ISRAEL/GAZA EMBROILS AMERICA

On my mind this week: two separate illustrations of how the consequences of the Israel/Gaza conflict, instigated by Hamas’s (likely Iran-funded) unprovoked October 7th massacre, is having worldwide effects, and in particular, how it is threatening the American political and cultural fabric (or rather, how we are unnecessarily letting it threaten that fabric). First, a new federal, congressionally-mandated definition of “antisemitism” for campus purposes raises questions about just how serious conservatives are on free speech. Secondly, President Biden stupidly considers letting in Gazans as refugees under pressure from Arab nations, NGOs dedicated to free movement or humanitarian causes, and Israel itself.

Anti-Semitism bill passes House, 320-91

On Wednesday, the US House passed an “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” that makes Anti-Semitism (as defined within the bill) a protected legal basis under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The bill would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism (which is very broad and, one gets the sense, was enumerated to guide people in identifying broad contours of anti-Jewish thought, not to set specific limits on speech targeting individuals or inform governments), and allow the government to deny federal funding to institutions that tolerate antisemitism the same way that federal funds are currently rescinded from colleges, municipalities, or other entities that discriminate openly on race or sex. Of the 91 votes against, about 70 were far-left Democrats and 20 were conservative or libertarian Republicans (it was a motley array of hotheads like Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs and principled conservatives like Byron Donalds and others). It now heads to the Senate for final passage. I ardently hope it fails.

The broad conservative approach to “hate speech” in the United States for as long as I can remember has been to assert that the proper control of such exists not in the legal sphere, but in the social one. Consequences for controversial but not outright threatening (to individuals or groups of individuals in a concrete and realizable sense—e.g. “I will kill you next Tuesday,” not to peoples vaguely, ideologies, etc.) or traitorous (“There will be a meeting for those interested in kidnapping the governor next Thursday at 7pm, camouflage attire recommended”) speech is not a law against it, but the social pressure of one’s peers and the culture writ large, or of one’s employer.

Just last month, the entire conservative movement in the US was in an uproar over the Scottish government’s stupendously pre-Enlightenment decision to criminalize speech affirming the truth about trasngenderism and homosexuality, among other things. Have we given up the principle that the government cannot police any but the most obvious, imminently violent speech that quickly? Granted, a bill that criminalized speech anywhere by private citizens (Scotland) and the current US bill that would not criminalize speech but only restrict federal dollars from flowing to institutions that allow certain types of speech are different in scope, but they are similar in principle, and it is hard to see how the current bill would not lead to a more general hate speech bill in the US eventually.

Limits on speech, as a matter of law, are easy to abuse, easy to partialize, and hard to keep from chilling legitimate speech. The English-descended common law tradition, and the American tradition of extreme emphasis on individual rights in particular, has never tolerated them. The recent explosion of vile antisemitism on campuses around the country, condemned on this very blog last week, is not reason to overturn that four-hundred-year history. While many, probably most, of those who drafted and supported this bill in Congress had good intentions of limiting the threats that Jewish students face on American campuses, this bill is an affront to the principle that speech is policed socially, not legally in free nations.

Existing laws against threatening individuals (e.g. protestors telling Jews “every day will be October 7th for you”) or committing actual violence, or occupying public spaces unlawfully, are more than adequate to quell the madness. The problem on our campuses is not insufficient restriction of civil liberties; it is a maddening disrespect for and unwillingness to enforce the laws we already have, and one level deeper, a culture in which no evil speech is any longer shameful.

Gazans Coming to America?

In a depressing but unsurprising display of characteristic weakness, gullibility, and willingness to put the interests of Americans dead last, the Biden administration is reportedly considering admitting Gazans who have family already residing in the US as refugees on a path to full citizenship and others as refugees on conventional temporary but renewable status.

The Arab nations closest to the conflict (who do not want to deal with the problem), the Israeli government (which would love it if the Gazan population disappeared without having to commit atrocities), and a certain species of Western bleeding-hearts lacking in discernment and prudence are all enthusiastic about this prospect of moving a substantial chunk of Gaza to the other side of the Atlantic. To be clear, Benjamin Netanyahu has not called for resettlement to the US (as he has goodwill on the American Right that he does not want to lose), although his finance minister and several lesser officials have. The population of Gaza is about two million.

The obvious answer from the United States should be: NO WAY JOSE.

