Ever since the pandemic began, the little-known, cold war-era Defense Production Act has played a prominent role in the U.S. government’s response to COVID-19. At the vigorous urging of a bipartisan swath of politicians and commentators, both Presidents Trump and Biden repeatedly invoked the DPA, which confers upon the executive branch broad powers to compel (Title I) or subsidize (Title III) private actors in the United States on “national security” grounds, in order to expand the domestic production and distribution of essential medical goods like N95 masks and vaccines.

Two recent events, however, show just how little we know about the DPA and the pandemic-related actions that the federal government has taken thereunder. First, there is increasing concern that a DPA action compelling prioritization of U.S. government contracts has acted as a de facto ban on the exportation of materials needed to make vaccines, especially in India, which has been hit hard by the pandemic yet hosts one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world. Widespread public outcry finally pushed Tim Manning, the White House COVID-19 Supply Coordinator, to take to Twitter to explain the general situation and how the DPA has been applied in this case, though the details still remain far from clear.

Second, NBC News reported last week that a major and widely-praised recipient of DPA funding was failing to meet its obligations:

A year after a Connecticut company was awarded almost $1.3 billion in federal loans and contracts to supply an essential syringe for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, no syringes have been made. The syringe hasn’t received even the first of a series of approvals it needs from the federal government before it can be manufactured, and a factory promising 650 jobs remains unbuilt.

ApiJect Systems Corp. positioned itself as the company that would make the difference between a stumbling rollout and delivery of lifesaving vaccines. But as the U.S. vaccine rollout hits full stride, with about half of adults in the U.S. having already received at least one injection, the need for ApiJect’s device has waned, leaving the contracts and loans in question.

NBC notes that more than half (a $590 million loan and a $251 million contract) of the funds awarded to Apiject since the pandemic began were authorized by the Defense Production Act, which grants the president broad authority to act unilaterally during a national emergency. Apiject, it must be noted, contests NBC’s reporting. 

Surely, one can and should scrutinize both of these DPA actions and their effects, but the bigger problem here lies with the DPA itself. As I noted in a recent paper, the Trump administration’s repeated use of the DPA during the pandemic has raised numerous concerns:

Ventilators, for example, were on no one’s radar before COVID-19 hit. In March 2020, when they were suddenly considered essential for fighting the coronavirus, the U.S. government invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to force domestic manufacturers to make them. By the summer, however, medical professionals determined that ventilators were not as critical as once thought, but producers continued to churn them out under government orders, leading to reports of the goods “piling up” in a strategic reserve or being donated to “countries that don’t need or can’t use them.” According to the USITC’s December 2020 report, other DPA‐​funded medical goods production will only come online after mid‐​2021, when the pandemic may have subsided.…

Finally, there a serious risk that future government interventions will have political, rather than economic, motivations—similar to the ones that reportedly drove the Trump administration’s doomed subsidies to Eastman Kodak. According to a July 2020 Congressional Research Service report, for example, the Department of Defense invoked the DPA to give hundreds of millions of dollars, appropriated under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act to fight COVID-19, to politically connected industries (shipbuilding, semiconductors, space‐​based defense, aviation, microelectronics, rare earth mining, etc.) that are at best tangentially related to the pandemic. The report adds that these and other COVID-19 actions lacked transparency and accountability, led to the reassignment of one official, and were opposed by several House committees because they were not, as Congress intended, “reserved for health and medical countermeasures.”

Despite the very real economic, political, and even geopolitical questions raised by the DPA, however, the law (pandemic invocations of which involve billions of taxpayer dollars and occasionally government force) does not permit a legitimate, independent assessment of past actions because it contains essentially no procedural guidance or requirements. The aforementioned CRS report notes, for example, that:

[T]here is no standing requirement for publishing DPA actions, and no centralized repository where they are collected.… It is unclear which executive agency leads overall efforts under DPA authority, in response to the pandemic. Reporting on DPA activities remains dispersed among multiple agency sources and appears incomplete. In addition, it is not clear under which authorities agencies are undertaking certain DPA attributed activities, such as DOD’s redirection of Title III funds, or DOJ’s enforcement of antihoarding/​price gouging.

My own independent research counts at least 64 invocations of the DPA since March 27, 2020, totaling tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. This list, however, remains incomplete, with transparency subject primarily to the parties’ decisions to disclose their transactions, often in response to intense public scrutiny. 

