Pun Salad

Just thought I'd throw out some red libertarian meat today. I'm pretty sure that Remy isn't going that far out on a limb, but …

HTML-annotated lyrics are here. But since I brought it up, my fellow crazies have thoughtful advocacies for repeal: Aaron Steelman at Chronicles; Jacob G. Hornberger at Mises Wire; Kerry McDonald at FEE (also here). From that last link:

Also revealed by Googling: here in the "Live Free or Die" state, ten half-days of unexcused absence may, and probably will, get you and your kid in trouble.

Also of note:

• Being honest about the real problem. Pun Salad appreciates strong, exact language, especially in expressing an opinion Pun Salad agrees with. At the Federalist, Kylee Griswold goes there: Kamala Harris Is Too Stupid To Be President.

  Univision hosted a “Latinos Ask” town hall with Kamala Harris on Thursday night, and it was about as airheaded and disingenuous as you’d expect. Here was one word salad from the first five minutes — remarkably in response to a question about the two hurricanes that just decimated the southeast of the country:

  Leadership is about understanding the importance of lifting people up, understanding that the character of our country is such that we are a people who have ambitions and aspirations, dreams, goals for ourselves and our families, and are entitled to have a leader who then invests in that. … The two visions [for our country], simply put, are that one is about the future, and the other is about the past and taking us backward. And I do believe that the American people are ambitious and aspirational about an investment in the future in a way that we are optimistic while being clear-eyed.

  That’s a lot of ambitions. After one voter observed that Harris was never elected to be the Democrat nominee but just magically became such when “President Biden was pushed aside,” the vice president naturally drove home the point for the umpteenth time that Donald Trump is the “unprecedented” threat to democracy. Funny she brought up Trump and democracy because the former president actually made an apropos comment about the topic earlier the same day, telling the Economic Club of Detroit: “Our biggest threat to democracy is stupid people.”

  Specifically, stupid voters are the biggest threat to democracy.

  And to be brutally honest, stupid voters are how we got Trump. Ironic that he should bring that up.

  (To be clear, I'm tossing ignorant people into my "stupid" basket of deplorables; technically, that's an oversimplification.)

• Allegedly smart people are no treat either. Robert Shibley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) notes a regrettable trend: The AAUP continues to back away from academic freedom.

  This week, the American Association of University Professors gave its blessing to mandatory “diversity statements” in hiring — as long as the faculty votes for them first. FIRE has long argued that such statements can too easily function as ideological litmus tests and has repeatedly warned against them.

  The AAUP’s new statement on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation” marks yet another departure from the organization’s roots as a stalwart protector of faculty members’ right to dissent from the orthodoxies of the day, whatever those might be.

  Shibley's rebuttal to the AAUP's denial that DEI statements "require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views":

  FIRE is careful to consider each such policy individually, as not every statement requirement is the same. But in general, when employees or job applicants are required to pledge or prove their allegiance to a school’s interpretation of DEI concepts, we object precisely because ensuring that allegiance is the stated goal of the policy. From the perspective of the policy authors, that’s not a bug, it’s the key feature.

  Schools adopting DEI requirements want to filter out people who don’t or can’t agree to act upon the institution’s specific set of views in the classroom and in their service work. If colleges and universities didn’t care whether applicants agreed with their conception of DEI, why would they bother to ask applicants to demonstrate that agreement?

  Can I imagine a happy day when the New Hampshire legislature (a) repeals compulsory attendance laws and (b) requires University System of New Hampshire schools to abolish required "diversity statements" for hiring and promotion? As Han Solo would say: "I don't know. I can imagine quite a bit."

• 

  And you won't guess who those little bastards are. Alan Jacobs has tracked down [Professor Richard] Rorty’s bastard children. Inspired by the Jewish Space Lasers Weather Control crowd:

  In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

  Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

  My informal understanding is that this is very similar to the late Harry Frankfort's thesis in On Bullshit (Amazon link at your right). And of course, it's not solely practiced by inhabitants of "MAGAworld".

• Hm. Should I vote for this guy? The Libertarian Party's presidential candidate will appear on my November ballot. Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Chase Oliver on Budget Cuts, War, and Immigration and if you're as disgusted/amused at the major party candidates as I am, you may want to check that out.

  But for me, this is a deal-breaker:

  You've said that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. Is that an accurate description of your view of Israel's actions in Gaza?

  When you look at the definitions that are brought forward by the International Criminal Court, I think much of the standards there have been met by the practices of the Israeli government.

  That's to the detriment of the Israeli people, who would like to see a more peaceful and stable Israel, who would like to see a more peaceful and stable region.

  Given the deep U.S. involvement in the Middle East, do you believe we should completely withdraw, or is there a role for the U.S. in brokering peace in the region?

  We need to be removing our military footprint as quickly and orderly as possible so that it can be done in a way that's responsible, not like what we saw with the Afghanistan withdrawal. But we do need to withdraw ourselves completely from the Middle East.

  The best thing we can do is be a neutral arbiter. What we should not be doing is putting our thumb on the scale. That's what we've been doing and it's not led to better outcomes. In fact, it's led to more turmoil and more tension in the region.

  Stipulated: US foreign policy has been, and is, more inept than it should be. But not "putting our thumb on the scale" when it comes to barbarism vs. civilization would make things much, much worse.

I just can't figure out if it will be a comedy or a tragedy.

This Charles C.W. Cooke Corner post would seem to point to "comedy": Kamala Harris Embarrassed Herself During Hurricane Milton.

Don't the Saturday Night Live skits write themselves?

But Jeffrey Blehar implies more than a little Et tu, Brute?-ism with his headline question: Is Joe Biden Trying to Knife Kamala Harris?.

Reader, as a thought exercise, can't you just imagine everyone involved here wearing togas?

Or (even better) Julius Caesar Costume Designs by Jack Kirby?

Also of note:

• Jeff, please expand this reasoning to pharmaceuticals. Jeff Maurer gets it: Hurricanes Are Showing Why Price Caps Are Bad. Skipping down a bit for our excerpt:

  Let’s focus on toilet paper. It gets bought up before a hurricane because people know that they might be stuck in their house for a few days, and they don’t want their lesser-worn clothing and fur-covered house pets to be “pressed into service”, so to speak. If toilet paper is sold at the normal price, there’s no reason not to stock up — even if you don’t end up needing any extra paper at all, you bought at the normal price, so no harm done. So, the first person to get to Kroger cleans out the store and rides out the hurricane atop a mountain of two-ply luxury, while everyone else ends up having to throw out their socks and sofa cushions after the storm.

  But if toilet paper starts selling for $10 a roll when demand suddenly surges, the first person to get to Kroger will face different math. They’ll ask themselves “How much toilet paper do I actually need?” and then do a quick calculation based on the amount of toilet paper they already have, the number of days they expect to be stuck, and their planned diet over those days. And then they’ll buy only what’s essential. Other people will do the same thing, and folks who don’t really need toilet paper — like bidet owners and divorced women who still have their wedding dresses — will opt out entirely. And that helps prevent shortages.

  The other thing that will happen when TP sells for jacked-up prices is that companies will divert supply to where it’s needed. During a hurricane, most of the country is not experiencing an Ass Emergency, so they won’t notice if five percent of shipments get diverted to the disaster zone. But that five percent will mean the world to disaster victims who are facing rectal 9/11. If TP is at $10 a roll, the Charmin Bears — America’s third-richest family — will move mountains to get their product where it will make the most money. And that will prevent shortages and eventually lower prices.

  All of this is totally counterintuitive. It really does seem like jacking up prices during a crisis should earn you a Nobel Prize in Assholery and be forbidden. But the market forces I’m describing are real, and it does look like Florida’s anti-price gouging law is contributing to shortages. And yet, there’s a bipartisan consensus that the anti-gouging law is good; Ron DeSantis’ government extended the law, and Kamala Harris warned price gougers of “consequences”. Which seems like more evidence that both parties have suddenly decided that even though there are hundreds if not thousands of years of evidence that price caps lead to shortages and hardship, maybe this time they’ll work.

  That's a long snip-out but, I did want to point out that whenever you see "bipartisan consensus", it increases the probability that whatever's attached is a Real Bad Idea.

• Speaking of tragedies, however… Don't throw away those Julius Caesar costumes at the end of hurricane season, kids. Because, as Veronique de Rugy points out: Biden and Harris' Record on Spending and Debt Is a Tragedy of Epic Proportion.

