CENTRAL PLANNING NEVER GOES OUT OF FASHION: Wishful Thinking on Antitrust.  Jonathan Clarke dismantles a progressive law professor’s plan for giving vast new economic powers to antitrust bureaucrats and judges.

ANOTHER PROGRESSIVE MYTH DEBUNKED: What the Prescription Drug Debate Gets Wrong. If we want new drugs for Alzheimer’s and the other ravages of old age, the last thing we need is European-style price controls at the pharmacy. But that’s the dream of Democrats, and the Trump administration is unfortunately threatening to go along with it.

This campaign is based on the same myth that was used to sell Obamacare: Americans are dying because their health-care system is an international disgrace. While it’s true that Canadians’ and western Europeans’ life expectancy is higher than Americans’, it’s not because of their price-controlled drugs and government health services. As I write in City Journal, the gap is due to variables that have nothing to do with health-care systems: the higher rates in America of poverty, obesity, smoking, homicide, fatal accidents and other factors.

The gap would be even larger if it weren’t for the fact that Americans receive better health care, particularly for heart disease and cancer. And the chief reason that American patients fare better than European patients is that they get earlier access to more new drugs. A dollar spent on drugs does more to combat disease and disability than a dollar spent anywhere else.

Yes, Canadians and Europeans pay less at the pharmacy, but they’re getting what they pay for. Why would Trump want to copy them? He should look at the numbers. Americans already get a much better deal.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Campus Diversity Swarm. Universities are wasting millions on their ever-expanding staffs of diversity apparatchiks with six-figure salaries. This cottage industry even has its own journal — supported with tuition dollars, of course — which publishes timeless articles like, “The Influence of Campus Climate and Urbanization on Queer-Spectrum and Trans-Spectrum Faculty Intent to Leave.”

GROWING THE SWAMP: How Bloomberg Embeds Green Warriors in Blue-State Governments. To be fair, it’s not just Bloomberg. NYU Law School is working with him to plant — and pay for — activists working to raise the price of energy.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS (IF THEY’RE MALE): The Madame DeFarge of New York. Seth Barron on the New York senator who never lets due process get in the way of her belief in a female’s unsubstantiated (or discredited) accusation against a man.

MEN SHOULD JUST SHUT UP: Feminist Narcissism. Heather Mac Donald on feminists hitting a new low with their attack on Brett Kavanaugh: “It is feminist narcissism to put an uncharacteristic instance of adolescent, never-repeated sexual aggression [even if it were substantiated, which in this case it hasn’t been] ahead of a lifetime of achievement in the law. The priorities look like a revenge attack on a civilization deemed too male.”

THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR BAD ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS: Continually Mistaken, Chronically Admired. From his admiration of Hugo Chavez’ economic policies to his predictions about Fannie Mae, Joseph Stigliz has proven that you don’t have to be correct to be a celebrated left-wing economist. (To be fair, Paul Krugman deserves priority for this discovery.)

JUVENILE LOGIC: Unforgiven. Liberals used to be in favor of leniency for juvenile offenders. But of course they didn’t mean Republicans, as Kay Hymowitz writes in City Journal:

That Kavanaugh’s fiercest opponents are now using a (tenuously recalled) adolescent crime as proof of his unfitness is an irony worth considering. The Left has always been at the forefront of the fight for leniency for minors. Progressives founded the juvenile court in 1899. Liberals fought “law and order” conservative attempts to try juveniles as adults initiated during the crime wave of the 1970s through 1990s. They pointed out, accurately, that those policies affected black kids far more than white. They were rightfully indignant that prepubescent children could be labelled sex offenders. “Children are regularly put on sex offender registries, sometimes for their entire lives, for conduct less serious than what Kavanaugh is accused of,” writes [New York Times columnist Michelle] Goldberg. Well, yes. That’s exactly the tough-on-juvenile-crime approach that has five times as many black as white juveniles in prison and that Goldberg herself would justify against Kavanaugh.

If it weren’t for double standards . . . .

