is largely a result of existing federal, state, and local policy. Government policies that constrain housing development are particularly detrimental in this regard.

State and local regulations constitute some of the most significant policies constraining housing supply. Zoning and land‐​use regulations are nearly ubiquitous across American cities. These regulations directly prohibit housing development, increase costs, create uncertainty, and produce delays.³

Zoning regulations have a meaningful impact on family budgets. A well–known paper finds that zoning regulations push up the cost of apartments by around 50 percent in Manhattan, San Francisco, and San Jose.⁴ A recent paper reviewing 24 metropolitan areas finds a massive “zoning tax” (up to $500,000 per quarter–acre) in cities with restrictive land–use regimes.⁵

In addition to state and local policy, federal policy also plays a role in limiting housing supply. In Western States, the federal government owns a substantial portion of the land, which therefore cannot be developed.

In Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, the federal government owns between 60 and 80 percent of the land.⁶ In other states like Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, California, and Montana, the federal government owns more than one–third to one–half of land.

Contrary to public perception, the vast majority of federal lands are not national parks, monuments, or Bureau of Indian Affairs land. Instead, most federal western land is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or U.S. Forest Service (USFS).

This land is often close to urban areas, with a significant portion of land within city or county boundaries. Previous estimates indicate that there are 217,000 acres of BLM and USFS land within Utah city boundaries and 650,000 acres of the same within one mile of Utah city borders.⁷

Presented with a similar set of facts in the 1990s, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid led a group of legislators in passing the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA). This legislation allowed local governments in the land‐​locked Las Vegas, Nevada area to nominate federal land for competitive market auction.

The sale of federal land in the Clark County area subsequently resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to Nevada public schools and more than a billion dollars allocated to Nevada’s trails, parks, and natural areas, creating a win–win for Nevada developers, conservationists, and residents.⁸

Ranking Member Lee and cosponsors of the HOUSES Act propose extending a similar solution to other Western States. The HOUSES Act would allow local governments to nominate and purchase federal land and develop the land for housing projects that meet certain density minimums and other criteria.⁹

Like the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, proceeds from the HOUSES Act would be made available for environmental initiatives, including improvements to existing National Parks, wildfire prevention programs, public water infrastructure projects, and restoration initiatives.

Research suggests that the HOUSES Act could have a meaningful effect on housing affordability. A recent U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee study finds that HOUSES reforms could lead to the construction of approximately 2.7 million homes, and this increase in housing development would be possible with the conversion of just 0.1 percent of existing federal land holdings.¹⁰ As a result of this new development, six Western States could nearly or completely eliminate their housing shortages, and six other states could substantially reduce them.¹¹

In addition to policies that directly constrain development, additional federal, state, and local policies are relevant.12 When supply‐​limiting policies are addressed, the participation of institutional investors in the housing market is largely inconsequential. Furthermore, the gains that result from reforming supply‐​limiting policies far exceed potential gains from regulating junk fees or market participants. When considering reforms to improve housing, policymakers and analysts should keep in mind that the government is the dominant player and regulator in the housing market.

As a result, ample reform opportunities exist for policymakers interested in improving housing access and affordability. Reforms that expand housing supply will unleash the housing market and ensure that American families have the choice, opportunity, and upward mobility that they desire.

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions."

Why the Fed’s Unprecedented Losses Matter

The Federal Reserve’s risky policy has backfired

Letters to The WSJ. 

"Jason Furman’s “Profits and Losses Don’t Matter at the Federal Reserve” (op-ed, Sept. 28) gets it wrong in several respects. First, the loss of an average yearly profit of $75 billion certainly does matter when the national debt is already staggering.

Second, Mr. Furman seeks to justify the Fed’s quantitative-easing policy because it had the effect of “bolstering the economy” by depressing long-term interest rates. This foolish policy led to the asset-liability mismatch that placed the Fed in its current loss position and created the housing-market bubble that makes it so difficult for first-time buyers to purchase a home today. Keeping interest rates artificially low does juice the economy, but at the cost of a terrible later reckoning. We are experiencing this today in heightened inflation and asset bubbles.

You can praise the Fed for its current policy of raising rates to reduce inflation, but please don’t praise it for the mistakes that led it to have to take these drastic measures.

