Simple. Because "We" Don't Pay Enough Attention to Orwell

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The New Yorker article headline seems designed to piss me off: Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist. It is a review of a new book, Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America, Amazon paid link on your right. And the publisher's blurb claims it "collects, in one place, key texts from the sharpest minds in politics, history, and the academy beginning with classic pieces by Hannah Arendt, Angela Davis, Reinhold Niebuhr, Leon Trotsky, and others."

I'm sorry, book. You lost me at "Angela Davis".

It has been only one day since I unleashed my George Orwell quote that clears up everything, and answers the implicit question posed by the New Yorker article title. It's from his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language"

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

The reviewer, Andrew Marantz, could have just quoted George, and observed that saying "Donald Trump is a fascist" is indistinguishable from saying "I don't like Donald Trump".

But, to his credit, Marantz, does quote Orwell. And he's even got better quotes than I do:

One classic text not anthologized in “Did It Happen Here?” is “What Is Fascism?,” the oft-quoted essay published by George Orwell in 1944. “As used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless,” he wrote. “I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit . . . astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” (This is as true today as it was then. I have seen the F-word applied to Russia, Ukraine, Hamas, Israel, the Catholic Church, academia, and London’s Metropolitan Police—and that was just from one recent perusal of X, and not a very thorough one.) Orwell later pointed out that many such words, including “democracy, socialism, freedom,” had been similarly distorted. (Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Mitch McConnell have all been maligned as socialists; Sweden calls itself a democracy, but so does North Korea.) Yet Orwell was clear that semantic confusion was no excuse for quietism: “Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this.”

So I gotta say that reading Marantz's review is almost certainly a better use of your time than reading the book itself.

And here's a link to Orwell's 1944 essay: What is Fascism? (Interestingly, it's hosted at "orwell.ru"; how long before that gets shut down?)

Also of note:

  • Into the Memory Hole. Apparently it doesn't focus-group well any more: Biden and congressional Democrats aren't saying "Bidenomics" much. Axios observes:

    For the first time in more than two months, President Biden on Tuesday publicly uttered a word that he and other Democrats have largely abandoned: "Bidenomics."

    Why it matters: Republicans are now using the term — mockingly — far more than Democrats heading into the meat of the presidential campaign, even as the economy has improved under Biden.

    The intrigue: After Axios asked the White House why Biden wasn't saying "Bidenomics" — including in his State of the Union address this month — he used the term at a Tuesday afternoon event in North Carolina.

    • It was the first time he'd done so since Jan. 25.
    • "Leading economists aren't making much fun of 'Bidenomics' anymore," he said of his programs to boost the middle class through public spending. "They're thinking maybe it works!"

    Biden seems to think that the primary function of "leading economists" is to make fun of stuff.

    Veronique de Rugy is one of my "leading economists", and she makes a bold claim: Americans Can Tell the Difference Between Rosy Economic Data and Reality.

    The economy is growing, unemployment is low, wages are up, and inflation is down. However, the American people remain grumpy about the state of the economy. This puzzle was just investigated by four economists. They found that people often know that something is wrong even if statistics don't reflect the problem. In this case, people are perceiving that inflation is still, in fact, high.

    For months now, Americans have been told that inflation's downward trend, from almost 9% annually to around 3%, should make them feel good about the economy. But it isn't working. A recent Gallup poll found that 63% say the state of the economy is getting worse and 45% think it's already "poor." One reason, many have speculated, is that while the rate at which prices are rising might have slowed considerably, prices remain very high. Food and rent in particular are still expensive. These prices are felt everyday by Americans when they pay for their housing and go to the supermarket.

    But that's not all. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research by economists Marijn Bolhuis, Judd Cramer, Karl Schulz and Larry Summers finds that a change in the method used to estimate inflation today, compared to the method used in the 1980s, might well cause an underestimation of the true level of inflation.

    You can read the Bolhuis/Cramer/Schulz/Summers NBER study here: The Cost of Money is Part of the Cost of Living: New Evidence on the Consumer Sentiment Anomaly. Abstract:

    Unemployment is low and inflation is falling, but consumer sentiment remains depressed. This has confounded economists, who historically rely on these two variables to gauge how consumers feel about the economy. We propose that borrowing costs, which have grown at rates they had not reached in decades, do much to explain this gap. The cost of money is not currently included in traditional price indexes, indicating a disconnect between the measures favored by economists and the effective costs borne by consumers. We show that the lows in US consumer sentiment that cannot be explained by unemployment and official inflation are strongly correlated with borrowing costs and consumer credit supply. Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels since the Volcker-era. We then develop alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs and can account for almost three quarters of the gap in US consumer sentiment in 2023. Global evidence shows that consumer sentiment gaps across countries are also strongly correlated with changes in interest rates. Proposed U.S.-specific factors do not find much supportive evidence abroad.

    Fortunately, I don't need to borrow money, so I'm doing OK. But those high prices? They seem to be staying high, Joe. That's Bidenomics.

  • Henceforth, NBC will only be employing Democrat-approved liars. Jacob Sullum observes: If Ronna McDaniel Is Beyond the Pale, NBC May Have Trouble Presenting 'Diverse Viewpoints'

    Two weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Ronna McDaniel, then chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), let Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's lawyer, hold a press conference at the RNC's headquarters in Washington, D.C. During that bizarre presentation, Giuliani and Sidney Powell, another member of the Trump campaign's "elite strike force team," crystallized the craziness of the president's stolen-election fantasy by describing a baroque international conspiracy that supposedly had delivered a fraudulent victory to Joe Biden.

    On January 29, 2021, three weeks after angry Trump supporters who believed that fantasy invaded the U.S. Capitol as Congress was about to affirm Biden's election, McDaniel expressed regret about hosting Giuliani's clown show. "When I saw some of the things Sidney was saying, without proof, I certainly was concerned it was happening in my building," she told The New York Times. "There are a whole host of issues we had to deal with: What is the liability of the RNC, if these allegations are made and [prove to be] unfounded?"

    That incident reflects McDaniel's ambiguous role in promoting Trump's baseless claims of decisive election fraud in the two months prior to the Capitol riot. Her support for those claims, which stopped short of outright endorsement but nevertheless lent them credibility, was at the center of the complaints that yesterday persuaded NBC executives to abruptly rescind their decision to hire her as an on-air commentator.

    Sullum does a heroic job of laying out the history of what McDaniel actually was saying about the 2020 election.

    For extra credit, check out Matt Taibbi's rebuttal to an NBC "news" story about his revelations of government's censorship campaigns against "disinformation": The Peacock Joins The Smear Campaign.

  • Yep. Fiona Harrigan says what's probably not said enough: Immigrant Workers Who Died on the Baltimore Bridge Were Hardworking Heroes. She's pretty disgusted by Fox News spokesmodel Maria Bartiromo's spin:

    "The White House has issued a statement on this saying that 'there's no indication of nefarious intent in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge,'" said Bartiromo yesterday, prefacing an interview with Sen. Rick Scott (R–Fla.). "Of course, you've been talking a lot about the potential for wrongdoing or potential for foul play given the wide-open border."

    Despite Bartiromo's implication that the tragedy at the Key Bridge might be linked to border crossers, the details of Tuesday's incident say far more about the contributions of immigrant workers than they do about the perils of an "open border."

    "Jesus Campos, an employee of contractor Brawner Builders, had worked the overnight shift of the bridge work before switching to another," reported The Baltimore Banner. "He said the missing men are from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico." The New York Times confirmed that at least one of the missing men was from El Salvador and two were from Guatemala.

