The following is the final post in a five-part series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. In this fifth and final post examining Akhil Amar’s NR essay arguing that Thomas Jefferson should be castigated rather than celebrated, I look at Amar’s parting shots and discuss what drove Amar to write his essay. After challenging Jefferson’s constitutional thought, Amar could not resist denouncing Jefferson as an evil slaveholder. This is nothing but pure presentism and paints the American experience with slavery as unique when, …
The Pandemic is Over, But Pandemic Policies Are Not
President Biden told us over a year ago that “the pandemic is over.” While the virus is still mutating, the worst is clearly behind us. Recent data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control’s COVID data tracker estimates that COVID-19 causes less than 1 percent of new deaths. While fears of fast-paced outbreaks or dangerous new variants are a thing of the past, policies and measures enacted during the height of the pandemic are slowly making a comeback across the country. For example: Morris Brown College implemented a mask mandate for students and faculty members a week into their fall …
Can the U.S. Grow Its Way Out of the National Debt?
In April 2020, the size of the U.S. government’s total public debt outstanding as measured against the country’s GDP spiked up to 135% in the wake of government-mandated pandemic lockdowns. That’s the highest the U.S. national debt-to-GDP ratio has ever been, breaking the previous record of 121% set in the World War II era. 121% is about where the U.S. total national debt-to-GDP ratio is today. It’s been hovering around that level since July 2021. After initially falling rapidly after the economy was allowed to reopen in 2020, progress in lowering the national debt burden …
President Biden’s Fiscal Train Wreck
On 2023’s Labor Day, President Biden boasted of cutting the U.S. government’s budget deficit at a speech in Philadelphia. “Unlike the last president, in my first two years—all this stuff, guess what?—I cut the deficit $1.7 trillion, cut the debt $1.7 trillion.” There’s just one problem. President Biden’s fiscal policies are exploding the U.S. government’s budget deficit during his third year in office. Here’s the Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein’s introduction to that hard truth: The federal deficit is projected to roughly double this year, as bigger interest payments and lower tax receipts widen the nation’s …
Divorcing Ourselves From Akhil Reed Amar (Part IV)
The following is the final post in a four-part series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I, Part II, and Part III. My argument is rather than jettisoning Thomas Jefferson as Amar demands, we should ditch Amar, who is a darling of the Federalist Society and has no trouble persuading the “conservative” editors at NR to give him space. Amar’s popularity among Conservatism, Inc., to borrow a term from Paul Gottfried, is a symptom of why the right is content to simply follow the left and occupy the ground that the left abandons as it moves …
Divorcing Ourselves from Akhil Reed Amar (Part III)
This is the third post in a series on Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar’s criticism of Thomas Jefferson. Follow these links for Part I and Part 2. In the two previous posts, I dealt with Amar’s criticism of Jefferson related to the Virginian’s opposition to the national bank and his advocacy of nullification. This post deals with Jefferson and secession, which Amar blasts as follows: “He played footsie with the plainly unconstitutional idea that a state could unilaterally secede. (At one point he nonchalantly declared that whether America remained united or instead divided into two parts was …
Yet Another Reason Why Minimum Wage Studies Might “Fail”
Last year, I wrote about why empirical minimum wage studies might fail to find a disemploying effect. In this post, I want to explore yet another reason why it might seem like raising the minimum wage is a free lunch. The reason concerns economics going “beyond p’s and q’s”—a theme I’m fond of promoting on Marginalia. Here’s my idea in a nutshell. In 2023, there are more available “margins of adjustment” as compared with 1938 (the year of the Fair Labor Standards Act). With more margins of adjustment available, employers can adjust to minimum wage hikes by removing those perks from the total …
Divorcing Ourselves from Akhil Reed Amar (Part II)
Akhil Reed Amar wants Americans to “break up” with Thomas Jefferson and instead toast other Founders such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. In the first post in this series, I dealt with Amar’s attack on Jefferson based on the Virginian’s opposition to the national bank. Amar also finds fault with Jefferson because “[h]e fathered the false idea that each state could legitimately ‘nullify’ a federal law on its own say-so (as distinct from sounding political alarms against unconstitutional federal actions, filing lawsuits, or doing other things that ultimately relied on national legal and political dispute-resolution mechanisms).” Amar ignores …
NIMBY Etymology and Its Connection to the Independent Institute
I have always been interested in etymology, which can often provide interesting historical insights about whatever topic a word encompasses. Changes in language patterns in terms of the meaning and frequency of certain words can reveal much about a society’s cultural perception of a given issue. Recently, I have been curious about the origins of the acronym NIMBY (“not in my backyard”). In popular parlance, “nimbies” are local residents who work to preserve the status quo of their neighborhoods by preventing commercial and residential construction. The acronym is most commonly reserved today for the “neighborhood …
Price Controls Destroy Coasean Bargains
A useful way to think about price controls is that they destroy mutually beneficial Coasean bargains. By a “Coasean bargain,” I mean an offer that takes the following form: “I’ll pay you to reduce this harm” or “I’ll compensate you for bearing this harm.” Consider minimum wage as an example of the former instance. Imagine factory workers on a hot summer day making $7.25 per hour. In a free market, they (could) strike the following deal with their employer: “We’ll go down to $7 per hour if you install AC.” Assuming that AC is sufficiently cheap, it’s a win-win. Workers …
Divorcing Ourselves from Akhil Reed Amar (Part I)
Just a month ago, National Review (the supposed Gray Lady of the Right) ran a piece by Yale’s Akhil Reed Amar entitled Declaring Independence from Thomas Jefferson. The piece is a paean to centralized power imbued with presentism as Amar virtue signals and plays the role of Pied Piper as “conservative” lawyers and academics follow him to the land of the living Constitution. Amar is a staunch progressive, yet when one views his biography and list of engagements from the Federalist Society, one is left with the impression that he is some sort of conservative/originalist hero. I have no problem when the Federalist …
FDA Efforts to Curb Youth Vaping Continue to Come Up Short
Most people associate the Food and Drug Administration with regulating prescription drugs and other medical goods. The agency’s actual regulatory power extends to about 20 percent of all US consumer goods. Some of its authority extends over large portions of the economy—affecting the entire healthcare market and the quality of life for millions of Americans. One of the FDA’s most expansions of power came in 2016 when it began regulating e-cigarettes. By 2018, it launched the ongoing “war on vaping” and started a heavy-handed crackdown on e-cigarette producers and retailers. As then FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb …
