Here at Pun Salad, We Continue to Hope for Fiscal Sanity, Honest Politicians, Rational Voters, and a Pony
One year ago, Hamas launched a horrific attack against Israel, killing over 1,400 Israeli citizens – including defenseless women, children, and the elderly – and kidnapping hundreds more. Today, the prospects of peace seem more distant than ever. But we continue to hope for a…
… return of all the hostages, an end to the violence, a rejection of hate, and a future in which both Israelis and Palestinians can enjoy the security and stability that most of them yearn for.
"… and a pony."
Ah well, I guess his heart is in the right place. Which I also guess was the point of his tweet: to show
that his heart was in the right place.
Alas, not everyone is getting the message of peace and love. Jim Geraghty views
recent anti-Israel protests and concludes:
The Antisemitism Is the Point.
This planet is full of people who just want to kill Jews, and this country has no shortage of people who just want to cheer on the murderers.
Anybody on campus want to march in the quad about that?
The local TV station, WMUR,
notes the local
festivities:
The University of New Hampshire's Palestine Solidarity Coalition held a gathering in Durham on Monday to honor Palestinian lives.
The event was part of the group's "Week of Rage," which commemorates the 41,000 people killed on Oct. 7, 2023.
Ah, nothing "honors" Palestinan lives more than a "week of rage".
Quibble: the "41,000" number is wrong, of course. It is similar to the number of Gaza fatalities
reported by the Gazan "health ministry" since 10/7, according to
Forbes. And that doesn't count Israeli dead on 10/7.
As Geraghty notes, there's no indication that Uyghur, Ukrainian, or (of course) Israeli lives were
mentioned, let alone honored. And what the "Solidarity Coalition" actually says is…
Join us next week to protest one year of the Palestinian genocide and mourn the loss of life and liberty that has been deemed acceptable by the United States, Israel, and Western medias. We will not stand idly while more massacres unfold!
There are two basic debates about AI. One is the “AI safety” or “X-risk” debate, which is about whether AI will turn into Skynet and kill us. But the most prominent and common debate is about AI taking jobs away from humans. What’s interesting about this debate is that practically everyone involved, from AI’s biggest boosters to its biggest critics, seems to agree on the basic premise — that the primary function of AI is as a direct replacement for human beings. In general, people only disagree about what our reaction to this basic fact should be. Should we slow down AI’s development intentionally? Should we implement a universal basic income? Should AI engineers and their shackled gods retreat behind towering fortress walls guarded by legions of autonomous drones, letting the rest of humanity suffer and die as GPT-278 sucks up all of the world’s energy for data centers?
Coercive policy regarding COVID vaccination, recommended by Fauci on the false premise that vaccinated people could not get or spread the virus, collapsed public trust in other vaccines and led the media and public health officials to gaslight individuals who had suffered legitimate vaccine injuries. To pay for the lockdowns recommended by Fauci, the U.S. government spent trillions of dollars, causing high unemployment in the most locked-down states and a hangover of higher prices for consumer goods that continues to this day. Who is to blame?
Fauci served as a key adviser to both President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, and was a central figure on Trump's COVID task force that determined federal policy. If Fauci has no responsibility for the outcomes of the pandemic, nobody does. Yet in his memoir's chapters on COVID, he simultaneously takes credit for advising leaders while disclaiming any responsibility for policy failures.
Fauci implausibly writes that he "was not locking down the country" and "had no power to control anything." These statements are belied by Fauci's own bragging about his influence on a host of policy responses, including convincing Trump to lock the country down in March 2020 and extend the lockdown in April.
Bhattacharya co-wrote the "Great Barrington Declaration", which Fauci loudly opposed, and
still does. I think Bhattacharya has the better argument here.
The botched plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 terrorists is a signature Biden-Harris administration moment: a scheme, apparently double-wrapped in incompetence, to spare the Democrats’ presidential candidate — first the senescent one, then the vacuous one — from an unpopular political decision.
I say double-wrapped because it appears the deal that the administration made, and since then has desperately tried to renege on, contains an anti-renege clause — one that officials calculated would frustrate Donald Trump but on which, instead, the administration has tripped itself up.
Back in August, I outlined how the Biden-Harris administration traded a political problem for a legal problem. The political problem is that the 9/11 case, which has lingered for over two decades, probably cannot be ended unless the administration permits the Defense Department to take the death penalty off the table in order to induce a guilty plea from the terrorists; yet, because the terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans, removing capital punishment would be extremely unpopular — and thus the administration does not wish to do it, or at least be seen doing it, much less try to explain it.
As we have seen, the progressive Democrats who run the administration love to make the base swoon by brandishing their anti-death-penalty credentials in the abstract. When it gets down to real cases, though, they hide under their desks: Not only is capital punishment patently constitutional; the majority of Americans approve of it in heinous cases, particularly jihadist mass-murder cases. So, Biden and Harris play a game. They airily proclaim philosophical opposition to capital punishment. In concrete cases — such as that of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — they tell the country they are defending the death-penalty sentence ordered by a jury; but in so doing, they quietly assure Democrats not to worry because they have imposed a moratorium on executions, ensuring that no death sentences will actually be carried out.