    In other words—based on what's currently known about the victims—the men working on the Key Bridge when it collapsed were immigrant workers who sought better economic opportunities and ended up filling difficult jobs. "They are all hard-working, humble men," said Campos, and all came to the country to help their loved ones in their home countries, the Banner reported.

    RIP, gentlemen.

Don't Get Fooled Again

The NR editorialists are a little late to the show, but that is (as they say) better than never: Biden’s Shameful Betrayal of Israel at the United Nations.

By allowing the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution demanding an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza while Hamas remains in power and still holds 130 hostages, the Biden administration has shamefully betrayed a key ally while empowering a terrorist group committed to its destruction.

President Biden has been getting increasingly bellicose in his rhetoric against Israel in recent weeks, particularly when it comes to Israeli plans to finish the job against Hamas by invading Rafah in southern Gaza. Over the weekend, the administration dispatched Vice President Kamala Harris to ABC to again chastise the planned Israeli offensive, claiming, laughably, that she had “studied the maps” and decided that Israel’s plan to evacuate civilians from the area wasn’t feasible.

She's studied the maps!

Kamala is only a hair's breadth away from channelling Fredo in The Godfather Part II:

I can handle things! I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb... I'm smart and I want respect!

Also of note:

  • Via Instapundit, UPI reports Eli Lilly warns of shortage of insulin products.

    Drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co is announcing a temporary shortage of two of its insulin products.

    "The 10 mL [millilter] vials of Humalog® and Insulin Lispro Injection are or will be temporarily out of stock at wholesalers and some pharmacies through the beginning of April," Lilly said in a recent statement.

    Fingers crossed, I'm not in need. But I found this White House boast from last year pretty easily: FACT SHEET: President Biden’s Cap on the Cost of Insulin Could Benefit Millions of Americans in All 50 States.

    This week, Eli Lilly, the largest manufacturer of insulin in the United States is lowering their prices and meeting that call.

    Eli Lilly announced they are lowering the cost of insulin by 70% and capping what patients pay out-of-pocket for insulin at $35. This action, driven by the momentum from the Inflation Reduction Act, could benefit millions of Americans with diabetes in all fifty states and U.S. territories. The President continues to call on Congress to finish the job and cap costs at $35 for all Americans.

    I'm not smart enough to establish causality here. But I am familiar with the usual effect of arbitrary price "caps" decreed by government.

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    Orwell! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. At Hot Air, John Sexton reviews the reviews, and they're not good: Judith Butler's New Book Sounds Shallow and Not Very Thoughtful. But the Amazon link for "Judith Butler's new book" is over there at your right, should you want to judge for yourself.

    Sexton quotes extensively from Katha Pollitt's review in the Atlantic. Amusingly, the HTML <title> element for that review is The Phantasms of Judith Butler; the actual headline is "Not Everything is About Gender".

    Also amusingly, Pollitt's review notes, parenthetically:

    Butler identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns

    Pollitt follows that rule, Sexton doesn't.

    Confusing pronoun usage is relatively new, but Pollitt notes a different language issue that is very, very old:

    Fascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet. As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own. That definition is so broad and so vague as to be useless. You might even say that “fascism” functions as a kind of phantasm, frightening people into accepting views wholesale without examining them individually. It’s a kind of guilt by association—like comparing critics of your prose to Nixon.

    Uh huh. I haven't quoted George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" for over five months, so I guess it's time once more:

    The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

    It's been 78 years. You'd think literate people would know better by now.
  • Since we're quoting… I'll second Don Boudreaux's Quotation of the Day... from Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell:

    Arguing as if some people’s high incomes were deducted from some fixed or predestined total income – leaving less for others – may be clever. But cleverness is not wisdom, and artful insinuations are no substitute for factual evidence, if your goal is knowing the facts. But, if your goals are political or ideological, there is no question that one of the most politically successful messages of the twentieth century was that the rich have gotten rich by taking from the poor.

    This goes back to something I blogged just a couple days ago: We're talking philodoxy (love of opinion) vs. philosophy (love of wisdom). These two disciplines rarely collide, but when they do, the former picks itself up, dusts itself off, and continues on as if nothing had happened.


Last Modified 2024-03-27 9:05 AM EDT

Shaheen and Hassan Should Say: "Ditto"

But unless I'm missing something, they have nothing to say on this issue, unlike …

On that subject, turning to the NYPost editorialists: Team Biden's ceasefire sellout of Israel is public, monstrous and final.

Desperate to satisfy the Democratic Party’s hard left, the Biden administration just took a giant step toward abandoning Israel by declining to veto the latest UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

The measure from the 10 non-permanent Security Council members demands an immediate ceasefire through the month of Ramadan, while also calling on Hamas to release the 100 or so Israelis it still holds hostage from its Oct. 7 terror raid.

No matter that Hamas will refuse; the measure still adds to the pressure for Israel to end its necessary, justified and humane war against Hamas just as it’s getting close to destroying the terror cadre’s last battalions.

Betrayal is the unifying theme of Biden Administration foreign policy.

The WSJ editorialists are also scathing:

In his State of the Union address, President Biden made a promise to the families of U.S. hostages held by Hamas: “We will not rest until we bring their loved ones home.” At the United Nations on Monday, he undermined that pledge.

The U.S. withheld its veto and abstained as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that demanded a cease-fire in Gaza but didn’t make the cease-fire contingent on Hamas releasing its 134 hostages. That condition, on which the U.S. had previously insisted, has been dropped.

Instead, the resolution’s two demands—“an immediate cease-fire for the month of Ramadan . . . leading to a lasting sustainable cease-fire” and “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”—each stand on their own. To Hamas, the diplomatic pressure will be meaningless. To Israel, it can be perilous, as Mr. Biden well knows. His fence-sitting opens up Israel to more pressure to end the war while Hamas still reigns in part of Gaza.

White House spokesman John Kirby says, “Nothing has changed about our policy—nothing.” He explains that the U.S. abstained because the Security Council resisted a last-minute amendment condemning Hamas. Yet the U.S. had previously vetoed resolutions that wouldn’t condemn Hamas for Oct. 7. The moral arbiters at the U.N. still won’t do that.

Excerpt from Commentary's commentary:

This will have consequences. Here at home, it will confirm that the president is a doormat not a doorstop. The protesters who follow him around accusing Biden of all manner of crimes against humanity will see this, correctly, as an invitation to kick him some more. In the naïve hopes of appeasing a faction of goosestepping goons, Biden will have instead rewarded their tactics and incentivized more of the same.

I am unsure if the goosestepping goons will ever be appeased unless and until Israel is destroyed and Jews eliminated "from the river to the sea".

But this is what happens when your country's foreign policy is run by the wizards who designed the Afghan pullout and US border security.

Also of note:

  • Or is it a Speedway to Serfdom? Andrew Stuttaford considers the regulatory push to electric vehicles to be The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco.

    Helmuth von Moltke (1800-91), the greatest of Prussia’s nineteenth century generals, so the old (unreliable but enjoyable) story goes, laughed only twice in his life. Once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable and once when told that his mother-in-law had died.

    He would surely have at least permitted himself a smile at the over-confidence with which the EPA is attempting to reorder the American automobile industry. “No plan of operations,” he warned, “extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,” a wordy formulation often condensed into the pithier, but overly simplistic, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Von Moltke did not believe that planning should be dispensed with, but he insisted that its limitations should be recognized: He understood the trap that “certainty” could be. He thought it was far better to think through the various contingencies that might emerge once a battle or campaign was underway, and how to handle them.

    The EPA’s plan for the auto sector, which we discussed (unenthusiastically) on the home page on Friday, reflects a different approach. It has imposed a (declining) CO2 quota on the auto sector, and then passed the buck. Carmakers will just have to find a way to sell the EVs they don’t want to make to consumers that don’t want to buy them (in sufficient quantities). No problem!