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Reeducation Campus. In City Journal, I report on an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone: attending the annual convention for the college bureaucrats in charge of indoctrinating freshmen. More than 1,700 of them from around the world convened to discuss the First Year Experience, an umbrella of orientation programs that have spread to 90 percent of American campuses and are rapidly expanding overseas.

These programs often start with a “common read,” a book sent to everyone the summer before school starts, and proceed with lectures, discussion groups, seminars, courses, exercises, field trips, art projects, local activism, and whatever else the schools will fund. The programs are typically run not by professors but by “co-curricular professionals”—administrators lacking scholarly credentials who operate outside the regular curriculum.

These professionals seem to lean even further left than the faculty, to judge from the wild applause they gave to authors promoting common-read books with no literary merit but plenty of identity politics. And in some ways these bureaucrats have more influence than the faculty.

By choosing your courses carefully, you can avoid the progressive sermonizing that passes for scholarship in some departments, but everyone has to undergo the orientation and first-year programs. You may have come to study computer science or literature or biochemistry, but first you’ll have to learn about social justice, environmental sustainability, gender pronouns, and micro-aggressions. You may have been planning to succeed by hard work, but first you’ll have to acknowledge your privilege or discover your victimhood. If you arrived at college hoping to broaden your intellectual horizons, you’ll quickly be instructed which ideas are off-limits.

While the tenured professoriate stagnates, these administrators are expanding their domains, just as predicted by Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

NO, THEY’RE NOT GOING TO ABDUCT YOUR CHILD: Fear of Strangers is Fatal. The “World’s Worst Mom,” Lenore Skenazy, on the deadly consequences of scaring parents.

IF YOU CAN READ THIS WITHOUT LAUGHING OR CRYING: Now that the University of Manchester has deemed Rudyard Kipling insufficiently woke and scrubbed his poem “If” from the wall of its student union, Rod Little has revised the poem for today’s students:

If you can self-define as something you’re not,
And crawl into victimhood, however well-bred
And spew out tendentious sub-teenage rot
And wear a vagina on top of your head,
And whine like a ninny, inside your safe space,
When the real world intrudes on the crap you’ve averred,
Then apply to our college – we’ll give you a place,
(For about £30k). And you’ll get a third.

As further punishment, you’ll be forced to read the Maya Angelou poem that has replaced “If” on the wall at Manchester.

THE LEFT’S WAR ON PUBLIC HEALTH: Juul Madness. The smoking rate for American adults and teenagers has hit an all-time low, but public-health activists are working hard to reverse the trend. They’ve renewed their attack on the vaping industry and singled out Juul Labs, the makers of an e-cigarette so effective at weaning smokers from their habit that Wall Street analysts are calling it an existential threat to the tobacco industry (whose stocks have plunged this year along with cigarette sales).  From my City Journal piece:

Activists are so determined to prohibit any use of nicotine that they’re calling Juul a “massive public-health disaster” and have persuaded journalists, Democratic politicians, and federal officials to combat the “Juuling epidemic” among teenagers.

The press has been scaring the public with tales of high schools filled with nicotine fiends desperately puffing on Juuls, but the latest federal survey, released last month, tells quite a different story. The vaping rate last year among high-school students, a little less than 12 percent, was actually four percentage points lower than in 2015, when Juul was a new product with miniscule sales.

A coalition of activists and Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, are denouncing Juul and pressing for regulations that would outlaw most vaping devices now on the market.

You’d think that progressive activists and journalists would be cheering the small company whose life-saving product has become an existential threat to Big Tobacco. But the lower the smoking rate falls,  the less work there is for anti-smoking activists at groups like the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which has helped lead the attack on Juul and the vaping industry. The activists need a new cause and a new enemy, and they’re not about to let the public’s health get in their way.

Or the facts.

BUCKLEY AT HIS BEST: The Judge Hunter is out today, the latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley (and my new favorite).  On the theory that Washington has become impossible to parody, Buckley switched from political satire (Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men) to historical fiction, starting in 2015 with The Relic Master, a 16th-century caper to steal the Shroud of Turin. Now he’s on to the 17th century in the The Judge Hunter, in which the London diarist Samuel Pepys gets rid of his feckless brother-in-law, Balty, by sending him to New England to track down two judges who had signed the death warrant of King Charles 1.