  No matter the result of next month's election, President Joe Biden will soon leave the White House. That makes it a good time for a nearly final assessment of his and Vice President Kamala Harris' first-term legacy on federal spending and debt—a tragedy of epic proportion. Unfortunately, neither Harris nor her rival on the campaign trail has made a priority of fixing this problem.

  As a matter of fact, "her rival on the campaign trail" seems to be making a priority of promising to make the problem worse: Donald Trump tells Detroit he'll make car loan interest tax-deductible

• Speaking of the Donald… Madeleine Kearns is doing the news roundup at the Free Press these days, Lots of small items worth skimming. Example:

  Donald Trump has long complained that China is stealing American jobs. But that didn’t stop him outsourcing the printing of at least 120,000 copies of his “God Bless the USA” Bible to China. The foreign-made Bibles cost less than $3 each and are sold in the States for a minimum price of $59.99, leading to a sales revenue of about $7 million. “The Bible is a reminder that the biggest thing we have to bring back in America, and to make America great again, is our religion,” Trump said in a video urging people to buy his good book.

  From the link. the GBtUSA Bible also includes at no extra charge:

  • Handwritten chorus to “God Bless The USA” by Lee Greenwood
  • The US Constitution
  • The Bill of Rights
  • The Declaration of Independence
  • The Pledge of Allegiance

  Are the Chinese reading what they're printing?

  How about these guys in Oklahoma: State Education Department Seeks Bids for 55,000 Classroom Bibles.

• He's gonna have to take down that "Science is Real" sign on his lawn. NHJournal reports on the deep thoughts of Timothy Horrigan: NH Dem Says There's No 'Accepted Definition' of 'Biological Male'. It's a longish article about the failed (for now) effort to keep restrooms sex-segregated in New Hampshire. Skipping down…

  Rep. Timothy Horrigan (D-Durham) published a letter in the Union Leader criticizing one of the newspaper’s reporters for writing, “a transgender athlete identified in court paperwork as a ‘biological male.’”

  “This reference is a little misleading because the young woman at the center of the controversy is female,” Horrigan wrote, referring to a biological male playing on a girls soccer team. “She is living her life as a woman, and everyone close to her considers her to be female. She’s not male.”

  Besides, added Horrigan, “The term ‘biological male’ has no commonly accepted definition.”

  Actual Scientist Jerry Coyne has been on the warpath for years about this disinformation. Here's something he wrote back in 2020: A defense of the binary in human sex.

  Tim Horrigan can assert that there's no "commonly accepted" definition, but that's mainly because he, and people like him, have (essentially) a theological objection to not accepting the definition.

And MTG's mind was at work on Monday:

Climate change is the new Covid.

Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.

Did you ever give permission to them to do it?

Are you paying for it?

Of course you are..

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) October 7, 2024

In the real world, the actual news is (Ars Technica): NOAA drops scientist’s ashes into the eye of Category 5 Milton.

So, <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">good news, Floridians!</voice>. NOAA can't manipulate or control your weather, but it can add dead scientist ashes to it. In case you needed another reason to evacuate.

Also of note:

• Toward a new definition of insanity. No, Einstein didn't say "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." But if he were still around, he might offer this headline from Eric Boehm as an example of insanity: Budget Deficit Hit $1.8 Trillion After Huge Increase in Borrowing Costs.

  The only good news contained in the Congressional Budget Office's latest revenue report is that the federal budget deficit did not get significantly worse during the most recent fiscal year. The deficit increased by a mere $139 billion when compared to the previous year.

  But the fact that the deficit increased at all in a year when revenue from federal tax collections climbed by 11 percent—from $4.4 trillion to $4.9 trillion—suggests something about the nature of the fiscal problems facing the federal government. Specifically: that it's a spending problem. The federal government spent $6.75 trillion last year.

  More specifically, it's a borrowing problem. While spending increased by about 10 percent from the year before, the interest payments on the national debt ballooned by 34 percent—from $710 billion to $950 billion. That sharp increase reflects both the size of the national debt, which is now roughly as large as the nation's annual economic output for the first time since World War II, and the rising interest rates that have been a feature of the economy for the past few years.

  Add that to the list of things "your government" can't (or won't) control, MTG.

• Not literally. Jeffrey Blehar observes (at least) Category 3 stupidity: Nobody Needs Kamala Harris’s Help with Storm Response, and It’s Killing Her. After he wrote for publication on Sunday that, as VP, Kamala had no role to play in hurricane response. (MTG interrupts: "Other than to point the hurricanes at Republicans!")

  Yes, immediately after I finished trying to patiently explain to readers — conservatives, no less! — that it’s hypocritical to hold someone as powerless as Harris responsible for disaster responses, here comes Kamala to demand that people pretend she is in charge or has any meaningful role to play in this whatsoever. Not only that, but for once she actually deigned to lodge the complaint in person, speaking to reporters about it on the tarmac between campaign stops and whining that she tried to call Governor DeSantis and he “refused to speak to me.”

  Ron DeSantis has utterly no time for any of this nonsense — he has a Category 4 hurricane on his hands — and said as much in the most brutally effective way possible yesterday. I hope everyone gets a chance to watch this excerpt from yesterday’s storm-preparation press conference, where the governor bats away, with visible disgust, the attempt by reporters in the room to insert Harris into a hurricane briefing. It’s a masterfully persuasive performance precisely because DeSantis isn’t trying to make a political argument at all — he goes out of his way several times to emphasize that he’s spoken with the president and received full cooperation from the federal government. You just can tell how insultingly inappropriate he considers it to be talking about anything other than weather predictions and evacuation protocols. (His facial expressions convey disdain eloquently.)

  As a bonus, see the WSJ's Notable & Quotable: Biden vs. Harris on Florida’s Hurricane Response. Compare and contrast the quotes. You would not expect doddering Joe to outclass "joyful" Kamala, but there you go.

• What do hedge funds do? Also at the WSJ, the editorialists point out CNN and Sen. Bob Casey’s Economic Illiteracy.

  You can tell the Pennsylvania Senate race is tightening because CNN on Wednesday rolled out a hit piece on GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s record as former CEO of Bridgewater Associates. The story happens to fit perfectly with Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s campaign strategy vilifying private business.

  “Senate candidate Dave McCormick led hedge fund that bet against some of Pennsylvania’s most iconic companies,” reads the headline, which Mr. Casey tweeted. The Democratic incumbent and his allies in the press can’t find any wrongdoing during Mr. McCormick’s five years (2017-2022) running Bridgewater, so they’re peddling economic illiteracy disguised as investigative reporting.

  The piece claims that Bridgewater under Mr. McCormick shorted the stocks of roughly four dozen companies headquartered in Pennsylvania, including Hershey Co., U.S. Steel, Comcast and Penn National Gaming. Short-selling is when an investor borrows a security and then sells it with the intent of buying it back at a lower price.

  Well-diversified investors take short positions to hedge risks in their portfolio. As the Biden Securities and Exchange Commission explained last year, “short selling provides the market with important benefits, such as providing market liquidity and pricing efficiency.”

  Short-selling would scare the crap out of me, but there's nothing wrong with it. I don't think CNN is economically that illiterate; they're just trying to exploit the ignorance of Pennsylvania voters.

• NSF delenda est? At the Free Press, Rupa Subramanya highlights some shameful news: DEI Is Transforming the National Science Foundation.

  If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”

  A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.

  “In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in actual scientists—that is, people with degrees in the hard sciences from major universities who regularly receive money to conduct actual scientific research—using their credentials to parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the Senate committee, said in the report.

  The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.

  Gee, maybe fund some Alzheimer's research instead? Or work on weather manipulation/control! If you're going to be accused of it anyway, why not?

With under four weeks to go, I went to the New Hampshire Secretary of State website to check out my sample ballot:

At my age, I need to keep my voting algorithm pretty simple:

• Shudder a bit when looking at the choices for President/Vice President, and then leave that line blank.
• Otherwise, vote for the Republicans.
• Unless the same person appears as a Democrat, then skip.

Yes, I'm a RINO. Sue me.

And, as a geezer, I'm leaning "No" on that constitutional amendment.

I like the stoicism behind Chris Stirewalt's general election advice: Don’t Vote Like Your Life Depended on It.

Can't help but mentally add "Or worse" to that last sentence.

Fun fact: Stirewalt self-identifies as a "displaced Appalachian American with a bust of Calvin Coolidge on his bookshelf."

Further fun fact: I couldn't find a bust of Coolidge at Amazon, but they do have a bobblehead for the low, low price of $29.95. And if you really need a bust, here you go.

