THE HOUSE DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS HAS A FRAGILE MAJORITY.

What was I just saying about the rent-seekers and oligarchs with donkey ears?  "Democratic moderates are holding climate policy hostage to get a tax cut for the rich."  Usually, the point of putting as many projects into an omnibus bill as possible is to secure the necessary votes.  Arnie van Damm told Jack Ryan as much.  Here's where the true believers get off the train, though.  Note what "tax cut for the rich" is at stake here.

The state and local tax (SALT) deduction was capped at $10,000 as part of the 2017 Republican tax-cut legislation, a change that prompted outcry from centrist blue-state House Democrats who represent the higher-income, higher-tax areas that were disproportionately impacted by the limit. The House voted to suspend the cap in 2019—a move opposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other prominent progressives—but the effort died in the then-Republican Senate.

There is nothing like the prospect of losing your seat in two years, either by redistricting or by facing a primary challenge from a more leftist Democrat, to concentrate the mind.

In a joint statement late Tuesday afternoon, Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), and Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) declared that they "will not accept any changes to the tax code that do not restore the SALT deduction and put fairness back into the system."

"We say, 'No SALT, no deal,'" the lawmakers said. "The GOP passed an unfair cap of $10,000 on state and local tax (SALT) deductions to pay for their 2017 tax giveaway. Due to the GOP cap, our home states of New York and New Jersey have been crushed and residents have been leaving for other states."

The trio of House Democrats issued their demand just 24 hours ahead of President Joe Biden's expected release of a $2.25 trillion infrastructure and climate package that the president is aiming to finance by hiking taxes on the wealthy and corporations. While Biden is pushing to partially reverse some elements of the 2017 GOP tax law—including its cut to the corporate tax rate—the initial package is not expected to call for repeal of the SALT cap.

Axios reported earlier this week that Gottheimer and other centrist Democrats are pushing back against some of the proposed tax increases while simultaneously demanding repeal of the SALT cap as a necessary component of the forthcoming package.

Pass the popcorn, it's going to be fun to see these guys attempting to tax that guy behind the tree, when that guy is behind a tree in Texas or Florida.

LIMITED IN SCOPE AND DURATION.

I'm just a guy with a free weblog, and I can point out that emergency orders issued by governors ought to be limited in scope and duration in Pennsylvania or around the Great Lakes or in Illinois.

When a state supreme court rules accordingly, all I can do is call approving attention.

In a 4-3 decision released Wednesday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Governor Tony Evers’ cannot use successive emergency orders to tackle the same Covid-19 crisis.

“The plain language of the statute explains that the governor may, for 60 days, act with expanded powers to address a particular emergency,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the majority. “Beyond 60 days, however, the legislature reserves for itself the power to determine the policies that govern the state’s response to an ongoing problem. Similarly, when the legislature revokes a state of emergency, a governor may not simply reissue another one on the same basis.”

It matters not whether the ukases are of Platonic perfection or are arbitrary and capricious. The legislative branch is coequal with the executive.

“Some may wish our analysis would focus on ensuring the Governor has sufficient power to fight COVID-19; others may be more concerned about expansive executive power,” Hagedorn wrote. “But outside of a constitutional violation, these policy concerns are not relevant to this court’s task in construing the statute. Whether the policy choices reflected in the law give the governor too much or too little authority to respond to the present health crisis does not guide our analysis. Our inquiry is simply whether the law gives the governor the authority to successively declare states of emergency in this circumstance.”

No. Next question?

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty have released a position paper spelling out what steps the legislature ought take once the pandemic is past to codify emergency powers in future pandemics (and there will be future pandemics.)  "  If the Wisconsin Legislature chooses to adopt these policies, then our civil liberties and the separation of powers will be more secure when we confront the next emergency."  Good.

Where is the similar lawsuit for Illinois?

THE SHAPE OF PRAGMATIC LIBERTARIAN POPULISM.