Might be amusing to hear Queen Kamala of Word Salad explain that one. But then someone would have to ask her about it, right? Dream on . . .
Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
(paid link)
I picked up this book from Portsmouth (NH) Public Library mainly due to
this review
from Brian Doherty at the Reason website. (I don't think it made it into
the magazine.) Doherty called it "a solidly educational and entertaining work of political history."
Ganz's implicit thesis: the early 1990s were an important part of the story of
How We Got Here, thirty years later.
But, really, you can say that about any period in American history, can't you?
Ganz focuses on personalities of the period, mostly ones he finds colorful, outrageous, or dangerous.
As Doherty notes, he spends a lot of words on Murry Rothbard, concentrating on his flirtation
with paleoconservatives. The book's title is from a Rothbard speech; you can also find
it in
one of his long-winded articles
from the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, reproduced by the Mises Institute. And it's in
response to the cliché "You can't turn back the clock."
We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.
As Doherty also notes, despite Ganz's title, this did not come close to happening.
Anyway, Ganz's history is wide-ranging and (you might argue) idiosyncratic. In addition to
Rothbard, Ganz looks at folks like David Duke, Bo Gritz, John Gotti, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani,
Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Jackson, …
And, naturally enough, the major figures of the 1992 presidential campaign: George H.W. Bush,
Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan.
Anyone remember Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment?
Ganz does. Were you aware that a professor named Caroll Quigley
had an inordinate influence on Bill Clinton's philosophy? I didn't, but
Ganz spends many pages on exploring that.
And Ross Perot was a holy terror back then about the deficit and associated national
debt. Why, we were adding "$1 billion in debt every 24 hours"!
Reader, according to
these folks,
over the past year, the debt averaged a $6 billion increase per day.
One little sentence on page 20 jumped out at me, and I fear it colored my attitude toward the book:
During the presidential campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned against "welfare queens."
Uh, reader, no he did not. I blogged about this
ten years ago
(heavily relying on
this Reagan-hostile Slate article). As near as anyone can tell, Reagan used
the term "welfare queen" (not "queens") once, in 1976 (not 1980), during one of his radio addresses. And he was quoting
the term used in a Chicago Tribune story about Linda Taylor, an actual person.
I noticed a few other drive-by mini-slanders throughout, unsourced. If you're tempted to repeat any of 'em as
gospel, caveat lector.
But another unsourced and widely repeated factoid on page 189: Gene Roddenberry was the speechwriter
for LAPD chief William Parker in the 1950s, and based Star Trek's Mr. Spock on him. I didn't know
that! And it might be true!
I've been a fan of Anthony Horowitz's fictional collaboration with ace detective, ex-cop, Daniel Hawthorne
since 2020. I've since learned that this series is a variety of
metafiction, where the author
inserts himself into the story as a character. As I've said before: it's as if
Sherlock's companion was not named "John Watson", but "Arthur Conan Doyle".
Works for me! (My previous
reports on the Horowitz/Hawthorne mysteries:
here,
here,
here, and
here.)
This one's different. Horowitz's publisher is demanding that he write the next book in the series, but
Hawthorne hasn't been working on any new cases. What to do? After some difficult negotiations,
they decide to do a prequel of sorts: a murder Hawthorne worked on before he joined up
with Horowitz. Hawthorne will provide Horowitz with the case documents in chronological order,
so the book can be written without knowing how it's going to turn out.
The years-ago murder took place in "Riverside Close", a group of six houses
containing people living in decent harmony until a new family moves in
and proceeds to irk every one of their new neighbors. Tensions rise until, eventually, the
main offender gets a crossbow bolt in the throat.
There are too many suspects, and they all seem to be hiding something. Hawthorne and his
then-partner, Dudley, interview them all.
And Horowitz, as he learns about the crime in the present, becomes increasingly dismayed
at how the past case developed. Is there really a book in all this?
Well, yes there is.
You're reading it. Keep turning those pages, Paul….
There's quite a bit to keep track of, but Horowitz lays out everything clearly; that doesn't mean
you'll see the plot twists coming. (Well, I didn't. Maybe you will.)
As I ride this train through the Dutch countryside on October 7, all I can think about is the violence that people are willing to object to and the violence those same people are willing to pro-actively support with material and political aid.
Professor Prescod-Weinstein has trained her brain well. Even on the one-year anniversary of a vile atrocity,
she's only thinking about the stuff she's been thinking about for years, and in the same, predictable way. Deploying
the same turgid clichés.
She has successfully managed to avoid even a shred of self-doubt intrude on her mental processes.
Congratulations are in order, I suppose.
Also of note:
Reminder: She's a nitwit.
JUST IN: Kamala Harris has no clue what to say after her teleprompter appears to stop working, keeps repeating herself.
The Vice President kept repeating “32 days.”
“Remember his number 32 today? We got 32 days until the election.”
I almost sympathize with her. I'm pretty bad at extemporaneous speaking, too.
But, yeah, the actual problem here is the mental white noise that leaks out through
her mouth. There's nothing going on
between those ears except cavernous echoes of what she just said.
Although Biden (and now Harris) have proclaimed an ironclad commitment to Israel’s well-being, they’re acting very wonky about Israel’s behavior. First they withheld 2000-pound bombs from Israel (you know, the kind that were used on the targeted strike that killed the leader of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah), though the U.S. rations some of these bombs to Israel.
