What Libertarianism Is and Isn’t

By David Boaz.

"Here we go again. Another “obituary” for libertarianism. While Salon Magazine declares that we all live in a “libertarian dystopia,” and a new brand of big‐​government conservatives promise to free the Republican party and American government from their libertarian captivity, Barton Swaim declares in the Wall Street Journal that a new book “works as an obituary” for libertarianism. That’s not a characterization that I think the authors—Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi—would accept of their book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.

Swaim notes that the book surveys many different kinds of self‐​styled libertarians over the past two centuries, and that the authors lay out six “markers” that libertarians share: property rights, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberties, and a belief that people are best left to order themselves spontaneously. Not a bad list, significantly overlapping with the list of seven key libertarian ideas that I laid out in the first chapter of my own book, The Libertarian Mind.

He goes on to argue, following the authors, “In the 21st century, the movement in the U.S. has consisted in an assortment of competing, often disputatious intellectual cadres: anarchists, anarcho‐​capitalists, paleo‐​libertarians (right‐​wing), ‘liberaltarians’ (left‐​wing) and many others.” Somehow he leaves out actual libertarians, such as those who populate the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, the Objectivist world, and much of the Libertarian Party. Indeed, a few lines later he cites the “diversity” of “the priestess of capitalism Ayn Rand, the politician Rand Paul and the billionaire philanthropist Charles Koch”—none of whom would fall into any of the esoteric categories that he suggests make up modern libertarianism and in fact belong to actual libertarianism or its penumbras.

The whole review is ahistorical. Swaim never mentions classical liberalism, the revolutionary movement that challenged monarchs, autocrats, mercantilism, caste society, and established churches beginning in the 18th century. Liberalism soon swept the United States and Western Europe and ushered in what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Enrichment,” the unprecedented rise in living standards that has made us moderns some 3,000 percent richer than our ancestors of 1800. The ideas of the classical liberals, including John Locke, Adam Smith, and the American Founders, are those that animate modern libertarianism: equal rights, constitutional government, free markets, tolerance, the rule of law. Zwolinski and Tomasi say that “what sets libertarians apart is the absolutism and systematicity” with which we advocate those ideas. Well, yes, after 200 years of historical observation and philosophical and economic debate, many of us do believe that a firmer adherence to liberal/​libertarian ideas would serve society well. We observe that the closer a society comes to consistent tolerance, free markets, and the rule of law, the more it will achieve widespread peace, prosperity, and freedom.

Swaim insists that libertarians do not engage “with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on.” He’s wrong about that. Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. F. A. Hayek stressed the importance of morals and tradition. Ayn Rand set out a fairly strict code of personal ethics. Thomas Szasz’s work challenged the reductionists and behaviorists with a commitment to the old ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, and responsibility for one’s choices. Charles Murray emphasizes the value and indeed the necessity of community and responsibility. Libertarian philosophers of virtue ethics find the case for limited government to be based on the search for the good life. Swaim would be on more solid ground to say that libertarianism does not presume to tell individuals what to believe and how to live. Separation of church and state and all that. As I wrote in a letter to the Journal (not yet published), Swaim refers to the “studiously amoral philosophy of libertarianism.” A popular summary of libertarianism, “don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, and keep your promises,” is just the basic morality that allows human beings to live together in peace.

As for his claim that libertarianism is dead, that this book is an obituary, I refer Swaim again to all the people who complain that we’re living in some sort of libertarian world. Libertarians often feel depressed; they believe the world is on “the road to serfdom.” But in fact the world is far freer in this century than ever before in history. Free markets and free trade, an end to slavery and caste societies, representative government, and the rule of law now govern the Western world and much of the rest. Most of the Cato Institute’s website comprises complaints about the malfeasance of the U.S. government. But in the bigger picture, libertarians have had much success. In the roughly 50 years since I started thinking about politics, one could point to such successes as:

• the end of conscription in the United States
• social, economic, and political equality for women
• dramatically lower marginal tax rates
• freer trade
• deregulation of major industries such as airlines, trucking, communication, and finance
• the almost total demise of communism
• and the consequent discrediting of socialism and central planning
• the reorientation of antitrust policy to a consumer welfare standard
• expanded First Amendment protections
• expanded Second Amendment protections
• the progress of gay rights and gay marriage
• growing opportunities for school choice
• a slow erosion of the war on drugs

I could go on. None of these are total victories. No ideology achieves all of its sweeping vision, at least not without a military conquest of the government and the ability to rule by decree—and those experiments are nothing to emulate. In various parts of the world bad ideas are back—socialism, protectionism, ethnic nationalism, anti‐​Semitism, even industrial policy. The libertarian challenge is to join with other liberals—Reaganite conservatives, free‐​speech liberals, people who are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal”—to push back against these bad resurgent ideas. But this record of accomplishment is no obituary."