Jack Hunter suggests it's The Right Kind Of Realignment.  It sounds, at first blush, like something out of the New Deal.

How many wealthy people today have benefitted from the trillions in coronavirus relief at the expense of those in actual need? Republican Congressman Thomas Massie said of the first relief package in March 2020, “The tragedy of this bill is it’s a massive wealth transfer from the middle class to the moneyed class.”

Americans have become accustomed to watching the rich and powerful shielded by big government, while the little guy has to accept his financial hardship. Maybe there should be a major American political party that fights for them.

The rent-seekers are too much in charge of the Democrats for the traditional nostrums to work.  Now season that with a year of public health measures that looked anything like expertise in action.

Many of those Republican voters are still dealing with or recovering from job-crushing coronavirus lockdowns, and fear that their civil liberties are under assault by the government and Big Tech. Many voters are distrustful and angry at their state and federal governments working in tandem with large corporations to disrupt or suppress daily life.

It's a long essay. The organizing theme appears to be "Why not make the cronyism favored by political and corporate elites the enemy?"  By all means, go there and read it.

BOURGEOIS CONVENTIONS AS ANTIPOVERTY MEASURES..

Mark "Carpe Diem" Perry recently posted three charts that gathered widespread attention.  Two call attention to the success sequence, more precisely to what happens in its absence.  He offers a sad prediction.  "As long as 70% of black children are born to unmarried mothers, the black-white disparities in income, wealth, homeownership, educational outcomes, school suspensions, crime rates, incarceration rates, etc. will all continue. And of course, the racial disparities between Asians and whites (for income, wealth, education, etc.) receive almost NO attention because it doesn’t fit the narratives of white privilege, black victimhood, systemic racism, etc." Most of the people who picked up his post and commented on it are from the traditionalist or culturally conservative parts of the commentariat.  I haven't yet seen any reaction from the usual woke suspects.

STILL THINKING ABOUT RESUMING DAILY LIFE.

Here I was a year ago.  "Wait another month, wait for that first really nice day, wait for the little kids to spontaneously go to the neighborhood tot-lot: will the Powers that Be still be respected if there isn't some firm sense that there is an exit strategy?"  The Powers that Be still haven't offered that exit strategy.  The verdict is being rendered by the people.  I'm seeing more road traffic, more kids at the tot-lots, even some bars and restaurants looking positively busy.

COULD ROSA LUXEMBURG KEEP UP THE STEAM PRESSURE?

As women's history has gone mainstream, so have the activities called attention to.

Andrea Biesecker worked as engineer and Shelley Hall as fireman for all five round-trips on the 189-year-old Strasburg Rail Road, the 4.5-mile-long tourist and freight carrier in southeastern Pennsylvania. The runs took place on a cold and blustery Saturday, March 6, with No. 475, the same Baldwin-built 1906 former Norfolk & Western Railway 4-8-0-type that Biesecker qualified on in 2014.

The Strasburg Rail Road is the oldest continuously operating under the same name railroad company in North America.  The special crew, that's something new.

Hall suggested an all-women engine crew. “I just wanted to show girls that just because it’s mostly guys that do this job, women can do it too. For as long as the Strasburg has been running trains, there hasn’t been an all-female engine crew, so I figured it was about time.”

Both women are given high marks for their skills and work ethic by Dave Domitrovitch, formerly boiler shop supervisor at the Strasburg and now Chief Mechanical Officer at the newly revived narrow-gauge East Broad Top Railroad in south-central Pennsylvania.

The Rail Road has long been a good neighbor for the community. Recently trains ran as a fund raiser for the town Fire Company, which is a worthy cause.  The Fire Company make the firehouse available for quarterly O Scale shows, and the upcoming summer show might merit a road trip, and a look at the East Broad Top along the way.

BEAVER. BUCKY BEAVER.

Last week, we were hailing a successful title defense by Wisconsin's women's hockey team.

