Beet L. Jooz

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The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday will begin its confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. If confirmed, Kavanaugh will replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. In his opening statement, Kavanaugh, echoing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, will say that a “good judge must be an umpire—a neutral and impartial arbiter who favors no litigant or policy.” Breitbart News will have live updates throughout the week. All times eastern.

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Assad was supposed to be gone already. President Obama thought it would be just another “regime change” operation and perhaps Assad would end up like Saddam Hussein or Yanukovych. Or maybe even Gaddafi. But he was supposed to be gone. The US spent billions to get rid of him and even provided weapons and training to the kinds of radicals that attacked the United States on 9/11.

But with the help of his allies, Assad has nearly defeated this foreign-sponsored insurgency.

The US fought him every step of the way. Each time the Syrian military approached another occupied city or province, Washington and its obedient allies issued the usual warnings that Assad was not liberating territory but was actually seeking to kill more of his own people.

Remember Aleppo, where the US claimed Assad was planning mass slaughter once he regained control? As usual the neocons and the media were completely wrong. Even the UN has admitted that with Aleppo back in the hands of the Syrian government hundreds of thousands of Syrians have actually moved back. We are supposed to believe they willingly returned so that Assad could kill them?

The truth is Aleppo is being rebuilt. Christians celebrated Easter there this spring for the first time in years. There has been no slaughter once al-Qaeda and ISIS’ hold was broken. Believe me, if there was a slaughter we would have heard about it in the media!

So now, with the Syrian military and its allies prepare to liberate the final Syrian province of Idlib, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo again warns the Syrian government against re-taking its own territory. He Tweeted on Friday that:

“The three million Syrians, who have already been forced out of their homes and are now in Idlib, will suffer from this aggression. Not good. The world is watching.”

President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has also warned the Syrian government that the US will attack if it uses gas in Idlib. Of course, that warning serves as an open invitation to rebels currently holding Idlib to set off another false flag and enjoy US air support.

Bolton and Pompeo are painting Idlib as a peaceful province resisting the violence of an Assad who they claim just enjoys killing his own people. But who controls Idlib province? President Trump’s own Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, Brett McGurk, said in Washington just last year that, “Idlib province is the largest al-Qaeda safe-haven since 9/11, tied to directly to Ayman al Zawahiri, this is a huge problem.”

Could someone please remind Pompeo and Bolton that al-Qaeda are the bad guys?

After six years of a foreign-backed regime-change operation in Syria, where hundreds of thousands have been killed and the country nearly fell into the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda, the Syrian government is on the verge of victory. Assad is hardly a saint, but does anyone really think al-Qaeda and ISIS are preferable? After all, how many Syrians fled the country when Assad was in charge versus when the US-backed “rebels” started taking over?

Americans should be outraged that Pompeo and Bolton are defending al-Qaeda in Idlib. It’s time for the neocons to admit they lost. It is time to give Syria back to the Syrians. It is time to pull the US troops from Syria. It is time to just leave Syria alone!

As Nike unveiled its new ad starring Colin Kaepernick, the ex-San Francisco 49ers QB turned lightning rod in the fight against police brutality, patrons of the sports brand began lashing out.

Within hours of the ad’s big reveal showing an intense black and white shot of Kaepernick over which are superimposed the words, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything,” Nike consumers began slashing their swooshes and setting fire to their sneakers.

First the @NFL forces me to choose between my favorite sport and my country. I chose country. Then @Nike forces me to choose between my favorite shoes and my country. Since when did the American Flag and the National Anthem become offensive? pic.twitter.com/4CVQdTHUH4

— Sean Clancy (@sclancy79) September 3, 2018

Even country music star, John Rich of Big & Rich, tweeted that his sound guy destroyed a pair of socks in protest, Rich warning, “Get ready @Nike.”

Our Soundman just cut the Nike swoosh off his socks. Former marine. Get ready @Nike multiply that by the millions. pic.twitter.com/h8kj6RXe7j

— John Rich (@johnrich) September 3, 2018

Other owners of the brand’s products went to far as to cut up their shoes and use them as tinder for a bonfire, hashtagging tweets of the acts with #RemovetheSwoosh, #IStandForTheAnthem and #maga2020.

