For all practical purposes, except for US-PR/US-Hawaii Jones Act trade, the US has no merchant marine. It would be interesting if Trump restricted cargo offloading to US ships, absent a treaty with another nation. Other than the Navy, the US maritime culture has been lost. Other than the very limited Jones Act trade, we have port pilots, tugboat captains and recreational boating. That's not a recipe for "dominance at sea."
There's a fundamental difference - restaurants checking if you like wine on Instagram to enhance service is optional and consequence-free, while China's system is mandatory with significant legal and financial penalties.
Until they start denying people service because they expressed support for the wrong political party or took the wrong side on a divisive social issue.
Their social credit system doesn't actually exist in the way most people think it does, it was a top down mandate that each province was expected to implement in their own way, often without coordination.
Compare this crash to the Emirates crash in Dubai (EK 521, 2016). In the Emirates incident, the passengers stalled the evacuation in order to grab their carry-ons. Many were seen on the tarmac dragging roll-aboards. Here the passengers chose life over property and efficiently evacuated the aircraft.
> He would have eliminated dozens of federal agencies; perhaps 80% of them.
Most licensing is state level. That’s why you so often hear that someone is only licensed to practice in a certain state.
Eliminating federal agencies wouldn’t change anything about how, for example, your barber is licensed.
Friedman also wrote for an entirely different era. The world has changed a lot since he was active, and even more since he died almost two decades ago.
We have some enthusiastic elimination going on from a Friedman fan in Argentina
>Furthermore, we have a deregulation ministry, where basically every day we eliminate between one and five regulations. (from https://youtu.be/8NLzc9kobDk?t=666)
so there's a real world experiment to see how it goes.
The world Milton Friedman lived in was very different than the world we have now. Much of what he had to say no longer applies, today. Its analogous to reading philosophy from pre-enlightenment or pre-naturalist philosophers. Academically interesting, but totally irrelevant.
Economists like to masquerade as hard-scientists, but once you get past supply and demand and behavioral economics, its just academics making things up that sound good.
The world we live in is globally interconnected with civilization and planet-sized problems. The actors squabbling in today's world are no longer small local groups, focused on community-sized problems, as they mostly were pre-1900. They are impossibly large, country-spanning, corporate entities with huge reach and influence.
Public institutions need to be sized appropriately to solve modern problems and to properly contend with their corporate competitors.
Tiny pre-WWI-sized governments are not going to cut it with post-WWII-sized problems.
Yea, but he was born in 1916 and, like most other humans, the world that he group up in shaped him for the rest of his life.
Most of his popular works were published in the early 60's, before many of our modern problems were obvious and the outcome of many of the expansionary policies of that period had time to take root.
The outcomes of public policy throughout the 1900s, particularly pre-Reagan and post-FDR. Quite expansionary, but nearly all of the bedrock institutions most people have come to rely on and take for granted materialized in this period.
- The GI Bill
- Medicare / Medicaid
- Social Security
- Unemployment Insurance
- Regulatory institutions / policies like the SEC, FDIC, OSHA, and the EPA.
- The Civil Rights Act
None of this stuff just happens by accident, and these kinds of things definitely don't magically fall out of unregulated free-markets. And they DEFINITELY don't fall out of markets where the participants are massive corporate interests.
You need institutions whose focus is solely on social / economic wellbeing and who have the power and authority to provide it.
There are also plenty of modern academics, making things up themselves, who articulate similar points.
Perhaps Friedman's most widely known saying is that "inflation is a monetary phenomenon". In the last 30 years the correlation between money supply expansion and inflation has been low. OTOH the correlation between supply shocks and inflation has been high.
A real science would update in the face of contradictory evidence. Some economists have, but most haven't.
We did see massive inflation in subsectors of the broader economy, though, and there were a lot more monetary policy levers moving than just supply expansion.
For what it's worth, Musk has said his goal is to eliminate all regulations[0] (and, one assumes, all federal agencies except DOGE, assuming it even counts) and then add each regulation back one at a time if they deem it necessary.
I wonder if China is going to step up to the plate and swipe all that American influence under their umbrella. They can print out yuan the same way we print dollars except that theirs are backed by being the world's factory.
Accenture, E&Y, PWC and Deloitte all have a law division; not as much in the US but overseas and slowly creeping here because these firms are joined at the top and fueled by public money. The consolidation was set back by more than a decade because of Enron and the prosecution of Andersen, but now they're back. These hybrid firms, because of the requirement of annual tax filings, offer something big law firms simply cannot. Very few law firms have set up consulting arms and those who have done so have stumbled, e.g. Greenberg Traurig.
None of the orgs you listed provide direct "lawyers for hire" style legal services in the United States. They'll have partner orgs which are lead by lawyers, they'll have international arms with international lawyers, they'll offer legal-adjacent services, but show me and example where, say, Deloitte will put a lawyer into a US courtroom who is directly being paid on W2 by Deloitte.
You can't, because they can't legally operate like that in the US.
> The Deloitte US firms do not practice law or provide legal advice. Deloitte Legal refers to the legal practices of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited member firms (or their respective affiliates) that provide legal services outside of the United States.
> PwC US does not provide legal advice or opinion in the United States
Lawyers in the US, through the state Bar Associations, have done a damn fine job of protecting their industry against capital. Doctors in the US now answer to MBAs, Lawyers only answer to other Lawyers.
Hasn't the Trustee recovered 90% of the money invested? Phantom returns were ignored; at the time of the arrest the phantom returns were considered money lost.