    Surprise, surprise, that target is not realistic. Central planners are like that.

    The only bright spot is that the planners' folly will become ever more apparent in the coming years as their mandates collide with reality. (Stuttaford does a fine job of describing the inevitable collisions.)

    Downside: we will have wasted a lot of time and money along the way.

  • But they have to keep their phony baloney jobs! Bureaucrats look bad unless they are Doing Something, even when that Something is "attempting to cripple or destroy a successful company that makes popular products." Elizabeth Nolan Brown takes a gander at The Absurd Apple Antitrust Lawsuit.

    The DOJ's antics are bad. But the really outrageous bit is further down in the article:

    In a civil complaint filed last Thursday, the DOJ and 16 state attorneys general accused Apple of violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a law allowing the government to intervene against companies said to be acting "in restraint of trade or commerce."

    "Apple illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers," the DOJ states in a press release. "Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers."

    That sounds bad—until you read the government's theories about how Apple does this. The feds complain about practices like Apple limiting App Store offerings, charging fees to developers who sell their products there, and making iPhones more compatible with Apple products than with third-party offerings.

    What's the outrageous part? Clicking through to the complaint reveals that New Hampshire's attorney general is one of those 16 participants in the suit.

    My tax dollars at work.

Done Your Taxes Yet?

I have. But unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to make TurboTax do this:

But while we're talking about taxes, let me register hearty agreement with Frank J. Fleming:

Would some sort of ‥ um … enhanced interrogation techniques be appropriate to get to the truth here? Nah, probably not. Still…

Also of note:

  • Awkward! George Will explains Why good news about inequality is awkward for the left and right.

    In more than 50 years, government transfer payments (Medicaid, food stamps, etc.) to the average household in the bottom quintile of earners, have risen (in inflation-adjusted dollars) from $9,700 to $45,000 annually. Why, then, does the government, which is substantially staffed by progressives, use — actually, abuse — statistics to suggest the futility of progressive anti-poverty policies? Because this provides a permanent rationale for government growth: perpetual undiminished poverty.

    In their 2022 book “The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate,” Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early demonstrate gross defects in the Census Bureau’s measurement of inequality. By not counting about 88 percent of government transfer payments that enlarge the buying power of lower-income households, and not counting taxes that lower the wealth of higher-income households, government statistics purport to prove that the average income in the top quintile of earners is 16.7 times that of the average in the bottom quintile. Counting transfers and taxes, however, the actual ratio is 4 to 1. Which is unsurprising, given this:

    In 2017, 40 percent of the $2.8 trillion in transfer payments distributed by federal, state and local governments went to the bottom 20 percent of income households, and 68 percent to the bottom 40 percent of households. Eighty-two percent of the $4.4 trillion Americans paid in all taxes came from the two most affluent quintiles. And allowing for transfers and taxes, the average household income in the lowest quintile is only 8 percent less than the average in the second lowest, and only 24 percent less than in the middle quintile.

    We reported on the Gramm/Ekelund/Early book on the book blog a few months back.

  • "Unserious" is too mild, I'd prefer "dishonest", but… Eric Boehm is otherwise on target: A GOP Plan To Raise the Retirement Age Reveals How Unserious Washington Is About Social Security.

    A Republican budget plan released Wednesday included one of the most obvious, low-hanging ideas for shoring up Social Security: Raising the eligibility age for benefits from 67 to 69.

    That idea was included within a 180-page budget plan released by the House Republican Study Committee (RSC), a policy-focused group that includes most but not all members of the House GOP. Proposals released by the RSC are in many ways similar to the president's annual budget request: an aspirational document that reflects big-picture agreement on important issues, but not necessarily an actionable plan that can be passed into law.

    So the call for raising the retirement age by two years—a change that the RSC plan says wouldn't even be implemented in the short-term to spare Americans currently approaching Social Security eligibility—would barely even be accurately described as a first step. It's also not a novel or surprising development: upping the eligibility age has been a part of the discussion about Social Security since at least the George W. Bush administration.

    Which is why what happened next is particularly illustrative.

    Well, you can click over to find out what happened next. It's unsurprising.

  • Weakened at Bernie's. Jonah Goldberg rescues one of those obscure words from the inpenetrable prose of Eric Voeglin; philodoxy. Analogous to how "philosophy" is "love of wisdom", "philodoxy" is love of opinion". Specifically:

    Intellectual projects based on falsehood or opinion untethered from wisdom and reality are philodoxical—or BS, if you prefer. The philosopher tries to understand and describe reality; the philodoxer plays games with words, feelings, opinions, and myths that might tickle our intuitions and feel truthy, but aren’t actually true.

    Jonah's immediate target is Senator Bernie's latest scheme:

    Bless Bernie Sanders’ heart. I think his proposal for Americans to work less is kind of adorable. It’s so retro, so old school, I feel like he should follow up with calls to enforce the Kellogg-Briand Pact—“Stop this war or we’ll shoot!”—or for the abolition of private property.

    “It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life,” Sanders insists. “It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.”

    Kevin Williamson or Scott Lincicome are probably better equipped to illustrate why this is such a cockamamie idea. But I’ll give it a whirl. Imagine if Sanders proposed that every business in the country—large and small—give every American an extra day’s pay without requiring an additional day of work. That’s like a 25 percent raise. (I say “like” both because math is hard and because I have no idea if you should count the value of health benefits and stuff like that. But if the standard workweek is four days under Sanders’ plan, paying for a fifth day looks like a 25 percent bump to me).*

    Rich Lowry is also unimpressed: Bernie Sanders’ four-day-work-week scheme is a prescription for poverty.

    “It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life,” the Vermont socialist insists.

    “It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.”

    The last clause is the key one: If everyone can work less and produce and earn exactly the same, why not?

    And if this is possible, why stop at four-days-a-week?

    It’d be positively cruel to make someone work four days when they can work three with the same outcomes.

    Of course, the promise that we can work less and make the same is the socialist equivalent of Mexico will pay for the border wall.

    It’s not just promising a free lunch, but a free breakfast, lunch and dinner, with room service delivering a late-night snack gratis.

    I don't want to irk those of you still working, but the absurdity of Sanders' arbitrary statist proposal made me realize that our current employment rules are absurd and arbitrary as well. There's nothing sacrosanct about 40 hours, time-and-a-half, $7.25/hour. etc. Junk 'em all.

Stay Tuned for "Victory Jiggles"

Hey, I just noticed that Google is displaying hit counts ("About n results") for its searches again! I was pretty sure they had stopped doing that! Was I just imagining things?

Anyhow, in the anarchic, plague-on-all-your-houses, spirit from past years, I'll add the phony hit count to our Sunday table:

Warning: Google hit counts are bogus.

Candidate EBO Win
Probability
Change
Since
3/17
Phony Hit
Count
Donald Trump 47.8% +0.1% 2,140,000
Joe Biden 39.7% +2.6% 372,000
Michelle Obama 2.9% -1.1% 106,000
Robert Kennedy Jr 2.9% +0.2% 45,600
Kamala Harris 2.4% unch 134,000
Other 4.3% +0.8%  

As noted, bogus. Still, it's unsurprising how yuge Trump's are.

Also of note:

  • Did someone say "phony"? Yes! Jeff Jacoby did: The phony feeding frenzies over ‘bloodbath’ and ‘hamstringing’. (Subhed: "Ripping words out of context, prominent voices on left and right alike keep pouring fuel on our incendiary civic discourse.")

