Day: December 22, 2023

By Jon Miltimore

For the last 2 1/2 years, price inflation has been eating away the paychecks and savings of the public.

Consumer prices are up roughly 20% since 2020, according to consumer price index data, and recent polls show the public believes inflation is the single biggest problem facing the country.

Unfortunately, many are so concerned about inflation that they are advocating “solutions” that would do tremendous damage to the economy and families.

Buried in a CBS poll released this week, which showed 59% of respondents disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, was this question: “To try and control inflation, would you approve or disapprove of government price controls?”

An alarming 66% of respondents answered that they would approve of government-imposed price controls to rein in inflation, including 80% of self-identified Democrats. (Fifty-six percent of Republicans also said they’d approve of price controls.)

Using government price controls to curb inflation might sound like a good idea, but basic economics and recent history make it abundantly clear that such a policy would be disastrous.

The last U.S. president to pursue aggressive price controls as a remedy to rising consumer prices was Richard Nixon, who, in August 1971, interrupted a Bonanza episode to announce in a national address that he was “ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States” for 90 days. Following this three-month freeze, increases in prices and wages would have to be approved by the federal government’s “Pay Board” or “Price Commission.” (Nixon also called on corporations to pause increases in dividends.)

Many economists warned the price controls would be disastrous, including Nobel Prize-recipient Milton Friedman, who famously confronted the president on the topic at the White House.

Friedman and his fellow economists were proven right. The price controls were a disaster. Not only did they fail to curb rising consumer prices; they also resulted in huge shortages of certain goods and services (evidenced infamously by the massive lines at gasoline stations due to fuel shortages that persisted throughout the decade).

None of this should have come as a surprise.

History is replete with examples showing that price controls are much better at creating shortages, causing famines, and producing black markets than they are at taming prices, which can never be fully constrained in a remotely free society. Famous price control failures stretch back to (and beyond) the Athenian Empire, Rome’s Edict on Maximum Prices, and the Bengal Famine of 1770, which Adam Smith detailed in The Wealth of Nations.

A Nixon apologist might argue the president’s heart was in the right place. He was only trying to “break the back of inflation,” as he said in his address.

Nixon was many things, but he was not a fool; the Nixon tapes show the president fully understood the ramifications of his policy.

“The difficulty with wage-price controls and a wage board, as you well know, is that the Goddamned things will not work,” Nixon privately told an aide six months before he announced his policy. “They didn’t work even at the end of World War II. They will never work in peacetime.”

Nixon didn’t just oppose price controls because of their lack of economic utility. He also opposed them on principle, describing them as “a scheme to socialize America.” Yet he couldn’t resist embracing them because of their political utility.

“To the average person in this country, this wage and price freeze — to him, [it] means you mean business,” Treasury Secretary John Connally told Nixon in August 1971.

In other words, Nixon imposed price controls to show he “meant business” on the economy, hoping the approach would help him win reelection the following year. And it worked. Nixon won in a landslide.

Sadly, it appears the public’s understanding of basic economics has improved little since 1971.

CBS’s recent poll shows price controls remain quite popular, even though economists such as Paul Krugman have described the idea of fighting inflation with price controls as “truly stupid.”

What these economists understand is that price controls cannot solve a fundamental economic reality: scarcity.

Scarcity, which Thomas Sowell has dubbed “the first lesson of economics,” is the simple idea that in a world of limited resources and unlimited human desires, there is never enough stuff to satisfy all our wants, which is why humans adopted property rights and prices — the essence of capitalism — to help them allocate resources.

It’s remarkable how well this formula has served humanity, which is why it’s so alarming to see the public support a policy as intellectually bankrupt and economically destructive as price controls.

• About the author: Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at FEE.
• Source: This article was published by FEE

Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter.  For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant.  “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition.  Gather outside the court at 8.30am on both days. It’s now or never.”  

Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.”  (This is qualified by the prospect of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.)  Were that to take place, the organisation’s founder faces 18 charges, 17 of which are stealthily cobbled from the aged and oppressive US Espionage Act of 1917.  Estimates of any subsequent sentence vary, the worst being 175 years.

The WikiLeaks founder remains jailed at His Majesty’s pleasure at Belmarsh prison, only reserved for the most hardened of criminals.  It’s a true statement of both British and US justice that Assange has yet to face trial, incarcerated, without bail, for four-and-a-half years.  That trial, were it to ever be allowed to take place, would employ a scandalous legal theory that will spell doom to all those who dive and dabble in the world of publishing national security information. 

Fundamentally, and irrefutably, the case against Assange remains political in its muscularity, with a gangster’s legality papered over it.  As Stella herself makes clear, “With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2018, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited.”

In mid-2022, Assange’s legal team attempted a two-pronged attempt to overturn the decision of Home Office Secretary Priti Patel to approve Assange’s extradition while also broadening the appeal against grounds made in the original January 4, 2021 reasons of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser.  

