Mr. Donald and Dr. Donald

Veronique De Rugy properly takes The Donald to task at The Corner on NRO for the silly things he said about General Motors.

Alert: We are heading off-continent with limited Internet access and this might be our last post for several weeks.  End Alert.

Do read the whole thing but here is a fairly big taste of Veronique:

To be sure, I can see why the president is so upset. Because he has made the revival of American manufacturing the centerpiece of his campaign and presidency, a weird goal considering the incredibly high manufacturing output that the U.S. has experienced in recent years, every American company that doesn’t go with the plan is chastised publicly, sometimes even threatened. Remember Harley Davidson, which the president threatened with a boycott from its consumers? On Monday, the president told GM that it “better get back in” Ohio “soon,” and that “They better put something else in” the Lordstown, Ohio, plant that is now slated to be closed.

Is this what it has come to that the president is meddling with the productive assets of a private company? And don’t get me started on the president’s threat to cut all GM subsidies. I oppose all forms of subsidies to the private sector but I am also appalled by the use of subsidies as a way for the president to get companies to do what he thinks that they should be doing.  [Emphasis added]

We agree with Veronique on her analysis and that the threats made by The Donald are a real distraction to serious issues.  His threat to end GM’s subsidy is a non-starter.  Wikipedia defines a bill of attainder as:

A bill of attainder (also known as an act of attainder or writ of attainder or bill of pains and penalties) is an act of a legislature declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them, often without a trial.

We, with our lack of legal expertise, see The Donald’s action as exactly outlined above.  Such bills do not meet constitutional muster.  It indicates the problem of having a person like The Donald as president.

We, unlike Veronique, see Dr. Donald in this action.  We don’t think he is playing three dimensional chess but there could be a good outcome.  Since they can’t end subsidies for just GM they would need to end subsidies for all companies.  We, like Veronique, want to end subsidies.  Electric cars would be a good place to start.  If this craziness end some subsidies for all companies then we are not happy about the discussion but willing to absorb the silliness of The Donald.  Weird things happen with The Donald.   We await the final accounting of this episode.

 

 

Geo-political Examples

As the Art of Blogging says writing posts takes time.  A couple of days ago we said we were going to have two posts linking Kevin Williamson and maps but each of them proved more time consuming than we thought.

Alert: We are heading off continent to places that might make blogging difficult.  Any post could be the last one until about Christmas.  End Alert.

Maps were one of our first loves.  We still love them and we especially love the paper kind that we grew up with.  We remember getting the state road atlas and checking for new Interstates because they were new then.  We checked to find the town with the smallest population in each state.  It was no surprise that we got Prisoners Of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About The World by Tim Marshall as a birthday present.  Here is his website where you can buy the book.  It is worth buying and reading.

Sidebar: We take expertise very seriously.  Some parts of this review are a bit speculative.  We will try to keep you informed.  End Sidebar.

Tim has written Geo-politics 101 without the theory.  Despite our love of maps we tend to see the world economically so it was worthwhile for us but we need another book to extend our education.  Tim’s book will be interesting and useful to lots of folks because it is exactly about ten maps.  Whoever wrote the subtitle that the maps explain everything is way overstating Tim’s case.  He thinks that geography is important but just that.  He uses ten maps as examples.  On page 7, Tim talks about obeying and ignoring the rules of geography but the only one he seems to give is when the land is hard to defend the leaders push outwards.  Then he gives Russia as the example of the rule.  Rules need more than one example.

A minor quibble is the quality of the maps.  They are sometimes hard to read and sometimes leave off some of Tim’s main topics.  For example, the maps of Pakistan on p. 188 and p. 194 leave off Gwadar.  The Chinese investment in Gwadar is a major issue in both the China map and the India and Pakistan map.  Gwadar does show up in the map that opens India and Pakistan on pp. 180-181.  We know the problems about the economics of publishing but better maps would help.

Here is where will will push the limits of our expertise to try and help you understand Tim’s book.  We don’t want this post to be book length so we can’t be very academic.  Consider Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, and Kevin Williamson as authors.  Although one might try and excommunicate the others from the conservative denomination, most of us recognize all of them as very different but still conservative.

Our take is that Ann is a prosecutor.  She is marshaling the evidence to try and prove her case.  If there are any weaknesses in her arguments you will not hear it from her.  She keeps herself on task and deals with a specific subject for a popular audience.  Given her legal background her writing style is not a surprise.

Jonah is an academic at heart.  The appendix in Suicide of the West is one piece of evidence.  The second is that he wants to generalize but he recognizes the difficulty of generalization and so he often considers alternative arguments.  He wants to write a popular book that an academic could enjoy.