But now the U.S. is trying to tell Israel how to run a war that is an existential thread to Israel’s existence, for the tiny Jewish nation is fighting on seven fronts at once (Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the West Bank). But the U.S. has been trying to control how Israel responded to Hamas’s October 7 attack from the very beginning. First Biden told Israel not to invade Gaza. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Gaza City. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Khan Younis. When they did, Biden told Israel in no uncertain terms not to go into Rafah, for that was “crossing a red line.” Kamala Harris backed up Bided then, asserting that she had “studied the maps.” Israel did go into Rafah and got some hostages, along the way destroying much of Hamas’s military capabilities. All the while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was waffling, especially about negotiations, for he is the lever Biden uses to try to push Israel in his direction. Had the U.S. followed Biden’s wishes, then, Hamas would still be in control of Gaza, and the dangers of another October 7 would remain.
OK, a sideways Kamala slam there too. 'Twould be funny except when you remember these are the
people who are supposed to be in charge. At a certain point, you'd think they'd readjust their
priors and admit that Israel (and Bibi) just might have more incentive to come up with
effective survival tactics than people sitting safely in DC, thousands of miles away.
Oh, I should provide the "coda" to which Jerry refers in his headline. In response to a comment from
a reader
who is (apparently) a Trump fan:
This made me laugh, because first of all, it seems likely to me that Trump really is mentally ill, at least with a diagnosable pattern of symptoms that fit into narcissistic personality disorder:
Although Jerry's armchair psychoanalysis is deplorable… yeah, I'd give pretty good odds he's right.
Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens.
Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom.
That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.
Unsurprisingly, Portsmouth (NH) Public Library has purchased Hillary's book, but has "banned" Turley's.
Moan.
Phillip W. Magness has some bad news:
Marxism is back.
(Did it leave? Missed that.)
Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran gushy homages to the communist philosopher to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Marx’s Communist Manifesto consistently ranks as the most frequently assigned book on university course syllabi, with the exception of a few widely used textbooks. Bibliometricevidence of Marx’s prevalence abounds in academic works, where he consistently ranks among the most frequently cited authors in human history. The academy erupted with yet another fanfare for Marx last month, when Princeton University Press released a new translation of his magnum opus, Das Kapital.
The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.
By every measure of its own merit, Marx’s economic system should have been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history – and for a brief moment it was. Marx’s Capital struggled to find an audience in his own lifetime. He died in 1883 in relative obscurity and with little following outside of a small band of fanatical leftists led by his friend Friedrich Engels. Even among fellow socialists, Marx was a controversial figure. He spent the last decade of his life locked in endless internecine feuds with anarchists, non-revolutionary socialists, and even other competitor revolutionary factions. For decades after his death, he faced credible accusations of plagiarising his theories from other writers. The Manifesto has more than a few arguments that strongly resembled an 1843 pamphlet by French socialist writer Victor Considerant, and Marx’s doctrine of “surplus value” closely follows an earlier work by democratic socialist thinker Johann Karl Rodbertus.
I was able to re-excavate this P.J. O'Rourke quote from his 1983 book, Modern Manners:
Another distinctive quality of manners is that they have nothing to do with what you do, only how you do it. For example, Karl Marx was always polite in the British Museum. He was courteous to the staff, never read with his hat on, and didn't make lip farts when he came across passages in Hegel with which he disagreed. Despite the fact that his political exhortations have caused the deaths of millions, he is today more revered than not. On the other hand, John W. Hinckley, Jr., was only rude once, to a retired Hollywood movie actor, and Hinckley will be in a mental institution for the rest of his life.
He was right about everything except for
that last bit.
In a two-page spread, the book’s author, Douglas Yacka, presents kids with 10 sentiments and then tells them, “If you answered ‘Yes’ to more of the odd-numbered questions, you agree with many ideas held by Democrats.” If you answered “Yes” to even-numbered statements, you might be a Republican, Yacka explains.
What kind of sentiments are Democrat-coded? Spending more tax dollars on “education and improving schools,” ensuring “businesses can’t pollute the environment,” government-provided “affordable health care available to all Americans,” government efforts to “see that all Americans have a home, a job, and a decent education,” and taxing those “wealthy people and big businesses” to provide “school lunch programs for children whose families don’t have much money.” Does your 8-year-old like free things, trees, lunch, and his teacher? Congratulations, he’s a Democrat.
Your kid is a Republican, on the other hand, if he doesn’t “believe in letting immigrants into our country,” a blatantly false mischaracterization of Republicans’ (and most Americans’) concerns about the open border crisis that has seen millions of people and hundreds of thousands of convicted criminals cross into the United States illegally. Those immigrant-hating Republicans are the same greedy people who want lower taxes just so they can “have more money in their pockets,” Yacka informs your kid.
Odd and even numbers? We're asking kids to read and do math? Good luck with that.
And let me just check the Portsmouth NH website… well, what do you know, yes of course
this pile of partisan propaganda
is waiting on the shelves of the Portsmouth Middle School Library, the better to indoctrinate impressionable
young minds.