Hey #Nike . I don’t wear politics or anything related to #ColinKaepernick I no longer buy 5 to 6 pairs per year of Air Monarch Black size 9 anymore either. Just do it? I did. I set my bunions free. #RemovetheSwoosh pic.twitter.com/68UuGMmIaD

— Twentyoz (@Twentyoz_) September 3, 2018

#Nike burn baby burn #IStandForTheAnthem #maga2020@Nike #AllLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/DluR1AgtsJ

— Freemen4liberty (@Liberty4Freemen) September 3, 2018

Kaepernick drew widespread attention when he began kneeling in 2016 at football games during the national anthem, using the move as a way to highlight ongoing oppression of communities of color. The demonstration has since become a hot button issue among both sides of the political aisle who have supported and decried Kaepernick’s actions, the Nike controversy only the latest example of the debate playing out among Americans.

[Image via screengrab]

The system has a 70 percent chance of developing over the next five days.

A judge nullified the original bidding process, which awarded the lease to Cafe du Monde.

In what we initially assumed was a satire piece, NBC News' 'fair and balanced' political chief Chuck Todd has taken to the auspiciously open-minded pages of The Atlantic to pen an op-ed  explaining how we've all got it all wrong - it is Fox News' Roger Ailes who is to blame for press distrust and in fact, it is time for the mainstream liberal media to 'rise up' and defend their work.

Presented with no comment (but some emphasis), here is Chuck Todd explaining that "It's time for the press to stop complaining... and start fighting back."

Via The Atlantic,

A nearly 50-year campaign of vilification, inspired by Fox News's Roger Ailes, has left many Americans distrustful of media outlets. Now, journalists need to speak up for their work.

I've devoted much of my professional life to the study of political campaigns, not as a historian or an academic but as a reporter and an analyst. I thought I’d seen it all, from the bizarre upset that handed a professional wrestler the governorship of Minnesota to the California recall that gave us the Governator to candidates who die but stay on the ballot and win.

But there’s a new kind of campaign underway, one that most of my colleagues and I have never publicly reported on, never fully analyzed, and never fully acknowledged: the campaign to destroy the legitimacy of the American news media.

Bashing the media for political gain isn’t new, and neither is manipulating the media to support or oppose a cause. These practices are at least as old as the Gutenberg press. But antipathy toward the media right now has risen to a level I’ve never personally experienced before. The closest parallel in recent American history is the hostility to reporters in the segregated South in the 1950s and ’60s.

Then, as now, that hatred was artificially stoked by people who found that it could deliver them some combination of fame, wealth, and power.

Some of the wealthiest members of the media are not reporters from mainstream outlets. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people. They are thriving financially by exploiting the very same free-press umbrella they seem determined to undermine.

Much of the current hand-wringing about this rise in press bashing and delegitimization has been focused on the president, who - as every reporter in America sadly knows - has declared the press the “enemy of the people.” But, like much else in the Trump era, Donald Trump didn’t start this fire; he’s only spread it to a potentially more dangerous place.

The modern campaign against the American press corps has its roots in the Nixon era. President Richard Nixon’s angry foot soldiers continued his fight against the media even after he left office.

Roger Ailes, who went on to help found Fox News, was the most important of those figures. His sustained assault on the press created the conditions that would allow a president to surround himself with aides who argue for “alternative facts,” and announce that “truth isn’t truth.” Without Ailes, a man of Trump’s background and character could never have won. Roger Ailes was the godfather of the Trump presidency.

Nixon’s acolytes blamed the press for drumming a good man out of office. From their perspective, his crimes were no different from the misdeeds of the Kennedys or Lyndon B. Johnson—but only Nixon was held to account. Did they blame this on Nixon? On the voters? No, they blamed the stars of the Watergate drama, the heroes of All the President’s Men. They blamed the media.

Enter Roger Ailes.

He first made his name by taking credit for Nixon’s rise in Joe McGinniss’s campaign book, The Selling of the President 1968. Ailes was a media genius who understood better than most how to use television to move people. There’s a fine line between motivating people through TV messages and simply manipulating them. Ailes’s gift, and the secret to his success, was his comfort in plunging across that line and embracing the role of TV manipulator.

He made his name as a political TV-ad man, one of the pioneers of the field, but he couldn’t help dabbling in news and talk. As a network programmer, Ailes excelled at matching a mood with an audience. From Mike Douglas to Limbaugh to, later, Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly, Ailes had a gift for promoting engaging, smart, man-of-the-people talkers.

In the early ’90s, while he was president of CNBC, Ailes had a hunch that an evening lineup catering to a culturally conservative audience would thrive. He wanted to give his theory a chance, but he was passed over for the leadership of the network’s new channel, MSNBC. Enter Rupert Murdoch. The mogul bought into Ailes’s theory, and in 1996 they launched Fox News with the slogan “Fair and balanced.”

From the very beginning, Ailes signaled that Fox News would offer an alternative voice, splitting with the conventions of television journalism. Take the word balanced. It sounded harmless enough. But how does one balance facts? A reporting-driven news organization might promise to be accurate, or honest, or comprehensive, or to report stories for an underserved community. But Ailes wasn’t building a reporting-driven news organization. The promise to be “balanced” was a coded pledge to offer alternative explanations, putting commentary ahead of reporting; it was an attack on the integrity of the rest of the media. Fox intended to build its brand the same way Ailes had built the brands of political candidates: by making the public hate the other choice more.

Ailes’s greatest gift as a political strategist lay not in making his clients more electable, but in making their opponents unelectable. His last formal presidential campaign was in 1988. Then–Vice President George H. W. Bush was on his way to defeat when Ailes helped orchestrate a devastating campaign against Michael Dukakis, exploiting a series of superficial issues that touched many voters’ cultural beliefs and fears about everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to furloughs for violent felons. Ailes helped destroy Dukakis by making him seem an other to many Americans.

Fox News adopted a similar strategy, rarely showcasing its own reporting or journalism. There are some great journalists at Fox, including Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, and Shep Smith, but it’s not an organization that emphasizes journalism. Instead, Ailes created an organization that focuses on attacking the “liberal media” whose “liberal bias” was ruining America. Almost anybig story that was potentially devastating to a conservative was “balanced” with some form of whataboutism. The Ailes construction has been so effective that these days, I often get mail from viewers who say: Now that you’ve focused on all of President Trump’s misdeeds, you are biased if you don’t dedicate the same amount of time to Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds. It seems completely lost on this segment of the population that one person is the leader of the free world, and the other is a retiree living in the suburbs of New York City. Because journalists report on new and controversial ideas all the time, it’s not uncommon for us to be accused of championing an idea—think of same-sex marriage—that some members of our audience find objectionable. Letting folks know that a movement is afoot, and documenting its successes and failures, is our job. But Ailes exploited the public’s lack of knowledge of journalistic conventions, portraying reports aboutsocial change as advocacy for such change. He played up cultural fears, creating the mythology of a biased press.

Reporters, I fully acknowledge, bring their own biases to their work. The questions they ask, and the stories they pursue, are shaped by things as simple as geography. I grew up in Miami; I follow Cuban politics more closely than many other Americans did. As a result, when I covered the White House, I was more likely than my colleagues to ask questions about Cuba. A New York–based reporter may approach reporting on guns, or on evangelical Christianity, differently than a reporter in Pensacola, Florida.

The charge of media bias can encompass a great many different problems. Critics, for example, may be pointing to the way that certain journalists pay more attention to some issues than to others, or complaining about the unquestioned assumptions reflected in journalists’ work. These are real issues, and most journalists labor to correct them. At the other extreme, critics may be accusing journalists of having deliberately and consciously shaped their reporting to serve some political end. That sort of overt bias is far rarer. Ironically, the best example of this kind of bias airs regularly in prime time on Fox News.   

But this was the genius of Roger Ailes. He didn’t sweat the nuance; he exploited it. Errors of omission and commission, inadvertent inattention and willful disregard, unconscious assumptions and deliberate distortions—Ailes collapsed all of it into the single charge of bias.

And what did we reporters do in the face of this cable onslaught that would eventually turn into a social-media virus and lead us to the election of the most fact-free presidential candidate in American history? Nothing.

We did nothing, because we were trained to say nothing. Good reporters know that they have to let the chips fall where they may, and that criticism comes with the gig. We know that the loudest squealers are usually the ones we’ve exposed doing something untoward—and that eventually they’ll get theirs.

“Don’t engage” is a phrase I’ve heard internally at NBC over the decade I’ve been here. And “Don’t engage” was a mantra that I actually believed in. I embraced it. On most days, I still want to believe that eventually, the truth will matter. That eventually, folks will see through the silly name-calling and recognize good reporting.

In fact, we not only failed to defend our work in real time from this onslaught; we helped accelerate the campaign to delegitimize the American press corps. From unforced errors by high-profile anchors to the biggest missed news story of the 21st century—the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—we have handed critics some lethal ammunition. There’s not a serious journalist alive who hasn’t had one of those “gulp” moments when you realize that you really messed up. But serious journalists correct the record, serious journalistic organizations allow themselves to be held to account, own up to mistakes, and learn from them so they can do a better job the next time. I’m fully aware that some entity will try to tarnish this piece simply because I work at a news organization that, yes—gasp—has made mistakes. Here’s what comforts me: The record is there for all to see. The same can’t be said for the manipulators who aren’t playing by any set of serious journalistic rules.

The American press corps finds itself on the ropes because it allowed a nearly 50-year campaign of attacks inspired by the chair of Fox News to go unanswered.

If you hear something over and over again, you start to believe it, particularly if the charge is unrebutted. The Trump team now keeps pounding this message, compounding the challenge. And the president faces little penalty with his voters, no matter how disparagingly he talks about the press corps; it’s precisely what Ailes conditioned them to believe.

For me, idle death threats are now the norm. (I don’t take them seriously, because if I did, I’d never feel at peace.) But forget the personal animus or safety issues reporters now face. American democracy requires a functioning press that informs voters and creates a shared set of facts. If journalists are going to defend the integrity of their work, and the role it plays in sustaining democracy, we’re going to need to start fighting back.

The idea that our work will speak for itself is hopelessly naive. Fox, Limbaugh, and the rest of the Trump echo chamber have proved that. Meanwhile, even in Ailes’s absence, Fox seems more comfortable than ever pushing the limits of responsible behavior by a supposed news organization. It recently allowed a sitting state attorney general to co-host a show for three days. The network effectively gave a GOP candidate for Florida governor nearly unfettered access to its airwaves during his primary campaign, providing a more significant boost than any super pac can offer. The fact that so few viewers batted an eye shows how conditioned they have become to the network’s unique ethical standards.

Does this mean that other cable-news networks should follow Fox News’s lead and become advocates? That’s not the answer. Newspapers did this in the early 19th century, when they operated as arms of the political parties. And while American democracy survived, the polarization of the early republic produced threats, brandished weapons, and even open violence on the floors of Congress with shocking regularity.

Instead of attacking rivals, or assailing critics—going negative,in the parlance of political campaigns—reporters need to showcase and defend our reporting. Every day, we need to do our job, check our facts, strive to be transparent, and say what we’re seeing. That’s what I’ve tried to do here. I’ve seen a nearly 50-year campaign to delegitimize the press, and I’m saying so. For years, I didn’t say a word about this publicly, and at times I even caught myself drawing false equivalencies because I was afraid of being labeled as biased. I know that stating the obvious will draw attacks, but I’ve also learned that the louder critics bark, the more they care about what’s being reported.

I’m not advocating for a more activist press in the political sense, but for a more aggressive one. That means having a lower tolerance for talking points, and a greater willingness to speak plain truths. It means not allowing ourselves to be spun, and not giving guests or sources a platform to spin our readers and viewers, even if that angers them. Access isn’t journalism’s holy grail—facts are.  

The truth is that most journalists, in newsrooms large and small across the country, are doing their best each day to be fair, honest, and direct. These values are what Americans demand of one another, and it should be what they demand of their media. The challenge for viewers and readers is this: Ask yourself why someone is so determined to convince you not to believe your lying eyes.  

*  *  *

Congratulations Chuck, Orwell would be proud.

Authored by Robert Murphy via The Mises Institute,

In a recent column titled, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Unfreedom,”Paul Krugman lambasted libertarians for equating “freedom” with minimal government. He ridiculed the recently updated Cato index that ranks the 50 U.S. states according to their "freedom" defined in this fashion. Because he lives in New York state—which came in dead last in the Cato ranking—Krugman sarcastically asked a “comrade commissar” in his piece for permission to talk, and in his tweet promoting the column, Krugman said he was writing “from the socialist hellhole of Manhattan.” Besides mocking the (apparent) libertarian claim that New York state was somehow dangerously low in freedom, Krugman’s substantive point was that Americans value other things besides freedom from government intervention. For example, workers in New York state might enjoy the relatively strong unions and Medicaid coverage. Yet as I’ll point out, Krugman’s column is riddled with problems — even his jokes blow up in his face.

Krugman Is “Free” From Self-Awareness

Before diving into the meat of the dispute, let me note something hilarious: Literally the day after Krugman mocks the Cato Institute for ranking U.S. states according to their freedom—such that the state in last place, New York, must be a “socialist hellhole” ha ha—Krugman wrote a column warning his readers that freedom was on the verge of disappearing in America:

As you can see in the screenshot above of Krugman’s archive, on Aug. 26 he pooh-poohed the libertarian warnings about Big Government, and then on Aug. 27 Krugman was warning about autocracy coming in the back door.

What makes Krugman’s 24-hour turnabout even more hilarious is that his Aug. 27 piece relies on alleged examples of Republicans in state governments violating democratic principles. So to sum up: Krugman says the Cato Institute is a bunch of paranoid nutjobs for arguing that New York state has the lowest freedom in the country, but Krugman is allowed to argue that the Republicans in (say) North Carolina are implementing our version of European fascism.

Having Fun With Statistics

In order to show just how (supposedly) silly the Cato study is, Krugman produces a scatter plot pitting the Cato score of a state’s “freedom” against that state’s infant mortality rate. He displays his chart with the following commentary:

The other day I had some fun with the Cato Institute index of economic freedom across states, which finds Florida the freest and New York the least free. (Is it OK for me to write this, comrade commissar?) As I pointed out, freedom Cato-style seems to be associated with, among other things, high infant mortality. Live free and die! (New Hampshire is just behind Florida.)

Before pointing out the problems with it, let’s make sure we understand Krugman’s ostensible point: In the x-axis above, we have a state’s Cato freedom score. (The higher the number, the more freedom.) The y-axis shows the infant mortality rate; the higher the score, the more infants who die. Although he doesn’t mention it in the column, if you follow the link you’ll see Krugman explain that the size of the dot is proportional to a state’s population; that’s why California is so big.

So Krugman is arguing that there is a positive correlation between these two variables, meaning that as you increase a state’s freedom (as Cato measures it), you tend to get a higher infant mortality. Thus, Krugman thinks he has shown just how silly this measure is, and why serious analysts shouldn’t be so simple-minded in focusing on libertarian objectives.

There are several problems with Krugman’s (tongue-in-cheek) analysis. First, notice the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that I put in bold in the quotation above: Krugman tweaks New Hampshire’s “Live Free Or Die” motto, to say “Live Free AND Die,” and then adds, “New Hampshire is just behind Florida.”

But hang on a second. New Hampshire is just behind Florida in its ranking of freedom; that’s why New Hampshire is almost as far to the right as Florida is. (In other words, New Hampshire is ranked #2 in the Cato list, while Florida is #1.)

Yet ironically, as Krugman’s own chart shows, New Hampshire has just about the lowest infant mortality of the 50 states. (This CDC ranking says in 2016 New Hampshire’s infant mortality was the second-lowest in the country, behind only Vermont.)

