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Whether inflation goes to profits or elsewhere isn’t really the question. That’s analyzing the outcome, not the cause.

After all, the higher revenues resulting from a price increase due to an increase in demand or reduction in supply have to go somewhere. If they all went to labor, would that make it “greedflation” too, just with a different greedy actor?

Legislative overreach as a response to judicial overreach?

Or is the claimed overreach just the court trying the best it can for lack of a written constitution?

Note that this article is the first in a debate series. Moreover, there are some prudent remarks in the comments.

What the West should do:

  • Strengthen alliances (America, Europe, India, Japan, “Altasia”)
  • Boost immigration
  • Institute industrial policy for defense

Also:

  • Belt and Road was an epic fail
  • Zero Covid was an epic fail
  • China’s reliance on the real estate sector for growth is starting to look like an epic fail
  • China is really big and that alone makes it the most powerful adversary of the United States no matter how many epic fails they come up with (not to mention the West’s own epic fails)

Key insights:

  • Tax cuts failed by having no noticeable positive economic effect under Bush and since (after looking very successful under Kennedy and a fair bit less so under Reagan)
  • Free trade failed by letting Chinese cheap labor destroy whole industries in America (after looking very successful in the Cold War era) because China was just so big and poor
  • Deregulation failed by causing the financial crisis of 2007 (after looking very successful as applied to energy and transportation)
  • Due to its economic failure, Libertarianism has fractured along cultural lines into progressive “Liberaltarianism” and right-wing racist Trumpism
  • A spin-off of Libertarianism that has tried to keep the economic aspect alive while staying out of culture war issues is state-capacity libertarianism
  • A bit of deregulation in certain areas would probably be a good thing, so the total demise of Libertarianism is not all good

Matt Levine’s newsletter on money and finance. Not usually my cup of tea—I tend to find finance to be dry and boring—but this man is a superb writer. Too bad it’s behind a paywall.

We are seeing deindustrialization and a lack of innovation in transformative technology.

Or so say people from the DIW and industry. Is it just the usual whining about the need for reforms to make our companies more competitive internationally? Hard to say.

Key insights:

  • Rome really did fall, not just “transform” as some claim
  • The Dark Ages really were dark in both senses of the word
  • Human reproduction, economic activity, quality of life, literacy, literature, life expectancy, and science all declined in the provinces after the fall of Rome
  • Hexapodia

If you are an ESG-noncompliant company:

  1. Create a new company
  2. Get the new company ESG-certified (since it holds nothing but financial assets and is therefore clean and responsible)
  3. Receive ESG funding for the new company
  4. Borrow money from the new company at zero interest

Canada is known as an immigration-friendly country and is often cited as an example to emulate in political discussions of immigration. But while it is all true when it comes to controlled immigration, it turns out that even Canada is actually pretty strict when it comes to asylum seekers. The same is true elsewhere, including Australia and the United States.

In the European Union we are facing the same dilemma as everyone else: On the one hand there is a basic human right to asylum and you want to treat asylum seekers as well as possible. On the other hand there are real capacity limits that an overly lax process inevitably runs into. So there must be an orderly process; but that process itself is vulnerable to capacity limits; so even entering the process in the first place has to be disincentivized in some way.

I do not envy the politicians who have to figure this out.

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