Pun Salad

The WePo editorialists examine Trump’s in-kind contribution to Mark Kelly ’28. (WaPo gifted link)

As long as it was just words—stupid, provocative, risky, Constitution-trashing words—we were fine. Bringing the Fibbies into it should be impeachable.

And, lest there be any doubt about the risk, lawprof Joshua Braver spells it out at the WSJ: Disobeying Military Orders Is Full of Risk. (WSJ gifted link)

And (to repeat) neither Maggie Goodlander, nor any of her five video buddies, will be volunteering to testify in the court martials for any hapless service members that took their legal advice seriously.

Also of note:

• Good question. And Kevin D. Williamson asks it: What About the Poor? (archive.today link)

  The comedian John Mulaney tells a funny—and terrible—story about trying to cure himself of his cocaine addiction by instructing his financial manager to keep cash out of his hands. No cash, no coke—I guess his dealer didn’t take Venmo. What happened next was a predictable series of shenanigans in which the comedian thought up ways to, in effect, embezzle from himself, e.g., buying a $12,000 watch and selling it for $6,000 on the same day. Mulaney’s story of desperate addiction offers a good example of one of the common mistakes we make in our current econo-political debate: trying to use economic means to solve non-economic problems. Mulaney’s problem was not economic: He has been very, very successful and probably could blow $6,000 a day for a very long time without endangering the mortgage payment. His problem was that he loved cocaine.

  There are a great many modern pathologies and problems that often are described as results of capitalism or as aspects of capitalism—of “late capitalism,” as the pseudointellectuals sometimes put it. For example, as formerly poor and hungry countries have become more prosperous and better-fed, they have seen an increase in obesity and diabetes, and, in some cases, they have seen higher levels of alcohol and tobacco use as increased private incomes enable the consumption of what had been unobtainable luxuries. Use of some other drugs has increased, in some places, with wealth: You need a little bit of money to have John Mulaney’s former bad habits. There are increased environmental pressures and externalities associated with increasing wealth, too, as the newly affluent consume more energy, food, and petroleum products (plastics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals—the list is long) than they had. When poor people leave farming villages for higher-paying jobs in urban environments, there are new pressures put on everything from utilities to transportation networks to housing.

  Capitalism becomes a go-to bogeyman, the witch behind every contemporary malady: “Blame capitalism for men’s loneliness,” etc.

  For some reason, discussion at the Thanksgiving table last night turned to potatoes. Which turned to the Irish Potato Famine. Which turned to someone blaming capitalism for it. I refrained from pulling out my phone and digging out the rebutting URL from the Mises Institute: What Caused the Irish Potato Famine? (Didn't stop me from digging it out for you this morning, though.)

• Fun Reason factoid: In her lead editorial in the January issue of Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward reveals there are some things you can't say in her magazine:

  Reason has a rule against starting essays with quotes from Friedrich Hayek. After all, one could start nearly every essay in this magazine with a bon mot from the Austrian-born economist and classical liberal hero. But sometimes things get bad enough that only a Hayek quote will do.

  I assume that rule also applies to article headlines, for example, J.D. Tuccille's: Mamdani and Trump prove that there are two paths toward socialism. Otherwise those last three words coulda been "roads to serfdom".

  About five years ago, the comedian Ryan Long posted a video in which a woke progressive and an old-fashioned racist meet and, much to their astonishment, discover that rather than being bitterly opposed, they agree on pretty much everything.

  There was a strong echo of that convergence in last week's White House tete-a-tete between Republican President Donald Trump and New York's new socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Anticipated to be a grudge match, it instead turned into something of a lovefest. Well, of course it did. As fans of horseshoe theory accurately point out, control freaks from the political extremes might differ on details, but they have more in common with each other than they do with people who respect each other's liberty.

  (And, sure enough, J.D. eventually gets around to citing The Road to Serfdom. Just not early enough in his article to run afoul of KMW's rule.)

• Whew. Noah Smith sets my mind, and maybe yours, at ease: No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land. It involves some brutal honesty:

  The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came into existence; the U.S. used force to displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land “ownership” existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land.

  This was also true before the U.S. was born. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

  If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore, for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say, “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

  I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.

  [Oops! It turns out I blogged Noah's article last year! Well, it still works, and is a good remedy if you were bullied into a Thanksgiving-table "land acknowledgement" yesterday.]

• Embodied inanity is the worst kind of inanity. And David Harsanyi has an example: Marjorie Taylor Greene Embodies the Inanity of Populism.

  During a recent stop on her image rehab tour, Marjorie Taylor Greene told CNN's Dana Bash that she is sorry "for taking part in the toxic politics." It has been, she added, "bad for the country." A week later, Greene finally did something patriotic by announcing her retirement.

  It's fair to say Greene is one of the most well-known GOP House members in the nation. Greene, though, is famous because her nitwittery has been endlessly highlighted by the media and Democrats to cast the Republican Party as one of hayseeds and conspiracists.

  And, in all fairness, Greene might be one of the biggest ignoramuses to ever serve in Congress, which is no small achievement when one considers the "Squad" exists. If I asked you to name a single piece of legislation Greene has sponsored, you would probably be at a loss. If I asked you to name an important policy she has championed, an uplifting speech she has delivered or an area of expertise she has mastered, you would not think of any because there have been none.

  Let's not spare the voters of MTG's congressional district (GA-14), who returned her to her seat, the one she's decided she didn't want after all, giving her 64.4% of their votes.