Thus, Krugman’s joke doesn’t make any sense. The state whose motto he is mocking does indeed live up to its reputation of freedom; it is ranked #2 according to Cato’s measure. Yet it also has the second-lowest rate of infant mortality too. Yet someone reading Krugman’s column and seeing “New Hampshire is just behind Florida,” in conjunction with Krugman’s joke, might have assumed Krugman meant that New Hampshire had a bad mortality rate. (After all, it doesn’t make sense for Krugman to be pointing out New Hampshire on the chart if it completely violated his “point.”)

Stepping back, even the scatter plot as a whole, doesn’t really accomplish what Krugman wants. Visually, he is seeing what he wants to see: Krugman thinks it’s clear (especially if you read his tweet about it) that the best-fit line would be upward sloping in the chart. Yet that is largely because of New York and California. If you exclude them from the analysis, the remaining cloud of states looks like it might exhibit a downward slope.

We don’t need to speculate. I asked Jason Sorens, one of the co-authors on the Cato study, to crunch the numbers. He did it a few different ways. First, he included all of the states, and found that the correlation (specifically, the Pearson coefficient) between infant mortality and “freedom” was 0.20. (Keep in mind that a correlation of 1.00 occurs when two variables are perfectly positively linearly correlated, while 0.00 means they are not at all linearly correlated.) Even here, the correlation wasn’t statistically significant; there was too much variability / not enough data points to be confident in the observed relationship.

Sorens also checked my intuition: If you remove NY and CA from the data, then the correlation between infant mortality and “freedom” drops to 0.07 (meaning no real relationship one way or the other). Finally, Sorens did what he thought was the most sensible adjustment: He kept the data for all 50 states, but he controlled for a state being in the South, and for per capita income. Doing that, the correlation between infant mortality and “freedom” drops to 0.03.

Obviously, what is happening here is that there are omitted variables. It’s not that freedom per se “causes” a state to have a higher infant mortality rate. For whatever reason, in recent years, states with relatively more freedom also happen to have higher infant mortality rates, though the correlation is very weak.

Calling Krugman’s Bluff

Now I imagine Krugman would say, “Exactly! That’s my point! You libertarians narrowly look at the world in terms of freedom—as you define it, meaning freedom from government meddling in your personal life and business — but there’s more to life than Ayn Rand. If a Big Government uses its regulations and tax receipts to, say, guarantee health care and good schools, then we would expect to see high quality of life go hand-in-hand with low scores of economic freedom.”

Yet if this is the general argument Krugman would pursue, he runs into a problem. Even though he can find particular correlations that are amusing—such as looking at the most recent infant mortality data just among the 50 U.S. states—then sure, it looks like focusing narrowly on “freedom” is goofy.

But places like the Fraser Institute and Heritage Foundation have produced global rankings of countries, and there are dozens if not hundreds of empirical studies showing that “economic freedom” at the national level is indeed statistically associated with all sorts of desirable social indicators. (To avoid confusion, the Cato measure of “freedom” is broad, whereas the Fraser and Heritage rankings focus specifically on economic freedom.)

Back in 2009, Lawrence McQuillan and I did a study for Pacific Research Institute, titled “The Sizzle of Economic Freedom,” that summarized some of these findings. The full study is available here. For example, using samples covering several continents and decades of observations (the details differ from study to study), we described studies that showed economic freedom being associated with higher personal income, lower unemployment rates, faster economic growth, more business startups, and more macroeconomic stability.

This was perhaps expected. But we also showed that economic freedom was positively associated with lower levels of inequality, a cleaner environment, lower childhood mortality rates, higher life expectancies at birth, and higher measures of political freedom. (For more research along these lines, check out Fraser’s pagededicated to its freedom index.)

Which States Do Workers Prefer? Voting With Their Feet

To drive home his main point, Krugman contrasts the different forms of power/freedom that citizens in New York face, compared to Florida. (Remember that New York scored lowest on Cato’s ranking, while Florida scored the highest.)

But seriously, do the real differences between New York and Florida make New Yorkers less free? New York is a highly unionized state...Does this make NY workers less free, or does it empower them in the face of corporate power?

Also, New York has expanded Medicaid and tried to make the ACA exchanges work, so that only 8 percent of nonelderly adults are uninsured, compared with 18 percent in Florida. Are New Yorkers chafing under the heavy hand of health law, or do they feel freer knowing that they’re at much less risk of being ruined by medical emergency – or cast into the abyss if they lose their job?