Howard B. Adler

Potomac, Md.

Mr. Adler served as deputy assistant Treasury secretary for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, 2019-21.

Mr. Furman excuses the Fed’s unprecedented losses, which have surpassed $100 billion on their way to $200 billion or more, suggesting taxpayers shouldn’t care. To the contrary, taxpayers should care that the Fed will spend, without authorization, $200 billion or more that will be added to their future taxes.

These Fed losses are the result of a radical and exceptionally risky Fed choice to build a balance sheet resembling a giant 1980s savings and loan. In the process, it stoked bubbles in bonds, stocks, houses and cryptocurrencies, in addition to inducing enormous interest-rate risk in the banking system. Those risks have now come home to roost.

Mr. Furman argues that the Fed’s negative capital position doesn’t matter. If so, why cook the books to avoid reporting it? The Fed books its cash losses as a “deferred asset” so that it can obscure its true negative capital position. The Fed changed its own previous accounting rules precisely so it could do so. We know what would happen if Citibank tried that.

Who authorized the Fed to take an enormous interest-rate bet, risking taxpayer money? Nobody but the Fed itself. Does “independence” give the Fed the right to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars without congressional approval? That question needs to be debated.

Alex J. Pollock and Paul H. Kupiec

Mises Institute and AEI

Lake Forest, Ill., and Washington"

Iowa’s Tax-Cut Triumph

The Hawkeye State shows how to cut rates and grow revenue

WSJ editorial. 

"Kim Reynolds is spending time with the Republican presidential hopefuls barnstorming her state, and we hope they’re taking notes on her record. The Iowa Governor has made her state a model of good tax policy, and she says she’s only getting started.

Ms. Reynolds said last week that Iowa wrapped up its fiscal year with a surplus of $1.83 billion. That may sound small compared with overgrown blue-state budgets, but it’s about 22% of what the Hawkeye State spent in 2023. It’s also the third surplus in a row in the Governor’s tenure.

These results have followed significant tax cuts that have helped the state’s economy. Since revenue surged during the pandemic recovery in 2021, Ms. Reynolds and the GOP Legislature have cut the state’s individual income tax rates. The top rate has dropped to 6% from 8.53% since 2022, and it is scheduled to drop to a flat 3.9% rate by 2026.

Iowa’s top corporate tax rate next year will drop to 7.1% from 9.8% in 2022, and it is scheduled to fall to 5.5% if the state keeps hitting its revenue targets. For property owners, the Legislature this year capped the annual increase in assessed value, reducing local tax collections by about $100 million.

Ms. Reynolds connected these dots when she announced the budget surplus last week. “We’ve seen what the powerful combination of growth-oriented policies and fiscal restraint can create,” she said in a statement. Income, corporate and franchise-tax receipts rose by about $500 million from 2021 to 2022 after the tax cuts.

Crucially, state spending has grown modestly since 2021, despite annual increases in per pupil school funding. Steady job growth has pushed the state’s unemployment rate down to 2.9%.

Now the Governor wants to raise her bet on this winning formula. “My goal is to get to zero individual income-tax rate by the end of this second term” in 2027, she said.

If that happens, Iowa will join its neighbor South Dakota in the club of states with no tax on income. Iowa is already charging ahead of most Midwestern peers—particularly Minnesota, which resembles the progressive states on the coasts with a 9.85% top income-tax rate. As for the fiscal risk to Iowans, the state is sitting on a $2.74 billion taxpayer relief fund that will grow again in January.

The Iowa tax experience belies the claims of the left that cutting taxes produces deficits. In Iowa the tax cuts have helped to produce record surpluses that then can be used to cut income-tax rates further. Ms. Reynolds has also shown that you can cut rates across the board, even at the top, and succeed politically. The GOP presidential candidates could stand to ask her for a few tax-cutting pointers."