Then it was the men's turn to add a seventh title to their ledger.  It didn't turn out well.

The Badgers were outcompeted for pucks, made unforgivable mistakes and had to play from behind.

“I think there was a lot of issues,” Badgers captain and defenseman Ty Emberson said. “They outworked us. They outbattled us. There were a couple tough bounces in the first period. It just sucks to see it come to an end.”

How bad was it? "Starting goaltender Robbie Beydoun laid prone on the ice with his blocker and his catching glove on his helmet after his misplay led to a short-handed goal by Owen Sillinger that put the Beavers up 4-1 late in the second period."  That's right, the Bemidji skaters (at one time, they had two brothers in the penalty box at the same time, is anybody having Slap Shot recollections?) were so aggressive on the penalty kill that a player would follow the clearing dump just in case the goalie misplayed the puck to initiate the power play.

Unfortunately, Bemidji were unable to continue the play in the second round, being excused by Massachusetts.  The other three participants in the frozen four are Minnesota teams:  Duluth, St. Cloud, and Minnesota State.  Still possible for the regional comprehensives to be competitive.

Duluth's trip to the finals took a little longer.  "As the game stretched into early Sunday morning, freshman Luke Mylymok scored the golden goal to send Minnesota Duluth into the Frozen Four semifinals against Massachusetts. Saturday's game — lasting 142 minutes, 13 seconds of ice time and six hours, 12 minutes of real time — broke the NCAA Tournament record for longest game set by the Wisconsin and Harvard women in 2007."  That Wisconsin team still had enough energy to defend their title.  Duluth are currently two-time defending champions.

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 10,125.

The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health.  Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.

The latest report from Sweden counts 744,286 infections and 13,402 deaths.
The latest report from Illinois counts 1,239,589 infections and 23,527 deaths.

Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order.  If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.

The Centers for Disease Control are currently reporting over five-and-a-half million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide.  The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent.  The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases.

That's despite Sweden doing at least as well as most of more lockdown-obsessed western Europe, despite ignoring scary advice that their relatively moderate mitigations would be deadly.  And now, Sweden reports fewer excess deaths (a calculation based on actuarial tables) year-on-year for 2020 than for previous years.  "Who could possibly argue with more freedom and fewer deaths?"  I'm waiting for J. B. Pritzker to defend himself.

Although public health officials aren't necessarily economists, they ought be sensitive to the notion of tradeoffs.

Public-health officials are supposed to consider the overall impact of their policies, not just the immediate effect on one disease. They’re supposed to weigh costs and benefits, promoting policies that save the most total years of life, which means taking special care to protect younger people and not divert vast resources to treatments for those near the end of life. They are not supposed to test unproven and dangerous treatments by conducting experiments on entire populations.

Sweden and Florida followed these principles when they rejected lockdowns and trusted their citizens to take sensible precautions. That trust has been vindicated.

The governor, however, gets away with an interview in which the Illinois death toll doesn't even come up.  "I think I’m genuinely considered to be the most progressive governor in the Midwest, if not in the country right now."  Let that be an indictment of so-called progressives.

Last week, the governor trailed by 10,095.  Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.  It's still growing, though, that despite Sweden having some of the same difficulties the rest of the European Union countries have been having with procuring and administering vaccinations.

As of 15 March, 10,070.

As of 8 March, 10,017

As of 1 March, 9,933.

As of 22 February, 9,857.

As of 15 February, 9,693.

As of 8 February, 9,623.

As of 1 February, 9,662.

As of 25 January, 9,739.

As of 18 January, 9,727.

As of 11 January, 9, 860.

As of 4 January, 9,595.

As of 28 December, 9,057.

As of 21 December, 8,414.

As of 14 December, 7,815.

As of 7 December, 7,049.

As of 30 November, 6,201.

As of 23 November, 5,706.

As of 16 November, 5,040.

As of 9 November, 4,516.