Do I advocate "banning" this biased book from that library? Interesting question. Nah. But I'd want to know:
Do they have any equivalent pro-Republican books on their shelves?
I bet the answer to that question is no. You don't have to "ban" books that never make it into the library.
So, anyway, what's the haps on the election betting this week? Here you go:
EBO Win Probabilities as of 2024-10-06 7:37 AM EDT
Not to sound like a broken record, but: "The bettors seem to think the outcome is close to a coin-flip. Kamala's still a slight favorite, but Trump did some catching up this past week."
Yes, that's exactly what I said last week.
And even the WSJ's weekly columnist
Peggy Noonan seems to be at a
loss for words:
Jump ball, deadlock, coin flip, tossup. We’re running out of election metaphors.
As long as we don't go into sudden-death overtime. That would be tedious.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have said during their campaigns for president that they want to bring down costs for consumers. It’s an admirable goal and, if done right, can be achieved.
Unfortunately, both have been sparse on details about how to do so. In his September 6 speech to the Economic Club of New York, Trump engaged in a lot of exaggeration and bluster, but didn’t give details. In response to a sympathetic Philadelphia reporter’s question about how to do so, Harris started by telling how she was born into a middle-class family. She then segued to a mention of how people in her neighborhood were very proud of their lawns. She did propose a $25,000 subsidy for first buyers of housing, but that would increase, not decrease prices. She never answered his question.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that economics gives us some tried and true ways of making consumers better off. They mainly have to do with allowing competition and allowing increased supplies. Trump did some of that while president. Harris as vice president showed no signs of moves in that direction. Yet many of the policies that both propose would do the opposite.
Henderson advocates an obvious policy for lowering costs: free trade. Somewhat less obvious: increased
immigration.
Tuesday's vice presidential debate included a surprising amount of agreement between the two candidates on stage. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) competed on who would produce more oil, keep the border more secure, and support Israel the most.
They also were both in alignment on the notion that housing shouldn't be "a commodity."
"The problem we've had is that we've got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity," said Walz, criticizing the influence of Wall Street on the housing market.
"We should get out of this idea of housing as a commodity!" concurred Vance, saying that the way to make it not a commodity would be to crack down on illegal immigration.
Actually, as Britschgi points out, the best possible thing to happen
in housing policy would be ignoring the nostrums peddled by both
Walz and Vance. The free market does a very good job of supplying
"commodities", bringing together willing buyers and sellers in mutually
beneficial transactions.
But you knew that. Too bad our politicians don't.
What's the degree of difficulty on her performance so far?
Imagine Elizabeth Nolan Brown as a judge at a gymnastic competition
as she observes
Kamala Harris' Freedom Flip-Flop.
Kamala Harris' most consistent political trait may be a lack of consistency. Over the course of her long career, first in California and then in Washington, D.C., the Democrats' 2024 presidential nominee has been plagued by plausible allegations that she's hard to pin down and lacks a stable ideological core. She's a flip-flopper—or, if you want to be charitable, she evolves quickly.
Over the summer, Harris' evolutions kept on coming, with her campaign issuing rapid-fire disavowals of many of her previous positions. Because she ran her failed 2020 presidential primary bid on an ultraprogressive, big-government platform, many of her new positions are noticeably more oriented toward the mainstream—and freedom.
To slightly adapt what Jonah Goldberg memorably quipped about Mitt Romney:
if you hit the mute button on your TV during a Kamala speech, she seems to
be saying: What do I have to do to put you in this BMW today?
I assume the above will be classified as "disinformation" in the Harris/Walz Administration.
James Freeman notes that there's one issue they haven't flipped on, and that's
their understanding of free speech. So, as James Freeman advocates:
Criticize Harris and Walz While You Still Can.
It’s a curious thing that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D., Minn.) are enjoying generally friendly media coverage even as they set modern campaign records for avoiding media scrutiny. Odder still is that while avoiding discussion of the policies they will employ to govern us, they’ve clearly expressed contempt for the bedrock liberty that allows all of us to criticize government policies.
Recently this column noted Ms. Harris’s history of hostility to free expression. Now we know that if voters give her the promotion she seeks, we can’t expect her vice president to serve as a moderating influence.
I'm feeling a warm glow inside…
Because Eric Boehm's headline (in print Reason) references a great little movie from the 1980s:
The Brave Little (American) Toaster.
But it's about JD Vance's know-nothingism about appliance manufacturing:
The nationalist conservative obsession with blue-collar manufacturing jobs often ignores the interests of workers and the will of consumers. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) provided a perfect illustration in an early August campaign speech in Nevada on "the American dream."
In it, Donald Trump's protectionist running mate declared that "a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job."
On its face, that's just rhetorical silliness. Common sense says anyone should be willing to make that trade: Affordable and abundant appliances are part of the reason that 21st century America is the best place to live in the history of the human race. Jobs are abundant too—there were 7.6 million unfilled jobs in August, per the Department of Labor—and the loss of a few should not worry vice presidential candidates.
But when right-wing populists such as Vance make this argument, they mean something less literal: that America would be better off if the nation manufactured more and imported less, and Americans would be better off working in metaphorical toaster factories than doing whatever job they have now.