Biden regulations have cost Americans almost $10,000 per household: study

By Aaron Kliegman of Fox News.

"The Biden administration's burdensome regulations have cost Americans about $10,000 per household, according to a new report, which noted that figure could skyrocket if President Biden is re-elected in 2024 and serves another four years.

Casey Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, compares the regulatory records of President Biden and former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama in a new study published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

As of the end of last year, according to the study, the Biden administration imposed new regulatory costs on American households and businesses at a pace that is surpassing that of the Obama administration during a comparable time period. Specifically, Mulligan writes that the Biden administration has so far been adding regulatory costs at a rate of $617 billion per year of rulemaking, not counting regulatory costs created by statutes and other non-rule regulatory actions.

Mulligan calculates that the added costs of these Biden-era rules finalized in 2021 and 2022 — including both their current and expected future costs — amount to about $9,600 per household. These costs are spread over time rather than concentrated in the first year that the rules take effect — and could spike significantly if Biden is re-elected.

If rulemaking and regulatory costs continue to accelerate at the same rate as they did during the Obama administration, the report states, "[T]he result after eight years [under Biden] would be a cumulative $7 trillion, which is almost $60,000 per household."

Still, Biden has fewer regulations per year than Obama and Trump in almost every category, according to the report. However, the current administration has implemented some especially costly regulations, such as actions on student loans and vaccine mandates.

Overall, automobile fuel economy and emissions standards account for a third of the total regulatory costs, with health, labor, telecommunications and consumer finance regulations also comprising a significant chunk.

Unlike Biden, Trump oversaw large-scale deregulation, as the report notes.

"The Trump administration's agencies through four years reduced regulatory costs by almost $11,000 per household in present value," according to Mulligan, who notes that figure doesn't include Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID vaccine. "On an annual basis, President Trump was on net reducing regulatory costs (more than $300 billion per year of rulemaking) almost as fast as Presidents Obama and Biden were creating them ($600 billion per year of rulemaking)."

Unlike Obama, who Mulligan notes "had virtually no deregulation in his first two years," Biden has already implemented meaningful deregulations. However, on net, Trump's deregulation was more far-reaching.

"President Trump showed that regulatory costs can be subtracted rather than perpetually added," the report states. "Four years of President Trump reduced regulatory costs by about $11,000 per household. Eight years would have saved a total of more than $21,000, which is a gap of $61,000 to $80,000 from the Biden trajectory."

Mulligan describes his report as the first "to comprehensively quantify the costs missing from agency cost assessments," explaining that several studies have shown government agencies employ poor cost assessments and detailing how these agencies often impose large opportunity and resource costs without acknowledging them.

"However, even if we ignore the large number of regulatory costs missing from the agency estimates, they show a meaningful gap too," Mulligan writes. "Eight years of President Trump would add only $561 to the average household's cost (agency estimate), whereas eight years of Biden staying 15% ahead of the Obama administration would cost households almost $11,000 each on average. The stagnation of economic growth, declining worker productivity, and wages that fail to keep up with inflation could well be linked to the resurgence of regulatory burdens."

The new report comes as Biden seeks to tout his economic policies heading into the 2024 presidential campaign."

On Race and Academia

By John McWhorter. Excerpts:

"The culture that a policy helps put into place can be as important as the policy itself. And in my lifetime, racial preferences in academia — not merely when it comes to undergraduate admissions but also moving on to grad school and job applications and teaching careers — have been not only a set of formal and informal policies but also the grounds for a culture of perceptions and assumptions.

I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.