A YEAR AGO IN COLD SPRING SHOPS.

Wait the gerontocracy out.  "I suppose that's the one blessing that so many senior members of the current political class are as old as they are, they won't be in charge for as long."  That's right, dear reader, I was losing patience with two weeks to slow the spread as it became a third week ...

FRIDAY SHORT TAKES.

1.  Paul Mirengoff recognizes that "Footie is popular with eight-year-old girls in the United States, and adolescent males all over the Third World."  Some of those eight-year-old girls, not so much.  "American men must compete with the best of these boys when they become men. Nothing comparable exists for women."  Unfortunately, neither Megan Rapinoe nor Joe Biden seem to understand that everybody who is likely to be guilt-tripped into watching women's sports is already watching, and a different value proposition might better attract a broader audience.

2.  Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has half of the U.S. News problem in higher education identified.  "The solution to the college scramble is on the supply side. If we had consistently excellent, affordable, well-funded public institutions large enough and numerous enough to handle demand, much of the scramble would go away. The U.S. did that, decades ago -- the mad scramble didn’t start in earnest until the 1980s -- and I’m told Canada still does."  His focus might be -- his salary depends on it -- on the missing public funding that might have made the public universities more affordable.  Without the shift of focus from excellence to diversity and inclusion, the scramble might have been less necessary, and people who could pay full freight at the public universities might have done so, rather than load up on Harvard Prep Day Care and all the rest.

3.  Speaking of the deleterious effects of diversity and inclusion, the most deleterious might be in the exemption that mind-set enloys from ordinary academic skepticism.  "I have learned that anything protected from critique cannot itself stand up to scrutiny. And since scrutiny of the assumptions and assertions of [the woke ethos] and anti-racism are not allowed and do not occur, a one-party orthodoxy is the result—an equity totalitarianism."  Like any other Established Church, it will face dissidents, whether the archdeacons like it or not.

4.  Better late than never.  "Experts could demand to know why politicians are closing playgrounds or banning outdoor dining, particularly when these interventions were reinstituted months after we knew better."

5.  Sometimes the only intellectual argument is "sod off."  "It is past time to 'disregard' COVID rules that prevent students from enjoying their college experience."

6.  The regressive tax called coronavirus mitigation.  "A year or so into the pandemic, the world is a poorer place filled with poorer people than was the case before COVID-19 appeared. Part of this was the inevitable result of people voluntarily pulling in their horns to avoid infection, but much of it resulted from government-imposed lockdown orders as public health experts engaged in a panic-stricken effort to stop the virus's spread through the force of law."  Unfortunately, ruling classes, including technocrats in lab coats, are unlikely to give up their powers voluntarily.  "Capitalism can only make us prosperous in a world that allows the freedom to enjoy its benefits."

ANOTHER HYPOTHESIS TO TEST.

We're still on a data watch for Easter Monday.  The panic-mongers are raising yet another future hue and cry.  "Disregard for public health measures from spring breakers and pandemic-weary tourists in South Florida will likely result in a spike of COVID-19 cases, health experts say."  Those experts are basing their warnings on contagion models.  Enough said.  If we hear the dogs barking next weekend, perhaps we'll credit them for anticipating yet another surge.  "The palace-guard media will do whatever they can to call attention to any spike in infections, whether it's valid or not. If you hear crickets, draw your own conclusion."

ELECTRICITY KEEPING ITS OWN BOOKS.

A promotional effort for Texas Central's bullet trains includes a green claim.  "Texas high-speed trains utilize regenerative braking technology to recapture spent energy."  That's an old concept.  The technical challenge more recently is in running power through inverters and choppers and then back again so as to be able to return the power to the catenary in a way that permitted setting back the electric meter.

WELCOME TO THE AGE OF FEAR.

Jonathan Cook discovers why "it's for your own good" is scary.

Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.

Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.

