Let’s Cut the Budget Nonsense

Robert E. Wright – March 30, 2023 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

The Biden administration has floated another bloated budget, one that will put the US national debt at $43.6 trillion by 2033, assuming its optimistic growth and interest-rate projections pan out and the Ukraine war ends. If this budget passes, the debt will hit 110 percent of GDP, federal spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP, and federal revenue will top 20 percent of GDP, with the balance borrowed.

The details induce queasiness. Some $5 trillion in tax increases are slated, including $119 billion by reducing the so-called “tax gap,” code for increased IRS scrutiny of small businesses. Some $3 trillion is to come from increasing the stock-buyback tax from 1 to 4 percent, increasing other corporate taxes, raising the corporate income tax from 21 to 28 percent, and reforming international tax rules, as if large corporations will just pay up and not move out.

Individuals will pay more, too, with the top income tax rate increasing from 37 to 39.6 percent, with capital gains and estate taxes increasing, too. A 25 percent tax on the “unrealized income” of billionaires is projected to raise $437 billion, though its constitutionality appears dubious. The plan also relies on bracket creep – by raising tax brackets more slowly than inflation, nominal taxes for the middle and lower classes will increase, even if their inflation-adjusted wages continue to stagnate.

That might all be palatable, were the money used to pay down the national debt, and not to increase funding for a bunch of stuff that needs to be reformed, not fed with more federal cash. 

At the top of the list is a $600 billion increase to expand funding for pre-K and child care. Fact is, over-the-top regulation and out-of-control occupational licensing has driven up the cost of childcare without any increase in quality. Reverse those policies and daycare costs would drop without costing taxpayers a cent. (Besides, given what is going on, and not going on, in government schools, how many parents are going to want their babies and toddlers attending government-funded daycare and pre-K?)

Next is $325 billion slated to establish national paid family and medical leave, a matter best left to employers and employees.

Then there is $217 billion to offer “free” community college and other higher education subsidies. It has been shown, repeatedly, that the latter simply raises tuition costs. The former will induce many young adults to waste a few years, as everyone knows how people treat things that they do not have to pay for themselves.

Another half-trillion is headed to the Affordable Care Act, which has turned out to be neither affordable nor very caring, and the Indian Health Service, which is so bad that the US government ought perhaps to pay reparations for imposing it on American Indians. Another almost half-trillion goes to other miscellaneous health care, and other spending increases. I’m afraid to delve too deeply into those, for fear I’ll need cardiac care that I cannot afford.

A final $105 billion is slated to support affordable housing. As with childcare, the government’s own rules and regulations are the biggest barriers to improvement. Deregulate mortgage markets, modernize building codes, and reform zoning, and the contractors will build and refurbish enough units to suit everyone.

The Biden administration’s goal seems to be to spend lots of money on new, unnecessary programs or failing, existing programs, and to pay for it with yet more debt and with novel taxes likely to fall more heavily on middle-class Americans and small businesses than on big corporations or the rich. If it does not break America outright, it will strain its fiscal capacity to the point that the government might not be able to respond effectively to a major war or other crisis.

It’s high time that we take seriously Democrat Bill White’s suggestion that US policymakers return to the unwritten fiscal constitution in place between the nation’s founding and the administration of George W. Bush. Its commonsense borrowing and taxing principles encouraged economic growth while keeping some fiscal capacity in reserve in case of emergency.

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Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019). He has also (co)authored numerous articles for important journals, including the American Economic Review, Business History Review, Independent Review, Journal of Private Enterprise, Review of Finance, and Southern Economic Review. Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.  