Boehm's article is marvelous. See if you agree with his answer to the question he poses near
its end:
How many Americans living in the year 2024 aspire to work—or see their children and grandchildren work—in a toaster factory?
Running a Close Second to John Lennon's "Imagine" for "Worst Song Ever"
(paid link)
OK, admittedly "Me and Bobby McGee" is a very catchy tune
and has some good lyrics, but Andrew Cline has a
bone to pick
with
one line:
Among his many memorable contributions to American arts, the great singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who passed away in September, wrote one of the most quotable lines in rock history.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It’s a fabulous drifter anthem.
It’s also entirely wrong.
Part of the American political left at the time was infused with a hippie ethos that disdained possessions and social connections. Freedom to them meant getting “back to the garden,” to quote another anthem of the era.
They should’ve read fewer radical poets and more Enlightenment philosophers.
In 1979, he played the first Cuban-American rock festival, in Havana. The high point for the hand-picked audience of government flunkies came when he dedicated a song to Fidel Castro, praising him, Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata, and Christ as great revolutionaries.
Later, he fell under the spell of the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. A Washington Post profile in 1987 noted that the only spot of color on his all-black outfit was a small red button with the picture of Augusto César Sandino, the patron saint of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution.
Indeed, his dedication to the Sandinista cause was such that he was on a first-name basis with Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega. After one of his many visits to Nicaragua, he released an album called “Third World Warrior” that was chock-full of songs celebrating the hard-Left.
We got nothing but contempt for Nazi sympathizers, but are inordinately forgiving to fans of Communism, an ideology
with a much higher body count.
And don't even get me started on what a shit he was to Rita Coolidge. (Google for yourself
if you want.)
Also of note:
(paid link)
If only Kristofferson were still alive.
He might want to use Joseph Stiglitz's new book (Amazon link at your right)
as the basis for a new song. Ryan Bourne reviews it and describes
Why Joseph Stiglitz Wants to Redefine Freedom
Given the pervasive existence of negative externalities, misinformation, market imperfections, and the suffering of the poor within “free markets,” Stiglitz thinks we need a more positive conception of liberty — one that considers opportunity-enhancing supports and public goods provided by the government as pro-freedom. In short, he argues that a benevolent state can make us freer, on net, by taxing, spending, and regulating to make the poor richer (“freedom to act”), provide social security (“freedom from want and fear”), and expand opportunity (freedom to live up to one’s potential). This coercion for the greater good will protect us against various market failures and exploitation. It’s the “freedom” that Vice President Kamala Harris promises on the campaign trail.
Why does Stiglitz try to redefine “freedom” rather than just use other existing words such as, say, “wealth,” or “opportunity,” or even “economic welfare” for these ambitions? Well, because he thinks that “freedom” resonates with people and that the libertarian-conservative conception of it has unfairly dominated our politics since the “neoliberal” revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. To read Stiglitz, in fact, you would think we’d seen minimalist government since the early 1980s, driving economic failure, climate-change destruction, and, ultimately, the economic disappointment that he thinks is fueling populist authoritarianism. Achieving his vision of real freedom requires “progressive capitalism,” Stiglitz concludes, by which he means a much more expansive form of social democracy and the regulatory state.
The above link is my first of five NR "gifted" links for October. Don't let it go to waste!
“In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men….The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document.” ~G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
And continues with his review of…
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is a very bad book. Writing a review of it thus presents a challenge. Who wants to read a review that is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel of dead fish? Yet, while reading Robeyns’ tendentious screed, I was faced with the absolute certainty that quite a few of my colleagues and students would love this book. Chesterton’s observation thus puts the right question forward. The interesting thing about Limitarianism is not why it is so very flawed, but rather why Robeyns and others would think it was good.
The thesis of the book is simple. Robeyns thinks it is wrong for anyone to have more than a million dollars in wealth, but she will agree to a compromise of a maximum wealth of ten million dollars. Robeyns doesn’t care what currency unit you use (dollars, pounds, or euros) as long as there is an enforced maximum. To the immediate reply that a 100% tax on wealth over that amount might be problematic, Robeyns repeatedly insists that she isn’t necessarily advocating that tax rate. Not that she thinks there is anything wrong with a 100% wealth tax, there are just other ways to get there. For example, you could convince everyone in the world it is bad to have lots of wealth.
The bulk of the book is Robeyns shouting at the reader about why anyone having high wealth is so incredibly bad. First: “It’s Dirty Money.” Some wealthy people acquired their wealth by stealing it. Obviously, that is an argument against theft, not high wealth, but in a perfect example of how this book works, having established that we all agree stealing is bad, Robeyns then notes that people get wealthy in lots of other similar ways — like only paying whatever they are required to pay in taxes or owning companies that pay wages less than what Robeyns thinks workers should be paid. You see? Stealing wealth and not paying more than you owe in taxes are both “dirty money.” So, high wealth is evil.
Amazon link at your right, although after reading Hartley's take,
I can't imagine why you would want to take advantage of it.
The Social Security program was too vulnerable to demographic bubbles from the very beginning and subsequent reforms have increasingly over-promised benefits thereby inviting our present budget insolvency. Voters are frustrated and losing confidence. They are looking for genuine leadership, not the “third rail of politics” policy détente we now have.