So maybe the White House and Apiject are right that these actions are all above-board, but it’s a serious problem that we can’t judge for ourselves.

Content moderation is often seen in binary terms. Platforms are either seen to moderate too little, prompting demands for government-imposed responsibility, or too much, inspiring proposals for state-mandated restraint. Any universally applicable policy or standard cannot satisfy both demands. Yet some tensions can be resolved by simply giving users more control over content moderation.

At the Game Developers Conference in mid-March, Intel debuted an audio moderation tool called Bleep. Bleep will allow users to filter video game audio in real time, excluding potentially offensive speech. In most online games, pseudonymous players are drafted into one-off teams. While real-time audio communication is vital for teamwork, it’s also a potent vector for harassment. Audio conversation is spread across many different matches, and happens in real time, making effective top-down moderation difficult. Game moderation usually relies on either heavy-handed word filters, or reporting, monitoring, and post-hoc account removal. Instead, Bleep runs on individual players’ computers. Rather than attempting to identify and remove offensive speech universally, Bleep filters speech at the point of potential offense. Because standards of offense differ between persons, user-managed tools more effectively avoid false positives and false negatives where they matter most.

Despite its potential (beyond a short, neutral piece in PC Magazine) Bleep was mostly ignored by the gaming press until early April, when a pseudonymous comic writer mocked it on twitter, garnering 11k retweets. This was followed by a deluge of negative coverage.

The bulk of the criticism centers on Bleep’s provision of separate, user-adjustable sliders for different varieties of offensive speech. Users can choose to hear “all, most, some, or none” of what intel’s algorithm, in real time, determines is “swearing,” “misogyny,” “white nationalism,” or various other uglies. Critics mocked the idea that users would want some mixture of offensive speech, or that their preferred mixture might change. This criticism ignores the realities of language use and the fallibility of algorithmic moderation.

Luke Pluckett of Kotaku was particularly critical, deeming it “ghastly that something like this ever left a whiteboard,” before declaring that “Hateful speech is something that needs to be educated and fought, not toggled on a settings screen.” I will assume that Pluckett means “educated against,” but even this misses the mark. There is no universal standard of hatefulness or offense that can be agreed upon, let alone educated against or fought. In a liberal society, there shouldn’t be. Diversity includes many competing understandings of the sacred and profane. In the absence of tools like Bleep, games employ blunt server-side filtering, moving the toggles out of players’ view, or push audio chat off-platform, making it someone else’s problem.

Server-side filtering doesn’t eliminate the slider – gave developers must still determine what constitutes hate speech and decide how much of it to allow. However, they must make a single choice for everyone and commit to enforcing it with little appreciation for nuance. Some see this as a benefit, or the only way to properly address hate. One critic writes, “If Intel wanted to address the concerns with hate speech, then why have any options at all?”

This criticism blurs two categories of potential harm together. If hate speech is a problem because it ruins the experience of other players, causing them stress and alarm when they’re trying to enjoy a game, a user-operated filter is a good response. Users can tune out categories of speech they find offensive and don’t have to worry about muting particular users while playing a game. It may also reduce harassment by reducing the potential payoffs. If offensive language if used to intentionally upset other players, the knowledge that insults will not be received may prevent their utterance.

However, for those worried about the potential downstream effects of hate speech, Bleep fails to address the problem entirely. If it is dangerous to normalize offensive language in private, or if hate speech causes hateful violence, it must be prohibited and policed everywhere. This totalizing approach to moderation expects game developers to do what the law cannot, preventing radicalization through rhetoric, or the expression of vulgar preferences.

In most cases, content moderation in gaming addresses everyday invective, the language of losing sports fans, not extremist instruction. Harassment is enough of a problem to justify some universal restrictions, but they have real costs, and are implemented to improve the user experience, not stamp out hate. Language is subjective. The understood meanings of words turn on the relationship between speaker and listener. “Queer” may be an expression of identity in some circles but an insult in others.

