Suchergebnisse

The Biden administration recently announced its intention to expand the border wall between Mexico and the United States; the goal is to limit illegal immigration. This effort will fail.

Healthcare costs are undoubtedly out of control. Yet the percentage of healthcare costs due to malpractice suits is modest and has been relatively stable over time.

The only way to shrink government, significantly and sustainably, is to convince more people that smaller government is better.

The UN should call for total legalization, the only approach that will fully resolve the harms identified in its report.

In short, we have a textbook situation where a prohibition on labor supply causes shortages, black markets, and losses for both business and labor.

Many policies have good intentions and aim to address real problems in the economy or society. A standard concern, however, is that government attempts to fix such problems generate backlash, meaning heightened antipathy toward an intervention's goal.

This past week, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham published a peer‐​reviewed study showing that modified pig kidneys performed complex life‐​sustaining functions in a brain‐​dead patient for a full week.

Should libertarians rejoice? Calm assessment suggests both optimism and caution.

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on Substack on August 10, 2023.
The Defund the Police (DTP) movement raises an interesting question for libertarians. On the one hand, libertarians abhor excessive police violence, against minorities and generally. On the other hand, libertarians, and others, might worry that slashing police budgets could increase crime.
The way to balance these concerns is to repeal laws against victimless crimes, meaning bans against drugs, sex work, vagrancy, loitering, and the like. These laws serve no role in protecting people from violence or theft, and they generate their own negatives: underground markets, corruption, violence, and excessive overdoses.
In addition, laws against victimless crime exacerbate racism by empowering those police with racist attitudes to impose their views on minorities.
In a homicide investigation, police and prosecutors must prove means, motives, and opportunity; they cannot just say, "This person looks like a murderer, so lock him up."
Under prohibitions of drugs or sex work, police can and do assert, "This teenager looks like someone who deals drugs, so I can stop and frisk." Or, they demand sexual favors from alleged prostitutes. If some police are racist, this power gets applied in racially disproportionate ways.
Racism can also arise even when police address real crime (e.g., the Charles Stuart case). For violence and theft, however, procedural checks and balances, and the presence of multiple observers, lowers the scope for racism. Legalizing victimless crimes also helps attract police who want to serve and protect rather than "bust heads."
DTP shares this perspective, opposing laws against buying or selling drugs, sex work, or nuisance offenses.
Libertarians and DTP do differ on a related issue: how to use the funds freed up by legalizations. DTP would transfer these to treatment and other social services; libertarians would lower taxes instead.
Libertarians and DTP nevertheless agree on a crucial issue: to make policing less racist, society must eliminate laws that criminalize private, consensual behavior.

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on Substack on August 4, 2023.
Fitch has just lowered its rating of U.S. debt from AAA to AA+. This is a modest step, but it reminds everyone that:

According to projections from the Congressional Budget Office, the United States faces a perilous fiscal future; and


The only plausible fix is slower growth of entitlements, especially Medicare and Social Security.

Conventional wisdom then concludes that the United States is between a rock and a hard place: it must risk fiscal catastrophe or cut widely popular and economically vital programs.
The political difficulty of cutting entitlements is undeniable; almost every voter either collects or expects to collect those benefits.
The economic value of these programs, however, is debatable.
Medicare subsidizes the purchase of health care. Standard economics holds that when government subsidizes a good, the economy produces and consumes too much relative to the efficient, laissez‐​faire outcome. (This holds even if health insurance markets suffer from asymmetric information and adverse selection. Those conditions might suggest intervention, but not subsidizing health insurance.)
Thus scaling back Medicare implies a more productive economy, with fewer resources devoted to health care and more to other goods and services.
Consistent with this view, abundant evidence suggests that health expenditure has a modest impact on health.
Social Security also lowers economic productivity by distorting savings and retirements decisions relative to a free market.
Regardless of the fiscal outlook, therefore, concern for economic productivity implies scaling back or eliminating both programs. The obvious adjustments are a higher age of eligibility for both Medicare and Social Security, plus larger co‐​pays and deductibles for Medicare. These changes can phase in over decades so that the pain is spread across many cohorts.
Reducing these programs will also have distributional implications, but these reinforce the case for cuts: both programs mainly benefit the middle class, not those living in poverty. Directly targeted anti‐​poverty programs (perhaps including Medicaid) and disability insurance are more reasonable ways to address distributional concerns.
Cutting Medicare and Social Security is therefore a no‐​brainer, if only the politics will let it happen.

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on Substack on July 31, 2023.
A recent front in the culture wars is public libraries, such as in Front Royal, Virginia, where
a handful of residents ha[s] begun demanding the removal of certain books in the children's section of Warren County's only public library. Most of the titles involved LGBTQ+ themes.