The former, among other matters, took issue with the acceptance by the Home Office that the extradition was not for a political offence and therefore prohibited by Article 4 of the UK-US Extradition Treaty.  The defence team stressed the importance of due process, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta of 2015, and also took issue with Patel’s acceptance of “special arrangements” with the US government regarding the introduction of charges for the facts alleged which might carry the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and such specialty arrangements that might protect Assange “against being dealt with for conduct outside the extradition request”.  History shows that such “special arrangements” can be easily, and arbitrarily abrogated.

On June 30, 2022 came the appeal against Baraitser’s original reasons.  While Baraitser blocked the extradition to the US, she only did so on grounds of oppression occasioned by mental health grounds and the risk posed to Assange were he to find himself in the US prison system.  The US government got around this impediment by making breezy promises to the effect that Assange would not be subject to oppressive, suicide-inducing conditions, or face the death penalty.  A feeble, meaningless undertaking was also made suggesting that he might serve the balance of his term in Australia – subject to approval, naturally.

What this left Assange’s legal team was a decision otherwise hostile to publishing, free speech and the activities that had been undertaken by WikiLeaks.  The appeal accordingly sought to address this, claiming, among other things, that Baraitser had erred in assuming that the extradition was not “unjust and oppressive by reason of the lapse of time”; that it would not be in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (inhuman and degrading treatment)”; that it did not breach Article 10 of ECHR, namely the right to freedom of expression; and that it did not breach Article 7 of the ECHR (novel and unforeseeable extension of the law).

Other glaring defects in Baraitser’s judgment are also worth noting, namely her failure to acknowledge the misrepresentation of facts advanced by the US government and the “ulterior political motives” streaking the prosecution.  The onerous and much thicker second superseding indictment was also thrown at Assange at short notice before the extradition hearing of September 2020, suggesting that those grounds be excised “for reasons of procedural fairness.”

An agonising wait of some twelve months followed, only to yield an outrageously brief decision on June 6 from High Court justice Jonathan Swift (satirists, reach for your pens and laptops). Swift, much favoured by the Defence and Home Secretaries when a practising barrister, told Counsel Magazine in a 2018 interview that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.  Why? “They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.”  Good grief.

In such a cosmically unattached world, Swift only took three pages to reject the appeal’s arguments in a fit of premature adjudication.  “An appeal under the Extradition Act 2003,” he wrote with icy finality, “is not an opportunity for general rehearsal of all matters canvassed at an extradition hearing.”  The appeal’s length – some 100 pages – was “extraordinary” and came “to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made and rejected by the District Judge.”

Thankfully, Swift’s finality proved stillborn.  Some doubts existed whether the High Court appellate bench would even grant the hearing.  They did, though requesting that Assange’s defence team trim the appeal to 20 pages.

How much of this is procedural theatre and circus judge antics remains to be seen.  Anglo-American justice has done wonders in soiling itself in its treatment of Britain’s most notable political prisoner.  Keeping Assange in the UK in hideous conditions of confinement without bail serves the goals of Washington, albeit vicariously.  For Assange, time is the enemy, and each legal brief, appeal and hearing simply weighs the ledger further against his ailing existence.  

By Tho Bishop

This week’s decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to ban — for now — Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot is the latest escalation in the broader theatre of deteriorating political norms in America. The four-three decision is grounded in the Court’s opinion that Trump’s actions on January 6 represent culpability in an attempted “insurrection” and therefore disqualify him under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The response to the court’s decision was predictable. On the left, political leaders in other Democrat-controlled states immediately called for their own disqualification efforts. Most amusingly, and an excellent illustration of the current state of American politics, a letter by the California Lt. Governor proclaimed: “The constitution is clear: you must be 40 years old and not be an insurrectionist.” The Constitution’s age requirement is, of course, 35.

On the right, the response was varied. While a minority of Republicans desperate for a return to a pre-2016 GOP celebrated the decision, many rank-and-file Republican voters responded with understandable anger, viewing the court’s decision as an outrageous attack on political determination and further indication of the lengths the government will go to undermine their desired political leader. Others viewed the decision as a net positive, a demonstration of the rising probability of Trump’s re-election, and ultimately a form of political theatre that would eventually backfire with voters.

This assumption, however, is predicated on the widely held belief that the Colorado decision will quickly make its way to the US Supreme Court, which will strike it down. The timing of Colorado’s decision, which has been threatened by Democrats for months now, will help clarify this process early and remove this threat from next November’s contest.

Supporting this view is one piece of precedence the Supreme Court has to work from: a Civil War-era case where a man, Caesar Griffin, challenged a criminal conviction on the basis that the presiding judge was disqualified from his position due to serving as a legislator in the Virginia Confederate government. At the time, the Court found that the relevant section of the 14th Amendment was not self-enforcing and, therefore, required an act of Congress to disqualify the judge in question.