It’s a lovely blend of P.G. Wodehouse and George MacDonald Fraser — Bertie Wooster meets Flashman — as the dandified Balty travels from Boston through the wilderness to New Amsterdam, fending off Puritan governors, Indians and Peter Stuyvesant. It gave me a new appreciation for the roots of the grim zealotry animating environmentalists. If you think today’s New Englanders are tough on non-recyclers, consider what their Puritan ancestors were doing to Quakers. When Balty attends a Puritan service in New Haven, he’s shocked to see a young woman walking serenely up the center aisle without a stitch of clothing on her. He assumes she’s insane, but his traveling companion, a savvy military veteran named Huncks, explains that this is a common form of protest for Quaker dissidents.

Balty considered. “Well, I’d call it lunatical. At the very least, fruity.”

“Religions are fruity.”

“Jesus didn’t go parading about naked.”

“He went looking for trouble, didn’t he? Same with Quakers. They embrace persecution. Fulfills them.”

Balty weighed this. “Damn strange bit of business, however you slice it. The sight would have broken your heart. A constable who bellowed at me for running said she’s to be tried tomorrow. Probably because they don’t have trials on the Sabbath. What will they do to her?”

“The King’s missive forbids them to persecute Quakers. No more hangings, floggings, cutting off ears, branding. What shall they do for entertainment?”

Spoiler alert: the Puritans aren’t about to let the King’s missive interfere with their entertainment, but Balty comes to her rescue. Read the whole thing.

WHY THEY HATE HIM: Scott Pruitt, Warrior for Science. How could “the party of science,” as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to the EPA administrator’s demand for more transparency in sharing data and more rigorous peer review of the agency’s research? Because better science could get in the way of the green political agenda. My City Journal piece looks at the fight to get rid of Pruitt in the context of the EPA’s history of junk science. Once again, the real war on science is the one waged by the left, as John Stossel writes at Fox News.

A MUST-READ FOR POTENTIAL SNOWFLAKES: All Minus One, a beautifully illustrated and smartly abridged version of John Stuart Mill’s arguments for free speech in “On Liberty,” is just out at Heterodox Academy, which hopes it will become required reading for students before they enter college. Here’s a conversation about Mill — and why he’s more relevant than ever — with Richard Reeves, the Mills biographer who edited this book together with Jonathan Haidt.

JOHN STOSSEL: The Left’s “War on Science.” The real threats to science virtually all come from the Left, not the Right, as Stossel deftly shows in this video. He interviews me and draws from from my City Journal article.

LUCK ISN’T SO DUMB AFTER ALL: I’ve been enjoying reading about the science of lucky breaks, as explored by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby March in How Luck Happens. They take a critical look at some of the legends of luck, like the story of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin when he came from vacation to find that a petri dish he’d left on a windowsill had been contaminated with mold:

And lo and behold, the bacteria surrounding the mold had been destroyed.

He didn’t shout, “Eureka!” or go running naked through the streets (as Archimedes reportedly once did),* but he did realize that the mold might have inhibited the bacterial growth. And there you have it— one lucky break and millions of people have been saved from diseases like strep throat and scarlet fever, as well as wound infections.

“When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did,” Fleming said later.

The revolution wasn’t quite as casual as all that. During World War I, Fleming had been in the Royal Army Medical Corps doing research into wound infections and antiseptics. After the war, he returned to his lab at St. Mary’s Hospital at the University of London, and by 1921, he had made his first big discovery, finding an enzyme that fights bacteria.

That research reportedly began when Fleming had a cold and dropped some mucus into one of his bacteria cultures. Are you starting to see a pattern here? The dropped mucus and the plopped mold were serendipitous, but they were common events. It wasn’t their occurrence that was so lucky and magical, but what Fleming made of them.

At the time of his family vacation, Fleming had been working on questions about bacteria and the human immune system for more than a decade. As is often the case in science, he had many small breakthroughs and lots of incremental steps. Many of the things he tried didn’t lead anywhere. When one does pay off, it’s not random luck— it’s the result of months and years of focused energy, and plenty of experiments that didn’t pan out.