Kevin loves controversy.  He tweeted some things that got him fired at The Atlantic.  That he went to The Atlantic in the first place tells you something about him.  He has amazing insights that he thunders down upon us in wonderful prose.

Tim isn’t interested in being Jonah.  He wants to be Kevin but he will have to settle to be Ann.  An example of why he isn’t the other two is Tim’s discussion of Venezuela in Latin America.  It is brief but it leaves out that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.  That is a big part of its geography.  To convince the unconvinced you must deal with the obvious problems in argument you are trying to make.

We recommend Tim’s book.  It gave us much to think about and changed our perspective in some areas.  If you don’t take every word as the gospel you will be better for reading it.  We are.

 

Who To Thank?

On our trip to Tennessee we passed through Williamson County in both Illinois and in our destination state.  Thus (?), we have two posts today connecting Kevin Williamson, now back at NRO and maps.

Kevin has a nice article about clarity, Thanksgiving, and economics, For These Gifts We Are Truly Grateful, at NRO.  In discussing human charity points out the obvious but rarely discussed point:

Here is a truth that almost never is spoken: All of the money that ever has been saved and invested in profit-seeking productive business enterprises has done incalculably more for the poor — more by many orders of magnitude — than has all of the money that ever has been put to charitable uses, formal or informal, mainly by preventing them from ever being poor in the first place. That saving and investment, and the innovation and labor that have gone along with them, are the only thing in the history of this little blue planet that has made its inhabitants less poor.

His observations lead us to the confusion of who to thank and a couple of recent examples.  We are somewhere near the middle of the distribution on modern technical skills.  A text said we could speed checkout at the pharmacy if we downloaded a matrix barcode for each prescription.  We did.  The shock came when the person at the window said we were the first to do it.  The incremental gains necessary to expedite this sale are extensive: two levels of barcodes, cell phones, texting, Internet, etc.

Shortly after that we bought a set of AirPods.  We couldn’t wait for Christmas because we have a trip in December.  First warning: It is likely that we will be unable to post from 12/2-12/23.  We were not sure we needed them but after being a first adopter at the pharmacy we were on a roll.  They are great.  Then through the wonders of cell phone confusion we heard The Offspring.  It turns out that something good musically did come out of the eighties.  It is our second new band this month.  Don’t forget the Brooks Hubbard Band  with its North Middlesex roots.

As this examples point out it is hard to know who to thank for the bounty we have been bestowed.  Here is what Kevin says:

But as you cut into that turkey today, remember that somebody did the hard and dirty work of raising it, butchering it, packing it, driving the truck that brought it to your town, stocking the store shelves — and the very difficult work of figuring out how to get all that done, from domesticating turkeys to fueling that truck, a long unbroken line of human effort and ingenuity stretching back to the first guy who figured out how to chip a piece of stone a certain way to make it more useful.

Markets help us stand on giant’s shoulders and become giants ourselves.  We are so fortunate that the growth fairy came to visit and stayed.

Sober Democrats

George Will is looking for a sober Democrat.  We think it would be somebody he could disagree on most policy issues but still vote for in 2020.  Showing the difficulty of George’s search, the 44th President was in the news recently:

The former U.S. President said during a talk at the Obama Foundation summit in Chicago that world leaders must solve problems around climate change, education, agriculture, among others, which according to him are not as hard to deal with as they may seem. As reported by the Daily Mail, [the 44th President] didn’t mention [The Donald] by name, but he did say that the world “badly needs remaking” and that “the reason we don’t do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.”

The joy of being a progressive is that you can attack The Donald and the press will say perhaps it was an attack on … well, it might be somebody else.  So the immediate past president would have a hard time making the list of sober Democrats.  George has identified John Delany, an entrepreneur and a Congressman from Maryland, as a reasonable choice for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020.  He is, as George demonstrates, a progressive:

He checks various boxes that might mollify all but the most fastidious progressives: He likes early-childhood education, a carbon tax, a $15 minimum wage, and extending the Social Security tax to higher incomes. He dislikes the NRA, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, high interest rates on student loans, and “outrageous” drug prices. He would achieve “universal” health care by offering Medicaid for all, and for those who choose to opt for private programs, as he thinks most people would, there would be federal subsidies for those who need them.

The only point of possible agreement for us in that list is the carbon tax.  We are willing to support a carbon tax at a reasonable level that replaces the gas tax.  It is not much to keep a conservative interested but, according to George, he is pleasingly adult compared to the candidates from the Senate.  George is right but it is an exceeding low bar to clear to be declared adult compared to Cory and Kamala.  George says the Democrats could do much worse and probably will.  We agree with him that it helps The Donald.  We would like to see a sober Democrat leader again in our lifetime but it doesn’t look good.  It is too bad because there is an opening for sober leaders.

