Pun Salad

It's that time of year again, and in case you're wondering what to get for that special someone, there's Dave Barry’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide. It is the usual list of classy stuff that you didn't know someone else needed. And:

Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour is on Dave's list. Who knows how long it will remain at Amazon? Spare your giftee the heartbreak of being left out at the next bug-kissing party. (And click over to view that fine print on the container, it's pretty funny.)

And now on to the slightly more serious stuff:

• She never saw a successful business on which she didn't want to crack down. Ars Technica takes a look at the latest totalitarian efforts from you-know-who: Elizabeth Warren calls for crackdown on Internet “monopoly” you’ve never heard of.

  US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s prime real estate.

  In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.

  In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms on how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since hiked prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, though its service remains identical and could allegedly be provided far more cheaply by others.

  The article links to VeriSign's rebuttal, Setting the Record Straight. I found it pretty convincing.

  And for that "hiked prices by 30 percent" since 2018 zinger: that's not too far out of line with the overall CPI increase since then.

  I can't imagine there's anything wrong with VeriSign's management of the .com TLD that Warren, Nadler, and Uncle Stupid can't make much worse.

• He read it so you and I don't have to. Phillip W. Magness loves to poke holes in works of lefty claptrap. For example, his review of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right by David Austin Walsh is pretty good.

  Walsh's monograph is an oddity. It mainly consists of scattershot vignettes about the racist and antisemitic figures who hovered around the American far right of the mid–20th century. The closest the text comes to a thesis statement is this: "All of the principal protagonists in this book—Merwin K. Hart, Russell Maguire, George Lincoln Rockwell, Revilo Oliver, Pat Buchanan, and Joe Sobran—have something in common," he writes. "They were all connected in some way to William F. Buckley, Jr."

  Walsh views Buckley, the "respectable" founder of National Review, as an arms-length partner of the aforementioned "crackpots" in what he dubs a conservative "popular front" against Roosevelt's policies. As in many works of this genre, the New Deal never faces meaningful interrogation. Its policy prescriptions are seen as obvious "democratic" correctives to capitalist excesses; the only conceivable motive for opposing it, Walsh apparently believes, is the reentrenchment of wealth and power.

  Buckley tapped the brakes against the excesses of the far right, nominally "purging" them when they became a liability, as with his 1962 denunciation of the John Birch Society. Meanwhile, the fringe elements festered in the background and, per Walsh, transmitted a lineage of racism and antisemitism to the present day. Those elements, Walsh argues, gained the upper hand after Buckley's death in 2008. Donald Trump followed, and with him a fascist undercurrent that seized control of the American right. This story somehow places the culpability for the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol on Buckley's shoulders, thereby bringing Walsh back to the object of his spite. In his telling, Goldberg created the "'liberal fascism' trope" to "obfuscate historical and contemporary connections between the conservative movement and American fascism."

  I am somewhat surprised that the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library doesn't own a copy of the Walsh book; usually they are a reliable source of anti-conservative diatribes. Ah, well, I won't ask them to get it.

• A myth is as good as a mile. Jeff Jacoby writes on The myths that cover up why Social Security is crashing.

  TO TEST your understanding of Social Security, try this short quiz:

  1. How much money is in the Social Security trust fund?
  2. How much money have you saved in your Social Security retirement account?
  3. How much money are you guaranteed to receive in monthly benefits when you retire?

  Reader, not to brag, but I knew the answer to all three questions right down to the penny. And I bet you do too. Click through for Jacoby's explanations. And this factoid is telling:

  Perhaps the most important change of all would be to acknowledge that Social Security has outlived its original purpose. When the program began in 1935, the elderly were the poorest age group in America. Today they are the wealthiest. As [Dispatch writer Brian] Riedl points out, "seniors have the lowest poverty rate of any age group and their average household incomes have grown four times as fast as the average worker since 1980." In FDR's day, there were no IRA and 401(k) accounts, few Americans owned stocks, and the average lifespan was too short for most people to accrue significant wealth. Now that that has changed, does it really make sense to keep taxing younger, poorer workers in order to pay benefits to retirees who are far better off than they are?

• So Jack Nicastro grasps the third rail. As part of Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue, he says we should Abolish Social Security. Expanding on the point made above:

  Social Security is not a retirement fund—it's a transfer program, taking income from the payrolls of current workers and giving it to retirees. Generally, these retirees are already wealthier than the workers subsidizing them. Social Security's retirement payments (Old-Age and Survivors Insurance) should be phased out because of the program's unsustainable and regressive nature, freeing workers to better use their earnings to plan for their own retirement.

  This should be easy to grasp: Retirees have had a lifetime to work, pay off their mortgages as their homes appreciate in value, and let their retirement accounts grow. Meanwhile, young workers are starting at the bottom of the labor market, have much less in savings to draw on in case of emergency, and often struggle to make rental payments or find an affordable home to buy. The median household wealth of those under 35 years old is $30,500, compared to $341,400 for the 65- to-69-year-old age group, according to the latest Census Bureau data from 2021.

  The plain truths about Social Security are easy to grasp. But it is to the advantage of a lot of people that those truths not be grasped, and replaced by demagoguery, lies, and fear.

  And so far that's been working just fine.