Harris and Trump now have an opportunity to provide such leadership. Each could promise to do one quick and simple thing as president to reduce the unfunded liability gap in Social Security funding. It’s easy to explain to voters, it will appeal to both younger and older voters, and it will especially appeal to those in the political middle who are looking for practical solutions rather than ideologically driven bumper sticker slogans. It would behoove both candidates to jump on this reform proposal first.
In 1972, an amendment was passed to protect Social Security beneficiaries from the effects of inflation. A mistake was made in the procedure for implementing the Cost of Living Adjustments indexing of benefits. This had the effect of over-accounting for the effects of inflation, leading to the prospect of benefit levels soaring out of control as inflation worsened in the 70s. In 1976, a Congressional panel led by a Harvard economist, William Hsiao, was convened in part to correct the error. The panel also recommended that the initial benefits calculation employ price indexing rather than wage indexing out of fear that the latter would produce an unsustainable budget. Unfortunately, wage indexing was chosen over price indexing.
So Rose's proposed fix is to switch over to price indexing. And he quotes Social Securities
trustee's report as claiming that One Simple Fix "wiil remove about 80 percent of the unfunded liability gap over the next 75 years."
Pretty good, right? The problem being that it's inevitable that this reform would be
demagogued as a "benefit cut." (Because it kinda is.) And that demagoguery has proven
to be extremely effective.
Also: someone's sure to point out that if you're going to use a CPI statistic to calculate
cost-of-living adjustments for retirees,
wouldn't
CPI-E (where the E stands for "Elderly") be more appropriate?
Sure it would. But the problem there: that would almost certainly increase benefits
more
than the current CPI-W calculation.
Bottom line: this won't be solved painlessly, I fear.
Unfortunately, it's a reply to something he posted back on September 19, so it's unlikely to be seen by anyone except… well, you, I guess.
From the linked Cato article by Romina Boccia:
Congress will soon consider the repeal of the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO), which would unfairly increase benefits for individuals with earnings that weren’t subject to Social Security taxation and end up costing taxpayers an additional $196 billion over ten years.
[…]
This change is further controversial in that repealing WEP and GPO would unfairly benefit public sector workers at a high cost to taxpayers. Instead, Congress should change the WEP formula to enhance fairness and accuracy in Social Security benefits without increasing taxpayer costs, and reform Social Security spousal benefits to better reflect the realities of 21st century families.
There follows a tutorial about why WEP and GPO were enacted in the first place, it's probably most interesting
for the folks who will benefit. And the people who will wind up paying will not pay attention. It's kind
of a classic "public choice" story.
Unfortunately, giving away taxpayer money is pretty popular among CongressCritters, including mine.
Also of note:
Sitting on the dock of the bay.
Noah Smith is a Kamala fan, but that doesn't mean he can't see that
Make-work is not the future of work.
(Whoa, a triple negative. I'm gonna leave it there though.)
In case you haven’t yet heard, the ILA — the union that controls the dockworkers along the entire East and Gulf Coasts of the United States — has just gone on strike, threatening to paralyze much of the U.S. economy by cutting off a substantial percentage of imports. If a deal isn’t reached soon, inflation could come roaring back, and lots of Americans could lose their jobs at the same time. (UPDATE: The strike appears to have been suspended until early next year.)
Here’s how [president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Harold J.] Daggett describes the potential impact of his union’s strike in the interview [at the link]:
When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port locked down. You know what's going to happen? I'll tell you. First week, be all over the news every night, boom, boom, second week. Guys who sell cars can't sell cars, because the cars ain't coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week, malls are closing down. They can't get the goods from China. They can't sell clothes. They can't do this. Everything in the United States comes on a ship. They go out of business. Construction workers get laid off because the materials aren't coming in. The steel's not coming in. The lumber's not coming in. They lose their job. Everybody's hating the longshoremen now because now they realize how important our jobs are.
We should all be thinking very hard about whether it’s wise to have a labor system that can allow that sort of thing to happen. Is it right that the livelihoods of millions of Americans should hang on the whims of 50,000 dockworkers? Is it smart to give a single union the power to shut down a large portion of America’s critical infrastructure? Collective bargaining is important, but there should be limits on how destructive we allow that bargaining process to be.
President Biden doesn’t see it that way. He has refused to use the powers of the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike on national emergency grounds, declaring that “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.” But although the ILA may win their fight in the short term, I don’t think they’re going to come off looking very good as a result of this strike. Belligerently threatening the livelihoods of millions of Americans while proudly declaring that “everyone hates the longshoremen” is not a good look, especially if you’re a guy who makes around $900,000 a year (three times as much as other big union leaders), once owned a giant yacht, and has been indicted (though acquitted) by the U.S. government twice for racketeering.
Smith goes on to note that it's more about banning automation at the ports than it is wages.
And for more on that issue…Reason's Eric Boehm is not gonna be on Daggett's Christmas list;
he advocates that we go ahead and
Automate the Ports.
The news that the International Longshoreman Association (ILA) agreed to suspend its strike until January is undeniably good news for just about every aspect of America's economy.
But whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank's most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which "reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction," the World Bank notes.