Also of note:

• Meanwhile, back in the states, Brittney Griner gets back to vaping hash oil. The WSJ had a page one item yesterday: Putin’s ‘Merchant Of Death’ Gets Back To Work.

  Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” walked out of a U.S. prison almost two years ago in a trade with Moscow for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner. Now he is back in business, trying to broker the sale of small arms to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants.

  The 57-year-old, whose life reportedly inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie, “Lord of War,” starring Nicolas Cage, spent decades selling Soviet-made weapons in Africa, South America and the Middle East before being arrested in 2008 in a U.S. law-enforcement sting operation.

  Since his release, Bout has joined a pro-Kremlin far-right party and won a seat in a local assembly in 2023, seemingly turning the page on his days as an arms broker. But when Houthi emissaries went to Moscow in August to negotiate the purchase of $10 million worth of automatic weapons, they encountered a familiar face: the mustachioed Bout, according to a European security official and other people familiar with the matter.

  Sounds like a fun guy.

• Because of course she does. Elizabeth Nolan Brown updates on the latest "respectable politician" assaulting free speech: Hillary Clinton Wants To Repeal Section 230.

  Hillary Clinton said on CNN this weekend that repealing Section 230 of federal communications law should be a top political priority.

  The former secretary of state's comments are a reminder that this vital protection for free speech is far from safe, even if we seem to be on the other side of peak anti-230 politics.

  Just as a reminder:

  A lot of politicians hate Section 230 precisely because it makes it more difficult for them to censor what is said online, while others hate Section 230 because it allows private companies to avoid hosting speech the politicians like. The bottom line is that both Democrats and Republicans would like to weaken or abolish Section 230, and that doing so would give government authorities more control over the internet.

  During Donald Trump's presidency, he was an enthusiastic advocate for repealing Section 230. This sort of anti-230 sentiment and action from both major parties has continued into Joe Biden's. And while anti-Section 230 sentiment has quieted down a bit in recent years, Clinton's comments serve as a good reminder that a lot of powerful people still have it out for this law.

  So: "Help us Kamala, you're our only hope?" Nope: "Not only does Trump oppose Section 230, but Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has been crusading to weaken Section 230 since her days as attorney general of California."

• All the better to transport us down the Road to Serfdom. Rich Lowry "has the receipts" and concludes that despite her denials: Yes, Kamala Harris Wants You Out of Your Gas-Powered Car.

  Kamala Harris is an automotive libertarian, or so she maintains.

  “Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive,” the vice president said at a campaign stop in Michigan the other day.

  She will, however, favor regulations to drastically change the mix of gas-powered and electric cars that are manufactured in the United States, regardless of what consumers want.

  The Biden-Harris administration has been working to regulate the American car market more to its liking. In 2023, the EPA proposed rules to make electric vehicles as much as 67 percent of new light vehicles sold by 2032. The agency then backed off a little, to electric vehicles constituting 56 percent of such cars in 2032 (another 13 percent would be hybrids, leaving purely gas-powered cars at less than 30 percent).

  From the relevant Wikipedia article (translated from its original language): "Plan is law, fulfillment is duty, over-fulfillment is honor!"

One year ago, Hamas launched a horrific attack against Israel, killing over 1,400 Israeli citizens – including defenseless women, children, and the elderly – and kidnapping hundreds more. Today, the prospects of peace seem more distant than ever. But we continue to hope for a…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 7, 2024

BO's tweet continues:

… return of all the hostages, an end to the violence, a rejection of hate, and a future in which both Israelis and Palestinians can enjoy the security and stability that most of them yearn for.

"… and a pony."

Ah well, I guess his heart is in the right place. Which I also guess was the point of his tweet: to show that his heart was in the right place.

Alas, not everyone is getting the message of peace and love. Jim Geraghty views recent anti-Israel protests and concludes: The Antisemitism Is the Point.

The local TV station, WMUR, notes the local festivities:

Ah, nothing "honors" Palestinan lives more than a "week of rage".

Quibble: the "41,000" number is wrong, of course. It is similar to the number of Gaza fatalities reported by the Gazan "health ministry" since 10/7, according to Forbes. And that doesn't count Israeli dead on 10/7.

As Geraghty notes, there's no indication that Uyghur, Ukrainian, or (of course) Israeli lives were mentioned, let alone honored. And what the "Solidarity Coalition" actually says is…

Join us next week to protest one year of the Palestinian genocide and mourn the loss of life and liberty that has been deemed acceptable by the United States, Israel, and Western medias. We will not stand idly while more massacres unfold!

UNH Divest!
Free Palestine! pic.twitter.com/Nw7WSqV8kv

— Palestine Solidarity Coalition UNH (@psc_unh) October 4, 2024

They're real river-to-the-sea folks. They up the toll to 180,000+. And they don't mention honoring anyone, WMUR. Just raging.

Also of note:

• Noah Smith seems to have a limited notion of "everyone". He asks in his headline: What if everyone is wrong about what AI does?

  There are two basic debates about AI. One is the “AI safety” or “X-risk” debate, which is about whether AI will turn into Skynet and kill us. But the most prominent and common debate is about AI taking jobs away from humans. What’s interesting about this debate is that practically everyone involved, from AI’s biggest boosters to its biggest critics, seems to agree on the basic premise — that the primary function of AI is as a direct replacement for human beings. In general, people only disagree about what our reaction to this basic fact should be. Should we slow down AI’s development intentionally? Should we implement a universal basic income? Should AI engineers and their shackled gods retreat behind towering fortress walls guarded by legions of autonomous drones, letting the rest of humanity suffer and die as GPT-278 sucks up all of the world’s energy for data centers?

  

  Not a big deal, but it's only been a few months since (for example) Reason put out a whole issue dedicated to AI. And the lead article's headline is In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment. Provocative. And in case you missed it, there's The Case of the AI-Generated Giant Rat Penis.

  Noah, I think all the issue's articles are out from behind the paywall. Just sayin'.

• Also out from behind the Reason paywall. … is a review from Jay Bhattacharya of a book by a guy who should have lost his job: Anthony Fauci, the Man Who Thought He Was Science. Just a snippet:

  

  Coercive policy regarding COVID vaccination, recommended by Fauci on the false premise that vaccinated people could not get or spread the virus, collapsed public trust in other vaccines and led the media and public health officials to gaslight individuals who had suffered legitimate vaccine injuries. To pay for the lockdowns recommended by Fauci, the U.S. government spent trillions of dollars, causing high unemployment in the most locked-down states and a hangover of higher prices for consumer goods that continues to this day. Who is to blame?

  Fauci served as a key adviser to both President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, and was a central figure on Trump's COVID task force that determined federal policy. If Fauci has no responsibility for the outcomes of the pandemic, nobody does. Yet in his memoir's chapters on COVID, he simultaneously takes credit for advising leaders while disclaiming any responsibility for policy failures.

  Fauci implausibly writes that he "was not locking down the country" and "had no power to control anything." These statements are belied by Fauci's own bragging about his influence on a host of policy responses, including convincing Trump to lock the country down in March 2020 and extend the lockdown in April.

  Bhattacharya co-wrote the "Great Barrington Declaration", which Fauci loudly opposed, and still does. I think Bhattacharya has the better argument here.

• As Obama said, "Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to… Well, you probably know the rest of that quote. (But if not, here you go.) Another example from Andrew McCarthy: Botched Plea Deals with 9/11 Plotters Get Worse for Biden Administration.

  The botched plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 terrorists is a signature Biden-Harris administration moment: a scheme, apparently double-wrapped in incompetence, to spare the Democrats’ presidential candidate — first the senescent one, then the vacuous one — from an unpopular political decision.

  I say double-wrapped because it appears the deal that the administration made, and since then has desperately tried to renege on, contains an anti-renege clause — one that officials calculated would frustrate Donald Trump but on which, instead, the administration has tripped itself up.

  Back in August, I outlined how the Biden-Harris administration traded a political problem for a legal problem. The political problem is that the 9/11 case, which has lingered for over two decades, probably cannot be ended unless the administration permits the Defense Department to take the death penalty off the table in order to induce a guilty plea from the terrorists; yet, because the terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans, removing capital punishment would be extremely unpopular — and thus the administration does not wish to do it, or at least be seen doing it, much less try to explain it.

