Pun Salad

Onetime reporter Garry Rayno wonders: What Has Become of Laissez Faire New Hampshire? He bemoans the Good Old Days, when (he alleges) "people were reluctant to delve too deeply into their neighbors’ activities unless the cows broke out too many times and trampled the vegetable garden."

Ah, but now things have changed and it's all the fault of … libertarians!

Sneaky!

Garry rambles on disparate topics, never spending too much time on any one of them: he's in favor of "local control" (as long as the local controllers are doing things he likes). But he meanders over abortion, transgenderism, Education Freedom Accounts, minimum wage laws, zoning, and more. Never spending much time on one topic, and never seriously considering the "libertarian" arguments. That would be work!

By the end, he's worked himself up into high dudgeon, making wild and ominous charges in a semi-incoherent rant:

Bet you didn't notice all the tyranny and authoritarianism, did you?

I couldn't help but recall Joe McCarthy's famous assertion: "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

Well, Garry's got a somewhat less specific (80 to 90) list. Comprising "Republican libertarian lawmakers". And they are "bankrolled by oligarchs"!

Leaving me to wonder: how do I get oligarch-bankrolled? Is it those clickbait ads I see on those other websites?

Also of note:

• Speaking of slanderous evidence-lacking rants… Diane Ravitch had one in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books: Selling Out Our Public Schools. At National Review, Matthew Lau rebuts: Correcting a Faulty History of School Choice and Racism.

  In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch denounces school choice for its “racist origins” and assails Milton Friedman for allegedly exploiting white supremacy to privatize education. For many decades, she writes, the term “school choice” was “widely and rightly dismissed as racist.” According to Ravitch, whose essay reviews Josh Cowen’s The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, school-choice programs have harmed poor students and enabled “publicly funded discrimination.”

  Ravitch’s essay and her accusations of racism make for interesting reading, but they are hard to defend. And while she is correct that racism was present in the early years of school-choice activism in the Jim Crow era, how relevant is that in understanding school-choice programs today?

  (It is worth, if only briefly, juxtaposing the emphasis that Ravitch places on racism and school choice over half a century ago with her strong support of a higher minimum wage, despite the fact that the original federal minimum wage law, the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, was envisaged by some of its supporters as a way of pricing black non-union workers out of construction jobs.)

  I'm old enough to remember when Diane Ravitch was a critic of lousy public schools. That was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

• When will there be good news? George Will certainly doesn't have any: Even without the tariffs, Trump’s economic agenda is a disaster.

  In the five minutes required to read this column at a leisurely pace, pausing to sip coffee, the nation will pay $11 million (about $38,000 a second) toward servicing the national debt. Today, Congress is debating how many trillions to increase the debt.

  The debate concerns extending or revising portions of, or perhaps extending all of, the first Trump administration’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Since then, the 75 percent increase in federal spending has far exceeded the 58 percent increase in revenue. Such an imbalance is an accelerating consequence of the changed relationship between the citizenry and the federal government that began 90 years ago.

  Government actions always have a certain degree of plunder, but we've really kicked it up a notch in those 90 years.

• An obvious observation made by Veronique de Rugy: 'Liberation day' tariffs will liberate people—from their income. (And also, as I check my investment portfolio, it also liberated me from a significant fraction of my wealth.)

  We're told that "Liberation Day" tariffs on imports from around the world will raise $6 trillion in federal revenue over the next decade, plus another trillion from automobile tariffs. But the only true "liberation" will be us Americans—consumers and taxpayers—being liberated from even more of our hard-earned income. So hold on to your wallet.

  If you don't believe that Liberation Day is bad news for the overwhelming majority of us, first remember that U.S. consumers are, as always, the ones who pay U.S. tariffs. Whatever the Trump team collects from foreign imports will be shifted back to us in the form of higher prices.

  Then there is the fact that the administration is already preparing for economic damage control with emergency aid for U.S. farmers. The need for such aid is a tacit admission that the president's trade policy—marketed as a tool to strengthen America—will trigger retaliations from our trading partners that will hurt many American producers, including farmers who export this country's agricultural bounty to help feed the world.

  Need I point out that Nikki Haley would not have done this?

• But let's finish up on a positive note. Michael F. Cannon finds something to praise in the Trump Administration: Downsizing HHS Is the Right Thing to Do.

  Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has announced and begun implementing the elimination of 10,000 positions at the Department of Health and Human Services. He is also reorganizing the department. He estimates savings of $1.8 billion per year. A further 10,000 HHS employees have taken buyout offers or retired early since President Trump resumed office. Altogether, these moves will reduce HHS staffing levels by some 24 percent.

  To the extent Congress authorizes the secretary to do so, reducing HHS staffing levels is the right thing to do. Congress should go further by eliminating the regulations and spending programs those HHS employees implemented. Doing so would prevent the risk that cutting some HHS jobs could paradoxically increase the size of government.

  Fine, but given Congress's demonstrable fiscal irresponsibility, starting any sentence with "Congress should…" is just hoping for the unlikely.

Recently on the book blog:

This book had been sitting on my shelf for a long time, so long that I've completely forgotten how, when, or why I got it. But it eventually worked its way to the top of the non-fiction pile of my book-picking system. The main text is a hefty 651 pages, which factors nicely into a 21-day reading schedule of 31 pages/day.

It's really pretty good. As you might expect, given that it won the Pulitzer back in 2002. The author, David McCullough, performed a massive amount of scholarship, digging through primary documents of the era, and bringing everything to life with his evocative prose.

It's a welcome correction to what I (dimly) remembered from high school US History: Adams was a Bad President who made a direct assault on the Constitution's First Amendment with the Alien and Sedition Acts, but fortunately Thomas Jefferson got in and saved the country.

Not quite. The Acts were four in number, three were simply allowed to expire. Remaining was the "Alien Enemies Act", which did not expire, and was not repealed. And was used in the War of 1812 (against Brits), WWI (against nationals of the "Central Powers"), and WWII (against Germans, Italians, and (mostly) Japanese). And now Trump is using it (so far) to deport Venezuelans.

Anyway: in addition to straight biography, there's a lot of accompanying history that provides the context to Adams' life. He was a tireless advocate for American independence from Britain, at a time when that was far from a sure thing. During the Revolutionary War, he played an important role in getting the French to keep the Brits off balance.

Overall, McCullough lends some balance to the characters of the era. Adams comes off very well, although with persistent flaws of vanity and temper. Current idols Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton are taken down a notch or two.

There are a lot of great anecdotes. One of my favorites was a story Ben Franklin told Thomas Jefferson, who was dismayed by the surgery the Continental Congress was performing on his draft of the Declaration of Independence.

[Franklin] had once known a hatter who wished to have a sign made saying John Thompson, Hatter, Makes and Sells hats for ready money, this to be accompanied by a picture of a hat.But the man had chosen first to ask the opinion of friends, with the result that one word after another was removed as superfluous or redundant, until at last the sign was reduced to Thompson's name and the picture of the hat.

Well, I chuckled.

Along the way, I discovered that Adams was not a fan of New Hampshire's John Sullivan (born in Somersworth, just a couple miles up the road from Pun Salad Manor); he was suspected of Loyalist sympathies. (That turned out not to be the case.)

Just one more: in his long and (mostly) happy post-presidential retirement, Adams was a voracious reader. He especially liked this, from a famous Cicero essay:

For as I like a young man in whom there is something of the old […], so I like an old man in whom there is something of the young; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man but he will never be an old man in mind.

And, as an old man myself, I find that to be excellent advice.