Links to Consider, 6/15

Nick Gillespie and David Boaz; Allison Schrager defends neoliberalism; N.S. Lyons on the Ford Foundation; me on philanthropy in general

From Nick Gillespie’s last interview with David Boaz. Boaz says,

I would love to see a fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist party. I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way. But the two parties are controlled by, more or less, their extremes, and how do you break into that? My [former] colleague Andy Craig has thought a lot about election reforms. I never thought much about them. I always figured if there's enough libertarians, they'll make themselves felt within whatever political system. But maybe something like ranked choice voting, not so much that it would help libertarians, but that it might hurt extremists and get more of a consensus candidate.

And hey, when I was a young guy, I didn't ever think I'd be looking for a consensus centrist country.

Allison Schrager writes,

What do I mean by neoliberalism? It means many things to many people—it has become synonymous with die-hard devotion to markets—but it is really just accepting that policies introduce trade-offs, prices convey important information, governments aren’t great at picking winners, and free trade is the closest thing we’ve got to a free lunch. And this has largely been proven true. That does not mean everything is perfect. Opening trade to a country as large as China that has so much cheap labor has caused displacement, and policymakers should have done more for the affected communities. And we learned during the pandemic that we are maybe too dependent on China, though we should not be dependent on any one country, including ourselves. But still, the benefits by far outweigh the costs—we can now appreciate how great things like 40 years of low inflation were.

At the Manhattan Institute conference last week, I explained how the new consensus operates under the assumption that there are no trade-offs or costs to their favored policies. It seems to assume that debt is costless, less trade makes us stronger, and industrial policy does not create distortions.

If you hate neoliberalism, wait until you see what replaces it.

N.S. Lyons writes, (alternatively, here)

the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people,” she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city,” surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power.”

Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant—one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice,” as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing—and often outright revolutionary—causes.

While Henry Ford would probably be rolling over in this grave over some of these left-wing causes, he probably would be pleased to see his foundation funding Jew-hatred.

I was interviewed about my take on non-profits. And here is the second part of the conversation.

I think that when they are funded by grass-roots contributions, non-profits are not too bad. Funded by large donors and you start to have problems. Non-profits that sponge off the government are the worst.

substacks referenced above:

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The Foundation of American Folly

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David Boaz, RIP