He's a Briton, with a different notion of enumerated, limited, and separated government powers, and yet he gets that surrendering liberty for security ultimately yields neither.

The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislation—against noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protest—is being passed in states across the United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must not disturb.

That might be a warning shot toward advocates of progressive intolerance.

Large sections of the population are happy to see speech rights stripped from those they don't like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a "nuisance" or are "too noisy" in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathy—especially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.

For that matter, shaming people daring to have fun outside because they're not wearing their Fauci filters has become a thing, particularly if the fun doesn't go along with Approved Opinion.  I wonder if Mr Cook remembers the Brezhnev era of politicized schizophrenia.

Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one's irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.

He doesn't ever write "corona tyranny,' and yet, that's what it is.

Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.

Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public health.

Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-science—or whatever other pretext they think will play best with the "responsible" public as they seek to cling to power.

And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemic—and the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with it—for as long as possible.

Better late than never to recognize that dictatorial officials have been stretching out the regulations for at least a year now.

GENTRIFIERS ARE NOT SUFFICIENTLY RESPECTFUL OF DIVERSITY.

In an Austin, Texas, neighborhood, the incoming upscale tenants confront a local tradition.

After a few loops around the park, some drivers—most of them Black and Latino men in their twenties and thirties driving customized lowriders, bright, candy-colored slabs, and jacked-up trucks with flashy chrome rims—packed into a nearby middle school parking lot. Some unloaded barbecue grills, toddlers, and pit bulls, then cracked open beers, and blasted Texas hip-hop and Tejano music. Others joined a slow-moving carousel that flowed from the parking lot into the street and back again, swerving from side to side and occasionally screeching their tires, unleashing plumes of white smoke that covered the block in a light haze.

The impromptu car shows have been a thing for years. The Texas Monthly-reading yuppies are new to the neighborhood. Coasian bargaining is not invariant to initial endowments.

Some variation of this assembly has taken place nearly every Sunday afternoon since the early nineties. But now many residents of The Weaver, a newly built luxury apartment building across the street—whose website promises renters access to a “community that is rich in history and tradition”—have decided it’s time for the weekly event to come to an unceremonious end. Some of the building’s residents defend the car club gatherings and note they predate The Weaver residents’ arrival in the neighborhood, but many others have grown tired of the loud music, annoyed by the traffic, and turned off by the smell of skidding tires. One particularly vocal tenant, a non-Hispanic white woman with short blond hair who appeared to be in her fifties, claimed that smoke from the tires was killing nearby trees and that traffic from the gathering would make it impossible for an ambulance to reach her in the event of a medical emergency (though two other roads to the apartment building remain accessible at all times). Another Weaver resident voiced more generalized criticism, calling the event a “display of toxic masculinity.”

Time to convene a struggle session: what is the correct intersectional response to young men of varying colors having fun with souped-up cars?

“[W]e should shut this thing down,” a third resident, who blamed the lack of police response on the “idiotic” city council’s decision to slash the Austin Police Department’s budget, wrote in March on a building forum. Indeed, at a recent gathering, a non-Hispanic white tenant had flagged two police vehicles and pleaded with officers to disband the celebration, calling it “scary.” The officers eventually drove off without taking any action. Even though the event sometimes violates noise and traffic ordinances, it doesn’t pose major threats to anyone in The Weaver, nor does it break other city rules.

That's priceless, although it's precisely the sort of social friction that accompanies rising real estate values we've been noting for years.

The conflict between residents of The Weaver and the car club is a microcosm of a larger struggle between professionals newly arriving in Texas, many of them tech workers, and the Black and Latino neighborhoods across East Austin that the newcomers are transforming through gentrification. With large tech companies including Apple, Oracle, and Samsung expanding operations in Austin, and many more making plans to relocate there, such conflicts have accelerated during the pandemic. Surrounded by new neighbors, many native Austinites say they’re often made to feel unwelcome in their own communities. For the car clubs, which gather in public parks on the front lines of gentrification, the feeling has been especially amplified.