Selected Publications

• Reducing Recidivism and Encouraging Desistance: A Social Entrepreneurial Approach of Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy (Summer 2022).
• “The Political Economy of Modern Wildlife Management: How Commercialization Could Reduce Game Overabundance.” Independent Review (Spring 2022).
• “Sowing the Seeds of a Future Crisis: The SEC and the Emergence of the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) Category, 1971-75.” Co-authored with Andrew Smith. Business History Review (Winter 2021).
• “AI ≠ UBI Income Portfolio Adjustment to Technological Transformation.” Co-authored with Aleksandra Przegalinska. Frontiers in Human Dynamics: Social Networks (2021).
• “Liberty Befits All: Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Independent Review (Winter 2020).
• “Pioneer Financial News National Broadcast Journalist Wilma Soss, NBC Radio, 1954-1980.” Journalism History (Fall 2018).
• “Devolution of the Republican Model of Anglo-American Corporate Governance.” Advances in Financial Economics (2015).
• “The Pivotal Role of Private Enterprise in America’s Transportation Age, 1790-1860.” Journal of Private Enterprise (Spring 2014)
• “Corporate Insurers in Antebellum America.” Co-authored with Christopher Kingston. Business History Review (Autumn 2012).
• “The Deadliest of Games: The Institution of Dueling.” Co-authored with Christopher Kingston. Southern Economic Journal (April 2010).
• “Alexander Hamilton, Central Banker: Crisis Management During the U.S. Financial Panic of 1792.” Co-authored with Richard E. Sylla and David J. Cowen. Business History Review (Spring 2009).
• “Integration of Trans-Atlantic Capital Markets, 1790-1845.” Co-authored with Richard Sylla and Jack Wilson. Review of Finance (December 2006), 613-44.
• “State ‘Currencies’ and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Clarifying Some Confusions.” Co-authored with Ron Michener. American Economic Review (June 2005).
• “Reforming the U.S. IPO Market: Lessons from History and Theory,” Accounting, Business, and Financial History (November 2002).
• “Bank Ownership and Lending Patterns in New York and Pennsylvania, 1781-1831.” Business History Review (Spring 1999).  

Find Robert

1. SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=362640
2. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3792-3506
3. Academia: https://robertwright.academia.edu/
4. Google: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=D9Qsx6QAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
5. Twitter, Gettr, and Parler: @robertewright

Books by Robert E. Wright

Abuse Escalation

Robert E. Wright – April 17, 2021 

 

On 31 December 2020, AIER’s Lou Eastman and Micha Gartz published a smart piece warning that the behaviors of lockdown-happy governments parallel those of domestic abusers. From “dismissing your opinions” to punishing you for “breaking” unclear or ever-changing rules, the 15 signs that you might be in an abusive relationship published by the Workplace Mental Health Institute, they showed, tracked almost perfectly with various federal and state Covid policies.

The 15 signs, though, are only potential indicators. How do you know when someone is definitely in an abusive relationship, be it with a lover or a government?

Researchers have identified behaviors that abused people use to try to cope with their abuse. They are definitive signs that abuse is occurring and many Americans exhibit all six of them:

1. Tiptoeing: Many Americans no longer behave as they wish but rather self-censor to avoid the wrath of government or its minions. That might mean wearing a mask even though they know that it doesn’t help to slow the spread of Covid and may even be harmful. Or it may mean telling a political pollster that they are undecided even when they know they will support a controversial candidate or position.
2. Excessive apologizing: Abused Americans say they are sorry for sundry policies past and present even though they may know nothing about the policies, which may have been implemented before they were born or remained so arcane they are virtually unknown to anyone, even inside the government. A few even support a second round of slavery reparations (the first being LBJ’s Great Society) even though their ancestors came to America after passage of the 13th Amendment.
3. Clamming up: Abused Americans do not vigorously or even vociferously oppose even obviously flawed or partisan policies like DC statehood or court packing, in part because they are unsure what to believe in a world where rioting becomes “mostly peaceful protests” and a mostly peaceful protest becomes an “insurrection.” They have little self-confidence and reflexively do as authorities dictate out of fear of retribution.
4. Abuse of others: Americans abused by their governments even become abusers themselves, trying to enforce social distancing mandates on mountain hiking trails, beaches, and other places where the enforcement attempts actually defeat the putative goal of limiting social interaction. They also viciously “cancel” anyone who doesn’t follow the latest “Woke” mandate.
5. Defense of abuser: Those abused often defend their abuser, or even in extreme cases come to identify with him or her. Only the Stockholm Syndrome explains how anyone still listens to Dr. Fauci. Although The Faucian Bargain is a bestseller, and many people have read Phil Magness’s careful deconstruction of Fauci’s self-serving lies and half-truths, too many other Americans have coped with Fauci’s abuse by lionizing him.
6. Profession of continued love: Abused Ameicans blare “God Bless America” and otherwise behave with patriotic zeal partly due to the Stockholm Syndrome but also partly because they feel they must justify continuing their abusive relationship with the government, which has convinced them that they cannot possibly live without it. The abused must really love America to have stayed with it this long, they “reason.”