Boehm notes later in his article that Daggett also despises E-ZPass. Because all those human toll-takers
were unionized! And none of the E-ZPass hardware is!
Let’s start with automation. It’s true that many American ports are some of the least-efficient in the world, but that’s because a port like Oakland (ranked #397) doesn’t have the built-in advantages of a global hub like Luanda, Angola (#389) or Port Sudan (#388). The ILA will not to be dragged into the mid-20th century against our will. Some foreign ports are already automated, using dangerous, untested technology like computers, bar codes, and video cameras. In Mobile, Alabama, the port tried to install something called an “automatic gate” — what in the devil is that?!?!? We will never allow greedy corporations to deny someone the dignity of earning a living by standing next to a gate all day. If we don’t act, it won’t just be the standing-next-to-a-gate-all-day jobs that will go away; jobs like guy-who-carries-an-orange-flag-around-sometimes, guy-who-stands-next-to-a-guy-who-is-loading-things, and guy-who-leans-on-a-forklift-all-day-listening-to-sports-radio will be threatened, too.
By why should the pro-labor measures be limited to the docks? It’s time to confront the fact that modern, diesel-powered ships destroy jobs. Dock workers would benefit if shipping reverted to wood-built, wind-powered ships that served humanity just fine for thousands of years. That’s true for two reasons: First, today’s steel-and-diesel behemoths slide into port with virtually no help from the docks. In contrast, a three-masted schooner laden with spices from the orient would require at least 20 stout men to pull her ashore. Second, modern ships haul huge amounts of cargo with sparse crew, which reduces demand for hardscrabble chaps from port towns who wear cable-knit sweaters and clinch corn cob pipes in their teeth. Sailors and longshoremen share many things: A love of the sea, a penchant for feeding peanuts to pet monkeys who perch on our shoulders, and a stew of venereal diseases contracted from dockside whores. What’s good for sailors is also good for dock workers, so we must retreat from this post-Monitor/Merrimack hell that has befallen us in the past 160 years.
Daggett's bottom line:
President Biden has said that he won’t force us back to work. I applaud his decision to affirm union solidarity as we cause supply chain disruptions that will bring back inflation right before the election — that is true commitment! Vice President Harris and former president Trump have also expressed support, so there seems to be a broad consensus that the ILA will not be forced to accept technological change just because it makes goods cheaper, facilitates commerce, and increases productivity. The future of global commerce will be decided in the coming weeks. And I will do everything in my power to see that that future closely resembles the distant past.
And I enjoyed the "disclaimer" at the end too:
For the lawyers and ILA-connected mafia members: This is a bit. So, you can’t sue me or kill me and toss my body in a drainage ditch off the Jersey Turnpike, because satire is protected speech.
So there. And if this is my last post ever, you'll probably find me in that ditch too.
The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet
(paid link)
A hefty tome, weighing in at 580 pages. But many of those pages are tables with row after
row of data, and I hope you'll forgive me for skipping over those. Obtained by the Interlibrary Loan
service at the University Near Here, from Wesleyan.
You may remember the 1980
Simon–Ehrlich wager,
where techno-optimist Julian Simon bet eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich that the prices of five
minerals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would go down in real terms over the next
decade. Simon won that bet. This book's authors (Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley) deem Simon their hero, and this book is
their effort to expand and generalize his sunny optimism.
Their approach is to calculate the "time price" (TP) of various commodities and services; how long it
would take a typical worker to earn enough money to buy them. And to see how those TPs have changed
over time. Spoiler: nearly without exception, the TPs have declined over the periods they examine.
I.e., the items have become more "abundant". And, in many cases, the growth in abundance has outstripped
the growth in population; the authors term this "superabundance".
Reader, did your school teachers chide you to "show your work" in your math classes? And to "cite your
sources" in other classes?
Tupy and Pooley
do so, in mind-numbing detail. Again, a lot of pages skimmed over. I trust them.
Other than those core calculations, the book is an examination of the history and causes of
economic prosperity. It is a rebuke to the gloomy followers of Malthus, like Ehrlich. (And also,
amusingly, Thanos, the mass Malthusian murderer from the Marvel movies.) Here, they mainly
follow the arguments of folks I like too: Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley,
Michael Shellenberger,
and the like.
No surprise, I think the authors are largely correct in their cheerleading for technological
optimism and free-market capitalism. And also that the main dangers to continued prosperity
are the too-popular advocates for (various flavors of) socialism, economic degrowth, technophobia,
and (generally) predictors of doom, unless we stop our sinful ways.
One small nit to pick: the phrase "infinitely bountiful planet" up there in the book's subtitle.
I'm more of a fan of (Herbert)
Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
(Example:
Moore's Law: even its originator
admitted that would eventually bump into fundamental limits.)
Also, the authors make a decent argument that innovation is driven in areas with large populations.
(You want a country where Jobs has a better chance of meeting Woz, for example.) But large doesn't
necessarily imply growing indefinitely; I think the authors tend to blur that distinction.
Reader, I recommend you do not search Amazon for "poop emoji". Lot of stuff there you don't
want to be tempted to buy. Like our Product du Jour! You're welcome!