To the extent that gaming platforms have implemented universal prohibitions and filters, they have accepted a certain amount of collateral damage. Universal antiharassment measures often fall hardest on minority users. Most voice recognition systems are worse at recognizing African American Vernacular English, leading to higher false positive rates. Even well-designed filtering systems will make mistakes when constantly parsing millions of utterances. Enforcement becomes a matter of probability; moderators make tradeoffs between false positives and false negatives. By relying on a user adjustable algorithm to filter received speech, Bleep lowers the stakes of failure in moderating harassment. Users may respond to mistakes individually, rather than trying to change a universal standard. Intel’s Kim Pallister explains;

“If you had a profanity filter, with sensitivity and someone said ‘fudge’ and word clipped off briefly, the max slider would bleep that.”

If users want to avoid ever encountering swearing, and are willing to accept false positives, they can set the sliders to their most restrictive position. If they are more willing to risk mistakes in the other direction, hearing the occasional curse, but never missing a fudge recipe, they could adjust it to a more moderate setting. For subjective, individualized, highly contextual problems like harassment or offense, rather than clearer questions of illegal speech, users should pick the probability of enforcement. Many users may end up preferring one setting for play with friends and another for larger or more public games. Users can tailor moderation to context far more effectively than distant moderators.

WSJ columnist Andy Kessler offers a different complaint, accusing Bleep of having the suppressive effects other critics demand. He casts pervasive, real time speech filtering as the end state of cancel culture. Conjuring images of Bleep for keyboards and suggesting that the software might have helped former Miami Heat player Meyers Leonard avoid using antisemitic language while gaming, Kessler conflates filtering received speech with quashing output. By allowing players to filter what they hear, Bleep avoids justifying exactly the sort of output filtering Kessler fears.

Kessler treats the desire to avoid stress and alarm while playing video games, the user experience justification for moderation, as weakness. He writes;

“If you can’t play “Call of Duty” and call the person you’re about to virtually shoot a lying, dog-faced pony soldier, why play?”

“Call” again mistakes Bleep’s effect. Bleep allows players to avoid hearing someone call them a “dog-faced pony soldier” (or, in most cases, something much less printable). It does not prevent the insult from being uttered, or from being heard by others with less restrictive filters. Some may prefer to play with harsh language. However, they shouldn’t be able to impose this preference on other players any more than others should be able to censor them.

Both criticisms of Bleep attempt to collapse one category of moderation into another, instrumentalizing the provision of a useful tool in the pursuit of utopian political goals. A good antiharassment tool need not stamp out hate everywhere. On the other hand, pseudonymous gamers cannot simply be expected to “think before they speak, using their own biological Bleep code.” Because offense and harassment are subjective, local, user-defined filtering is the best method for preventing harassment from ruining players’ experience without subjecting them to either paternalistic linguistic guard-rails.

While it’s easy to dismiss these complaints as empty chirping by writers who find condemnation easier than nuanced examination, the rush to condemn risks strangling a valuable, agency-respecting antiharassment tool in the crib. If Intel takes this criticism to heart, and reduces users’ choice over filtering options, it will harm both players who hope to escape harassing speech and those stifled by one-size-fits-all filtering.

In case after case over the past decade, the federal courts have made it clear that nuisance and tort litigation, especially under state law and in state courts, is a poor fit in addressing the harms of global climate change. The latest of these decisions is City of New York v. Chevron, decided April 1, in which a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the dismissal of a municipal lawsuit filed by New York seeking to hold oil companies legally responsible for climate change.

Cato adjunct scholar Andrew Grossman was prescient about the fate of these suits in a Cato podcast three years ago. As I summarized his argument then:

As Grossman notes, the idea of suing over the role of carbon emissions in climate change has by this point been tried many times. The most obvious approach would be to sue large industrial emitters of carbon, which is what some state governments did in one of the most prominent cases, filed against electric utilities. In its 2011 AEP v. Connecticut decision, however, the Supreme Court ruled that such outputs were regulated comprehensively and exclusively at the federal level through enactments like the Clean Air Act, and were not subject to an additional level of state regulation through public nuisance claims. Suits on other theories, such as Comer v. Murphy Oil from the Fifth Circuit and the Kivalina case in the Northern District of California, have been launched “to enormous bombast and press attention and they have all bombed out…. Those cases were the low‐​hanging fruit. Those were the more obvious legal theories if you were going to try to bring this kind of case,” he says.