    At a campaign rally in Dayton last weekend, Donald Trump said something that released a tsunami of outrage and scorn from Democrats and the left-leaning media. During a Supreme Court oral argument two days later, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said something that released a tsunami of outrage and scorn from Republicans and the right-leaning media.

    In neither case was there anything scurrilous or shocking about the remark in question. What was reprehensible was the way the remarks were willfully misrepresented by ideological partisans who didn’t scruple to distort the truth in order to advance a political narrative and discredit a political foe.

    What Trump said was that “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country” if he doesn’t win the presidential election in November. Seizing on the word “bloodbath,” a liberal chorus instantly raised an alarm.

    “It’s clear this guy wants another January 6,” President Biden posted on X, as his campaign released an ad raising the specter of civil unrest. Politico headlined its story “Trump says country faces ‘bloodbath’ if Biden wins in November.” Similar headlines appeared above stories on NBC, CBS, and The Guardian. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, advised the media to pile on: “Headline writers: Don’t outsmart yourself,” he urged on X. “Just do ‘Trump Promises Bloodbath if he Doesn’t Win Election.’” Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, a frequent TV talking head, told MSNBC that Trump’s comment was reminiscent of “fascism and totalitarianism and in Germany’s case the Holocaust.”

    Whoa. Of course, Trump was talking about a "bloodbath" for the American auto industry if another four years of Biden's EV mandates continued.

    But what about the righties? They were similarly freaked about Ketanji Brown Jackson's remarks about the First Amendment "hamstringing the government in significant ways."

    Well, yeah. That's what it's supposed to do. But context shows that KBJ was talking specifically about governmental "persuasive" speech. Which is, and should be, legal.

    I should note that your humble blogger was swept up in the outrage. My bad.

  • Warning: unsettling imagery ahead. Piers Morgan takes to the NYPost to complain: The only bloodbath in America right now is the bowels of liberal hypocrisy splattered all over social media.

    When Donald Trump became president, he quickly developed a favorite morning hobby.

    “I wake up early,” he revealed to me a few months into his tenure. “And if I don’t like what I see about myself on the TV screens in my bedroom, I pull out my phone in bed and tweet something that makes them all change to BREAKING NEWS and a completely different story based on my tweet.”

    Then he burst out laughing.

    I did, too.

    Hilarious. We had a president who spent his time trolling the media instead of, y'know, doing his freakin' job.

  • Just say no. Christian Schneider has some advice for pontificating Democrats: If ‘Democracy Is on the Ballot,’ Kamala Harris Shouldn’t Be. (I'm out of gifted NR links for the month, sorry.)

    Biden, who finds himself down in the 2024 presidential polls in all the wrong swing states, is facing off against two stubborn adversaries: Donald Trump and Father Time. But while Trump is beatable, Father Time is famously undefeated. In NCAA Tournament parlance, the Grim Reaper is a No. 1 seed and Biden’s remaining cogent for the next four years is a longshot.

    Democrats are publicly in denial about Biden’s age, lashing out against the New York Times for, among other things, publishing poll results showing that nearly eight in ten Americans believe the president is too old to continue. That includes 73 percent of people over 65, meaning people roughly Biden’s own age are looking at him and saying, “The old man’s lost it.” (Only 43 percent felt the same about Trump.)

    In any sane political environment, Biden would have a release valve — that of a capable vice president who could take over in the event something happened to him while in office. But this is not a sane environment, and Biden is riding along with Harris, whose current approval rating of 37 percent is roughly that of salespeople who squirt lotion on you as you try to walk through the mall.

    I'm not a huge FDR fan, but he wisely dumped Henry Wallace from the VP slot in 1944. Take a lesson from FDR, Joe. Posterity will breathe a sigh of relief.

    Schneider quotes Kamala:

    To wit: Take Harris’s speech at the U.S.-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Nations) summit in Washington, D.C., in 2022:

    We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules and agreements, that we will convene to work together.

    “We will work together,” she said in closing, with a flourish reminiscent of a glitching AI text program.

    Not the first, nor probably the last, time I've observed: that's a dumb person's idea of what a smart person sounds like.


Last Modified 2024-03-27 8:41 AM EDT

Save Us, Oh Mighty DOJ!

A brief confession: I was an Apple fanboy, but I got better.

My first "real" job was selling computers at ComputerLand in Rockville MD in the late 70s, early 80s. Mostly Apple ][s. And an Apple ][ was my first computer, eventually tricked out with a Z-80 CP/M card from Microsoft, a nine-inch B&W Sanyo monitor (eventually upgraded to color). When the Mac came along, the good folks at Osborne bought me one, and I wrote a book for them.

But at a certain point, I was forced to admit that I was being played. The bang-per-buck just wasn't there. (The mid-90s were not great for Apple fans.) So I gave up on Apple. (Mostly. I still have an iPod for car music listening.)

And I do not have an iPhone. Friends, it's easy to not have an iPhone. So I'm even more bemused as usual about the latest efforts to "protect" us, as described by the WSJ editorialists: Biden Fires an Antitrust Shot at Apple.

The Justice Department on Thursday unveiled its long-mooted antitrust suit against Apple, and don’t smile—Apple’s main alleged victims are giant tech and financial companies. The lawsuit is trying to force changes in antitrust law that Congress hasn’t passed, and the alleged benefits to consumers aren’t obvious.

Justice says Apple exploits a putative smart-phone monopoly to lock consumers into its closed system and undermine competing products and services. It’s a plausible theory. Apple makes up roughly 55% of the U.S. smart-phone market, giving it enormous power over the app ecosystem. But Justice’s evidence is far from compelling.

There's something about the heartbreak of Android users, whose texts appear in iPhone in green bubbles, or something. Somehow I've been able to live with that.

Somewhat more concerning, unrelated to DOJ antics: Apple Chip Flaw Leaks Secret Encryption Keys. Not good, Apple!

Also of note:

  • What do you expect from a cheap populist demagogue? Stephen Moore is unkind, but accurate: Biden's Tax Plan That Puts America Last.

    I am often asked if President Joe Biden is intentionally trying to dismantle the American economy with his imbecilic energy, climate change, crime, border, inflation and debt policies. But I've always believed these policies are driven by a badly mistaken ideology -- not malice.

    Then I watched Biden's State of the Union speech. When Biden thundered that he was going to make corporations "pay their fair share," the Democrats in Congress leapt to their feet in applause.

    When I read through the details of Biden's new multitrillion-dollar tax plan, it's hard to come up with any plausible explanation other than that he's trying to make American industry less competitive. Biden's tax scheme would hobble United States businesses with nearly the highest corporate tax rate in the world -- higher than our primary competitors.

    If he can't get 'em with antitrust, he'll cripple them with taxes.

  • Via Jerry Coyne, Melanie Phillips notes that Biden is not just going after successful Americans, he's also engineering The American betrayal of Israel.

    America could end this war tomorrow by telling the Qataris that unless they instruct Hamas to surrender and release the hostages, Qatar will forfeit its preferential treatment by the United States and will henceforth be treated instead as an international pariah.

    Instead, America is feeding Israel into the Qatari jaws. The outcome, writes Carmon, will be escalation into a total regional war by Iran not only against Israel but America.

    America’s action is so preposterous it’s hard to believe. Yet in any event, the Biden administration has already pivoted from supporting the destruction of Hamas to working for its ultimate victory.

    To be sure, the Biden Administration is treating all the Hamas-enabling states well: U.S. Grants Iran Sanctions Waiver Worth $10 Billion.

    The Biden administration renewed a sanctions waiver on March 13 that grants Iran access to $10 billion in previously escrowed funds. The waiver, which allows the Islamic Republic to use electricity revenue from Iraq for budget support and debt repayment, comes just six weeks after an Iran-backed drone attack killed three U.S. servicemembers in Jordan. The Biden administration last extended the sanctions waiver on November 14.