It Is A Feature Not A Bug

Jim Geraghty had a question last week.  We have an answer.  In the Morning Jolt Jim is discussing the problems Democrats have and ends with (And of course you should read it all.  You should read the Jolt every day.):

Andrew Cuomo: Whoa, I Just Realized My Own State’s Taxes Are High

These are the sorts of statements that just make you want to scream at people:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo defended the deal, arguing that New York has to offer incentives because of its comparatively high taxes. At 6.5 percent, New York’s corporate income-tax rate is only modestly higher than Virginia’s 6 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. But other business and individual taxes are higher in New York.

“It’s not a level playing field to begin with,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview Tuesday. “All things being equal, if we do nothing, they’re going to Texas.”

First, what about all the companies in New York that don’t get a special deal the way Amazon does? Why is it okay for them to pay the high taxes, but not Amazon?

Second, if Andrew Cuomo thinks that his state’s taxes are too high and are scaring away businesses, why doesn’t he try to lower them? [Emphasis added]

We would like to answer Jim’s second question.  You can’t have crony capitalism unless the authorities have something to sell.  In less developed counties it is often cutting red tape.  The Donald is trying to sell access by raising prices.  Andrew is selling potentially lower prices.  As the title says, this is intentional.  Andrew wants cronies.  High taxes gives him the opportunities he desires.  Jim should recognize that this is part of the plan.  We want to scream about the plan.  And we are happy that lots of firms are going to Texas.

Engaging Shaw

We accompanied the Lady de Gloves to American Players Theatre (APT) to see the closing performance of Engaging Shaw.  The play, by John Morogiello, is about George Bernard Shaw’s relationship with Charlotte Payne-Townshend.  We approached it with some trepidation because we feared it would give us some of Shaw’s best lines without being much of a play.  We knew the cast of Colleen Madden as Charlotte, James Ridge as Bernard, Tracy Michelle Arnold as Beatrice Webb, and APT relative newcomer Gavin Lawrence as Sidney Webb would make it interesting.

The opening music told us it was going to be a fun time.  The play turned out to be an excellent rom-com with a conservative heart.

Sidebar: APT is becoming our favorite Wisconsin conservative institution.  True most of their conservatism is about the theatre.  They are, however, fearless with the conviction to freedom of expression and that means they are different from almost every other similar organization.  Experiencing Shaw is a great example.  End Sidebar.

Bernard, Beatrice, and Sidney are (in the play and real life) socialists who are members of the Fabian Society.  Their foolishness is often pointed out.  For example, Bernard and Charlotte are discussing income (in)equality and it goes roughly like this: Bernard says incomes should be equal.  Charlotte inquires as to how much income.  Bernard says just enough to get by.  Charlotte asks who will decide.  It take Bernard awhile but he admits that he plans on deciding.  It is wonderful romp both as a rom-com and skewering socialists.  The latter is something we can never do enough.

Porn And The Regent

We recently wrote about Joe Gow’s, the Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL), failure to protect freedom of expression.  It is not far back if you want to look for it.  We had missed Bob Atwell’s, a Regent in the University of Wisconsin System, opinion piece on Joe and porn.  We have almost nothing in common with Wisconsin’s new governor but we see an opportunity..

We see now that the pressure on Joe was coming from the Regents.  We wish that he had the courage to stand up to them and, if necessary, fall on his sword.

Porn, like alcohol, weed, and gambling, to name a few, has all kinds of bad outcomes.  None of those things can be legislated out of existence.  We have tried and failed with all of them.  We can’t even define porn.  Inviting a former porn star or a current conservative doesn’t mean that the university supports either one.  Few people have been more wrong than Bob when he says:

There is ample scientific evidence that what [Joe] apparently admires as free expression, is in fact a massive public health problem.

I am hopeful this will result in a deep conversation about pornography rather than a shallow one about freedom.

If Bob is suggesting that Joe admires porn then he is dishonest.  He is correct that porn is a big problem.  His preferred solution, ignoring it, is not working.  Preventing a discussion about porn and all of the variants of near-porn is worthy of a deep conversation.  Bob doesn’t want one.  The conversation about freedom is anything but shallow.  Somebody needs to tell Bob that.  We hope Tony will use a pink slip to try and convince Bob about the importance of freedom of speech.  It would be our first opportunity to agree with Tony and a chance for him to show everyone that he is more than an empty chair.

Signs

It seems that all the good titles have been taken for odds and ends so we are calling this Signs.  We only have two items.  We are serious about exactly one so you need to pick it so we don’t get nasty comments.