There's a lot more at the article, and much of it suggests that woke wine women aren't as enthusiastic about diversity when it rolls up to the local park as they might be at work.

CONFLATING STOCKS AND FLOWS.

Tax-'n-spend Democrats have control of the presidency^* and both houses of Congress, and they're all about wanting to make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.  Perhaps  I'm too much the purist, expecting an incidence analysis to stratify tax receipts by income quintiles (deciles would be better, but that's how the empirical research goes) and then, with something resembling a good estimate of the share of taxes paid by the higher income earners, we could have a good common-room lunch session about what share was fair, or not.

THE INFORMATION CONTENT OF PRICES.

Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux wonders if economics, as a discipline, is burdening the discourse with too many technical terms.  I fear that he starts with a forced distinction.

Everyone agrees that if Sarah negligently drives her car physically into Silas’s car and thereby inflicts on it $1,000 worth of damage, Sarah violates Silas’s property right in his car and should compensate him for the damage. But suppose, instead, that Sarah, by agreeing to put her car up for sale, causes the price for which Silas can sell his car to fall by $1,000. Although the negative effect in the second example of Sarah’s action on Silas’s welfare is identical to the negative effect of Sarah’s action in the first example, only in the first example does Sarah incur an obligation to take account of the consequences on Silas of her action.

In the first case, the crash has affected the resale value of Silas's car, yes, although assigning liability for damaging a car is not the same as putting portfolio insurance on the car price. Gosh, there could be quite the common-room lunch question here, if anybody still meets for lunch in the common-room. In the second case, what does that price drop say about the supply and demand elasticities for used cars? But I'm getting pretty far from my story. Maybe it would be fun to crash a common-room lunch at George Mason to push what comes next a little.

Impressed by this difference separating example one from example two, economists call the consequence of the first of Sarah’s actions – her negligently causing physical damage to Silas’s property – a “technological externality,” while calling the consequence of the second of her actions a “pecuniary externality.”

I must confess to getting all the way through graduate training in public economics and a career with occasional incursions into environmental and public policy stuff without ever once encountering a "technological" externality, although I did encounter liability rules, and there's got to be a way to disrupt that lunch gathering with some comment about information technologies providing network externalities, but again, I'm getting away from my story.

Economists then proceed to wonder why the law requires compensation only for technological externalities but not for pecuniary externalities. After all, in both cases Sarah’s action harms Silas without his permission.

The answer economists give is this: The benefits to society from actions that cause technological externalities are generally lower than are the costs to persons who suffer technological externalities, while the benefits to society from actions that cause pecuniary externalities are generally higher than are the costs to persons who suffer pecuniary externalities. And so to ensure maximum possible economic growth – or, to increase the social welfare – the law punishes technological externalities but tolerates pecuniary ones.

That's one approach to take, I suppose. Might it be simpler to say something about liability being present in the case of the crash in a different way than it is in the car market, that is, when Sarah causes a car crash, she is in a different position with respect to Silas than she is when she puts a car on the market? Silas, after all, can cause the same $1000 capital loss to Sarah by putting his car up for sale. I think that's where the professor is going.

Yes, Sarah’s decision to sell her car decreased the market value of Silas’s car. But Silas has no property claim to his car’s previous market value. Silas, being a reasonable person (as we must assume him to be), knows that the market value of his car can change in response to the economic decisions made by strangers. Stated differently, Silas expects, with some probability greater than zero, that the market value of his car will fall. Therefore, Sarah’s decision to sell her car was already “internalized” on Silas. He took account of this possibility in his earlier decisions regarding what kind of car to buy and how long to maintain his ownership of that vehicle.

It might be simpler to recognize that pecuniary externalities are precisely what markets are about, because the prices that come out of market exchange are information available to active or inactive sellers alike.  Whether you call that information "pecuniary externality" or "banana" might not be relevant.