  As we have seen, the progressive Democrats who run the administration love to make the base swoon by brandishing their anti-death-penalty credentials in the abstract. When it gets down to real cases, though, they hide under their desks: Not only is capital punishment patently constitutional; the majority of Americans approve of it in heinous cases, particularly jihadist mass-murder cases. So, Biden and Harris play a game. They airily proclaim philosophical opposition to capital punishment. In concrete cases — such as that of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — they tell the country they are defending the death-penalty sentence ordered by a jury; but in so doing, they quietly assure Democrats not to worry because they have imposed a moratorium on executions, ensuring that no death sentences will actually be carried out.

  Might be amusing to hear Queen Kamala of Word Salad explain that one. But then someone would have to ask her about it, right? Dream on . . .

  "Queen Kamala of Word Salad." Heh.

Recently on the book blog:

I picked up this book from Portsmouth (NH) Public Library mainly due to this review from Brian Doherty at the Reason website. (I don't think it made it into the magazine.) Doherty called it "a solidly educational and entertaining work of political history." Ganz's implicit thesis: the early 1990s were an important part of the story of How We Got Here, thirty years later.

But, really, you can say that about any period in American history, can't you?

Ganz focuses on personalities of the period, mostly ones he finds colorful, outrageous, or dangerous. As Doherty notes, he spends a lot of words on Murry Rothbard, concentrating on his flirtation with paleoconservatives. The book's title is from a Rothbard speech; you can also find it in one of his long-winded articles from the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, reproduced by the Mises Institute. And it's in response to the cliché "You can't turn back the clock."

We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the 20th century.

As Doherty also notes, despite Ganz's title, this did not come close to happening.

Anyway, Ganz's history is wide-ranging and (you might argue) idiosyncratic. In addition to Rothbard, Ganz looks at folks like David Duke, Bo Gritz, John Gotti, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani, Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Jackson, … And, naturally enough, the major figures of the 1992 presidential campaign: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan.

Anyone remember Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment? Ganz does. Were you aware that a professor named Caroll Quigley had an inordinate influence on Bill Clinton's philosophy? I didn't, but Ganz spends many pages on exploring that.

And Ross Perot was a holy terror back then about the deficit and associated national debt. Why, we were adding "$1 billion in debt every 24 hours"!

Reader, according to these folks, over the past year, the debt averaged a $6 billion increase per day.

One little sentence on page 20 jumped out at me, and I fear it colored my attitude toward the book:

During the presidential campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned against "welfare queens."

Uh, reader, no he did not. I blogged about this ten years ago (heavily relying on this Reagan-hostile Slate article). As near as anyone can tell, Reagan used the term "welfare queen" (not "queens") once, in 1976 (not 1980), during one of his radio addresses. And he was quoting the term used in a Chicago Tribune story about Linda Taylor, an actual person.

I noticed a few other drive-by mini-slanders throughout, unsourced. If you're tempted to repeat any of 'em as gospel, caveat lector.

But another unsourced and widely repeated factoid on page 189: Gene Roddenberry was the speechwriter for LAPD chief William Parker in the 1950s, and based Star Trek's Mr. Spock on him. I didn't know that! And it might be true!

I've been a fan of Anthony Horowitz's fictional collaboration with ace detective, ex-cop, Daniel Hawthorne since 2020. I've since learned that this series is a variety of metafiction, where the author inserts himself into the story as a character. As I've said before: it's as if Sherlock's companion was not named "John Watson", but "Arthur Conan Doyle". Works for me! (My previous reports on the Horowitz/Hawthorne mysteries: here, here, here, and here.)

This one's different. Horowitz's publisher is demanding that he write the next book in the series, but Hawthorne hasn't been working on any new cases. What to do? After some difficult negotiations, they decide to do a prequel of sorts: a murder Hawthorne worked on before he joined up with Horowitz. Hawthorne will provide Horowitz with the case documents in chronological order, so the book can be written without knowing how it's going to turn out.

The years-ago murder took place in "Riverside Close", a group of six houses containing people living in decent harmony until a new family moves in and proceeds to irk every one of their new neighbors. Tensions rise until, eventually, the main offender gets a crossbow bolt in the throat.

There are too many suspects, and they all seem to be hiding something. Hawthorne and his then-partner, Dudley, interview them all.

And Horowitz, as he learns about the crime in the present, becomes increasingly dismayed at how the past case developed. Is there really a book in all this?

Well, yes there is. You're reading it. Keep turning those pages, Paul….

There's quite a bit to keep track of, but Horowitz lays out everything clearly; that doesn't mean you'll see the plot twists coming. (Well, I didn't. Maybe you will.)

As I ride this train through the Dutch countryside on October 7, all I can think about is the violence that people are willing to object to and the violence those same people are willing to pro-actively support with material and political aid.

— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) October 7, 2024

Professor Prescod-Weinstein has trained her brain well. Even on the one-year anniversary of a vile atrocity, she's only thinking about the stuff she's been thinking about for years, and in the same, predictable way. Deploying the same turgid clichés. She has successfully managed to avoid even a shred of self-doubt intrude on her mental processes.

Congratulations are in order, I suppose.

Also of note:

• Reminder: She's a nitwit.

  JUST IN: Kamala Harris has no clue what to say after her teleprompter appears to stop working, keeps repeating herself.
  
  The Vice President kept repeating “32 days.”
  
  “Remember his number 32 today? We got 32 days until the election.”
  
  “So 32 days… 32 days… Okay. We got some… pic.twitter.com/2fIl1nyEkq

  — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 4, 2024

  I almost sympathize with her. I'm pretty bad at extemporaneous speaking, too.

  But, yeah, the actual problem here is the mental white noise that leaks out through her mouth. There's nothing going on between those ears except cavernous echoes of what she just said.

• But enough about the lady brains. Jerry Coyne looks at a couple of bad XY examples, and wonders: What’s going on with Biden and Israel? (and a coda about Trump’s possible mental problems)

  Although Biden (and now Harris) have proclaimed an ironclad commitment to Israel’s well-being, they’re acting very wonky about Israel’s behavior. First they withheld 2000-pound bombs from Israel (you know, the kind that were used on the targeted strike that killed the leader of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah), though the U.S. rations some of these bombs to Israel.

  But now the U.S. is trying to tell Israel how to run a war that is an existential thread to Israel’s existence, for the tiny Jewish nation is fighting on seven fronts at once (Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the West Bank). But the U.S. has been trying to control how Israel responded to Hamas’s October 7 attack from the very beginning. First Biden told Israel not to invade Gaza. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Gaza City. When they did, Biden told Israel not to go into Khan Younis. When they did, Biden told Israel in no uncertain terms not to go into Rafah, for that was “crossing a red line.” Kamala Harris backed up Bided then, asserting that she had “studied the maps.” Israel did go into Rafah and got some hostages, along the way destroying much of Hamas’s military capabilities. All the while Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was waffling, especially about negotiations, for he is the lever Biden uses to try to push Israel in his direction. Had the U.S. followed Biden’s wishes, then, Hamas would still be in control of Gaza, and the dangers of another October 7 would remain.

  OK, a sideways Kamala slam there too. 'Twould be funny except when you remember these are the people who are supposed to be in charge. At a certain point, you'd think they'd readjust their priors and admit that Israel (and Bibi) just might have more incentive to come up with effective survival tactics than people sitting safely in DC, thousands of miles away.

  Oh, I should provide the "coda" to which Jerry refers in his headline. In response to a comment from a reader who is (apparently) a Trump fan:

  This made me laugh, because first of all, it seems likely to me that Trump really is mentally ill, at least with a diagnosable pattern of symptoms that fit into narcissistic personality disorder:

  Although Jerry's armchair psychoanalysis is deplorable… yeah, I'd give pretty good odds he's right.

• 

  Speaking of narcissists, though… Jonathan Turley spots the latest from the bullet we dodged back in 2012 and 2016: “We Lose Total Control”: Clinton Continues Her Censorship Campaign on CNN.

  Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens.

  Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom.

  That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.

  Unsurprisingly, Portsmouth (NH) Public Library has purchased Hillary's book, but has "banned" Turley's.

• Moan. Phillip W. Magness has some bad news: Marxism is back. (Did it leave? Missed that.)

  Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran gushy homages to the communist philosopher to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Marx’s Communist Manifesto consistently ranks as the most frequently assigned book on university course syllabi, with the exception of a few widely used textbooks. Bibliometric evidence of Marx’s prevalence abounds in academic works, where he consistently ranks among the most frequently cited authors in human history. The academy erupted with yet another fanfare for Marx last month, when Princeton University Press released a new translation of his magnum opus, Das Kapital.

  The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20^th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.