    Disgusting.

  • Go outside, scan the skies. Do you see any pigs flying? G. Patrick Lynch continues his look at the self-destructing LP, asking When Will the Libertarian Party Have Its Moment?

    When you talk with leaders from each side of this conflict ["Old Guard" vs. Mises Caucus] it’s clear that even though both camps are much, much closer ideologically than they’d admit, ultimately Aristotle was right – humans are fundamentally political creatures. The entire episode reminds me of a conversation I had at one of my first Liberty Fund conferences when I was hired, directed by Pierre Lemieux. I was talking with a conferee who was eyeing me suspiciously and asked me, which economist I preferred, Mises or Hayek. I told him that as a political scientist I was more drawn to Hayek, and this prompted him to label me a socialist, turn away from me and find someone more “orthodox” to chat with.

    The broad contours of a liberty-based political movement would be simply less government and more personal freedom and responsibility in realm x. One would hope people could compromise on the range of constriction on government and expansion of individual freedom somewhere between 100% and 5%. But for more than 5 decades the Libertarian Party has been unable to create a broad consensus on how to pursue those goals. That leaves the world without the prospect of seriously considering more liberty during public deliberations over governance alternatives. Elections, admittedly highly imperfect ways to decide governance, are worse for not providing voters with a wide range of options and choices. The frustration for observers and non-combatant libertarians in this conflict is that we face an upcoming election featuring two deeply unpopular, anti-liberty candidates. The fear that libertarians will find no representation in this election is not invalid.

    Libertarians disagree with statists, sure. But they really like to fight with libertarians who fail their purity tests.

  • I have some weird-ass beliefs, but fortunately not the ones Jeff Maurer is talking about. He provides, very entertainingly as usual, More Evidence Emerges that Lefty Racial Justice is Mostly Just the Weird-Ass Beliefs of Highly-Educated White People.

    Few people dispute that something happened in the American left in the early-to-mid 2010s. We can debate the causes and precise start dates, but, clearly, something happened. Michael Brown, #MeToo, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Racial Reckoning — these were things. Just about the only thing that the woke left and non-woke left agree on is that we did not all fall asleep watching Malcolm X and simply dream the recent period of lefty resurgence.

    Though this resurgence focused mostly on identity issues, it’s never been clear that the policies deemed necessary to advance fill-in-the-blank justice actually represent the views of the groups they ostensibly help. Of course, it’s surely true that some bits of the lefty agenda are things that marginalized people want; even a clock-with-no-batteries-in-it-because-batteries-are-capitalist is right twice a day. But some cleavages have been apparent for a long time. It was clear from the jump that most Black people don’t want to defund the police. 75 percent of Latinos want more border security. Of course, it’s often hard to tell what any group of people want: Issue polling is only slightly more scientific than the Psychic Vampire Repellant that Gwyneth Paltrow sells on Goop (meanwhile, I’m over here knee-deep in non-psychic vampires — thanks for nothing Goop!). But the claim that the mostly white activists who cluster in big cities and elite institutions speak for non-white people across America was always dubious to say the least.

    He looks at the polling that seems to show Voters of Color are drifting away from the Democrats, and toward… Trump?! Whoa. Did not have that in my crystal ball.

Recently on the movie blog:


Last Modified 2024-03-24 5:41 AM EDT

The Longest 15 Days

Gee, I missed the fourth anniversary of the famed "15 Days to Stop the Spread" event held on March 20, 2020.

Surely, there's more than one lesson to be learned here, but if your brain only has room for one, Steven Greenhut has a suggestion: Don't Give Government More Power.

The great conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1963 wrote that he would rather "live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University." Buckley recognized the great "brainpower" among the university's faculty, but feared the "intellectual arrogance that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."

I thought of that oft-quoted line four years after the COVID-19 panic. It was a very real public health threat, so much so that it enabled Americans to transfer wide-ranging and largely unchecked powers to the experts. For two years, it was exactly as if Buckley's fears came true and we were ruled by the type of people found in the faculty lounge.

It's no secret that American universities are dominated by progressives, who don't typically accept the "common premise" of limited governance. A core principle of progressivism, dating to its early 20th century roots, is the rule by experts. Disinterested parties would reform, protect, and re-engineer society based on their superior knowledge. Although adherents of this worldview speak in the name of the People, they don't actually trust individuals to manage their own lives.

I decided to look back at my 4-years-ago postings. One of my "favorites" (not the right word, but whatever) was a reaction to this article in The Hill: Fauci: Neither Trump nor CDC to blame for testing delay.

"It was a complicated series of multiple things that conflated that just, you know, went the wrong way. One of them was a technical glitch that slowed things down in the beginning. Nobody’s fault. There wasn’t any bad guys there. It just happened," Fauci said.

A reminder: that testing delay killed people.

My response at the time: "Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of the narrative: (1) the State's job is to protect us all, and (2) it's "nobody's fault" when it fails to do that."

Holds up pretty well, I think.

Also of note:

  • He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss). At Commentary, Seth Mandel wonders if President Dotard is channelling Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone: Biden Offers Israel a ‘Deal’ That Sounds Like a Threat.

    The White House doesn’t want Israel to go into Hamas’s last redoubt in the numbers with which it would normally try to capture and secure a city full of Hamas terror leaders and militants. One reason is that President Biden and his advisers are nervous about the pro-Hamas elements in his party ramping up their protests and threatening his nominating convention this summer in Chicago. Another reason is that Egypt doesn’t want Israel to do anything that would cause Palestinians to enter Egyptian territory even temporarily and even for humanitarian purposes, nor does Egypt want anyone seeing what’s underneath Rafah—probably because Egyptian-facilitated smuggling tunnels below the southern Gaza city will be revealed.

    […] We will stop Egypt from flooding Gaza with arms and ammunition if you promise to go easy on Hamas is the kind of thing a mafia goon would say if you put him in the foreign service. What the Under Secretary of State for Gabagool is saying here is that if Israel helps the president calm the muppet babies in his party by summer, the Israelis get to choose the cause of the next war: Do they want it to be because Western leaders saved Hamas from oblivion, or would they rather the next war come because Egypt kept up its supply of cannonballs to the Jolly Roger?

    (Headline is the title of an old song written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King , Phil Spector produced. For some strange reason it's not heard much any more.)

    Also attempting to pressure Israel, as we've noted before, is Senator Chuck from New York.

    Joel Zinberg describes The Problem with Schumer's Israel Speech.

    Well, actually, two problems: "arrogance and ignorance." Or, in Yiddish:

    The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.

    […]

    The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.

    I don't do Yiddish myself, so different words comes to mind when perusing this NH Journal article: Shaheen Joins Progressive Dems Urging Push for Palestinian State. And those words are Et tu, Jeanne?

    A group of U.S. Senate Democrats sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to unilaterally announce plans for the U.S. to recognize a Palestinian state and to pressure Israel to do the same.

    They include progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono…and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen.

    “In an effort to reignite U.S. leadership on a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we call on you to publicly outline a path for the United States to recognize a nonmilitarized Palestinian state,” the letter reads.

    “While we have been particularly disappointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to engage on a path to a Palestinian state, we believe that this provides even more reason for the Biden Administration to lead and push the Israeli government to take [action].”

    The letter describes a rosy two-state future which will never happen.

  • They go together like greed and corruption. Veronique de Rugy looks at Industrial Policy and Electoral Politics.

