Pun Salad

So, those wacky Iowa Republic caucus-goers, huh? My attitude is summed up in Jeff Maurer's headline. Welp: That Was the Worst-Case Scenario.

No excerpt, but recommended, if you have to laugh to keep from crying.

The NR editors opine on a lack of elephant spine: Republican Abandonment of Entitlement Reform Reckless. We all know about Trump and DeSantis. But:

Still, however unfleshed her proposals, that is the main reason I like her.

And, at the Federalist, Christopher Jacobs tells the truth about House Republicans: Johnson Cut His Bad Deal Because GOP Doesn’t Want To Cut Spending.

So in sum: the Republicans are poising to renominate a bloviating bullshitter who's advocating a $300 billion per year tax hike. The Democrats would be out of the question even if their candidate wasn't demented. And the Libertarian Party looks like it will be holding its nominating convention in Crazy Clown City.

Ah well. It's not as if my vote counted.

Also of note:

• In case you had heard otherwise… Noah Smith takes a cudgel to an undeservedly common notion: Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations. One of the tweets he offers as typical:

  Where did America’s wealth come from if not from plundering South America and then the rest of world?

  — Khayyam 🇵🇸 (@kkhayyam1) December 16, 2023

  He counters:

  This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunking. And it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich. (There actually are some more sophisticated academic ideas along similar lines, and I’ll talk about those in a bit.)

  So anyway, on to the debunk. The first thing to notice is that in the past, no country was rich. There’s lots of uncertainty involved in historical GDP data — plenty we don’t actually know about populations, prices, and what people consumed in those eras. But even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago:

  It's sounds as if it could be a "correlation doesn't imply causation" fallacy, but Smith shows that even the evidence for correlation isn't there.

• States don't get rich by plundering their citizenry either. Andrew Cline of the Josiah Bartlett Center wonders: Will New Hampshire's income tax finally die this year?. Fingers crossed, right? But:

  New Hampshire is less than a year away from eliminating its income tax.

  Maybe.

  A bill up for consideration in the House Ways & Means Committee on Tuesday would bring it back.

  It’s a myth that New Hampshire has no income tax. The state’s Interest & Dividends Tax is a levy on income derived from dividends or interest. Under current law, this tax expires on Dec. 31 of this year. That would make New Hampshire the eighth U.S. state with no direct tax on personal income.

  Joining that elite club won’t happen if the Legislature endorses a plan by state Reps. Susan Almy and Mary Jane Wallner. Their House Bill 1492 would bring the income tax back from the dead.

  As usual with Democrat proposals, it's aimed at "the rich". By which they mean: anyone who's (ahem) got a decent-sized nest egg at an investment company or bank.

• Love Hertz? Allysia Finley writes at the WSJ on Hertz, Tesla and the Perils of CEO Groupthink. After relating Hertz's big bet on an electric vehicle future…

  The market has changed. Electric-vehicle euphoria has crashed into reality, and Hertz’s bet has gone south. On Jan. 11 the rental-car giant announced it would sell roughly a third of its global EV fleet and use the proceeds to buy gasoline-powered cars. The cited reasons: weak demand for EVs and high repair costs.

  Readers might have heard that lower maintenance costs are a major electric-vehicle advantage. As Hertz discovered, the opposite it true. Even minor accidents can require batteries to be replaced, which can cost $20,000. Many EV parts aren’t readily available, so cars have to sit in the shop for weeks.

  Ms Finley notes that similar missteps, efforts to please "stakeholders" instead of shareholders, have plagued Coca-Cola and Delta. We could add Disney, Unilever, ‥

• TANSTAAFL watch. Kevin D. Williamson wonders: What If There Is No Low-Hanging Economic Fruit?

  Joe Biden is in an economic-political bind, partly of his own making and partly more than a century in the making: He is a hostage of our national religion, the cult of the magic president. 

  In this case, it is the president-as-rainmaker, the guy who is responsible for the economy—a belief founded on very little other than pure superstition rooted in ancient magical beliefs about national/tribal leaders as intercessors between men and the gods, who by their personal virtue and ceremonial correctness ensure material prosperity. If the rains are timely and the crops abundant, then the king has done right. If there is disease or drought, then … 

  In the (very) old days, a sacral king who lost the mandate of heaven might expect to be ritually murdered by his successor, but now we just have elections—unless you take Donald Trump’s lawyers seriously, in which case apparently we can expect doddering incumbents to murder their would-be successors. As a tradition-minded conservative, I have to say that I prefer it the other way around, but that’s a longer story.

  For the record, I do not favor the ritual murder of Joe Biden.

Recently on the book blog:

I put this book on my "Get At Library" list thanks to a good review in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewer, Michael Auslin, was right: it is really good. It's accessibly written; the author, Evan Thomas, was once a journalist at Time and Newsweek, and he knows how to tell a punchy story. But he's also a meticulous researcher, and it shows in the text, bibliography, and endnotes.

The "three men" of the subtitle: Henry Stimson, US Secretary of War under FDR and Truman; Shigenori Tōgō, Japan's Minister for Foreign Affairs; and Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, commander of the US Pacific air forces. There are, of course, many supporting characters; Thomas gets inside the heads of nearly everyone involved.

Thomas ably defends his major thesis: there was a good-faith argument that inflicting massive civilian casualties on Japan was necessary to avoid an even more massive bloodbath (on both sides) that would have resulted from an American invasion. He notes the intransigence of Japan's hardliners about surrender that continued even after the A-bombs were dropped. And even the eventual surrender was a near thing; there was an attempted coup against the pro-surrender forces. And there was a lot of seppuku.

Stimson, in particular, was tormented by the use of the A-bomb against Japanese cities. (He absolutely banned its use against Kyoto, a city he had previously visited, and charmed by its beauty.)

On the Japanese side, the focus on Tōgō is interesting too. He was kind of an oddball, marrying a German lady he'd met while on a diplomatic assignment there. Thomas makes clear that his advocacy of surrender was perilous: officials insufficiently gung-ho for war were often murdered.

Interesting fact: while the new B-29 bombers could fly at 30,000 feet, their ground speed on the way to Japan was greatly reduced thanks to the jet stream. (Thomas claims that the jet stream was a "never-before-observed meteorological phenomenon"; Wikipedia disagrees.) This caused a strategy shift from high-altitude daytime "precision" bombing (which was beset by other problems) to nighttime lower-altitude incendiary bombing, causing firestorms and massive civilian death. This, after the British bombing of Dresden was widely deplored.

Further interesting fact: Stimson called for the abolition of submarines as a weapon of war as Hoover's Secretary of State in 1930; too sneaky! And (as noted) he was morally torn about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in 1966, the USS Henry L. Stimson ballistic missile submarine was commisioned, carrying 16 Polaris/Poseidon/Trident missles, with warheads that made the bombs dropped on Japan look like relative firecrackers.