We were shopping with the Lady de Gloves when we came upon a hand bag that was marked “Vegan Leather.”  We dismissed it as an oxymoron but lately we have been wondering if somebody is making handbags out of vegans.

We had a wonderful horoscope today.  It said, “Double-check numbers.  Review financial records and budgets.”  We have little faith in horoscopes but we have already done the Sudoku

Sidebar: We always double-check the Sudoku with 27 check marks.  There are nine vertical checks, nine horizontal checks, and nine checks for squares.   If the center number is blank we do that last and check the center square last.  There will be four tens plus a five.  End Sidebar.

and hope, amongst other things, the Internet delivers our bank statement so we can reconcile and visit the budget.  Fun times!

Jay On Tariffs

There are, as we often hear, no won causes and no lost causes.  We worry about saying the same thing about the benefits of free trade, the cost of socialism, and the folly of the minimum wage all the time.  We also worry about failing to remind folks on a regular basis about such foolishness.  Jay Nordlinger at NRO has a wonderful contribution on the way to put the question of tariffs versus free trade:

May I give you my view of trade? Each country ought to do what it considers in its own interest. Trade is not a matter of tit-for-tat. It’s a matter of, What’s best for me, or my side? If Paris wants French people to have fewer choices and higher prices, fine. If Washington wants something else — that’s fine too.

You see what I mean? Trade is not a matter of schoolyard score-settling. It requires maturity.

Jay is not an economics guy but as sometimes happens it is easier for outsiders to point out the obvious.   Jay has a great insight and a great way to communicate a common folly on the tariff issue.  What sense does it make to say since you have hurt your consumers we will hurt ours?

Porn At The University

There is a big controversy at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) involving freedom of expression.  The facts are, as we understand them, that UWL invited noted sex educator and free expression advocate Nina Hartley to visit and speak at the campus.  Of importance to the tempest is that Nina is, or at least was, a porn star.  Here is the Wikipedia entry on Nina.  After Nina spoke to 70 students there was controversy and Chancellor Joe Gow took to the local newspaper to defend the decision.  As the answer to why did he invite a porn star to campus Joe said:

My primary motive in inviting Hartley was to help promote the UW System’s “Commitment to Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression,” implemented last fall by our Board of Regents.

You can find the Regents document here.  The Regents saw the policy as a restatement of what they said over a century ago:

“Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

Joe’s response did not quiet the concern and he has taken action:

He agreed to personally compensate the university for Hartley’s $5,000 appearance fee, which was initially covered by student fees and interest.  He is also booking a speaker from Fight the New Drug, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit dedicated to “raising awareness (of porn’s) harmful effects using only science, facts and personal accounts.”

One of the strange things about Nina’s presentation came out in the story about Joe’s actions.  They said:

The event [Nina’s talk]did not appear on the university’s online events calendar and, unlike many events, was not made known to the press.

It does seem odd to hide away your freedom of expression speaker.

So what do we have to say about this sad story?  First, we think Joe fails freedom of expression 101.  We could have agreed that refunding the money to the students was a grand but silly gesture.  Agreeing to bring in the alternative speaker was absolutely a failure to back free expression.  The Regents say:

Each institution in the University of Wisconsin System has a solemn responsibility not only to promote lively and fearless exploration, deliberation, and debate of ideas, but also to protect those freedoms when others attempt to restrict them. [Emphasis added]

Joe failed to protect Nina.

Second, how did the initial situation happen?   We have suppositions but only those from knowing how universities work.  We do not have any inside details about what really happened.  We think that the administration was looking at the first part of the Regent quote above and realized they were at risk because they had failed to promote the debate.  The administration is heavily progressive so nobody wants to bring in a conservative and the available conservatives often like to stir up controversy and that can lead to violence.  What are the other choices?

Sex.  We can see the meeting.  The students like sex and having a sexy speaker.  The administration thinks we have met the Regents’ requirement without a big controversy of bringing an Ann Coulter type to campus.  Everyone is happy but it still turns out to be a disaster.  Now they have failed to meet the Regents’ expectation.

The answer is that we need to support Nina and Joe.  Freedom of expression is freedom of expression.  The statement says fearless exploration and deliberation as well as debate.  Debate is only part of freedom of expression.

Yet, at the same time, somebody needs to be responsible for some balance over time.  Let us use a real example.  As chair of the accounting department we had a speaker at the banquet each year.  We kept track of each speaker’s affiliation so that there would be a variety types of organizations (Big Four, other public, corporate, governmental/NFP) and actual organizations.  Some organizations would volunteer every year and we told them no.

It is easy to see why administrators fail at free expression.  It is a tough job.  It is also part of their job description.