If you’re a highly paid professional, it probably doesn’t make much difference. But my guess is that most workers feel at least somewhat freer in New York than they do in FL. [Krugman, bold added.]

Well, I guess it would be hard to truly get inside everybody’s head, but here’s a simple test to see which set of policies people prefer: Look at where they live. Namely, if we tend to see people moving out of states with high taxes and excessive regulations, and into states with low taxes and light regulations, then that’s pretty good evidence that Krugman is dead wrong.

Fortunately, we have a convenient map of net domestic migration that we can grab from this Business Insider article:

What this map shows is the net domestic migration into or out of a state, as a fraction of the state’s population. So to be clear, these figures exclude immigration from abroad, and just keep track of how many people “internally” moved into or out of a state, from July 1, 2016 to July 1, 2017. Positive numbers mean more people moved into a state, and negative numbers mean more people moved out, on net.

If you compare this map with Krugman’s scatter plot, you can see a general pattern: the states with low levels of economic freedom (i.e. the ones on the left in Krugman’s plot) tend to be losing population, i.e. have negative numbers in the map. For example, California lost 3.5 out of 1,000 of its population if we just consider domestic migration, while New York lost a whopping 9.6 residents out of 1,000.

In contrast, the states with high levels of economic freedom are gaining people. For example, Florida gained 7.8 per 100 residents, and New Hampshire gained 3.5.

You can try it the other way, too. For example, the Business Insider map shows that Wyoming lost 14.7 out of 1,000 of its population (in terms of internal migration).  The Cato interactive map indicates that Wyoming was ranked #38 in economic freedom (i.e. toward the bottom). In contrast, Arizona gained 9.1 per 1000 population (in this measure), and the Cato ranking says it has a freedom ranking of #9 in the country.

Now to be sure, there are some problems with my approach. Most serious, I believe that the way these calculations work, border states like California (but also Texas) get “dinged” because they have large flows of foreign immigrants coming in, who then eventually might move to internal states. Even so, that type of issue doesn’t explain away the clear pattern that holds even among the internal states.

More generally, I recognize that there are other factors at play, besides economic freedom. For example, distant places like Hawaii and Canada might have a net outflow simply because many people who are born in those states end up moving away at some point, for reasons that aren’t really due to “the low degree of economic freedom in my hometown.”

Despite these caveats, I think the aggregate flow of population among the 50 states is a much better indicator of how people subjectively evaluate the pros and cons of economic freedom. And it seems as if they tend to flock to the states that do better on Cato’s ranking. People do indeed seem to be fleeing the “socialist hellhole” where Krugman resides.

Indeed, this isn’t just my theory. I once read a Nobel economist who said:

But all too many blue states end up, in practice, letting zoning be a tool, not of good land use, but of NIMBYism, preventing the construction of new housing.

In fact, liberal (in the non-political sense) land use policy is probably the secret behind Texas economic growth: the state doesn’t offer high wages, but it does offer cheap housing even in huge metro areas.

Who was this mystery economist, who argues that Texas’ minimal zoning regulations explain its strong economy? Long-time readers know that when I’m being coy, it’s because I’m quoting Paul Krugman to make my point.

Conclusion

Paul Krugman tried to mock the idea that a ranking of U.S. states by economic freedom was a useful exercise. He put words in the authors’ mouths by sarcastically saying New York must be a “socialist hellhole”—even though literally the next day, Krugman pointed to the behavior of a few state legislatures to argue that American democracy was on the verge of disappearing.

More substantively, Krugman argued that “freedom” was only one of several things important to Americans, and that a strong government could provide other desirable goods—such as protection from employers and health insurance. Yet empirical studies show that over long stretches and across multiple countries, economic freedom really is positively associated with all sorts of measures, including not just income and GDP growth, but also a cleaner environment, lower childhood mortality, and measures of political freedom.

Finally, even if we restrict our attention to the U.S., we see that Americans tend to move out of low-freedom states and into high-freedom states. Believe it or not, Prof. Krugman, most people don’t share your enthusiasm for Big Government.