30 year growth rates for U.S. and Europe

See Biden Gets European Help for His Big-Government Agenda: When Congress and the courts say no, his agencies recruit foreigners to apply pressure here at home by Phil Gramm and Jeb Hensarling. Excerpt:

"Over the past 30 years, real per capita gross domestic product in France and Germany, the EU’s two largest economies, have grown, respectively, from $28,670 to $38,913 (a 35.7% increase) and from $30,615 to $43,032 (40.5%). Real per capita GDP in the U.S. has grown 56.7%, from $40,108 to $62,866. Making America more like Europe gives the Biden administration the government it wants, but European economic results won’t give American families what they want."

Hamas War Shows Us What American Universities Stand For

Some students celebrate and many presidents equivocate. No wonder trust in higher ed is down

By Jason L. Riley. 

"According to a Gallup survey published in July, public confidence in the usefulness of a college education has been in something of a free fall for most of the past decade. In 2015, 57% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed. Today, that’s down to 36%.

Moreover, trust in college has fallen broadly. It’s down among men and women, among Democrats and Republicans, and among people with and without a college degree. The cost of attending college, which rose by 169% between 1980 and 2020, according to a Georgetown study, surely is a major factor in this trend. But so are radical campus politics, such as those displayed at some of our most prestigious institutions of learning since Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel earlier this month.

The Israeli civilians who were abducted, tortured and killed—including women, children and senior citizens—weren’t bystanders caught in the crossfire. They were the intended targets. Entire families were executed in their homes. NBC News reported that documents recovered from the bodies of terrorists mapped the locations of elementary schools and youth centers and instructed the gunmen to “kill as many as possible” and “capture hostages.” Denouncing the perpetrators of these wicked acts shouldn’t be difficult, yet the response on too many campuses has been to fault Israel for the atrocities or to equivocate.

A coalition of more than 30 left-wing student groups at Harvard issued an open letter stating that the Israeli “regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” It has taken Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, three tries (and counting) to issue a statement distancing the administration from the letter and making it clear that the university condemns the terrorist attacks. Worse, Ms. Gay acted only after being pressured to do so by former Harvard president Larry Summers and some of the school’s biggest donors.

University of Pennsylvania president M. Elizabeth Magill likewise needed multiple attempts to issue a forceful statement on the terror attacks. She, too, found her moral compass only after megadonors to Penn said they were closing their checkbooks and urging other philanthropists to do the same. “In an updated statement following the backlash, Magill condemned Hamas, and emphasized the University’s position on anti-Semitism,” the Daily Mail reported. “She referred to the violence from Hamas as a ‘terrorist assault,’ a change from her initial statement.”

If your school is so ethically adrift that it needs to emphasize its position on anti-Semitism, something is very wrong. And if Americans increasingly are hesitant to leave impressionable youths in the care of institutions run by people who have trouble rebuking openly genocidal terror campaigns, who can blame them?

Hamas has never hidden its intentions. It is an Islamist organization dedicated to eradicating Israel by killing the Jewish people who live there. Hamas isn’t interested in a “two-state solution” or any other compromise. Its objective, stated explicitly in its founding documents, is the annihilation of the Jewish state. Period.

Ben Sasse, president of the University of Florida, takes Hamas at its word and was one of the few college leaders who was unequivocal in his response to the attacks: “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard,” he wrote. Apparently, however, calling out evil is harder than you might think, not only for administrators and students but also for faculty members.

A Cornell history professor appearing at a pro-Palestinian rally this week referred to Hamas’s butchery as “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Columbia political scientist Joseph Massad described the attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,400 people, including at least 30 U.S. citizens, as “awesome” and a “major achievement of the resistance.” And CNN reports that a Stanford instructor was suspended after students reported that he singled out Jews in his class by asking them to raise their hands, accused them of being “colonizers,” and played down the significance of the Holocaust’s body count.

Academia has been an incubator of leftist causes going back at least as far as the 1960s. Since that time, however, double standards have proliferated in admissions and faculty hiring. Ideology has become more important than scholarship, and political correctness dominates decision-making to the point that calling an act of terror an act of terror is to risk upsetting significant numbers of students and faculty. Many administrators are captive to those on campus who believe that higher education is about indoctrination and thought control rather than open inquiry, civil engagement and the rational examination of competing viewpoints.

The old joke among college presidents is that A students become their professors, while C students become their donors. We’re starting to see some donors throw their weight around. Let’s hope it continues."