But that last justification is really just an expression of the sunk cost fallacy. Most relationships that have progressed through the 15 signs discussed by Lou and Micha and the 6 behaviors described above will escalate into physical violence and, indeed, this already happened on 6 January 2021 when an American citizen was shot and killed during the Capitol riot. The name of the shooter has not been released and neither have the precise circumstances under which she was killed, although the investigation has been closed with assurances that her civil rights were not violated. Abusers are, of course, always in the right.

The abuser claims that the abused are a threat and, in a sense, they are. Enslavers quivered in fear at the thought that those enslaved would one day say enough and end their abuse by ending their abuser. But just as slaveholders held most of the power, so, too, does the federal government now hold most of the power in their relationship with the American people.

Nevertheless, the party in power feels vulnerable and hence attempts to consolidate its abusive control through pending federal voting and zoning laws, SCOTUS reform, and further restrictions on firearms ownership. Like an abusive lover, it isn’t honest about its motivations (or it is incredibly stupid) and when it meets resistance it doesn’t compromise but rather finds new levers of control.

The most important of those new levers are corporations. As noted elsewhere, corporate regulations and taxes have grown so abusive that the federal government can now bend corporations to its will. Corporations are now akin to powerful in-laws who always take the side of the abuser, further isolating the abused. That is why hundreds of corporations recently attacked Georgia’s new voting law, which neutral observers believe is necessary to promote confidence in election integrity but which the Biden administration labelled a 21st century Jim Crow law. Apparently, President Biden has learned to stop calling his constituents Neanderthals but a Democrat with a spotty record on race shouldn’t be invoking Jim Crow voting restrictions.

Speaking of voting restrictions, even if stockholders want their corporations to desist (which isn’t likely given the cost-imposing tools at the government’s disposal), they cannot force a leadership change because, ironically enough, corporate voting is far from democratic. It isn’t just that votes are weighted by shares owned, it’s that managers automatically receive the votes of shareholders who choose not to vote, which entrenches them in power. Were that not enough, most corporate elections are not secret, so managers know who voted against them, virtually ensuring that all employee-owned shares are cast in their favor. Little wonder that corporations eagerly kowtow to the authoritarian regimes of certain large, modestly wealthy nations while using their money muscles to influence legislation that is, frankly, none of their business.

One hopes that Americans can pull themselves back from the brink of a fatally abusive relationship but the fact that under the current system Democrats will almost certainly lose control of the House and Senate in early 2023 means that they have an incentive to strike hard and fast. Unlike in a marriage, which can follow long “cycles” of rising tensions, incidences of physical abuse, reconciliations, and periods of calm, the political cycle is short, and the abuser knows it. It must prevail completely or risk permanent divorce, or at least a long period of political losses, like that which occurred the last time the Democratic Party tried, and failed, to dominate part of the country. (Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress most years from the Civil War until the New Deal.) 

The difficulties of Democrats at the polls during their long hiatus from power were, of course, a leading cause of the party’s efforts to suppress Republican voters, black and white. They have since learned that it sounds better to support voting access than to seem to restrict it but of course every illegal vote cast by a dead person, a non-citizen, or a vote harvester essentially negates the vote of a legal voter. Balance is needed so that all who may legally vote can do so at the lowest possible cost consistent with a rapid and accurate tally. Most Americans are probably smart enough to realize that, but they may be too cowed by their abuser and its numerous and powerful minions to resist.

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Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019).

Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.

Books by Robert E. Wright

 

Liberty or Subjugation?

Robert E. Wright – February 10, 2021@ American Institute for Economic Research

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The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed two titanic political struggles in the United States. One pitted Masons against Antimasons while the other arrayed the forces of Slavery against those of Antislavery. Both struggles ultimately posed the same question as the Revolution had. Would Americans enjoy liberty or suffer subjugation?

Today, Americans face the same question but it isn’t clear that liberty shall again prevail because Americans seem not to “esteem” their liberties as “jealously” as they once did. Many blame the recent retreat of economic freedom and civil liberties on ostensibly new technological or social forces. The following jaunt through America’s antebellum history, however, reveals that nothing new faces lovers of liberty except that the massive size and power of the state has weakened their ability to fend off subjugation, be it in the form of dangerous lockdowns or the blatant favoritism of some (e.g., elites) over others (e.g., regular Joes and Janes).