I have no reason to think affirmative action played much of a role in the colleges I went to for undergraduate and graduate work, as neither was extremely selective at the time. In the latter case, I was told by a mentor, a Black man, that race had been the reason I wound up in the top 20 pile of applicants for graduate study in linguistics in the department where I got my Ph.D. I had minimal experience with linguistics proper, and my G.P.A. was very good but nowhere near perfect. (Those hobbies!) But I have always thought of that as racial preferences the way they should have been, merely additive around the margins. I’d done well on tests like the G.R.E., my grades in language courses were top level and I had written a senior thesis that made it clear I had a linguistics frame of mind.

But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt like I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all.

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

At the time I was not very politicized, and I assumed that my race had merely been a background bonus to help me get hired. Only later did the reality become more apparent, when I learned just who else had been on that shortlist. (I will never forget how awkward it was when I met one of them — older than me, with more gravitas in the field — some years later. I sensed that we both knew what had happened and why.) I had been hired by white people who, quite innocently, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing a Black person onto the faculty. I bear them no malice; under the culture we were all living in, I would have done the same thing.

Around this time I gave some really good talks, and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. And in the meantime, I was hopelessly undercooked for the position I had been hired for. I was not utterly clueless, but I simply didn’t know enough yet — and especially not enough to be in a position to counsel graduate students.

I needed some years of postdoctoral study. They say you don’t really know it till you teach it, and that’s largely true: Having never actually taught a class, I needed to teach some. I needed to hang around linguistics for a longer time in general. There are formative experiences key to being a real linguist that I had not yet had, such as long-term work with speakers of my language of focus, Saramaccan.

The doctoral program I had been in had gone through a phase of allowing students perhaps too much leeway in deciding which courses to take. Many students took this as an occasion to sit at the feet of their mentors and drink in what they knew. But my natural orientation has always been autodidactic, and so I basically went off into a corner and focused like a laser on one issue that particularly interested me — how creole languages form — while developing only a passing acquaintance with linguistics beyond it. With undergrads, I could coast on stage presence, but grad students know the real thing when they see it — and when they don’t. I looked like a fool.

I didn’t like it. But because I am obsessive, I ultimately dedicated myself to boning up and then some. I read and read and read. I spoke closely with as many linguists as I could. I took up new interests within the field. I did intense study of my language of focus. I taught classes outside my comfort zone. That is, I became a normal academic.

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make."

How Tobacco Companies Are Crushing ESG Ratings

'Women involved in tobacco farming often face structural and cultural barriers,' the tobacco giant Philip Morris wrote in its 2022 ESG report. 'Globally, less than 15 percent of agricultural land is owned by women.'

By Aaron Sibarium of The Washington Free Beacon.

"S&P Global made headlines this month when it gave Tesla, the world's largest manufacturer of electric cars, a lower environmental, social, and governance score than Philip Morris International, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes. 

The electric car company, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has become a culture-war lightning rod, earned just 37 points on the 100-point scale compared with the cigarette giant's 84.

ESG ratings are supposed to guide investors, and their money, toward ethical enterprises. But Big Tobacco has lapped Tesla in the ESG ratings race more than once: Sustainalytics, a widely used ESG ratings tool, gives Tesla a worse score than Altria, one of the largest tobacco producers in the world. And the London Stock Exchange gives British American Tobacco an ESG score of 94—the third highest of any company on the exchange's top share index—while Tesla earns a middling 65.

How could cigarettes, which kill over eight million people each year, be deemed a more ethical investment than electric cars? It may have something to do with the tobacco industry's embrace of corporate progressivism.

Companies like Altria have gone out of their way to emphasize the diversity of their corporate boards and the breadth of their social justice initiatives, from funding minority businesses to promoting transgender women in sports. But Tesla, whose executives are overwhelmingly white men, has resisted that bandwagon, going so far as to fire its top LGBT diversity officer last year.

The "S" in ESG typically includes diversity programs. Philip Morris International, which in 2021 advertised a partnership with "African data scientists," got a social score of 84 from S&P Global. Tesla got a measly 20.

The contrast highlights the hazards of a movement that lumps pressing health and environmental issues in with ideological fads. Early ESG efforts were laser-focused on "sin stocks"—companies whose core business was deemed immoral—including tobacco. But as ESG investing has ballooned, so has the number of variables used in ESG ratings, which now encompass everything from labor practices and carbon pledges to diversity trainings and human rights. That has created countless opportunities to game the system, experts say, and lets even the most sordid companies score points—and investors—by toeing the progressive line.

"ESG company ratings often measure abstract woke goals that have no rational connection to companies' actual businesses," said Boyden Gray & Associates managing partner Jonathan Berry, who sued NASDAQ last year over its diversity requirements for corporate boards. "Companies score 'points' mainly by demonstrating their compliance with the latest dogmas issued by the DEI complex."

Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing more people than alcohol, illegal drugs, and car accidents combined. And their supply chain involves a litany of environmental sins: The industry's carbon footprint is substantial, and even e-cigarettes, marketed as a less harmful alternative to tobacco, can result in serious pollution because they don't biodegrade. Tobacco farming, which mostly takes place in developing countries, causes deforestation and soil erosion. Tobacco workers are exposed to toxic chemicals, including high doses of nicotine, which can lead to hospitalization.

But ESG ratings often mask those effects. Some scores, including S&P Global's, say in fine print that they are sector-specific, which means companies are held to different standards depending on their industry. An unusually green tobacco giant could score better than an electric carmaker with an all-male board, and corporations can earn points merely by setting water reduction targets or using "diverse" suppliers.

That may be why Philip Morris International, in its 2022 ESG report, bragged about "empowering" female tobacco farmers. "Women involved in tobacco farming often face structural and cultural barriers," the report explained. "Globally, less than 15 percent of agricultural land is owned by women."

This sort of rhetoric permeates Big Tobacco's ESG reports, documents aimed at investors seeking an ethical portfolio. Imperial Brands touts its trainings on "microaggressions" and a board that is 40 percent women. Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco promote their scores on Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index—Tesla doesn't doesn't participate—which uses self-reported data to track companies' progress toward "equitable inclusion." Altria advertises a granular list of diversity targets, including for "AAPI women." And in 2020, the company's "Corporate Responsibility" report addressed the "pandemic within the pandemic" caused by "systemic racism." It did not mention that smoking, like COVID-19, disproportionately kills black Americans.

The paeans to diversity underscore how tobacco, long considered the quintessential sin stock, could exploit ESG to become a more palatable asset, profiting off the progressivism that has swept through C-suites and corporate boards. Most ESG funds exclude tobacco from their portfolios due to its harmful health effects. But cigarette makers are hoping to change that.

Philip Morris International CEO Jacek Olczak told the Financial Times in May that some ESG asset managers had asked his company, which sold over 600 billion cigarettes last year, for one-on-one meetings, signaling a possible rapprochement with tobacco.

"Asset managers will not spend the time on talking with you," Olczak said, if they don't plan to "reconsider the exclusion" policy.

That détente is largely due to the rise of smoke-free products, which now account for a third of Philip Morris International's revenue. But critics say the ESG movement, and the progressive marketing it encourages, have also played a role in legitimizing the cigarette industry. "Tobacco company ESG reports tend to deceive their primary audience, investors, into thinking that tobacco companies can be 'sustainable,'" the tobacco watchdog STOP wrote in an issue brief last year. "ESG reporting lets tobacco companies promote their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives"—like DEI—"while obscuring the significant health, economic, and environmental damage they cause."

Some rating systems even encourage cigarette makers to market their products to marginalized groups. Altria has a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index—a metric rumored to be behind the disastrous LGBT marketing campaigns at Target and Bud Light—which lets companies earn points by "advertising to LGBTQ consumers."

In California, tobacco kills almost as many gay and bisexual men as AIDS. LGBT youth nationwide are over twice as likely to smoke as their straight counterparts, and transgender adults smoke at three times the rate of the general public.

Altria said in a statement that it does not do "targeted advertising to the LGBTQ+ community" and that it earned its perfect score through other initiatives. Philip Morris International did not respond to a request for comment.

While the ESG juggernaut is relatively new, tobacco's corporate progressivism is not. When Philip Morris began advertising in gay periodicals in the 1990s, it dismissed critics of the move as bigots opposed to "inclusion." By the early 2000s, the company was using "Corporate Social Responsibility," the precursor to ESG, as a prophylaxis against lawsuits, according to a memo from Philip Morris's then-general counsel Steve Parrish.

"That will reduce the risks of lawsuits and improve our standing, when we are sued, as a 'responsible corporation,'" Parrish wrote to company executives in the 2000 memo, which was made public around that time in the course of litigation. "Otherwise, we will stand out as a target."