Now the question is whether litigants can accomplish an end run by instead attacking upstream, pre‐​emissions activity, specifically the extraction and distribution of fossil fuels destined to be burned. Ambitiously, some of the new suits attempt to apply state common law to activities occurring around the world — to the doings of worldwide corporations such as Royal Dutch‐​Shell, for example, and to oil production from places like the coast of Norway and its subsequent use by European motorists. Needless to say, many of these processes are comprehensively regulated by the laws of the European Union and its member countries. Doctrinally, then, the new efforts get into even deeper water (so to speak) than strictly domestic claims.

Even if suits could somehow avoid displacing the sovereignty of foreign countries to make rules within their own borders, there would remain the domestic concerns raised by the political question doctrine. As I wrote back then:

By its nature, global warming is exactly the sort of policy question traditionally entrusted to the political branches: it is wholly unsuited to individualized justice based on links between particularized emissions and particularized effects, its proposed remedies are much disputed and likely to be the result of inevitably arbitrary compromise, sovereign negotiations with foreign actors play a crucial role, and so forth. As the courts have long recognized, one does not generate a case for judicial action simply by piling atop each other the propositions “something needs to be done” and “the political branches have not done it.”

In a couple of more recent panel discussions, hosted by the Rule of Law Defense Fund and the other week by the Law and Economics Center at George Mason, I’ve approached the subject from a different angle: over the long history of nuisance law, Anglo-American courts have sharply limited its availability as a remedy through a series of interlocking constraints: nuisance must ordinarily involve some sort of property invasion (as of smoke, noise, or wild animals) from which the plaintiff suffers a special injury not falling on the rest of society; the causation must be direct, not indirect (the proprietor of a malfunctioning chimney might be liable, but not the supplier of firewood); the plaintiff should not be itself contributing to the nuisance it complains of; court orders based on specific attribution of responsibility are preferred to those under which the whole populace would be found to have acted wrongfully.

In modern times, some have sought to reshape the old nuisance law into more of an all-purpose tool by which courts can march here and there correcting a far wider range of claimed externalities. (Litigation itself, not incidentally, is a powerful source of externalities.) But we should listen to the judges both old and new who keep telling us, through the logic of the case outcomes and doctrines, why they are reluctant to go that route.

What happens when the counsel for a class action lawsuit doesn’t represent the best interests of the class members? The scenario begins simply (if not mundanely). Bank of America charges a $35 fee anytime a deposit account holder writes a check against insufficient funds. When an overdraft occurs, the bank can honor the check by advancing funds. If the Bank does so, the account holder must pay back the Bank’s advance plus any fees incurred. Failure to do so within five days triggers a second $35 fee.

A group of account holders filed a class action complaint, arguing that the second fee violated the anti-usury provision of the National Bank Act. Eventually, they and Bank of America agreed to a $37.5 million settlement. While each class member received a refund of about $1.07 for each $35 fee paid, the district court awarded $14.5 million in attorneys’ fees, coming directly from class members’ recovery.

Accordingly, Rachel Threatt and other class members objected to the settlement and appealed to the Ninth Circuit. In a split decision, the court affirmed the fee amount, finding that the district court’s method of approving the settlement request was proper. In dissent, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld took issue with the amount of money the class counsel was to receive, and the level of compensation earmarked for the class members.

Cato has filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to review the case to ensure that all class members are afforded their due process rights. Class action lawsuits are often the only way to feasibly redress wrongs inflicted on many victims. But the present federal class action regime is fraught with conflict as counsel face perverse incentives.

While class counsel have proper incentive to bargain for a larger settlement, they do not face a similar incentive about how to allocate the payments as between class members and their own fees. Every dollar reserved to the class is a dollar not going to counsel.

Our adversary system depends on unconflicted counsel’s zealous advocacy for their clients. Accordingly, courts must act as fiduciaries for class members and apply a rigorous analysis to all aspects of litigation and settlements, to prevent self-dealing and other improper behavior. Only meaningful and rigorous review of class counsel’s actions can minimize the danger that class counsel is not representing the interests of the class—whether with respect to class members’ compensation or counsel’s own compensation.

The Supreme Court will likely decided before the end of its current term in June whether to take up the case of Threatt v. Farrell.

This morning the Supreme Court heard argument in what I consider to be the most important case of the term, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta (which used to be Rodriguez, and before that Becerra, as those serving as California’s attorney general keep shifting). The case involves a broad California law requiring nonprofit organizations to disclose extensive donor information to the state. For more background, see this blog post and Cato’s brief.)