  By every measure of its own merit, Marx’s economic system should have been relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history – and for a brief moment it was. Marx’s Capital struggled to find an audience in his own lifetime. He died in 1883 in relative obscurity and with little following outside of a small band of fanatical leftists led by his friend Friedrich Engels. Even among fellow socialists, Marx was a controversial figure. He spent the last decade of his life locked in endless internecine feuds with anarchists, non-revolutionary socialists, and even other competitor revolutionary factions. For decades after his death, he faced credible accusations of plagiarising his theories from other writers. The Manifesto has more than a few arguments that strongly resembled an 1843 pamphlet by French socialist writer Victor Considerant, and Marx’s doctrine of “surplus value” closely follows an earlier work by democratic socialist thinker Johann Karl Rodbertus.
  

  I was able to re-excavate this P.J. O'Rourke quote from his 1983 book, Modern Manners:

  Another distinctive quality of manners is that they have nothing to do with what you do, only how you do it. For example, Karl Marx was always polite in the British Museum. He was courteous to the staff, never read with his hat on, and didn't make lip farts when he came across passages in Hegel with which he disagreed. Despite the fact that his political exhortations have caused the deaths of millions, he is today more revered than not. On the other hand, John W. Hinckley, Jr., was only rude once, to a retired Hollywood movie actor, and Hinckley will be in a mental institution for the rest of his life.

  He was right about everything except for that last bit.

"OK. And the answer is: 'What storm of bullshit occurs every four years in the US?'"

And an acceptable response would be the title of our Amazon Product du Jour. Which is reviewed by Elle Purnell at the Federalist: Book Tells Kids GOP Hates Immigrants, Dems Are Party Of Lunch. She is particularly bemused by…

Odd and even numbers? We're asking kids to read and do math? Good luck with that.

And let me just check the Portsmouth NH website… well, what do you know, yes of course this pile of partisan propaganda is waiting on the shelves of the Portsmouth Middle School Library, the better to indoctrinate impressionable young minds.

Do I advocate "banning" this biased book from that library? Interesting question. Nah. But I'd want to know: Do they have any equivalent pro-Republican books on their shelves?

I bet the answer to that question is no. You don't have to "ban" books that never make it into the library.

So, anyway, what's the haps on the election betting this week? Here you go:

Not to sound like a broken record, but: "The bettors seem to think the outcome is close to a coin-flip. Kamala's still a slight favorite, but Trump did some catching up this past week."

Yes, that's exactly what I said last week.

And even the WSJ's weekly columnist Peggy Noonan seems to be at a loss for words:

Jump ball, deadlock, coin flip, tossup. We’re running out of election metaphors.

As long as we don't go into sudden-death overtime. That would be tedious.

Also of note:

• Wrong answers being provided by both candidates. David R. Henderson's anodyne headline: How To Lower Costs For Consumers.

  Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have said during their campaigns for president that they want to bring down costs for consumers. It’s an admirable goal and, if done right, can be achieved.

  Unfortunately, both have been sparse on details about how to do so. In his September 6 speech to the Economic Club of New York, Trump engaged in a lot of exaggeration and bluster, but didn’t give details. In response to a sympathetic Philadelphia reporter’s question about how to do so, Harris started by telling how she was born into a middle-class family. She then segued to a mention of how people in her neighborhood were very proud of their lawns. She did propose a $25,000 subsidy for first buyers of housing, but that would increase, not decrease prices. She never answered his question.

  That’s the bad news. The good news is that economics gives us some tried and true ways of making consumers better off. They mainly have to do with allowing competition and allowing increased supplies. Trump did some of that while president. Harris as vice president showed no signs of moves in that direction. Yet many of the policies that both propose would do the opposite.

  Henderson advocates an obvious policy for lowering costs: free trade. Somewhat less obvious: increased immigration.

• Iron law of bipartisanship: When opposing parties agree on an issue, they're probably both wrong. Christian Britschgi notes a confirming example of that from the veep debate: Contra J.D. Vance and Tim Walz, Housing Should Be a 'Commodity'.

  Tuesday's vice presidential debate included a surprising amount of agreement between the two candidates on stage. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) competed on who would produce more oil, keep the border more secure, and support Israel the most.

  They also were both in alignment on the notion that housing shouldn't be "a commodity."

  "The problem we've had is that we've got a lot of folks that see housing as another commodity," said Walz, criticizing the influence of Wall Street on the housing market.

  "We should get out of this idea of housing as a commodity!" concurred Vance, saying that the way to make it not a commodity would be to crack down on illegal immigration.

  Actually, as Britschgi points out, the best possible thing to happen in housing policy would be ignoring the nostrums peddled by both Walz and Vance. The free market does a very good job of supplying "commodities", bringing together willing buyers and sellers in mutually beneficial transactions.

  But you knew that. Too bad our politicians don't.

• What's the degree of difficulty on her performance so far? Imagine Elizabeth Nolan Brown as a judge at a gymnastic competition as she observes Kamala Harris' Freedom Flip-Flop.

  Kamala Harris' most consistent political trait may be a lack of consistency. Over the course of her long career, first in California and then in Washington, D.C., the Democrats' 2024 presidential nominee has been plagued by plausible allegations that she's hard to pin down and lacks a stable ideological core. She's a flip-flopper—or, if you want to be charitable, she evolves quickly.

  Over the summer, Harris' evolutions kept on coming, with her campaign issuing rapid-fire disavowals of many of her previous positions. Because she ran her failed 2020 presidential primary bid on an ultraprogressive, big-government platform, many of her new positions are noticeably more oriented toward the mainstream—and freedom.

  To slightly adapt what Jonah Goldberg memorably quipped about Mitt Romney: if you hit the mute button on your TV during a Kamala speech, she seems to be saying: What do I have to do to put you in this BMW today?

• I assume the above will be classified as "disinformation" in the Harris/Walz Administration. James Freeman notes that there's one issue they haven't flipped on, and that's their understanding of free speech. So, as James Freeman advocates: Criticize Harris and Walz While You Still Can.

  It’s a curious thing that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D., Minn.) are enjoying generally friendly media coverage even as they set modern campaign records for avoiding media scrutiny. Odder still is that while avoiding discussion of the policies they will employ to govern us, they’ve clearly expressed contempt for the bedrock liberty that allows all of us to criticize government policies.

  Recently this column noted Ms. Harris’s history of hostility to free expression. Now we know that if voters give her the promotion she seeks, we can’t expect her vice president to serve as a moderating influence.

  Gee, I noticed that myself a few days ago. Freeman doesn't quote Pun Salad, but instead goes with Robby Soave, Jonathan Turley. And this tweet from Todd Zywicki:

  It is ironic that Walz saying there’s no First Amendment protection for “misinformation” is itself misinformation.

  — Todd Zywicki (@ToddZywicki) October 3, 2024

  Yes, irony can be … pretty ironic sometimes.

• I'm feeling a warm glow inside… Because Eric Boehm's headline (in print Reason) references a great little movie from the 1980s: The Brave Little (American) Toaster. But it's about JD Vance's know-nothingism about appliance manufacturing:

  The nationalist conservative obsession with blue-collar manufacturing jobs often ignores the interests of workers and the will of consumers. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) provided a perfect illustration in an early August campaign speech in Nevada on "the American dream."

  In it, Donald Trump's protectionist running mate declared that "a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job."

  On its face, that's just rhetorical silliness. Common sense says anyone should be willing to make that trade: Affordable and abundant appliances are part of the reason that 21st century America is the best place to live in the history of the human race. Jobs are abundant too—there were 7.6 million unfilled jobs in August, per the Department of Labor—and the loss of a few should not worry vice presidential candidates.

  But when right-wing populists such as Vance make this argument, they mean something less literal: that America would be better off if the nation manufactured more and imported less, and Americans would be better off working in metaphorical toaster factories than doing whatever job they have now.

  Boehm's article is marvelous. See if you agree with his answer to the question he poses near its end:

  How many Americans living in the year 2024 aspire to work—or see their children and grandchildren work—in a toaster factory?

  "I'll take "Very Small Numbers" for $400, Ken."

OK, admittedly "Me and Bobby McGee" is a very catchy tune and has some good lyrics, but Andrew Cline has a bone to pick with one line:

Good advice for us all.

Not to pile on the recently deceased—OK, I guess I am going to pile on the recently deceased—John Fund notes that Kris Kristofferson Was Great at Singing & Supremely Lousy at Politics. Specifically, he "was fully marinated in the mythology of communist sympathizers."

We got nothing but contempt for Nazi sympathizers, but are inordinately forgiving to fans of Communism, an ideology with a much higher body count.

