Existing research repeatedly shows that political factors influence resource allocation in disasters, so it should come as no surprise if it is ultimately determined that politics affected the response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Like any multimember adjudicative body, indeed like any appellate court, the OSHRC’s core functions have a meeting stage and an opinion-writing stage.

Under normal market conditions, lowest-cost producers can be expected to dominate sales, leaving many higher-cost producers on the market sidelines because they can’t compete on price and cover costs.

Most of the major environmental statutes have not been reauthorized in decades, and new environmental measures are rarely considered.

The EU’s regulatory zeal has been egged on by the awareness that its tightened, harmonized standards can be exported worldwide through market mechanisms as opposed to global campaigns or multilateral deals.

“Rather than being governed by the masses of Boston or by the professors of Harvard, I’d far rather be governed by the engineering faculty of MIT.”

Readers can see the parallels to today’s economic environment.

In “I, Pencil,” Read is also capturing in the context of a simple story something that blows my mind every time I teach comparative advantage to my introductory macroeconomics students: two people can enjoy consumption possibilities in excess of their individual production possibilities simply because of specialization and exchange.

Throughout the book, McCarraher seems to yearn (like Brown, apparently) for a truly radical reorganizing of society according to the Romantic transcendent frame

One objection to antitrust is that large technology firms demonstrate that concentration can coexist with competition and efficiency.

Economists who had been protectionist or even socialist changed their minds.

The debate over the morality of the market is usually carried out purely at the rhetorical level.

Antitrust became a reliable cash cow for white shoe lawyers.

It is common for analysts who oppose a particular program or industry to accept all criticisms of the industry even when the criticisms are weak or off-target.

Governmental economic control had predictably poor consequences.

Once it became clear the USSR was failing—people turned sour on Stalinism after Nikita Kruschev’s 1956 speech—they turned to Mao’s China.

Slavery, after all, is ancient, and what was new in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was the more widespread embrace of business and especially quantification.

A summary of recent papers that may be of interest to Regulation readers.

It’s not unreasonable to conclude that recent restrictions have been necessary and wise.