The way argument went, it’s almost certain that the challengers to the law, Americans for Prosperity Foundation and Thomas More Law Center will win this case, but the devil will be in the details. Will a splintered Court issue a narrow ruling that essentially forces every charity soliciting donations in California (including Cato) to go to court to protect its donor lists, or will the justices uphold the broad associational freedom and privacy that the First Amendment protects? It’s not clear from argument, but I’m optimistic.

AFPF and Thomas More have shown on the record the justified concerns they have for the harms that could befall their donors if they were compelled to disclose them, but those very real harms aren’t the most important part of the case. Indeed, AFPF and Thomas More should win this case even if there were no demonstrated threats against donors. The case is important because the Constitution protects private, anonymous association, which can be overcome only if the government shows an interest that is both compelling and narrowly tailored.

Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas each expressed concern over California’s claim of a sweeping, prophylactic power to collect sensitive personal information, and even Justice Sotomayor queried the state’s lawyer about donors’ reasonable fear of hacking.

The desire to remain anonymous in your political activities is a venerable and time-honored practice. That’s why AFPF drew unprecedented support from advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum, as well as apolitical charities: ACLU, Alliance Defending Freedom, Americans United for Life, Animal Legal Defense Fund, Becket Fund, Cato, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Human Rights Campaign, Institute for Justice, NAACP, NARAL of North Carolina, PETA, Young Americans for Freedom, Young Americans for Liberty, Southern Poverty Law Center, Zionist Organization of American, various religious orders and missionary groups, universities, and more.

Even without any threats, anonymity can be used to give arguments more attention than the identity of their author or funder. It’s still the government’s job to demonstrate when and why anonymous association should be squashed.

Again, here’s more background and Cato’s brief.

I wrote an op-ed about ending the drug war in the New York Times in 1988. It’s taking the world a long time to come around to my position. Meanwhile, the effects of prohibition persist. I complained in 1988 about 824,000 arrests a year. It was more than 1.6 million in 2018. I noted that the federal government was spending $3.9 billion a year on the drug war, and the figure is far higher now, though estimates vary.

This week’s newspapers have reminded me of some of the less immediately obvious effects of prohibition. As with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, it’s not enough simply to announce a ban on the possession, use, and/​or sale of some substance. Since people want to use the substance — that’s why other people want to ban it — the law will have to be enforced. That means police, arrests, courts, prisons, and billions of tax dollars. And some amount of violence will be involved, both by the police and among rival drug sellers. Almost half the people in federal prisons are there on drug-related charges.

The Washington Post reports, “Thousands of federal inmates serving their sentences at home under supervision during the coronavirus pandemic might have to return to prison when the pandemic ends.” Among those inmates:

Gwen Levi, 75, is one of the inmates trying to stay out of federal prison. She was sent to home confinement in June after serving 16 years of a 24-year sentence for conspiracy to sell at least one kilogram of heroin. She lives in Baltimore with her 94-year-old mother.…Wendy Hechtman had served three years of a 15-year sentence for drug manufacturing when she was transferred to home confinement in December from a federal prison in Connecticut.

What purpose will be served by sending those women back to prison?

In a separate story the Post reports:

A Black man was fatally shot by a sheriff’s deputy in Elizabeth City, N.C., as police were attempting to arrest him Wednesday.…Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten said in a video statement that the deputy fired at Brown when he started to flee as authorities tried to serve him a search warrant and an arrest warrant on felony drug charges.

He’s certainly not the first person killed as police attempted to arrest someone on drug charges (or “loose cigarette” charges). In 2014 Yale law professor Stephen Carter wrote:

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

That point applies to many more laws than the drug laws. But drug prohibition does seem to bring out the violence, in both the black-market business and the obsessive, futile efforts to enforce laws that millions of Americans violate. Those North Carolina police officers should have thought: Is this drug charge really worth shooting a man over?

Meanwhile, also in today’s Washington Post I read that the Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to ban menthol cigarettes. The Post says that “the FDA has held back, because of opposition from the tobacco industry, which spends tens of millions of dollars a year on lobbying.” It does not mention that the agency may also have held back because of the serious doubts that it has the legal authority to ban tobacco products. It does note that “Opposition has also come from GOP and Democratic officials as well as civil rights groups and leaders, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Al Sharpton, who have said that banning menthol would risk police targeting Black Americans for selling illegal cigarettes.”

