The 'Carrier' of Cronyism

I have a new column:

The 'Carrier' of Crony Capitalism Is Evident in Trump’s Deal: When I first started teaching economics, one day a student came to my office to argue about how a multiple test question was graded. He believed his answer was correct and explained why, but I disagreed. However, the student would not give up; he kept arguing and began to get angry. Finally, to make it go away I took what seemed to be the simple route and gave him credit for the question.

That was a mistake. It turned out the student knew lots of other people in the course, and within three or four hours at least 20 students who had marked the same wrong answer showed up and demanded they be given credit as well. I had no choice but to give in. I then had to check all the answers for the 300+ students in the course to make sure everyone was treated the same, and in the end the question was essentially nullified. That was unfair to those who answered correctly. Once I made that first fateful choice to take the easy way out there was no way to be fair to everyone.

There is a lesson here regarding Trump’s announcement that he is essentially bribing Carrier with tax cuts to keep jobs in the US. ...