Fight for Your Right
It's harder to get things done today than it used to be.
We have reached the point where we can now begin to have a debate about the response to the ascent of market ideology on the left, not just some knee-jerk reaction. The predicate for this introspection is the widespread perception that government doesn’t work as well as it used to, hamstrung by regulation and bureaucracy.
The first step is to acknowledge the problem instead of excusing it.
‘Two new books argue that these aren’t just isolated problems but instead reflections of a broader ideological dysfunction within left-liberal and Democratic coalitions. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers at The New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, argue in their book Abundance that liberalism has lost its ability to carry out great projects, and that it’s not just an economic, but a political, vulnerability. In Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, explains this crisis through the lens of a historical fight within progressivism between those who want to exercise power by consolidating it and those who want to limit power by constraining it. Both books argue that we can’t address the major challenges of the twenty-first century, like the housing and climate crises, without a reorientation in ideas. Worse, they claim that the failure to execute has created a broader distrust in public action that amplifies those challenges. As Dunkelman concludes, “A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism.”’
The Illinois Assault on Home-Schoolers
This is destructive.
‘Fewer than one in three students in Chicago Public Schools can read at grade level. That should be a five-alarm fire for the Democrats who run Illinois, but they have other priorities—to wit, regulating those dastardly parents who educate their children at home.
‘On Wednesday Democrats passed the Homeschool Act out of a House committee on an 8-4 vote. Current state law imposes minimal regulations on home-schoolers, requiring only that they teach certain core subjects. Democrats introduced the Homeschool Act after a 2024 report by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica claimed Illinois’s limited oversight leaves home-schooled children vulnerable to abuse.’
Xi Targets Petty Corruption on a Giant Scale to Soothe China’s Masses
The Communist approach to vilifying bureaucracy is to punish the powerless, going after the people at the bottom.
‘Communist Party enforcers are targeting grassroots graft from kickbacks for public contracts to bribes for medical treatment in a renewal of Xi’s popular assault on corrupt “flies” and “ants”—low-level bureaucrats and state workers—whose misconduct affects ordinary citizens.
‘Such energetic enforcement is pushing Xi’s war on corruption to new levels of intensity, more than a decade after he launched it to burnish his image as a man of the people and secure the party’s grip on power. Since Xi became leader in 2012, party inspectors have disciplined more than 6.2 million people for offenses ranging from corruption to bureaucratic inaction.
‘The latest campaign is part of China’s response to social reverberations from broad economic challenges—including a real-estate slump and high rates of youth unemployment—that have sapped consumer confidence, stoked unrest and fueled grumbling over Xi’s stewardship of the world’s second-largest economy.
‘“Punish the ‘greed and corruption of flies and ants,’ and give the masses a greater sense of fulfillment,” Xi said early last year as he ordered the party’s top disciplinary body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, to curb grassroots graft.’
It is conventional wisdom to blame local restrictions on homebuilding for artificial shortfalls in supply, but the authors here argue that higher income growth is a stronger predictor.
‘The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supply–shaped by factors like geography and regulation–strongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities and population to rising housing demand. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices, housing quantity, and population regardless of a city’s estimated housing supply elasticity. We find the same pattern when we expand the sample to 1980 to 2020, use different elasticity measures, and when we instrument for local housing demand. Using a general demand-and-supply framework, we show that our findings imply that constrained housing supply is relatively unimportant in explaining differences in rising house prices among U.S. cities. These results challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that easing housing supply constraints may not yield the anticipated improvements in housing affordability.’
The Vindication of the IRS Whistleblowers
Bad organizations become toxic when the bad workers push out the good workers.
This is a key difference between bureaucracy and process engineering.
‘Think instead of Washington’s 2.4 million workforce as the political version of a terribly run company. It has its fair share of hard workers—dedicated to the job, the mission, the law. But they are undermined by the usual self-promoters and get-byers, with the added toxicity of embedded partisans and hidden power players. Why overturn the system? It’s the only way to elevate the good ones.
‘That is what’s happened in the case of Messrs. Shapley and Ziegler, veteran civil servants who were promoted this week to senior jobs, advising Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on IRS reform. This comes after years of retaliation, for their sin of treating Hunter Biden like any other lawbreaker—for doing their job well—and for calling foul when colleagues put politics ahead of honest work.’
Many of the buildings that the Maui fires destroyed would be illegal to build under current laws. Add to that political dysfunction and things have ground to a halt.
We need more doers and less influencers.
‘City Journal: A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000.
‘Why is the recovery effort taking so long? Initially, the biggest hurdles were the pace of debris removal and damage litigation. Both were overcome only last month. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared the final lots on February 19, while the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that a $4 billion settlement for victims can begin to move forward.
‘The main challenge now is dealing with a crushing permitting regime that slows or outright bans construction. But local political dysfunction has discouraged state and local leaders from taking emergency action to cut through this red tape.’
How Trump’s regulatory freeze is disrupting the US fishing industry
The current period of regulatory instability is disruptive.
‘The freeze allowed overfishing in waters off North Carolina of Atlantic bluefin tuna which could mean reduced quotas for New York and New England fishermen when the fish migrate further north this summer, according to a Massachusetts lawmaker as well as industry groups and the federal government employees.
‘"There's just a lot of confusion right now, both internal and external," said Ben Martens, executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen's Association, an industry group. "I'm getting calls from fishermen asking what's going to happen."’
Los Angeles Goes for Broke—Literally
In the partial equilibrium, an extra tax or an extra rule does not change output. In the general equilibrium, the final grain of sand can cause a cascade.
‘High taxes, burdensome regulations, the city’s $17.28 an hour minimum wage, litigation abuse, shoplifting and other crime raise business costs and insurance premiums. Litigation abuse is also busting the city’s budget, with payouts totaling $240 million in the last fiscal year and an estimated $301 million in the current one.
‘“Plaintiff attorneys are getting rich at the expense of taxpayers and city services,” Mr. Szabo told the City Council this week. “Every dollar that goes towards a liability payout due to a lawsuit is reducing a city service.” He urged council members to lobby Sacramento for tort reform. Alas, plaintiff attorneys are nearly as powerful as public unions in Sacramento.’