Pun Salad

How old do you have to be to recognize our headline's source?

"But that's not important right now." Eric Boehm points to an unsurprising but still bad choice for Trump Part II: Electric Boogaloo: Peter Navarro should not have power over U.S. trade policy.

If you click over to Read The Whole Thing, as you should, you have a low but non-zero chance of seeing "Pun Salad" named as a Reason supporter in their webathon ad. You don't want to miss that! (I'm looking forward to receiving an "Abolish Everything" t-shirt.)

Also of note:

• When content production takes precedence. Robert Graboyes looks at the sad state of punditry, concentrating on a couple recent examples of Idiot America Indeed.

  Today’s post is not about politics but, rather, about contemporary journalism’s compulsion to besoil itself in the service of politics. The excess and carelessness engendered by political servility plopped squarely this week upon the heads of Charles P. Pierce (Esquire magazine) and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (ABC’s The View). Both sought to justify Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon of Hunter Biden by pointing to peculiar antecedents. Pierce cited George H. W. Bush’s pardon of his son Neil, and Navarro-Cárdenas cited Woodrow Wilson’s pardon of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. Their examples were peculiar because (1) Neil Bush was never convicted or even charged with any crimes, and (2) Hunter deButts never existed. Navarro-Cárdenas learned of Hunter deButts’s pardon from the often-hallucinatory ChatGPT. Pierce apparently bypassed electronic sources, plumbed purported facts from the depths of his own imagination, shunted them past whatever vestigial fact-checking routines exist at Esquire, and shot them out to gullible readers. Across the Internet some of those readers are yet spreading the Parables of Neil Bush and Hunter deButts.

  My inner ten-year-old makes me smile at "Hunter deButts".

• But seriously, folks. Robby Soave is a more careful journalist than Charles P. Pierce and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas ("put together"), and he concludes Hunter Biden's pardon is unprecedented.

  It's true that past presidents have issued controversial pardons: Gerald Ford, for instance, pardoned his embattled predecessor, Richard Nixon. There are also examples of presidents pardoning someone close to them: Bill Clinton pardoned his half brother, Roger Clinton.

  The Hunter pardon is far more comprehensive, however, in that it covered not just his convictions for drug-related activities and tax fraud, but any other criminal behavior since 2014—the year that Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. It has been alleged that Hunter's job was essentially to trade on the family name and sell his access to dad. This may not have been illegal, but it does mean that the pardon is clearly designed to offer preemptive protection not just to Hunter, but to Joe Biden himself.

  The defenses of the pardon I've seen, even the ones not involving Hunter deButts, are pretty lame. And they don't mention the issue above.

• Like a fine wine, he improved with age. Michael Shermer explains his evolution for us: Why I Am No Longer Woke.

  Before the transmogrification of the word woke into the pejorative slur against far-left politics it represents today, I would have called myself woke—and even a social justice warrior—inasmuch as I believe in civil liberties, civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, animal rights, and the continued expansion of the moral sphere to include all sentient beings. As the author of a book-length defense of the principles behind these social justice movements for which previous generations were woke to—The Moral Arc—I think I have earned the moniker, and yet because of how the word and concept has devolved, along with the ever-leftward shift into lunacy of woke social justice activists—I must distance myself from the label, ultimately because of its flawed theory of human nature as a blank slate.

  Shermer goes on to cite numerous Pun Salad heroes: Sowell, Pinker, and Hayek, for example.

  And he doesn't even mention the termination of his long-running Scientific American column in 2019. (He wrote about that here in 2021.)

• Frank J. Fleming is just trying to help. He offers a bunch of Ways to Cut Government Waste.

  • Stronger chain on pens at the DMV. We can’t keep replacing pens.

  • Train law enforcement in using katanas to save on ammo.

  • Send out a survey to government employees about what they do, and include an optional space to declare your pronouns. Then fire everyone who fills in that space; we can safely assume none of them do anything useful.

  • Steve in Health and Human services asks for a new box of paperclips every week. There is no way he’s using that many paperclips. Look into that.

  That's just the first four. You will want to pay attention to that Steve guy.

• I, for one, am pining for the fjords. But Jeff Maurer entertains, briefly, the theory that left-wing populism will be a hit with the masses, and Maybe Appalachia is Secretly Pining for Elizabeth Warren.

  But I want to excerpt one of his by-the-way points about polling with "absurdly slanted" questions, as exemplified by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy's report that (for example) "88% of respondents either strongly or somewhat agree that a handful of enormous multinational corporations wield a massive amount of influence over the quality of our lives without accountability or transparency to the public."

  Look at the word choices: “enormous multinational corporations”, “economic elites”, “big, profit-driven technology companies” — these questions are taking voters by the hand and leading them to a specific answer. It’s like asking voters: “Do you think education should be run by folks in your neighborhood or by bureaucrats far away in Washington?” Or how about: “Should veterans be given the best health care money can buy, or warehoused in piss-smelling flop houses where they battle feral dogs for scraps?” This is not serious polling — this is worthless slant-polling, probably by a consulting firm that just ripped off Chris Murphy for a bunch of money.

  And even if people hold some populist sentiments — which they might — it’s another thing to assume that those opinions are strongly held and will determine how people vote. If voters are motivated to lash back against economic elites, then they’ve been keeping that fact to themselves when answering exit polls: Those polls found that in 2024, people cared most about inflation, immigration, and transgender issues. If voters are motivated by economic populism, it’s also unclear why they just elected a rich1 businessman who cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations in his first term and who famously played an elite asshole who enjoyed firing people on TV. Murphy’s poll questions were so slanted that they probably elicited a lot of “yeah, sure” responses that don’t reflect deeply held convictions.

  I lost count of the number of "surveys" I got with mirror-image slanted questions from Republicans. After the first few, I just fed those "survey" envelopes into the shredder, unopened.

  It's nice to know that Democrats see the same kinds of polls. And those poll questions are probably written by the same people doing the Republican ones. Or maybe ChatGPT. Slant is slant.

• Not to sound like a Ron Paul crank or anything, but… I've come to admit that he might have had a point. Brian Doherty is a non-crank who thinks we should Abolish the Fed.

  In a 1995 interview, I asked Milton Friedman whether "it would be preferable to abolish the Fed entirely and just have government stick to a monetary growth rule?"

  Friedman answered: "Yes, it's preferable. And there's no chance at all of it happening."

  He didn't live to see the abolition of the Fed; perhaps no one reading this will. Still, a couple of years after Friedman's 2006 death, a semi–mass movement calling to "End the Fed!" arose in the aftermath of Rep. Ron Paul's first Republican presidential run in 2008. The Texas congressman found during that campaign a surprising (even to him) number of youngsters blaming the central bank, founded in 1913, for government sins from inflation to war (which is easier to wage when it can be financed by cash from a central bank summoned more or less at will).

  The Fed's performance since Paul's campaign has not blunted the urgency of the message. From 2008 to 2011, the central bank spit out as much new money as had entered the U.S. economy in the previous century, and it grew the value of the financial instruments it bought as an instrument of this money generation by $1.35 trillion in just part of 2008.

  Like Delta House, the Fed has a "long-standing tradition of existence to its members and to the community at large." So …