    The CHIPS Act was enacted in August 2022, with the objective of enhancing semiconductor production in the United States. This recent instance of industrial policy is driven in part by the desire to decrease U.S. dependence on Asian semiconductor manufacturing, and in particular from Taiwan. So here we are with dozens of billions of dollars going to large and wealthy corporations to subsidize what these corporations are already in the business of doing.

    According to Bloomberg, Samsung is on track to obtain $6 billion in federal support, and TSMC is expected to receive more than $5 billion. Meanwhile, Intel will get up to $20 billion ($8.5 billion in grants, $11 billion in loans) and “it plans to tap investment tax credits from the Treasury Department that could cover as much as 25% of capital expenditures, according to the Commerce Department.”

    Vero links to this Politico story which is pretty clear that it's really all about getting Arizona's 11 electoral votes in November: Biden boosts Intel with massive CHIPS payout in swing state Arizona.

  • Good suggestion. And it's from Noah Smith: Go read some Vernor Vinge.

    Vernor Vinge, my favorite science fiction author, passed away yesterday, at the age of 79. Hexapodia, my podcast with Brad DeLong, takes it’s [sic] name from a Vinge novel; in fact, it was me seeing Brad make a Vinge reference that led to us becoming friends. David Brin, another of my favorite authors, and a close friend of Vinge’s, has written a moving tribute on his blog; if you want to read tributes to Vinge, I would definitely start there. But as a devoted fan who considers it a point of pride to have exchanged a few emails with Vinge over the years, I thought I should write my own as well.

    Vinge is probably best known as the creator of the concept of the technological singularity — which we now simply call The Singularity. Vinge was not the first to imagine that the creation of AI might lead to a rapid intelligence explosion, as thinking machines quickly built better and better versions of themselves; that honor, somewhat predictably, goes to von Neumann. But Vinge coined the term, and it was his own extrapolations of the idea that form the basis of basically all of our thinking on the topic to this day. If you read Vinge’s famous essays on the Singularity — the first in 1983 and the second in 1993, you’ll see basically all of the concepts that AI engineers, effective altruists, “e/acc” folks, rationalists, etc. argue about to this very day.

    I've read a lot of Vinge, but only two novels since I started blogging in 2005. Turned out to be his last two: Rainbows End in 2008 and The Children of the Sky in 2012. I noted that the ending of that last one seemed to be a setup for another entry in the series, but looks like we won't get that.

    Unless he did something tricky with uploading his consciousness… nah, he probably didn't

Can't vs. Won't

At the Josiah Bartlett Center, Drew Cline channels his inner Monty Python: Legislators distributing random numbers is no basis for sound public policy.

Random chance is a constant feature of life on Earth, and for centuries it was a feature of human government. Kings and councils ruled with “arbitrary power,” as John Locke phrased it, subjecting the people to the whims of man just as they had previously been subject to the whims of nature.

Escaping the tyranny of randomness was, to Locke and the American Founders, a primary motivating factor of those who built republican governments.

“This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together,” Locke wrote in the Second Treatise on Government.

By “absolute power,” Locke meant rule by whim, not by law. But the Founders feared that in a republican government majorities would write laws that codified their whims and impulses rather than the considered opinions of a broader coalition of lawmakers. Hamilton and Madison were particularly animated in warning against this.

Drew provides examples from legislation proposed in our state legislature. To me, it brought to mind a Reason article from Eric Boehm last month: If Semiconductor Chip Demand Is High, Why Do We Need More Subsidies? Which starts:

The Biden administration has yet to announce how it plans to spend the $52 billion in semiconductor manufacturing subsidies that Congress approved more than 18 months ago.

You would think a rational way for government to spend taxpayer dollars would be to total up the costs of the things that needed to be done to achieve specific goals. Then, ask for that much money.

It's pretty clear that's not what happened here; the Biden Administration demanded a big chunk of money first. Our dumbshit Congress said "Here ya go, Joe!". And only now is the Administration trying to figure out what to do with that essentially random number, arrived at by whim.

Also of note:

  • So long, Hong Kong. Liz Wolfe has some sad news about recent legislation passed in a once-free polity: Hong Kong Falls, Again.

    At China's behest: Yesterday, Hong Kong passed a new national security law that will create draconian penalties for all manner of political crimes. Beijing puppet/Hong Kong leader John Lee says these swiftly passed laws "allow Hong Kong to effectively prevent and put a stop to espionage activities, the conspiracies and traps of intelligence units and the infiltration and damage of enemy forces." He's trying to push a narrative that such laws—passed expeditiously over 11 days, the fastest a bill has gone through Hong Kong's legislature since 1997—are needed to thwart Western spying. But what they actually represent is a massive encroachment on the already-eroded civil liberties of Hongkongers who have been absorbed back under mainland Chinese rule.

    Liberty: fun while it lasted.

  • I didn't expect anything else, did you? Jeff Jacoby looks at the lastest from the senator from the state to our immediate west: Sanders's foreign policy 'revolution' is a string of leftist clichés.

    THIS WEEK Foreign Affairs published a 2,800-word essay by Bernie Sanders, the US senator from Vermont whose campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020, though unsuccessful, attracted wide interest and support. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and his essay, titled "A Revolution in American Foreign Policy," faithfully reflects the far-left worldview he has always embraced.

    That worldview is easily summarized: Most of what is bad in world affairs can be blamed on the United States, and especially on American corporations and billionaires. Like the radical scholars Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn, Sanders sees US foreign policy as fundamentally "disastrous," a word he uses repeatedly in his essay. "For many decades, there has been a 'bipartisan consensus' on foreign affairs," Sanders writes in his opening paragraph. "Tragically, that consensus has almost always been wrong."

    Fun fact: Bernie won the New Hampshire primary a mere four years ago.

  • Speaking of things politicians get wrong… Veronique de Rugy applies a new term to old behavior: Industrial Policy and Protectionism Are Luxury Beliefs for the New Right.

    If you've heard of the concept of "luxury beliefs," you can thank writer Rob Henderson. Henderson's concept refers to cultural and political ideas that are predominantly held and advertised by individuals in society's upper echelons—those persons with significant economic, social, and cultural capital—to demonstrate that they are on the side of the downtrodden, minorities, and the poor.

    Henderson's new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, discusses luxury beliefs, a concept he developed during his time at Yale. Henderson had a difficult childhood spent in foster care, and he felt distanced from his Ivy League contemporaries, who espoused fashionable but unworkable or outright harmful views that they themselves were insulated from by some combination of status, wealth, and familial stability. The luxury beliefs Henderson witnessed were a way to signal and maintain elite status by supporting social concepts or policies that sounded empathetic. Yet in reality, they made life worse for those at the bottom rungs of society.

    Henderson argues that luxury beliefs are not just harmless opinions. They can have negative real-world implications, influencing policy and societal norms in ways that might exacerbate inequality or disconnect the elite from the broader societal consequences of the positions that they advocate.

    Another way to look at it: people advocating policies when they have absolutely zero skin in the game, no risk whatsoever that implementing their ideas will come back to bite them in the ass. Also see: Chuck Schumer on Israel.

Recently on the book blog:

Given the Options in our State's Motto, the Libertarian Party Chooses…

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

At EconLib, G. Patrick Lynch continues his look at the Libertarian Party's woes, with a focus on how things are going in New Hampshire, which means he was forced to use the headline: Live Free or Die. We cited his previous article on the LP a few days ago, which looked at the purge of the LP's "Old Guard" by the "Mises Caucus".

Some interesting historical analysis:

Ground zero for the Mises Caucus revolution is probably in New Hampshire, home to the Free State Project. The Free State Project was the brainchild of Jason Sorens, a libertarian public intellectual and researcher. Since there isn’t a majority of libertarians in the US, Sorens and others believed that the best way to create a sort of safe haven and example of libertarian policies would be to infuse a state with freedom loving individuals to push it towards “don’t tread on me” living. Over the past twenty years more than 6,000 people have moved to New Hampshire as part of the project.

And that migration of free state participants has made the New Hampshire Libertarian Party one of the staunchest supporters of the Mises Caucus. Its social media accounts and ideological persuasion are firmly in the “don’t tread on me” camp and frequently touch on very unconventional topics such as empowering private companies to raise their own militaries and attacking Martin Luther King as a socialist on MLK day.

I'm dubious of the FSP ➡ Mises causality that Lynch seems to imply.

But what makes sense to me is that the Mises folks seem to be intent on making the LP tent smaller. I can "live free" of the LP pretty easily.

Also of note:

  • Yeah, how do they get away with that? Alex Tabarrok takes a look at The Puzzling Law and Economics of Out-of-State Tuition. He links to a Bryan Caplan post on the subject, which concentrates on the economics involved. But here's the legal issue:

    I’ve argued for a long time that an enterprising lawyer ought to sue on the grounds that this is a violation of the constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause (Article IV, Section 2): “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” Indeed, in Toomer v. Witsell the Supreme Court noted that

    “…without some provision of the kind removing from the citizens of each State the disabilities of alienage in the other States, and giving them equality of privilege with citizens of those States, the Republic would have constituted little more than a league of States; it would not have constituted the Union which now exists.

    and they ruled that it was unconstitutional to charge out-of-state fisherman a much higher price for a fishing license than in-state fishermen.

    At the University Near Here, the per-year tuition (2023-4) is $15,520 for in-state, $35,290 for out-ot-state. (Additional bumps for some majors apply.)

    But (on the other hand) those out-of-state students can freely vote in New Hampshire elections. In fact, UNH encourages them to do so.

  • The debate continues… on Murthy v. Missouri. Here's Jacob Sullum: The Supreme Court Should Reject Clandestine Government Censorship of Online Speech: The Biden Administration's Social Media Meddling Went Far Beyond 'Information' and 'Advice'

    When federal officials persistently pressured social media platforms to delete or downgrade posts those officials did not like, a government lawyer told the Supreme Court on Monday, they were merely offering "information" and "advice" to their "partners" in fighting "misinformation." If the justices accept that characterization, they will be blessing clandestine government censorship of online speech.

    The case, Murthy v. Missouri, pits two states and five social media users against federal officials who strongly, repeatedly, and angrily demanded that Facebook et al. crack down on speech the government viewed as dangerous to public health, democracy or national security. Some of this "exhortation," as U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher described it, happened in public, as when President Joe Biden accused the platforms of "killing people" by allowing users to say things he believed would discourage Americans from being vaccinated against COVID-19.

    Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who echoed that charge in more polite terms, urged a "whole-of-society" effort to combat the "urgent threat to public health" posed by "health misinformation," which he said might include "legal and regulatory measures." Other federal officials said holding social media platforms "accountable" could entail antitrust action, new regulations, or expansion of their civil liability for user-posted content.

    Well, that sounds bad. Over at the WSJ, the editorialists are also unfond of Government’s ‘Thinly Veiled’ Social-Media Censorship.

    The line between government coercion and attempts to persuade can blur, and the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on Monday in Murthy v. Missouri added little clarity. This is too bad because the government’s facile argument deserves a rebuttal.

    The Justices pressed both parties to describe how the dealings of Biden officials with social-media platforms differed from those with the press. “It’s probably not uncommon for government officials to protest an upcoming story on surveillance or detention policy and say, you know, if you run that, it’s going to harm the war effort and put Americans at, you know, risk,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted.

    True. But in our experience, government officials don’t threaten legal or regulatory retribution against newspapers, which they have little power to carry out. The same isn’t true for social-media platforms. White House officials issued thinly veiled threats of legal consequences if platforms didn’t do more to police so-called misinformation.

    That's a free link, so click over to read how Biden spokesmodel Jen Psaki pretty explicitly tied social media companies' acquiescence to imposition of "better privacy protections and a robust antitrust program".

    But were we unfair to a SCOTUS judge yesterday? At Reason, Billy Binion defends her: A Viral Narrative Distorts Ketanji Brown Jackson's Understanding of Free Speech.

    "My biggest concern," said Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday, "is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways."

    That comment came during oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, the case that asks if President Joe Biden's administration violated the First Amendment when it sought to pressure social media apps to remove information it deemed harmful. It took almost no time for Jackson's tidbit to set off the viral narrative that she doesn't grasp basic constitutional principles, particularly when considering the point of the First Amendment is indeed to hamstring what the government can do in response to speech it may not like.

    "Jackson raises eyebrows with comment that First Amendment 'hamstrings' government," wrote Fox News. "Leftists want unlimited government — which is why they hate the Constitution," lamented The Federalist. It was "literally one of the craziest things I've ever seen," said Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio).

    But like so many viral narratives, Jackson's comments were fairly benign in context, and were actually echoed by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Perhaps most ironically, her remark spoke fundamentally to the crux of the case: The government, of course, does not have the right to punish someone criminally for the vast majority of speech. But does it have the right to persuade?

    So you might want to check that out. Meanwhile the (usually sensible) Mike Masnick at Techdirt is more worried about disinformation: The Disinformation Campaign That Has Effectively Destroyed The Ability To Combat Disinformation.

    We already covered the oral arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri case earlier this week, showing that the Supreme Court appears to be quite skeptical of the arguments by the states regarding the federal government “jawboning” to convince social media to take down certain content. For months now, we’ve been pointing out that the factual record in that case is a mess, driven by conspiracy theorists pushing nonsense. Unfortunately, a few Judges both believed the nonsense and then when they couldn’t rely on it to make their point had to misquote people, quote things out of context, or entirely fabricate parts of quotes in their rulings.

    What became abundantly clear in the oral arguments Monday was that multiple justices, including Trump-appointed ones, found the factual record to be suspect and problematic. The crux of the case was effectively (1) the White House made a few public statements in which they were angry about how social media moderated, (2) the companies regularly met with government agencies about a variety of things (cybersecurity, COVID misinformation, election integrity), and (3) therefore we can assume that any content moderation that occurred on the platforms was at the government’s command.

    I think Masnick's argument is, to use the same adjective as the WSJ, facile. But (as I said) he's usually sensible, so … we link, you decide.

    As if I needed to tell you that.

Unclear on the Concept

Glenn Greenwald is aghast at the judicial stylings of the Biden-appointed SCOTUS justice:

And rightly so.

If you prefer more text in your Supreme Court tea leaf-reading, here's Jacob Sullum: SCOTUS Ponders Whether Biden Administration Coerced Social Media Platforms To Censor Speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday considered dueling interpretations of the Biden administration's interactions with social media platforms regarding content it viewed as dangerous to public health, democracy, or national security. During oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga said those private contacts, combined with public statements condemning the platforms' failure to suppress "misinformation," amounted to government-directed censorship. U.S. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher disagreed, saying neither crossed the line "between persuasion and coercion."

If the federal government coerced platforms to censor speech by threatening them with "adverse government action," Fletcher conceded, that would be a clear violation of the First Amendment. But "no threats happened here," he argued, because White House officials merely "use[d] strong language" while encouraging the platforms to suppress speech that offended them and "referred in a general way to legal reforms in response to press questions." Any attempt to enjoin the government from privately pressuring Facebook et al. to crack down on controversial speech or publicly castigating them for failing to do so, he warned, would interfere with constitutionally permissible information sharing, "provision of advice," and federal officials' use of "the bully pulpit" to "call on the platforms to do more."