And don't even get me started on what a shit he was to Rita Coolidge. (Google for yourself if you want.)

Also of note:

• 

  If only Kristofferson were still alive. He might want to use Joseph Stiglitz's new book (Amazon link at your right) as the basis for a new song. Ryan Bourne reviews it and describes Why Joseph Stiglitz Wants to Redefine Freedom

  Given the pervasive existence of negative externalities, misinformation, market imperfections, and the suffering of the poor within “free markets,” Stiglitz thinks we need a more positive conception of liberty — one that considers opportunity-enhancing supports and public goods provided by the government as pro-freedom. In short, he argues that a benevolent state can make us freer, on net, by taxing, spending, and regulating to make the poor richer (“freedom to act”), provide social security (“freedom from want and fear”), and expand opportunity (freedom to live up to one’s potential). This coercion for the greater good will protect us against various market failures and exploitation. It’s the “freedom” that Vice President Kamala Harris promises on the campaign trail.

  Why does Stiglitz try to redefine “freedom” rather than just use other existing words such as, say, “wealth,” or “opportunity,” or even “economic welfare” for these ambitions? Well, because he thinks that “freedom” resonates with people and that the libertarian-conservative conception of it has unfairly dominated our politics since the “neoliberal” revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. To read Stiglitz, in fact, you would think we’d seen minimalist government since the early 1980s, driving economic failure, climate-change destruction, and, ultimately, the economic disappointment that he thinks is fueling populist authoritarianism. Achieving his vision of real freedom requires “progressive capitalism,” Stiglitz concludes, by which he means a much more expansive form of social democracy and the regulatory state.

  The above link is my first of five NR "gifted" links for October. Don't let it go to waste!

• 

  Not a fan of this lady either. James E. Hartley writes on The Religious Idiocy of ‘Limitarianism’. He leads off with a appropriate quote:

  “In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men….The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document.” ~G.K. Chesterton, Heretics 

  And continues with his review of…

  Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is a very bad book. Writing a review of it thus presents a challenge. Who wants to read a review that is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel of dead fish? Yet, while reading Robeyns’ tendentious screed, I was faced with the absolute certainty that quite a few of my colleagues and students would love this book. Chesterton’s observation thus puts the right question forward. The interesting thing about Limitarianism is not why it is so very flawed, but rather why Robeyns and others would think it was good.

  The thesis of the book is simple. Robeyns thinks it is wrong for anyone to have more than a million dollars in wealth, but she will agree to a compromise of a maximum wealth of ten million dollars. Robeyns doesn’t care what currency unit you use (dollars, pounds, or euros) as long as there is an enforced maximum. To the immediate reply that a 100% tax on wealth over that amount might be problematic, Robeyns repeatedly insists that she isn’t necessarily advocating that tax rate. Not that she thinks there is anything wrong with a 100% wealth tax, there are just other ways to get there. For example, you could convince everyone in the world it is bad to have lots of wealth.

  The bulk of the book is Robeyns shouting at the reader about why anyone having high wealth is so incredibly bad. First: “It’s Dirty Money.” Some wealthy people acquired their wealth by stealing it. Obviously, that is an argument against theft, not high wealth, but in a perfect example of how this book works, having established that we all agree stealing is bad, Robeyns then notes that people get wealthy in lots of other similar ways — like only paying whatever they are required to pay in taxes or owning companies that pay wages less than what Robeyns thinks workers should be paid. You see? Stealing wealth and not paying more than you owe in taxes are both “dirty money.” So, high wealth is evil.

  Amazon link at your right, although after reading Hartley's take, I can't imagine why you would want to take advantage of it.

• I'm dubious of the claim. Specifically, David C. Rose's claim that he knows How to Make Social Security Reform a Winning Campaign Issue. But let's take a look:

  The Social Security program was too vulnerable to demographic bubbles from the very beginning and subsequent reforms have increasingly over-promised benefits thereby inviting our present budget insolvency. Voters are frustrated and losing confidence. They are looking for genuine leadership, not the “third rail of politics” policy détente we now have.

  Harris and Trump now have an opportunity to provide such leadership. Each could promise to do one quick and simple thing as president to reduce the unfunded liability gap in Social Security funding. It’s easy to explain to voters, it will appeal to both younger and older voters, and it will especially appeal to those in the political middle who are looking for practical solutions rather than ideologically driven bumper sticker slogans. It would behoove both candidates to jump on this reform proposal first. 

  In 1972, an amendment was passed to protect Social Security beneficiaries from the effects of inflation. A mistake was made in the procedure for implementing the Cost of Living Adjustments indexing of benefits. This had the effect of over-accounting for the effects of inflation, leading to the prospect of benefit levels soaring out of control as inflation worsened in the 70s. In 1976, a Congressional panel led by a Harvard economist, William Hsiao, was convened in part to correct the error. The panel also recommended that the initial benefits calculation employ price indexing rather than wage indexing out of fear that the latter would produce an unsustainable budget. Unfortunately, wage indexing was chosen over price indexing. 

  So Rose's proposed fix is to switch over to price indexing. And he quotes Social Securities trustee's report as claiming that One Simple Fix "wiil remove about 80 percent of the unfunded liability gap over the next 75 years."

  Pretty good, right? The problem being that it's inevitable that this reform would be demagogued as a "benefit cut." (Because it kinda is.) And that demagoguery has proven to be extremely effective.

  Also: someone's sure to point out that if you're going to use a CPI statistic to calculate cost-of-living adjustments for retirees, wouldn't CPI-E (where the E stands for "Elderly") be more appropriate?

  Sure it would. But the problem there: that would almost certainly increase benefits more than the current CPI-W calculation.

  Bottom line: this won't be solved painlessly, I fear.

People interested in this issue, and skeptical of self-described "fairness", should read Cato's analysis: https://t.co/a3K96Mf5ID

— Paul Sand (@punsalad) October 4, 2024

Unfortunately, it's a reply to something he posted back on September 19, so it's unlikely to be seen by anyone except… well, you, I guess. From the linked Cato article by Romina Boccia:

There follows a tutorial about why WEP and GPO were enacted in the first place, it's probably most interesting for the folks who will benefit. And the people who will wind up paying will not pay attention. It's kind of a classic "public choice" story.

Unfortunately, giving away taxpayer money is pretty popular among CongressCritters, including mine.

Also of note:

• Sitting on the dock of the bay. Noah Smith is a Kamala fan, but that doesn't mean he can't see that Make-work is not the future of work. (Whoa, a triple negative. I'm gonna leave it there though.)

  In case you haven’t yet heard, the ILA — the union that controls the dockworkers along the entire East and Gulf Coasts of the United States — has just gone on strike, threatening to paralyze much of the U.S. economy by cutting off a substantial percentage of imports. If a deal isn’t reached soon, inflation could come roaring back, and lots of Americans could lose their jobs at the same time. (UPDATE: The strike appears to have been suspended until early next year.)

  Here’s how [president of the International Longshoremen’s Association Harold J.] Daggett describes the potential impact of his union’s strike in the interview [at the link]:

  When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port locked down. You know what's going to happen? I'll tell you. First week, be all over the news every night, boom, boom, second week. Guys who sell cars can't sell cars, because the cars ain't coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week, malls are closing down. They can't get the goods from China. They can't sell clothes. They can't do this. Everything in the United States comes on a ship. They go out of business. Construction workers get laid off because the materials aren't coming in. The steel's not coming in. The lumber's not coming in. They lose their job. Everybody's hating the longshoremen now because now they realize how important our jobs are.

  We should all be thinking very hard about whether it’s wise to have a labor system that can allow that sort of thing to happen. Is it right that the livelihoods of millions of Americans should hang on the whims of 50,000 dockworkers? Is it smart to give a single union the power to shut down a large portion of America’s critical infrastructure? Collective bargaining is important, but there should be limits on how destructive we allow that bargaining process to be.

  President Biden doesn’t see it that way. He has refused to use the powers of the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike on national emergency grounds, declaring that “I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley.” But although the ILA may win their fight in the short term, I don’t think they’re going to come off looking very good as a result of this strike. Belligerently threatening the livelihoods of millions of Americans while proudly declaring that “everyone hates the longshoremen” is not a good look, especially if you’re a guy who makes around $900,000 a year (three times as much as other big union leaders), once owned a giant yacht, and has been indicted (though acquitted) by the U.S. government twice for racketeering.

  Smith goes on to note that it's more about banning automation at the ports than it is wages.