But what if the Supreme Court does not overturn Colorado’s ruling?

Afterall the Colorado verdict engaged with the Griffin Case, arguing that the Court’s decision at the time simply reflected the unique issues regarding the particular circumstance of state secession, which maintained its pre-federal legislative bodies. In the Colorado court’s eyes, Trump’s encouragement of January 6 is a separate matter entirely. They granted their ability to judge Trump guilty of insurrection, regardless of the opinion of any other legal body.

This dynamic highlights one of the many limitations of any “constitutional order” that any legal system is ultimately only limited by the judgments of those responsible for enforcing it. As Ryan McMaken has noted, rather than some form of neutral institution charged with acting within the narrow limits of the law, “In practice, the Supreme Court is just another federal legislature, although this one decides matters of public policy based on the opinions of a mere five people, most of whom spend their time utterly divorced from the economic realities of ordinary people while cavorting with oligarchs and other elites.”

By looking beyond the romantic lens with which far too many conservatives hold regarding their assumptions about how the Constitution should function, the question is, what are the motivations of the current US Supreme Court?

Particularly in the current political environment, beginning with a simple partisan breakdown of the court is natural. This dynamic may better explain the confidence of conservative pundits more than confidence that the Constitution guarantees their desired outcome, given that six of the nine current judges were nominated by Republicans, including three from President Trump himself.

While this six-three split likely will be the favorite result on political gambling websites, the history of the modern court is more nuanced. We have “Republican” judges who frequently rule in ways that have hurt the political calculation of their associated party, from Chief Justice John Roberts’s infamous decision to uphold Obamacare to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s vote in a voting rights decision that forced the Alabama state legislature to bend to the will of the Democrat Party and create a reliably blue voting district earlier this year. Similarly, Justice Amy Comey Barrett joined in a separate case involving voting maps in North Carolina, as well as a case challenging controversial changes to 2020 election law.

As such, partisanship alone cannot be relied upon to carry the day. Further, commentary by legal scholars at the Cato Institute, such as Ilya Somin celebrating the Colorado Court’s decision, demonstrates that the appetite of “Constitutional lawyers” to justify the logic utilized in the case is not limited simply to progressive activists.

What individuals like Somin and the Colorado majority have in common is an underlying hatred of Donald Trump individually and their belief that he is a uniquely grotesque and dangerous figure to wield the office of the presidency. In the formers’ words, he is a “menace to liberal democracy” whose “rhetoric echoes that of twentieth-century fascists.” If one holds this view, the aim to retroactively rationalize any attempt to prevent his return to power becomes internally justified, even if disqualifying political opponents violates the principles of liberal democracy in a way twentieth-century fascists would have supported.

Could nominally Republican justices hold similar views?

A potential clue could be considering the academic affiliations of the Colorado Court. While Democrats appointed all seven of the state’s Supreme Court, three of the four in the majority justices were from Ivy League products, and DC clerkships shaped their careers. The three dissenters went to the University of Denver. Of the three potential swing votes at the federal level, two are Ivy Leaguers with similar pedigrees: Roberts and Kavanaugh.

While it is overly simplistic to predict the ruling of a judge like Kavanaugh simply because he was a part of that whole Yale thing — after all, the same could be said for Clarence Thomas — his pre-Supreme Court experience was very much spent as part of the political system that views Trump as a particularly vulgar threat. Similarly, the Harvard-trained Roberts was a reliable foil to President Trump during his first term. Various Supreme Court watchers have argued that some of his decisions were made from a position of trying to defend his court’s place in history from accusations of it being a Trump Court.

What better way for these two to win historical fame from their beloved institutions than being those responsible for ending the Trump political threat once and for all? Particularly if the result is a lifeline to a potential Nikki Haley takeover of the Republican banner, a candidate who some reasonably view as “Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels.”

As Murray Rothbard identified in his classic Anatomy of the State, the best way to understand the government’s behavior is from the viewpoint of defending its legitimacy and preservation. If the principle of political self-determination must be sacrificed to preserve the regime, then so be it.

With this understanding in mind, it would be a mistake for conservatives to believe their team will bail out “their guy.” In the end, most of those wearing robes are closer to their enemies than their friends.

If the Supreme Court saves Trump, it will not be due to their rejecting the belief that Trump is guilty of insurrection, but a calculated decision that the political fallout from the right will spark a danger to the Court’s credibility — and by extension the regime as a whole — then four more years of MAGA.

For those who desire to see the regime threatened, one’s preferred outcome in this case should be shaped by which of those two threats they view as most likely to deliver.

• About the author: Tho Bishop is Editorial and Content Manager for the Mises Institute, and can assist with questions from the press. Prior to working for the Mises Institute, he served as Deputy Communications Director for the House Financial Services Committee. His articles have been featured in The Federalist, the Daily Caller, Business Insider, The Washington Times, and The Rush Limbaugh Show.
• Source: This article is published by the Mises Institute

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