ESG ratings likely serve a similar purpose today, said Todd Henderson, a professor of law and economics at the University of Chicago. By performing well on them, tobacco companies can placate regulators and investors who think the "smoke-free future," as Philip Morris International calls it, is taking too long to materialize.

"A bad ESG score announces to the world you're a troglodyte," Henderson said. "That could be an invitation for socially conscious shareholders to seek board seats or oust a CEO."

BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard joined forces in 2021 to oust three ExxonMobil board directors who were out of step with the investors' climate priorities. All three firms own sizable stakes in cigarette companies, albeit not through ESG funds, giving them a considerable number of proxy votes. Tobacco's talk about social justice, Henderson said, may be a ploy to avoid Exxon's fate.

All this feeds into a larger critique that the ESG movement turns investors and rating agencies into de facto philosopher kings, weighing different and sometimes incommensurable values against each other. "You have to measure the goodness of women on corporate boards and compare it to the badness of killing people," Henderson said. "That's really a question for Plato."

The clash of values, he added, is one reason ESG scores vary significantly across different rating agencies, which means companies like Altria can usually find at least one good number to show investors. And it explains how even an electric car company can wind up with the short end of the stick.

To wit: Chevron, long a target for climate activists, edged out Tesla in the S&P's latest ESG ratings. It earned a lower environmental score than the automaker but scored over twice as high as Musk's company on social issues, where the oil titan has flexed its marketing muscle. Chevron's 2022 "sustainability" report boasts that the "first woman offshore platform engineer in Israel was employed by our operations."

A New Front in Reparations: Seeking the Return of Lost Family Land

Black families lost millions in wealth when their lands were seized through eminent domain. Now some are trying to get it back.

By Audra D.S. Burch of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"Scholars say the use of eminent domain was often racially motivated and invoked disproportionately in minority and poor communities. One study showed that between 1949 and 1973, 2,532 eminent domain projects in 992 cities displaced one million people — two-thirds of them African American."

"Separately, the return of prime beachfront real estate in Southern California to the descendants of the Bruce family, nearly a century after the land was seized from its ancestors through eminent domain, inspired more families to examine their own histories.

Michael Jones and his siblings were in their hometown, Huntsville, Ala., when they learned the return of Bruce’s Beach had been finalized. They had been following the story with the tiniest bits of cautious hope. To them, much of the Bruces’ story mirrored their own history with the land their family had used to farm cotton and corn.

Mr. Jones said his research shows that the land was seized in 1962 from his parents by local government using eminent domain — authority that allows governments to seize properties in the interest of public use, often to clear the way for freeways, parks and development. The state law calls for property owners to be paid “just compensation.”

The Jones siblings, who began researching their family’s history in 1995, say their father turned down an offer to purchase his 10-acre plot, and in 1954, the city condemned the property in order to gain access to a water source, forcing the family to move. In the years that followed, documents appear to show their parents, Willie and Lola Jones, signed the deed over to the chief of the Huntsville Land Acquisition office. The Joneses say the transaction was fraudulent because their father could not read or write and could not have signed the documents."

"In Georgia, Black families settled near the University of Georgia in Athens in the early 1900s in Linnentown, then a vibrant, close-knit neighborhood with about 50 homeowners. As part of an urban renewal project, the city of Athens and the state Board of Regents displaced the families to make way for three dormitories on campus. By the mid-1960s, the community was gone. Residents were paid as little as $1,450 for their properties. A University of Georgia analysis said homeowners received “only 56 percent of the amount they would have received if their properties had valued similarly to those outside of Linnentown.”"

Death by Regulation

By Dan Mitchell.

"As Frederic Bastiat sagely observed nearly 200 years ago, a good economist considers the indirect or secondary effects of any action.

For instance, a politician might claim we can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates, but a sensible economist will warn that higher tax rates will discourage work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

And those changes in behavior (along with increases in evasion and avoidance) will result in less economic activity, which means lower taxable income. So tax revenues will not double. In some cases, they might even fall.

This analysis also applies to regulatory policy.

In an article for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, James Broughel explains how red tape actually causes needless death because of less economic growth.