• And for more on that issue… Reason's Eric Boehm is not gonna be on Daggett's Christmas list; he advocates that we go ahead and Automate the Ports.

  The news that the International Longshoreman Association (ILA) agreed to suspend its strike until January is undeniably good news for just about every aspect of America's economy.

  But whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank's most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which "reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction," the World Bank notes.

  Boehm notes later in his article that Daggett also despises E-ZPass. Because all those human toll-takers were unionized! And none of the E-ZPass hardware is!

• And for a lighter look… Jeff Maurer provides Daggett some space at his substack to reiterate what his union really wants: We Demand That Ports Stop Using Automation, Ships Without Sails, Any Containers Whatsoever. (Just to be clear, it's a parody. I think.)

  Let’s start with automation. It’s true that many American ports are some of the least-efficient in the world, but that’s because a port like Oakland (ranked #397) doesn’t have the built-in advantages of a global hub like Luanda, Angola (#389) or Port Sudan (#388). The ILA will not to be dragged into the mid-20th century against our will. Some foreign ports are already automated, using dangerous, untested technology like computers, bar codes, and video cameras. In Mobile, Alabama, the port tried to install something called an “automatic gate” — what in the devil is that?!?!? We will never allow greedy corporations to deny someone the dignity of earning a living by standing next to a gate all day. If we don’t act, it won’t just be the standing-next-to-a-gate-all-day jobs that will go away; jobs like guy-who-carries-an-orange-flag-around-sometimes, guy-who-stands-next-to-a-guy-who-is-loading-things, and guy-who-leans-on-a-forklift-all-day-listening-to-sports-radio will be threatened, too.

  By why should the pro-labor measures be limited to the docks? It’s time to confront the fact that modern, diesel-powered ships destroy jobs. Dock workers would benefit if shipping reverted to wood-built, wind-powered ships that served humanity just fine for thousands of years. That’s true for two reasons: First, today’s steel-and-diesel behemoths slide into port with virtually no help from the docks. In contrast, a three-masted schooner laden with spices from the orient would require at least 20 stout men to pull her ashore. Second, modern ships haul huge amounts of cargo with sparse crew, which reduces demand for hardscrabble chaps from port towns who wear cable-knit sweaters and clinch corn cob pipes in their teeth. Sailors and longshoremen share many things: A love of the sea, a penchant for feeding peanuts to pet monkeys who perch on our shoulders, and a stew of venereal diseases contracted from dockside whores. What’s good for sailors is also good for dock workers, so we must retreat from this post-Monitor/Merrimack hell that has befallen us in the past 160 years.

  Daggett's bottom line:

  President Biden has said that he won’t force us back to work. I applaud his decision to affirm union solidarity as we cause supply chain disruptions that will bring back inflation right before the election — that is true commitment! Vice President Harris and former president Trump have also expressed support, so there seems to be a broad consensus that the ILA will not be forced to accept technological change just because it makes goods cheaper, facilitates commerce, and increases productivity. The future of global commerce will be decided in the coming weeks. And I will do everything in my power to see that that future closely resembles the distant past.

  And I enjoyed the "disclaimer" at the end too:

  For the lawyers and ILA-connected mafia members: This is a bit. So, you can’t sue me or kill me and toss my body in a drainage ditch off the Jersey Turnpike, because satire is protected speech.

  So there. And if this is my last post ever, you'll probably find me in that ditch too.

Recently on the book blog:

A hefty tome, weighing in at 580 pages. But many of those pages are tables with row after row of data, and I hope you'll forgive me for skipping over those. Obtained by the Interlibrary Loan service at the University Near Here, from Wesleyan.

You may remember the 1980 Simon–Ehrlich wager, where techno-optimist Julian Simon bet eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich that the prices of five minerals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would go down in real terms over the next decade. Simon won that bet. This book's authors (Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley) deem Simon their hero, and this book is their effort to expand and generalize his sunny optimism.

Their approach is to calculate the "time price" (TP) of various commodities and services; how long it would take a typical worker to earn enough money to buy them. And to see how those TPs have changed over time. Spoiler: nearly without exception, the TPs have declined over the periods they examine. I.e., the items have become more "abundant". And, in many cases, the growth in abundance has outstripped the growth in population; the authors term this "superabundance".

Reader, did your school teachers chide you to "show your work" in your math classes? And to "cite your sources" in other classes? Tupy and Pooley do so, in mind-numbing detail. Again, a lot of pages skimmed over. I trust them.

Other than those core calculations, the book is an examination of the history and causes of economic prosperity. It is a rebuke to the gloomy followers of Malthus, like Ehrlich. (And also, amusingly, Thanos, the mass Malthusian murderer from the Marvel movies.) Here, they mainly follow the arguments of folks I like too: Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Michael Shellenberger, and the like.

No surprise, I think the authors are largely correct in their cheerleading for technological optimism and free-market capitalism. And also that the main dangers to continued prosperity are the too-popular advocates for (various flavors of) socialism, economic degrowth, technophobia, and (generally) predictors of doom, unless we stop our sinful ways.

One small nit to pick: the phrase "infinitely bountiful planet" up there in the book's subtitle. I'm more of a fan of (Herbert) Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." (Example: Moore's Law: even its originator admitted that would eventually bump into fundamental limits.)

Also, the authors make a decent argument that innovation is driven in areas with large populations. (You want a country where Jobs has a better chance of meeting Woz, for example.) But large doesn't necessarily imply growing indefinitely; I think the authors tend to blur that distinction.

Reader, I recommend you do not search Amazon for "poop emoji". Lot of stuff there you don't want to be tempted to buy. Like our Product du Jour! You're welcome!

Anyway, it's a topical image for this Ars Technica story: AI digests repetitive scatological document into profound “poop” podcast.

I can't imagine what an AI fed on Pun Salad content would produce. Like the Giant Rat of Sumatra, 'twould undoubtedly be a story for which the world is not yet prepared.

But in a slightly more serious look at the AI doomsaying, John H. Cochrane advises: AI, Society, and Democracy: Just Relax.

Among Cochrane's numerous spot-on observations: remember when GMO-based "frankenfood" was gonna kill us all? Well, that didn't happen, but a manipulated virus made with the blessing of (and cash from) a US government agency did manage to kill a bunch of us.

His recommendation:

The government must enforce rule of law, not the tyranny of the regulator. Trust democracy, not paternalistic aristocracy—rule by independent, unaccountable, self-styled technocrats, insulated from the democratic political process. Remain a government of rights, not of permissions. Trust and strengthen our institutions, including all of civil society, media, and academia, not just federal regulatory agencies, to detect and remedy problems as they occur. Relax. It’s going to be great.

Cochrane's substack is titled "The Grumpy Economist", and it looks pretty good.

Also of note:

• On the crack-down watch. Joe Lancaster on yet another triumph for bipartisan agreement: Both Trump and Harris Would Crack Down on Fentanyl.

  Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the U.S. should do something about fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is significantly more potent than heroin. It is often found mixed into street drugs, but not because addicts are clamoring for it: Rather, fentanyl is cheaper and easier to manufacture and smuggle, making it an attractive alternative when prohibitionist governments crack down on pain pills.

  Unfortunately, neither of the major party seems willing to either admit the government's own role in making the drug so dangerous, or to pursue an alternative to classic war on drugs policies.

  Nothing is more likely to put me into a snit than seeing my local pols pontificate that they're gonna "keep drugs off our streets".

• If it's hard for him, imagine how difficult it is for me. And probably you. George F. Will has a problem: Between Harris and Trump, it’s hard to tell who’s worse on economic matters.

  If cynics are people prematurely disappointed about the future, they might now constitute something recently elusive: an American consensus. With voting well underway a month before Election Day (actually, during election autumn), gaze upon the campaign’s stricken landscape:

  […]

  Harris is parsimonious with interviews, but who cares? They can only reveal today’s batch of her views, which tend to expire in batches. It would, however, be fun to find out if there is any question — e.g., are there enough submarines for the AUKUS partners? — she will not answer by saying, “I was raised a middle-class kid, okay?”

  Former president Donald Trump still resembles the “Bleak House” character about whom Charles Dickens wrote: “When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject.” But Trump’s ongoing choices of colorful companions raise a question: Has a ship’s hull ever become so encrusted with barnacles that the weight of them sank the vessel? The Trump campaign should wonder. He evidently enjoys the company of the dregs of America’s political culture — Holocaust deniers, 9/11 “truthers,” Tucker Carlson, who praises a “historian” who thinks Winston Churchill was beastly to Adolf Hitler.