But to show why “pecuniary externalities” is a mistaken concept, we need to do more than note that Silas’s expectations include the possibility that the market value of his car will fall because others might sell cars in competition with him. Another factor in play is that Silas would not want to be relieved of this expectation if such relief meant that everyone enjoyed relief of this expectation. To relieve everyone of the expectation of the possibility that the market value of their cars will fall would require that Silas himself no longer be free to offer his car for sale whenever doing so might cause a fall in the price of Sarah’s or Steve’s car.

Because Silas (it is reasonable to assume) wants the right to sell his car whenever he chooses and at whatever price he can fetch, he cannot legitimately assert ethical or legal standing to prevent Sarah from exercising the same right over her car. By giving this right to all persons, the law effectively recognizes that everyone under its jurisdiction agrees that all people have a right to sell their cars even if some car-selling actions harm some people at particular points in time by causing the market values of their cars to fall.

The law, therefore, doesn’t merely tolerate “pecuniary externalities” on the grounds that such toleration promotes economic growth. Rather, the law treats each person as ‘purchasing’ the right to sell his or her car by giving to all other persons the right to sell their cars. The law, in short – and unlike most economists – understands that “pecuniary externalities” are not externalities at all. They are mirages in economists’ minds.

Alternatively, perhaps the Welfare Economics Paradigm approach to teaching economics has some value.  If, as the general equilibrium theorists tell us, an externality-free competitive equilibrium is Pareto efficient, and it is helpful to divide problems of costly information, with some information costs producing price discovery and pecuniary externalities amenable to supply and demand analysis, whilst other information costs generating liabilities amenable to Coasian bargaining and assignment of property rights, and the set of information problems warranting direct government intervention accordingly becomes more narrowly defined.

Now that we've settled all that, shall we take up the monopoly that produces a negative nonpecuniary externality?

YOU HAVE TO DISRUPT THE SLIPSTREAM.

The two-seam fastball does so more effectively than the four-seam pitch.  "Because of this, the maximum amount of drag can be achieved, and after a certain number of rotations, enough negative Magnus effect force will have been built up to cause a sudden downward pull."  Not that my eyes, let alone my reflexes, are good enough to pick up the visual signature of the pitch.  "The four-seamer on the other hand is a repeated interval of seam and no-seam ball surface, which isn’t enough to generate a negative Magnus force."

In baseball, as in economics, it is often what goes on at the margins that is most important.

A TITLE DEFENDED.

Good evening, hockey fans, may I present this season's women's collegiate champions.

Here are the highlights.  David Hookstead correctly characterizes the winning goal as an "insane final shot."  Off the defender, from behind the net.  "I have no idea how the hell she did that, but that’s one of the craziest goals that I’ve ever seen in my life." Play Jump Around!

Patrick Kane himself could probably pick up a trick or two from that sort of playing keep-away with the puck.

Because of last year's total shutdown of the collegiate tournaments, the 2021 winners are repeat champions.

ONE. TWO. THREE. FOUR. FIVE. SIX. 

WE. WANT. MORE.

Well done, kids.

IT'S WORLD WATER DAY.

There's some United Nations effort under that rubric.  It's about what you'd expect.  "Today, 785 million people are living without access to safe water, while 2 billion people are living without access to a toilet."

In the same way that the waters prevailed, the words will prevail.  Jump in, the water is fine.

WE'RE DONE WITH THIS.

Kurt Schlichter sees the corona tyrants for the losers they are.

Why would anyone enjoy this idiocy? Limits on your freedom, hectoring pests, nitwits riding around in their Priuses with face diapers wrapped around their talk-holes… it’s an abomination. Yet there’s this slice of the populace that gets into it. They resist a return to normalcy because their normal lives were not that great to begin with and this is the most exciting thing that will ever happen to them.

Also, "[T]he better adjusted among us put that nonsense aside pretty quickly."  Exactly.