No kidding. The last thing we need is yet another ban on a substance that a lot of people use, which will inevitably lead to more arrests, more incarcerations, and more confrontations that may end in death. One good way to reform policing and improve police-community relations is to repeal laws against actions that don’t violate the rights of others. Let the police arrest people for murder, rape, assault, theft, and vandalism, not for smoking and selling tobacco, e‑cigarettes, or marijuana. 

A damaging effect of government expansion is the “crowding out” or displacement of private-sector activities. Governments often think that they can do better than businesses, and they take over industries or intervene to set things right. But they misjudge, and government-dominated industries usually become bloated, stagnant, and distorted.

In infrastructure, governments over the past century have displaced private-sector airports, urban transit, passenger railways, and other facilities. America is a land of entrepreneurs, but we effectively bar them from many important industries. An entrepreneur could start an airport, for example, but it would be hard to compete against subsidized government airports that do not pay taxes.

President Biden’s infrastructure plan threatens to further crowd out private activities. It includes hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for electric vehicles, broadband, manufacturing, and the electricity grid that would partly displace private financing and decisionmaking. Once the subsidy spigot got started, it would be hard to turn off and the resulting distortions would get entrenched.

Consider Biden’s $174 billion in subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs) and charging stations. The money is unneeded because the private sector is already pouring billions of dollars into EV research, production, and infrastructure. GM, for example, says that it will invest $27 billion in EVs over the next five years. If Washington stays out of the way, such investments will advance innovation while competition will continue to drive down costs.

If you type “EV charging stations” into Google maps, you will see that they are sprouting everywhere: at hotels, garages, office and apartment buildings, and Target and Walmart parking lots. This source says there are already 30,000 EV stations nationwide, while this source says 40,000. New retail chains for EV charging include EVgo with 800 sites, Electrify America with 570 sites, and ChargePoint with sites at 4,000 businesses.

There is no market failure that needs Biden’s huge intervention. As Tree​hug​ger​.com explains, Target and Walmart want to “lure electric vehicle drivers in to shop, eat, drink and hang out while their vehicles get juiced.” In their search for profits, these retailers are making green investments. There is no need to subsidize them.

Juicing EVs with $174 billion in subsidies would bloat the industry’s cost structure. That was part of the Solyndra story—subsidies bloated costs and made the solar company uncompetitive. Biden’s “strong labor standards” attached to his EV subsidies would further increase costs. Biden claims that his plan would help America’s EV industry “compete globally,” but his subsidies would make businesses weaker and less nimble.

The Biden plan “will establish grant and incentive programs for state and local governments and the private sector to build a national network of 500,000 EV chargers by 2030.” What is the point of that? It would just substitute for investment that EVgo, Electrify America, ChargePoint, Target, and Walmart are already making. Or worse, it may induce state and local governments to take the federal money, set up their own charge stations, and squeeze out the private companies.

EVs raise concerns that still need to be worked out, so forcing the technology on us as Biden wants to do is unwise. Fifty-nine percent of electricity generation comes from coal and natural gas, so the greenness of rapidly switching to EVs is debatable. We can increase the wind and solar share of generation, but that will require major changes to the grid, including new transmission lines that will face large regulatory and NIMBY barriers.

There are other concerns. Offshore siting of windmills faces resistance. Half of the world’s supply of a key part of solar PV panels comes from an area in China known for human rights abuses. And the lithium-ion batteries in EVs have a nasty fire problem and their production harms the environment.

All that said, these problems are probably solvable, and EVs appear to be the future of surface transportation. I’m a fan of internal combustion engines and rebuilt one as a teenager. But EVs have many advantages, and market competition is making them better all the time. They will probably takeover, with or without subsidies.

What should federal policymakers do? They should shelve Biden’s corporate subsidy plans for EVs and other industries and get out of the way. Subsidies would crowd out private activities, undermine competitiveness, and supercharge the corporate lobbying frenzy in Washington.

Notes

Discussion of transportation crowd-out here, here, here, and here.

Background on EVs and charging here, here, here, and here.

More on Biden’s plan here, here, here, here, and here.

Finally, this Cato forum on Monday features infrastructure experts Bob Poole and Randal O’Toole. Bob, Randal, and I will critique the Biden plan and offer alternatives.