Aguiñaga argued that federal officials went far beyond providing information that might help the platforms enforce their own content rules. He said officials persistently pressured the platforms to broaden those restrictions and enforce them more aggressively, and the platforms responded by changing their policies and practices. "As the 5th Circuit put it," Aguiñaga said, "the record reveals unrelenting pressure by the government to coerce social media platforms to suppress the speech of millions of Americans." And most of that pressure, he emphasized, was applied behind closed doors, coming to light only as a result of discovery in this case.

Behind closed doors? Where was the Washington "Democracy Dies in Darkness" Post on that? Can't it get awfully dark behind those closed doors?

And here's some advice from Ilya Somin at the Volkh Conspiracy:: Court Should Focus on Coercion in Murthy v. Missouri. Because "coercion" by government officials is not kosher; mere "attempts to persuade" are A-OK.

Importantly, the Fifth Circuit found that officials did in fact threaten to punish social media firms that refused their demands:

[T]he officials threatened—both expressly and implicitly—to retaliate against inaction. Officials threw out the prospect of legal reforms and enforcement actions while subtly insinuating it would be in the platforms' best interests to comply. As one official put it, "removing bad information" is "one of the easy, low-bar things you guys [can] do to make people like me"—that is, White House officials—"think you're taking action."

That sure seems like coercion to me! Importantly, the people making these statements were officials whose superiors had the power to carry out at least some of these veiled threats. The evidentiary and interpretive issues here are—as noted in my previous post—similar to those that sometimes arise when organized crime organizations, like the Mafia, engage in extortion or protection rackets:

If it is indeed true that government officials "threatened…. to retaliate against inaction," then the Supreme Court should uphold the Fifth Circuit injunction against the defendant agencies, at least in so far as that injunction bars coercive pressure. As discussed in my previous post, I am far less convinced that the Fifth Circuit acted appropriately in also enjoining "significant encouragement" defined as "a governmental actor exercis[ing] active, meaningful control over the private party's decision." If the private party gave the governmental actor such control voluntarily, that may be bad media ethics, but it is not a violation of freedom of speech.

Based on this morning's WSJ headline about the argument ("Justices Skeptical Of GOP Claims of Censoring") I am not optimistic.

But note above the words of Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher about the "bully pulpit". Ann Althouse likes language analysis, as do I, and she has some (pre-argument) observations about "Bully."

The riposte was predictable: "The bully pulpit is not a pulpit to bully."

But an even more telling observation:

I want to add that what is said behind the scenes is not from the pulpit at all. A pulpit is an elevated and conspicuous platform. One thing about social media posts is that they are out there, in public, and perfectly conspicuous. If the President (or the shadowy people behind him) want to use the"central dimension of presidential power" that is the "bully pulpit," let them step up onto a conspicuous platform and proclaim opinions they intend us to find righteous.

In this case, the opinion that was conveyed behind the scenes was that social media platforms ought to take down posts on various political topics — coronavirus vaccines, claims of election fraud, and Hunter Biden’s laptop — that people wanted to debate. If it's pulpit-worthy, express that opinion outright and clearly to all of us. Don't go behind our back and intimidate the social media giants upon whom we, the little people, depend to slightly amplify our tiny voices.

There's that behind-closed-doors factor again.

Also of note:

  • A modest proposal. Alicia H. Munnell and William J. Arnone took to the pages of the Boston Globe to describe How to fix Social Security. With the interesting subhed: "It requires an automatic balancing mechanism."

    The national conversation during this election year needs to include a candid assessment of how to shore up our most popular and effective government program, Social Security. The program currently faces a long-term financial shortfall and an action-forcing deadline — the depletion of its trust fund in the early 2030s, which would require an across-the-board cut in benefit checks. Policy makers have known about this problem for decades but have failed to act. Therefore, when the horse-trading finally begins on a package to fix Social Security, one item on the table should be an automatic adjustment feature — policy changes that kick in if needed to prevent this scenario from ever happening again.

    The current approach of waiting until the last minute has serious consequences. It means that the eventual changes to revenues or benefits adopted will be more abrupt, with fewer generations participating in the fix, and it undermines Americans’ faith in the program. Younger people in particular often ask, “Will Social Security be there for me?”

    The authors mention, then shy away from, the fact that there already is an "automatic balancing mechanism" in place: that's the "across-the-board" decrease in outgoing benefits to bring them in line with incoming revenue.

    So, essentially, they're just arguing for tax increases. And to make those increases "automatic", i.e., without Congress having to have their greasy fingerprints on such increases. Like so much of what Uncle Stupid does, it would be accountability-free.

    The word "tax", by the way, appears zero times in the article. The authors consistently refer to the tax as a "contribution", and the FICA tax rate as a "contribution rate". Is that disinformation or misinformation? I can never tell.

  • Sliding down the slippery slope. J.D. Tuccille notes that the ACLU seems to have forgotten what the "CL" stands for: ACLU, Once a Defender of Free Speech, Goes After a Whistleblower.

    Among the unfortunate changes of recent years has been the transformation of the American Civil Liberties Union from an advocate for free speech and other individual rights into just another progressive political organization. Historically, despite much pushback, the group defended the right of people from across the political spectrum to advocate and protest. But the organization has become unreliable on the issue; most recently in the very 21st century debate over gender identity, which sees the ACLU of Missouri targeting a whistleblower who is critical of medical transitions for minors.

    "Strange evening," journalist Jesse Singal wrote March 7 on X (formerly Twitter). "The ACLU of Missouri subpoenaed Jamie Reed, demanding (among other stuff) all her communications w/me. I emailed them saying (politely) wtf, you're the ACLU. Got a call from a lawyer there saying it was a mistake – 'It's a big team.' Okay."

    The subpoena Singal attached (supposedly since modified, though a redacted version of the original remains publicly available through the Missouri courts website) demanded of Reed "all communications, including any documents exchanged, between you and Jessie Singal concerning Gender-Affirming Care provided at or through the Center." It also sought "all communications, including any documents exchanged, concerning Gender-Affirming Care involving media or between you and any media outlet or any member of the media" (journalist Benjamin Ryan says that would include him). The subpoena also demanded Reed's communications with state officials, legislators, and advocacy organizations.

    Singal is a well-known skeptic of transgender ideology.

  • I am in awe. I don't know whether some organization out there gives a "P. J. O'Rourke Memorial Award" for off-color hilarious commentary, but Jeff Maurer certainly deserves it. Latest submission to the selection committee: Don't Ban TikTok Just Because it's a Flaming Planet of Dinosaur Shit.

    For the unfamiliar: TikTok is an app where 50 year-old men “like” videos of pre-teens dancing. It combines the groupthink of Twitter with the shallowness of a wet t-shirt contest and makes your average Facebook tiff seem like a Socratic dialogue. There’s mounting evidence that giving the app to a young person is about as responsible as giving them a vial of crack and a handgun. And now, the government might ban TikTok if it’s not sold by its Chinese parent company, Bytedance.

    I think we probably should ban TikTok if it’s not sold. But I think we need to be clear about why we’re banning it. The debate around the ban sometimes notes — as I did above — that the app is a rotting septic tank filled with worm semen. Of course, the Constitution protects rotting septic tanks filled with worm semen, even if it doesn’t use precisely those words. Personally, I think those protections are extremely important. So, I think we should be careful to address concerns about TikTok in a way that doesn’t erode the First Amendment.

    You will want to Read The Whole Thing, lest you miss: "[S]aying 'I get my news from TikTok' should be like saying 'I get my clothes from Grave Robber Dave’s Strange-Smelling Suit Depot.'"

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Last Modified 2024-03-19 12:05 PM EDT