Regulations can contribute to an increased death toll by imposing costs that eat into disposable income. As spending power dwindles, so too does the potential for spending on risk management and health-related expenses. This argument, known as the “wealthier is healthier” hypothesis, complements the idea that warmer is healthier. In fact, spending on energy is potentially a critical channel that can explain the frequently observed relationship between financial health and physical health, including mortality. Two of my own research papers include estimates of the level of cost sufficient to produce one expected death in society. Depending on the study method, my coauthors and I found that for about every $40 to $115 million in costs imposed on American society, we can predict one death will occur by virtue of individuals being made poorer. …the death toll from the regulatory state is not trivial. My CEI colleague Wayne Crews has estimated that the total cost of federal regulations was just under $2.0 trillion in 2022. Other studies put the cost even higher… If we take just the two low-end estimates of cost, at $80 million per expected death there are roughly 25,000 to 50,000 deaths annually that can be attributed to federal regulations (and this doesn’t count state and local regulations).

By the way, this type of cost-benefit analysis is universally accepted by economists. There are disagreements about magnitudes, of course, but even folks on the left recognize that “wealthier is healthier.”

P.S. In addition to the adverse overall impact of red tape, there are specific forms of regulation (FDA drug approval, anti-vaping rules, gun control, bans on organ transplants, etc) that lead to needless death.

P.P.S. As always happens when he addresses and issue, Thomas Sowell makes excellent points."

Large-Scale Adoption of EVs Faces Logistical Hurdles

By Ken Wysocky. Excerpts: 

"The new EPA mandate calls for carbon dioxide emissions for new cars and light trucks to decrease by 49 percent from 2027 to 2032.

Analysts—and even the EPA itself—say that meeting this new standard would ostensibly require EVs to account for 67 percent of new cars sold by 2032. 

Is that goal realistic? For perspective, consider that only an estimated 1.5 million of the roughly 276 million vehicles currently driven on American roads are EVs. And EVs accounted for only 5.8 percent of car sales in 2022, according to market-research firm Motor Intelligence.

Furthermore, the average age of an internal-combustion engine (ICE) passenger vehicle currently stands at a record 12-1/2 years, according to S&P Global Mobility."

"Alan Reynolds . . . claims that passenger vehicles contribute only 16.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States—far below the number normally cited by EV proponents."

"it takes massive amounts of energy to manufacture them, not to mention the energy required to mine, process and transport the minerals needed to make EV batteries—and to manufacture the batteries themselves, contrarian experts observe.

In fact, some researchers contend that manufacturing batteries alone tacks on nearly 40 percent more in greenhouse gas emissions for EVs, compared to the carbon footprint of an ICE vehicle. For example, China—the dominant player in refining minerals required to make EV batteries as well as in manufacturing the batteries—obtains 60 percent of its energy from burning coal"

"Jeffrey Miron, vice president of research for the Cato Institute and the director of graduate and undergraduate studies for the Department of Economics at Harvard University, says the argument that EVs are more eco-friendly than ICE vehicles fails to account for how the energy used to charge batteries is produced."

"Much of the world’s lithium is mined in politically unstable countries that aren’t friendly to the United States, and China—which has a tense relationship with us—controls the majority of the global lithium-processing capacity.

China also controls about 75 percent of the market for building EV batteries. This makes us precariously dependent on China, which creates a supply chain fraught with risk.

Moreover, an Oxford University study shows that only about a quarter of the earth’s estimated 88 million tons of lithium is economically viable for mining. And experts note that getting permits to open mines in the United Sates, where we only have one lithium mine, based in Nevada, can take up to a decade or longer, especially if the approval process gets embroiled in lawsuits filed by environmentalists."

"by 2034, the United States alone will need 500,000 metric tons of unrefined lithium just for EVs. But we currently only produce a miniscule fraction of that; about 5,000 tons a year, or less than 2 percent of total global output"

"mining lithium requires vast amounts of water—about 500,000 gallons to produce just one metric ton of lithium"

"as demand for minerals increases, prices will skyrocket, making EVs even more expensive"

"The availability of electricity in the United States also poses challenges, especially considering that the grid is already under stress in some regions."

"what about the millions of people who live in apartment complexes without parking spaces? It will be impossible for them to charge their EVs overnight if they have to park several blocks away from where they live"

"The California Energy Commission has estimated the United States will need a ratio of seven EVs for every one charging port to handle an influx of EVs. But at the end of 2022, that ratio was just 29:1"

"out of the 31,000 counties in the country, 63 percent had five or fewer non-proprietary charges installed, and 30 percent installed none"