In Libertarian Land, such conflicts do not arise, since public libraries do not exist.
Despite the word "public," libraries are not a "public good" that private markets might undersupply.
The textbook public good is national defense. If any private group mounts an army that stands ready to defend the country, others will free ride. This makes it hard for the provider to finance its efforts and therefore discourages private provision.
No such issue exists for books; private provision is bountiful. People cannot free ride on book purchases by others.
The crucial benefit of leaving "libraries" to the marketplace is that no one's tax dollars support the provision of particular books. If Amazon sells books that some people do not want their children to read, these people do not buy such books. Thus the polarization that results from public libraries is absent.
Advocates will respond that public libraries provide free access to books and thus benefit low‐​income families. That is mainly false; public libraries typically locate in middle‐​class neighborhoods and serve middle‐​income families.
Fans of public provision might also argue that such libraries provide more than free access to books: story time, community events, author book signings, and the like. Private book stores, however, can do and provide these services if demand exists, perhaps because it brings in paying customers.

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on Substack on July 25, 2023
An interview in the Harvard Gazette with Professor of Medicine Allen Steere explains:
[T]here are currently no vaccines for humans, although there are three for dogs. One had been developed in the late 1990s and pulled off the market in 2002, in part due to a vigorous anti‐​vaccination movement.

Steere goes on to explain that concerns arose about a possible side‐​effect of the vaccine, but those concerns turned out to be invalid. Thus, general vaccine hesitancy, combined with a specific but misplaced fear about the early vaccine have meant no availability for humans so far.
The interview does not address one other factor: the FDA. Absent government restrictions on new medicines, people in earlier decades would have been able to access the initial vaccine, and the manufacturer or independent groups could have collected data on whether the alleged side effect was a genuine problem.
The good news is that a new vaccine is apparently near completion of its phase 3 trials, and an mRNA vaccine is also in the works. Still, many have suffered unnecessarily because of government restrictions on medicine.

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on SubStack on July 20, 2023.
One argument for the death penalty is that the usual alternative—life in prison without possibility of parole—imposes a financial burden on taxpayers (about $60,000-$70,000 per death row inmate per year, according to a recent estimate).
Yet capital punishment is costly, too:
Contrary to popular misconception, the expense of the death penalty does not lie in the "end less" appeals of death sentences. Although appeals do consume relatively more resources, capital trials also consume more resources than similar trials with a maximum sentence of life in prison. One early study found the additional trial costs exceeded those of appeals by a factor of four (Cook et al. 1993). Estimates of the marginal capital trial cost vary, but Collins et al. (2015) offer a middling figure of just under $1,500,000 (cf. Roman et al. 2009). The reasons for the increase are several. Attorneys spend more time preparing cases, and many states require the appointment of two defense attorneys to any defendant who cannot afford private counsel. Jury selection is more complicated. The process can take days or even weeks, partly because of the need for "death qualified" jurors, i.e., individuals who neither universally oppose nor support the death penalty. Capital cases also produce more hearings and court filings. Expert witnesses are unavoidable. Mitigation evidence, which argues for leniency in punishment, can require a significant travel budget. For these reasons and more, capital trials are uniquely expensive.

One overall assessment concludes that
In the 32 states in the Union where the death penalty is legal, as well as the federal government, the death penalty has grown to be much more expensive than life imprisonment, whether with or without parole. This greater cost comes from more expensive living conditions, a much more extensive legal process, and increasing resistance to the death penalty from chemical manufacturers overseas. These costs could even become higher, pending the outcome of various lawsuits against various states for their "botched" executions. Each death penalty inmate is approximately $1.12 million (2015 USD) more than a general population inmate.

And in at least one state, the implication of the increased expenditure is ironic:
When a local government bears the expense of trial, it must raise funds or reallocate them from other sources. In Texas, among other states, the cost of trial is borne primarily at the county level. A panel of Texas county spending over the last decade, constructed from audited financial statements, shows counties meet the expense of trial by raising property tax rates and by reducing public safety expenditure. Property crime rises as a consequence of the latter. The death penalty may therefore impede criminal deterrence if its finance is left to local, rather than centralized government.

Thus not only does the death penalty burden taxpayers; it seems to increase certain kinds of crime. Existing evidence suggests executions have minimal impact in deterring violent crime like homicide.
Reasonable people might still support the death penalty, for moral reasons ("an eye for an eye").
On consequentialist grounds, however, the case for capital punishment is weak.

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on SubStack on July 3, 2023.
Last week Maine legalized the sale—but not the purchase—of prostitution services, becoming the first state to enact such a law. (Nevada allows legal prostitution in counties with fewer than 700,000 residents; Rhode Island had no law against indoor prostitution between 1980 and 2009.)
Maine's policy is a step in the right direction, but as with laws that legalize drug possession but not production or sale, removing criminal penalties from only one side of the market is a minor step that can be worse than no legalization at all.
Under partial legalization, the prostitution market remains underground, with all the attendant negatives: violence, corruption, and poor "quality control," meaning greater transmission of sexually transmitted diseases.
De‐​criminalizing only the supply side improves the well‐​being of prostitutes. The risk, however, is that when other evils of underground markets continue, some observers assert that legalization has failed. This happens repeatedly in debates over decriminalized drug markets.
The ideal policy is therefore full legalization of prostitution that involves consenting adults. Child prostitution and trafficking are different stories, since both involve coercion (presumptively for children, as with statutory rape laws, or explicitly for children and adults when traffickers use deception and force). The most effective way to eliminate these components of the market is full legalization of adult, voluntary transactions.