Antebellum Americans adored most voluntary associations, especially those that today we would label nonprofits. Charities (asylums for the blind, indigent, or mad; hospitals; orphanages, etc.), fraternal organizations (e.g., Odd Fellows; YMCA), and institutions of self-improvement (libraries; lyceums; temperance societies; universities) generally met with high praise and donations.

Voluntary associations that took on a political cast, by contrast, were often met with derision, even vitriol, and sometimes violence. “Secret” societies were naturally particularly suspect because outsiders could easily weave them into conspiracy theories about lost elections and hated policies. If such associations had nothing to hide, why did they hide their activities?

The Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary society formed by Revolutionary War officers in 1783, was widely decried at first, as were the political organizations that sprang up in opposition to the policies of the Washington administration in the early 1790s. Both survive to this day, the first under its original name and the second, along a much more complicated path, as the Democratic Party. Both helped to cement the concept of “loyal opposition” into Americans’ political psyches. To disagree over policy — even stridently, vociferously, or raucously — did not entail treason or insurrection, even if an organization’s strategies, or “machinations” in the parlance of the day, necessitated a certain level of secrecy, so long as its end goal, gaining control of the government through lawful elections, remained paramount.

The Masons, though, were different. The organization presented itself to the public as a fraternal organization and charity and hence, like similar organizations that suffused antebellum America, worthy of praise. But many outsiders believed that was simply cover for a more insidious mission. Anti-Masonic angst was not so much about the society’s secret handshakes, initiation rites, and passwords as it was about the secret oaths that its members purportedly took that placed the interests of Masons above those of American society. That threat seemed very real in 1826 after several Masons allegedly murdered William Morgan for threatening to expose Masonic secrets and then used their positions in government to cover up the crime.

Anti-Masons also feared that Masons concentrated power in the hands of a few men at the top of the association, which was organized as local lodges that, like many large-scale nonprofits, fed money up to the organization’s national leaders. As Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing (1780-1842, not to be confused with the poet of the same name) explained, “Through such an Association, widely spread, yet closely connected by party feeling, a few leaders can send their voices and spirit far and wide, and, where great funds accumulated, can league a host of instruments, and by menace and appeals to interest, can silence opposition” [Remarks on the Disposition Which Now Prevails to Form Associations, and to Accomplish All Objects by Organized Masses (London: Edward Rainford, 1830), 18-19].

What are Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the like but widely spread associations closely connected by party feeling where great funds have accumulated and been used to silence opposition, from lone bloggers and videographers to corporations like Parler, by menace and appeals to interest? As if to make clear that readers today understand what is at stake, Channing continued: “We fear that in this country, an influence is growing up through widely spread Societies, altogether at war with the spirit of our institutions, and which, unless jealously watched, will gradually but surely encroach on freedom of thought, of speech, of the press.” That influence proved gradual indeed but was firmly as sure as Channing feared.

Channing also lamented that “a few individuals, perhaps not more than twenty, may determine the chief reading for a great part of children of the community, and for a majority of the adults, and may deluge our country with worthless sectarian writings, fitted only to pervert its taste, degrade its intellect, and madden it with intolerance.” Again, what do we have today but widespread fears that a few powerful associations, particularly those mentioned above, decide what most Americans read, be it about elections, lockdowns, politicians, racism, or viruses?

Although the dominant technology of (dis)information dissemination has changed since Channing’s day, the incentive mechanisms have not. Compare this exposé of the overlapping funding sources of a network of think tanks today with Channing’s warning then:

“Let Associations devoted to any objects which excite the passions, be everywhere spread and leagued together for mutual support, and nothing is easier than to establish a controul [sic] over newspapers. We are persuaded by an artful multiplication of Societies, devoted apparently to different objects, but all swayed by the same leaders, and all intended to bear against a hated party, as cruel a persecution may be carried on in a free country as in a despotism.”

Channing even described a type of cancel culture where “public opinion may be so combined, and inflamed, and brought to bear on odious individuals or opinions, that it will be as perilous to think and speak with manly freedom, as if an Inquisition were open before us. [Remember he was writing in the early nineteenth century, when some people still expected the Spanish Inquisition.] It is now discovered that the way to rule in this country is by an array of numbers, which a prudent man will not like to face,” especially without a mask!