Imagine you're a podcaster who regularly does quick 10- to 12-minute summary reviews of written works. Now imagine your producer gives you multiple pages of nothing but the words "poop" and "fart" repeated over and over again and asks you to have an episode about the document on their desk within the hour.
Speaking for myself, I'd have trouble even knowing where to start with such a task. But when Reddit user sorryaboutyourcats gave the same prompt to Google's NotebookLM AI model, the result was a surprisingly cogent and engaging AI-generated podcast that touches on the nature of art, the philosophy of attention, and the human desire to make meaning out of the inherently meaningless.
I can't imagine what an AI fed on Pun Salad content would produce. Like the
Giant Rat of Sumatra, 'twould undoubtedly
be a story for which the world is not yet prepared.
“AI poses a threat to democracy and society. It must be extensively regulated.”
Or words to that effect, are a common sentiment.
They must be kidding.
Have the chattering classes—us—speculating about the impact of new technology on economics, society, and politics, ever correctly envisioned the outcome? Over the centuries of innovation, from moveable type to Twitter (now X), from the steam engine to the airliner, from the farm to the factory to the office tower, from agriculture to manufacturing to services, from leeches and bleeding to cancer cures and birth control, from abacus to calculator to word processor to mainframe to internet to social media, nobody has ever foreseen the outcome, and especially the social and political consequences of new technology? Even with the benefit of long hindsight, do we have any historical consensus on how these and other past technological innovations affected the profound changes in society and government that we have seen in the last few centuries? Did the industrial revolution advance or hinder democracy?
Among Cochrane's numerous spot-on observations: remember when GMO-based "frankenfood" was gonna
kill us all? Well, that didn't happen, but a manipulated virus made with the blessing of (and cash from)
a US government agency did manage to kill a bunch of us.
His recommendation:
The government must enforce rule of law, not the tyranny of the regulator. Trust democracy, not paternalistic aristocracy—rule by independent, unaccountable, self-styled technocrats, insulated from the democratic political process. Remain a government of rights, not of permissions. Trust and strengthen our institutions, including all of civil society, media, and academia, not just federal regulatory agencies, to detect and remedy problems as they occur. Relax. It’s going to be great.
Cochrane's substack is titled "The Grumpy Economist", and it looks pretty good.
Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the U.S. should do something about fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is significantly more potent than heroin. It is often found mixed into street drugs, but not because addicts are clamoring for it: Rather, fentanyl is cheaper and easier to manufacture and smuggle, making it an attractive alternative when prohibitionist governments crack down on pain pills.
Unfortunately, neither of the major party seems willing to either admit the government's own role in making the drug so dangerous, or to pursue an alternative to classic war on drugs policies.
Nothing is more likely to put me into a snit than seeing my local pols
pontificate
that they're gonna "keep drugs off our streets".
If cynics are people prematurely disappointed about the future, they might now constitute something recently elusive: an American consensus. With voting well underway a month before Election Day (actually, during election autumn), gaze upon the campaign’s stricken landscape:
[…]
Harris is parsimonious with interviews, but who cares? They can only reveal today’s batch of her views, which tend to expire in batches. It would, however, be fun to find out if there is any question — e.g., are there enough submarines for the AUKUS partners? — she will not answer by saying, “I was raised a middle-class kid, okay?”
Former president Donald Trump still resembles the “Bleak House” character about whom Charles Dickens wrote: “When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject.” But Trump’s ongoing choices of colorful companions raise a question: Has a ship’s hull ever become so encrusted with barnacles that the weight of them sank the vessel? The Trump campaign should wonder. He evidently enjoys the company of the dregs of America’s political culture — Holocaust deniers, 9/11 “truthers,” Tucker Carlson, who praises a “historian” who thinks Winston Churchill was beastly to Adolf Hitler.
I've added that "prematurely disappointed about the future" quip to my blog's subtitle rotation.
Wax (still) off.
Charles Murray takes to Quillette to comment on
The Amy Wax Affair.
Last week, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) and three-time recipient of awards for excellence in teaching, was stripped her of her chaired professorship, suspended for a year at half pay, and denied summer pay in perpetuity. Why? As far as I can tell, for telling her students the truth in the classroom and exercising her constitutional right to express her private opinions outside the classroom.
Penn’s administration doesn’t see it that way. In the words of the official letter sent to Wax, these punishments were justified by her “flagrant unprofessional conduct”:
That conduct included a history of making sweeping and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status; breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of university policy; and, on numerous occasions, in and out of the classroom and in public, making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeting specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify.
The specifics of the allegations against Wax can be found in a twelve-page letter written by the Dean of the law school, Theodore Ruger, in June 2022. I am suspicious of some of them, but most of the things she is alleged to have said sound like the Amy Wax I know. In each of our occasional encounters over the years, I have always had the same reactions. She is brilliant, entertaining, disconcertingly frank, and sometimes abrasive. Her style is not my style, but I have never known Wax to use invective or slurs when she is expressing her opinion. She is just really, really, blunt.
… and, unfortunately, it's paywalled after that. But the upshot is obvious:
it's more likely all but the bravest dissenters from the theology that infests American higher
ed will avoid being "really, really, blunt".
And blunt criticism is exactly what higher ed needs. Otherwise we're in for a few more decades of
cluelessness and malpractice.
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