In response to politicians’ bombastic cries against “price-gouging” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, John R. Lott Jr. and Sonya Jones provide a basic lesson in economics in the Houston Chronicle (August 30): “Higher prices today reduce consumption and increase inventories and thus reduce how much prices will rise tomorrow. The overall increase in price will actually be less. The possibility of higher prices when disasters strike also gives oil companies an incentive to put aside more gas to cover those emergencies. Storing gas is costly, and if you want them to bear those costs, you had better compensate them. . . . Bashing companies may be profitable short-term political behavior, but the discomfort will be over far sooner and [be] less severe if markets are left to their own devices.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (August 17), John H. Makin warns of the Federal Reserve’s difficult tightening task in the face of a cooling housing market and rising energy costs: “The notion that world growth is sustainable given oil at $65 a barrel because the U.S. can shrug off the implied energy drag depends almost entirely on a continued U.S. housing boom. Yet the Fed is raising interest rates, a policy move that has already quelled the housing boom in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand as it did in Japan 15 years ago. There are signs of cooling emerging already in some of the ‘hot’ U.S. housing markets as inventories of unsold houses build and rents slip on speculative properties. The Fed needs to keep moving cautiously on tightening over the year because the housing slowdown will probably arrive suddenly as speculative sentiment dies.”

Phillip L. Swagel and N. Gregory Mankiw admonish Congress in Foreign Affairs (July–August) for current antidumping laws and call for trade-policy reform: “The ostensible purpose of antidumping law is to help ensure competition by punishing foreign firms that sell their products at ‘unfair’ prices in U.S. markets. In practice, however, antidumping has strayed far from this purpose, becoming little more than an excuse for special interests to shield themselves from competition at the expense of both American consumers and other American companies. . . . The U.S. economy has benefited enormously from the liberalization it has ‘conceded to’ in decades of trade negotiations. Any move to limit the use of antidumping policy would certainly be cast as a major concession as well. It is a concession Washington should be eager to make. Such a change would offer great benefits to both American consumers and American producers and pave the way for a return to antidumping’s original purpose: ensuring rather than restricting competition.”

Vance Serchuk argues in the Wall Street Journal (August 26) against shifting to a more multilateral effort in Afghanistan, despite the strategy’s lure: “While the Pentagon is understandably eager to trim its commitments, the progress of postwar Afghanistan still rests foremost on the reality of American power. It’s no accident, after all, that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has been pushing for a strategic partnership with Washington, not NATO. The Afghans clearly recognize the limits of multilateralism in their country. The question is: Do the rest of us?”

In a Commentary article (September) examining the documented differences between groups, Charles Murray calls for open discourse about the differences as the first step toward assuaging the resentment that has resulted from affirmative action policies: “In universities, affirmative action ensures that the black-white difference in IQ in the population at large is brought onto the campus and made visible to every student. The intentions of their designers notwithstanding, today’s policies are perfectly fashioned to create separation, condescension, and resentment-and so they have done. The world need not be that way. Any university or employer that genuinely applied a single set of standards for hiring, firing, admitting, and promoting would find that performance across different groups really is distributed indistinguishably. But getting to that point nationwide will require us to jettison an apparatus of laws, regulations, and bureaucracies that has been 40 years in the making.”