While clearly prescient, Channing took too pessimistic a view given the reality of his time. America’s governments were then too small to effectively suppress the market for ideas. Rightly or not, Anti-Masons effectively deplatformed Masons in several states, including Massachusetts, where the corporate charters of Masonic lodges were repealed. Importantly, though, Masonic lodges continued to exist, even in Massachusetts, but in a chastened state that no longer seemed to threaten the rule of law. Its mission achieved, Anti-Masonry eventually petered out as a political force, with many former members joining the new Whig Party. 

Like the Anti-Masons, who coalesced around opposition to the threat they perceived in Masonic lodges, abolitionists coalesced around opposition to the threat posed by chattel slavery. They did not style themselves Pro-Liberty because many of them did not seek racial equality, hoping that freed slaves could be transplanted to Africa, Latin America, or the Great West, perhaps on Reservations like those contemplated for American Indians. The abolitionists most in favor of liberty for all, those who sought immediate emancipation of slaves and equal rights for all regardless of skin color, were the most maligned. 

Those so-called “radical” antislavery agitators were sometimes assaulted, even murdered, and rioters disrupted many of their meetings, sometimes by burning their meeting halls or threatening conferees, even female ones, with violence. And that was in the North! Meanwhile “the life of a known Abolitionist,” a British abolitionist noted in 1846, “would not be safe in a Southern State” [Anon., A Brief Notice of American Slavery, and the Abolition Movement (Bristol: H. C. Evans, 1846), 29]. 

Even the U.S. government sought to silence the radicals. The Post Office stopped delivering abolitionist tracts in the South after slaveholders resorted to violence, including lynchings, and social ostracism to stanch the flow of over 100,000 antislavery tracts into the slave states in 1835. Instead of countering new Southern state laws banning the possession of abolitionist literature, the brave U.S. House of Representatives responded by refusing to consider any more anti-slavery petitions.

Despite the still small government’s best efforts, however, antislavery agitation continued. Eventually it fomented a civil war that ironically allowed the first great ratcheting up of the U.S. government’s power. Two more big shooting wars and an endless stream of minor, cold, and metaphorical wars against this and that have since rendered the U.S. government so large that its sundry agencies now crowd out independent sources of information. Instead of a free flow of critique, data, information, and interpretation, the market for ideas is now dominated by what nineteenth century Americans would have called a “phalanx” of institutions led by the federal government and bolstered by sundry “yes” (wo)men fearful of invoking its mighty regulatory and confiscatory wrath.

One result has been a policy response so out of proportion to the threat posed by Covid that it beggars belief. Or so concludes a trio of researchers (two Spanish and one Chilean) in an article called “COVID-19 and The Political Economy of Mass Hysteria” published recently in an open access Swiss public health journal. Specifically, the researchers show, governments exacerbated nocebo effects (the opposite of placebo effects), aiding the spread of Covid by creating mass expectations of mass illness.

With free market checks against disinformation — which can be as simple as private conversations about recent events — largely disabled by overly powerful governments, a nocebo snowball effect occurred. People concluded that for governments to lock down economies and suspend civil liberties Covid must constitute a plague of Biblical proportions. So instead of resisting, they supported lockdowns, mandatory masking, and the silly social distancing theater showcased in the recent broadcast of Super Bowl LV.

In short, regardless of the origins of the SARS-COV-2 virus, Big Government caused the pandemic and the resulting economic pain by rendering resistance futile and breaking the will of all but a few outlets (like this one). The sooner Americans come to terms with that reality, the sooner they can take steps to render lockdowns, and God knows what other harmful, irrational policies lurking in the shadows, less likely, if not impossible.

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Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s Financial Exclusion (2019).

Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.

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The Attacks on Kristi Noem Have Only Just Begun

Robert E. Wright   – January 30, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

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AIER’s researchers and contributors do not see any evidence that lockdowns help the situation and its mission compels it to speak out. The same could be said of South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, the subject of a recent video, an attempt at character assassination, produced by The New York Times.

During my decade of residence in South Dakota, I met Kristi only once, very briefly, at an antislavery conference she sponsored in Sioux Falls while serving her home state in the US House of Representatives. I am not a member of her political party and refer to her by first name only because that is what South Dakotans do. We silly gooses still conceive of ourselves as citizens rather than subjects and our leaders as employees rather than as absolute rulers. South Dakotans take their leaders’ employee handbook, the constitutions of the United States and the state, very seriously and most believe, as does the Supreme Court of Wisconsin and other high courts, that lockdowns are clearly unconstitutional. In other words, Kristi never really had a choice in the matter.