  I've added that "prematurely disappointed about the future" quip to my blog's subtitle rotation.

• Wax (still) off. Charles Murray takes to Quillette to comment on The Amy Wax Affair.

  Last week, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) and three-time recipient of awards for excellence in teaching, was stripped her of her chaired professorship, suspended for a year at half pay, and denied summer pay in perpetuity. Why? As far as I can tell, for telling her students the truth in the classroom and exercising her constitutional right to express her private opinions outside the classroom.

  Penn’s administration doesn’t see it that way. In the words of the official letter sent to Wax, these punishments were justified by her “flagrant unprofessional conduct”:

  That conduct included a history of making sweeping and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status; breaching the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of university policy; and, on numerous occasions, in and out of the classroom and in public, making discriminatory and disparaging statements targeting specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify.

  The specifics of the allegations against Wax can be found in a twelve-page letter written by the Dean of the law school, Theodore Ruger, in June 2022. I am suspicious of some of them, but most of the things she is alleged to have said sound like the Amy Wax I know. In each of our occasional encounters over the years, I have always had the same reactions. She is brilliant, entertaining, disconcertingly frank, and sometimes abrasive. Her style is not my style, but I have never known Wax to use invective or slurs when she is expressing her opinion. She is just really, really, blunt.

  … and, unfortunately, it's paywalled after that. But the upshot is obvious: it's more likely all but the bravest dissenters from the theology that infests American higher ed will avoid being "really, really, blunt".

  And blunt criticism is exactly what higher ed needs. Otherwise we're in for a few more decades of cluelessness and malpractice.

… it's looking real good that I will (eventually) be vindicated, according to Katherine Mangu-Ward: The Coming Vindication of the Double-Haters.

KMW goes on to note that we've entered "the era of total policy nihilism" where the candidates "will literally say anything to get elected." And her bottom line seems designed to cheer me up:

But policy nihilism is only tenable for as long as the campaign lasts. Someone will win, and that person must govern—at which point the double-haters will almost certainly be proven right.

… except what we'll be "proven right" about is the awfulness of whoever wins.

Also of note:

• Fortunately, shouting "What an idiot!" at a TV is still protected by the First Amendment. No, I didn't watch the veep debate last night, but if I had… well, let's go to the transcript, and examine Governor Walz's grasp of Constitutional jurisprudence:

  [Walz:] You can't yell fire in a crowded theater. That's the test. That's the Supreme court test.

  Uh, no it's not. Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen wrote an entire article about this particular cliché, but here's the one-sentence summary:

  Anyone who says “you can’t shout fire! in a crowded theatre” is showing that they don’t know much about the principles of free speech, or free speech law — or history.

  In a saner country, Walz would hang his head in shame, resign from the ticket, go back to mismanaging Minnesota. Alas, we don't live in that country.

  And (also alas) we live in a country where a current SCOTUS justice can make the same claim.

• Doesn't sound like something Calvin Coolidge would have done. Jeff Maurer claims We’re All Too Beat Down to Care That Trump Is Hawking $100,000 Watches and Crypto. And he might be right. He's talking about this:

  K. Trump watches. Roger that — can I go play XBox now? I mean, I know it’s fucked up that a presidential candidate has a merch store in which he sells bibles, sneakers, and other stuff, and I know that an ethical breach like that would sink any other campaign, but I also know that Trump’s fans will hold him to ethical standards the same day that Willie Nelson’s fans demand that he submit to rigorous drug testing. If you’re Jimmy Carter, you have to walk away from your peanut farm, if you’re Richard Nixon, you have to itemize a puppy on your FEC filing, but if you’re Trump, your campaign can be the loss leader for your trashy-rich QVC store, and we’ll all say “whatever” and freak out over a baby hippo.

  Awwww! Baby hippo!

• It ain't Ms. Pac-Man, baby. The National Review editors weigh in on Kamala Harris’s Video-Game Economy.

  After being ridiculed for not having a policy platform, the Kamala Harris campaign released an 82-page document outlining the vice president’s ideas on the economy. No longer suffering from lack of detail, it still suffers from lack of good sense.

  The Harris view of economics is that the United States is a single-player video game, and the federal government is the player. Creating a thriving economy is simply a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right order.

  Harris has replaced her formerly far-left economic views with minutely technocratic ones. Democrats want to use their freshly expanded IRS to micromanage flows of money in the economy through an even more invasive and convoluted system of tax credits than already exists.

  Further fun fact:

  The platform villainizes “Wall Street investors” while also proudly touting that Goldman Sachs estimates higher economic growth from Harris’s plans than from Trump’s. It attacks “big corporations” while noting that nearly 100 business leaders have endorsed Harris for president.

  I have always been an "America will muddle through somehow" guy, But I am not optimistic that this will end well.

Well, who knows? Megan McArdle (nee Jane Galt) takes on an easier issue: AI is an existential threat to colleges. Can they adapt? She is largely concerned at reports that a large fraction of students use AI to "cheat", passing off AI-written content as their own work.

Also of note:

• It's a common enough error. Robert Graboyes misquotes Shakespeare, but that's OK for his purposes: Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble. He presents "Bob's 12 Laws of Bubbles", and here are the first two:

  1. If you can’t comprehend why an intelligent, well-informed, decent person might believe that (1) Donald Trump was a better president than Joe Biden is, or (2) Joe Biden is a better president than Donald Trump was, or (3) Donald Trump and Joe Biden are roughly equivalent on the great-to-horrific spectrum, then you live in a bubble.

  2. If you can’t comprehend why an intelligent, well-informed, decent person would (1) vote for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, or (2) vote for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, or (3) decline to vote for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, then you live in a bubble and need to stop watching cable news and go take a walk.

  And you will not want to miss the other ten. Plus, as a bonus, a Lawrence Welk clip, unfortunately containing no champagne bubbles.

  I confess that I have unfollowed some Facebook friends because they mostly posted intelligence-insulting political memes. Maybe running afoul of Graboyes' Law #9, and thereby being an asshole? Ah, well.

• But speaking of bubble-dwelling… At the WSJ, James Freeman looks at the NYT's predictable election endorsement: Harris, Patriotism and the New York Times.

  Doing nothing to improve our public discourse or increase understanding across the partisan divide, the New York Times delivers its expected endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris under the intolerant headline “The Only Patriotic Choice for President.”

  This column hesitates to take the Times editorial board seriously, but for those determined to do so, a natural first question might be: How would they know? As the editorial itself acknowledges:

  Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. 

  There may be more than ignorance at work here. The Times editorial falsely credits the vice president with an “unwavering commitment to the Constitution” despite her documented rejection of the free speech protections at the heart of the First Amendment, without which none of our other constitutional liberties would be safe.

  The reasonable conclusion is that Timesfolk are free speech absolutists when the Times is smearing Republicans but indifferent to First Amendment abuses if they are to be visited upon people who disagree with the Times. This seems deeply unpatriotic.

  Of course, she's not Trump. That's her major, perhaps only, advantage.

• Kaus for alarm. Mickey Kaus rarely blogs these days, so attention must be paid when he points out The Trouble With Kamala's Nod. And also…

  : Ann Coulter cracked the code of why Kamala' Harris’ cackling laugh can be so annoying. It's not the sound of her voice. The problem is "she laughs when nothing remotely funny has been said." By laughing she’s asking us to become complicit in an emperor's-clothes social conspiracy to pretend it was funny. "If you don’t laugh, you’re rude ..."

  The same, I think, goes for an even more annoying and enduring Harris tic-- the way she nods her head like a bouncing ball after making what she thinks should be considered an important or profound point.** She's in effect asking the audience to join in acknowledging its importance. Reject that and you're rude.

  I confess I'm not that put off by the nodding, but that's me. Kaus has a few examples, most unfortunately requiring "premium" twitter. But here's one that doesn't:

  That would be annoying even in an audio-only form. A text transcript would be too.

• See you in court. NHJournal has the eminently predictable next step in the struggle for free speech rights in Bow, New Hampshire: Bow High School Hit With Lawsuit Over Treatment of 'Pink-Wristband' Parents.

  Bow High School has been hit with a lawsuit on behalf of the pro girls-only sports parents who wore pink wristbands to their daughters’ soccer game earlier this month, a story that has brought national scorn to the affluent, liberal community.

  The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, alleges that school officials violated the parents’ First Amendment rights by banning them from school grounds and events for wearing the pink wristbands as a form of silent protest during the Sept. 17 match.

  These school officials need some schoolin' themselves.