Pun Salad

In the wake of President Joe Biden's drug policy announcement last week, Kamala Harris crowed that the Biden administration is "changing the federal government's approach to marijuana." According to Harris, "The bottom line there is nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed."

Her statement was met by ample applause. I wonder how many of the people cheering know about Harris' history on this issue.

During Harris' tenure as California attorney general from 2011 through 2016, nearly 2,000 people went to state prison for having drugs that Harris now scoffs at locking people up for. And as a prosecutor in San Francisco, Harris helped ensure that people who may previously have been eligible for drug diversion programs were instead imprisoned.

You probably haven't given much thought recently to the wisdom of racial and gender quotas that allocate jobs and other benefits to racial and gender groups based on their proportion of the population. That debate is pretty much over. Google tells us that discussion of racial quotas peaked in 1980 and has been declining ever since. While still popular with some on the left, they have been largely rejected by the country as a whole. Most recently, in 2019 and 2020, deep blue California voted to keep in place a ban on race and gender preferences. So did equally left-leaning Washington state.

So you might be surprised to hear that quotas are likely to show up everywhere in the next ten years, thanks to a growing enthusiasm for regulating technology – and a large contingent of Republican legislators. That, at least, is the conclusion I've drawn from watching the movement to find and eradicate what's variously described as algorithmic discrimination or AI bias.

Commentators in Britain immediately alighted on the fact that Mr. Kwarteng’s proposed tax cuts would benefit principally the rich: which, to its credit, the government freely admitted and did not attempt to hide.

But in the eyes of most people, the fact that the rich would benefit from the tax cuts more than the poor was enough in itself to condemn them, irrespective of their outcome for their economy as a whole: that is to say, even if they were to increase general prosperity, they would still be undesirable because they would have increased inequality.

I emphasise here that I never believed that Mr. Kwarteng’s measures would in practice have the desired effect. But the opposition political party immediately announced that it would restore the taxes, without a caveat that it would not do so if they proved to be beneficial. (The promise to restore them would, of course, have undermined any possible beneficial effect that they might have had, by making it likely that they would not last for more than two years, thus discouraging delayed financial gratification.)

A dog-in-the-manger attitude to the rich is now morally de rigueur, even among those whom the majority of their fellow citizens would consider rich. To hate the rich is, ex officio almost, to sympathise with the poor, and therefore be virtuous: but hatred and sympathy are not two sides of the same coin. Hatred not only goes deeper than sympathy but is easier to rouse and to act upon. It is quite independent of sympathy. Hatred of the rich in the name of equality was probably responsible for more death and destruction in the twentieth century than any other political passion. The category of the rich tends to expand as circumstances require: ‘Rich bastards,’ Lenin called the kulaks, the Russian peasants whose wealth would now be considered dire poverty, and which consisted of the possession of an animal or two, or a farm tool, more than other peasants possessed. What Freud called the narcissism of small differences (the psychological equivalent of marginal utility) means that grounds, however trifling, can always be found for hatred and envy.

We may be headed for what Nate Silver has described as an “asterisk election,” a midterm that defies modern expectations of a wave for the out-party because of a black-swan event that shifts the tectonic plates of American politics. Or we might not: An electorate that’s nervous about inflation and about crime sounds like an electorate poised to run a buzzsaw through the ruling party.

The strategic question for Republicans is whether there’s anything they can do to dislodge the Democrats’ immovable object before it meets the irresistible force. Not all Democrats believe that it’s immovable, notably. “A lot of these consultants think if all we do is run abortion spots that will win for us. I don’t think so,” James Carville told the Associated Press this week. “It’s a good issue. But if you just sit there and they’re pummeling you on crime and pummeling you on the cost of living, you’ve got to be more aggressive than just yelling abortion every other word.”

California has been a reliable incubator of far-left policies for quite a while, but the state seems to be outdoing itself as of late.

Perhaps the ghastliest policy is the state’s new transgender-sanctuary law. It essentially takes the principle of sanctuary cities on immigration and applies it to transgender laws in states. The likely consequences of that law will include cases of pitting children against parents, denying parents custody of their children, and performing irreversible procedures on minors that they may later regret.

California is taking a similar attitude toward abortion. In the aftermath of Dobbs, Governor Gavin Newsom wants the state to become a “sanctuary” for abortionists, going so far as to advertise California’s openness to abortion in other states. California’s status as an abortion safe haven may even be enshrined into the state constitution.

Newsom signed a Covid “misinformation” law that flies in the face of the First Amendment. The law will punish doctors for medical advice they give their patients about Covid if the California state government decides it is misinformation, on a more or less arbitrary basis. Even a progressive public-health activist wrote in the Washington Post against this bill, so egregious are its implications.

All of this would be bad enough if only Californians had to suffer this misgovernance, but the entire country is affected by California’s failures. It’s the largest state by population and by economic impact, and it has a desire to spread its influence throughout the country. For the sake of Californians and of Americans, the Golden State needs better governance, and it needs it soon.