The video, like most of the NYT’s coverage of Covid, is highly misleading. I could bore readers to tears with a claim-by-claim rebuttal but it would soon devolve into a plea to read the AIER’s Covid-related books and articles. Consider, for example, the video’s admonition that “this would have been a good time to also recommend wearing a mask for a virus we know spreads through the air.” 

Yes, the virus spreads through the air but it remains unclear that masks, as used by real people in real life, slow the spread. So the video essentially mocks Kristi for understanding the extant data and science, and her own neighbors and constituents, in a more sophisticated way than the NYT itself does. It is like The 1619 Project all over again. Perhaps the NYT should stick to the news and leave history and political economy to historians and political economists? And make no mistake, while the virus itself is a medical issue, lockdowns are a type of economic policy that both theory and experience debunk.

The video also ignores crucial context. On 20 March 2020, the NYT published an article that predicted that if Kristi implemented only “some control measures” (which is what she actually did), by 1 August of that same year the number of people infected in South Dakota’s two most populous counties (Minnehaha and Pennington) would top 200,000, implying 2,000 plus deaths “from” Covid if the infection fatality rate turned out to be 1 percent. 

Six months on (28 Jan. 2021) and 1,739 have died “with” Covid (but only 1,468 “from” Covid) across the entire state. Moreover, 824 of the dearly departed were in long-term care facilities rendered inefficient by CONs (certificates of need) and other unnecessary regulations long attacked by health care policy experts like Sean Masaki Flynn and John C. Goodman.

Significantly, despite the inefficient policies imposed upon it by the federal government, the state’s hospitals never overflowed and coyotes never roamed the streets of Sioux Falls munching on covidic human corpses. So shouldn’t the NYT be lauding Kristi? After all, study after study has shown that Covid death rates and policy responses are uncorrelated because the real drivers are policy-insensitive variables like latitude, age and overall health, and pre-pandemic mortality. I truly wish that the world was as simplistic as the journalists at the NYT make it out to be, but it ain’t.

Rather than “rebranding her failures as ‘freedom,’” Kristi actually adroitly avoided the high economic and human costs of lockdowns without demonstrably hurting anyone. One needs to be an incredibly intransigent statist to believe that governors determine viral transmission patterns but if one does hold that position, as the NYT does, why not excoriate the governors of states with higher death rates than South Dakota too?

I understand that the NYT cannot attack Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous Covid record (though minor kudos on this expose of his nursing home death coverup) because he is the governor of the state where it does most of its business and asserts the power, a power endorsed by the NYT itself, to declare the newspaper inessential, or even murderous a la The Guardian, and shut it down. 

But why would the NYT go out of its way to attack Kristi, who even it admits remains popular in South Dakota? Possibilities abound but I see no reason to reject the hypothesis that the woke newsroom staffers who seized editorial control of the paper after the Cotton op-ed affair see Kristi and the entire state as a threat to their agenda, not just on Covid, but across the board.

Consider, for example, gun control. South Dakota effectively has none, not even for handguns, which anyone can carry, concealed or openly, without a permit of any kind. Contrast that with New Jersey and Massachusetts, which have strict controls on pistols and even long guns. According to a RAND study, South Dakota ranks ninth highest in the nation in per capita gun ownership yet 45th in per capita firearm homicides. The two aforementioned eastern states, by contrast, rank second to last and dead last in gun ownership, yet have gun homicide rates far higher than South Dakota’s.

Another inconvenient truth is that South Dakota pays its public school teachers less than almost every other state in the Union yet its students score better on national standardized tests than the students of most other states. 

Moreover, it overcomes numerous challenges by fostering economic freedom and encouraging innovation, even integrating “how to start a business” into its core K-12 curriculum. I suspect the Woke has long wanted to eject South Dakota from the Union for exposing the fallacies in their worldview and now its governor appears poised to run for POTUS in 2024 on the strength of her record of rationality. Look for more attempts at character assassination to come.

[AIER’s Jack Nicastro contributed research links for this article.]

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Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s Financial Exclusion (2019).

Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.

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