First, there is the logistics problem. Who is going to pay to get perhaps one million destitute Gazans to JFK airport? Uncle Sam? No thank you. Why is it that these refugees could not be absorbed by neighboring Egypt, with a population of 111 million, a relatively high GDP per capita (for the Middle East) of $4,295, and nearly unanimous Sunni Muslim majority? Wouldn’t just walking a few miles to Egypt, where the refugees would fit into the majority demographics already, seem a more sensible solution than flying them to an alien culture, climate, and governmental system thousands of miles away, at radically higher cost?

For Israel, resettlement at greater distance is preferable in case the refugees decided at some point to terrorize Gaza from their new home in Egypt, but this is unlikely, and as much as I do value the alliance with Israel, to paraphrase Russell Kirk, Tel Aviv is not the capital of the United States. For Egypt, obviously, its government would rather not deal with the extra people. The same applies to substituting any other Arab nation for Egypt (Saudi Arabia comes to mind—it has one-third of Egypt’s population but is much wealthier, UAE is the same way but on an even larger disparity—even smaller population and even wealthier citizens). But the United States government is to represent the interests of its own citizens and its own strategic interest, not those of Israel, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia.

Particularly in light of the prodigious military aid the US Congress just passed for Israel to the tune of $26 billion and the fact that this administration’s anti-fossil fuel agenda has made the Arab oil states a fortune on $75-90/barrel oil in the last two years, there is no reason why the problem of Gazan refugees cannot be settled entirely by the Arab states themselves while America is dealing with its own ballooning migrant crisis at the southern border, and no reason (other than the fact that they know we have a weak leader) that other nations should feel the right to dictate American immigration policy.

Then there is the small matter that within Gaza, Hamas (you know, the thugs who beheaded, raped, and killed over a thousand people last year in the name of a false god) enjoys majority support. Every poll taken there or in the West Bank shows a supermajority in favor of continued Hamas rule. It shows supermajorities that say the terrorist attacks were justified. Every video broadcast out of Gaza where folks are mourning at hospitals the dead from airstrikes refer to the dead as “martyrs.” Martyrs for what? For jihad. For the destruction of Israel. For the complete Reconquista of Judea “from the river to the sea” and the elimination of the Jews.

Gaza is a place where the thumping majority of people see terrorism as justified, the West and modernity as evil, and Islam as absolute mandate for a theocracy. There is no excuse for willingly letting such people into the United States. If such people are wittingly admitted into the country, every single precaution that law-abiding citizens are made to endure since 9/11 is made into a cruel farce, a reminder that the new American State values non-citizens infinitely more than its own.

Want a good reason why Trump might win despite being one of the worst candidates for re-election in American history? He would, for all his (many, and in my eyes disqualifying) faults, never make Americans feel that their leader cares more about other nations and abstract, misguided notions of social justice than America itself.

THOUGHTS 4-25-24

It’s one of those weeks where I don’t have anything punchy, concise, and profound to say about one particular issue, but a blunderbuss of thoughts about several and limited time to organize my thoughts into an op-ed style article. So, here are things on my mind this week in the worlds of economics, politics, and current events.

Inflation Continues Apace

After a 2023 that saw inflation rates (not prices)* decline substantially, from 5.6% annualized in January to 3.9% in December, as the Federal Reserve’s rate increases took effect on the US economy, inflation has flatlined in the first few months of 2024. All measures of inflation (CPI, “core” CPI that excludes food and energy, the producer price index or “PPI”) show that in early 2024, inflation has remained stuck in the high 3% range annualized, with some short-term acceleration in inflation rates. This is an overall bad sign for our country, as inflation (or as German-accented economist Joseph Schumpeter called inflation, “ze monster”) reduces the reward for conscientious behavior, creates social tension and space for more radical political candidates (see: 1930s Germany), and reduces future economic growth. The record spending spree of the US government during the COVID pandemic temporarily infused cash into the economy and scored political points with voters who loved handouts. But the price of those new dollars in ongoing inflation is proving to outweigh the benefit of their initial creation.

Only a rapid increase in supply can bring us out of this mess (as usual, our policy Brahmins will focus on the demand side with Fed policy and scratch their heads at the failure), as more goods and services mean lower prices per unit. Unfortunately, neither party understands this anymore. One party is definitely worse (hint: starts with “D” and ends with “emocrats”), promising to strangle US energy production, raise taxes (which decreases investment), strengthen unions, and explode the deficit further (which increases interest rates and inflation, as the government must either borrow and increase demand for limited savings, or print dollars), but the Republicans aren’t all that great either these days: Trump promises a 15% tariff on all foreign goods if re-elected. The topline: except for a severe economic downturn that decreases inflation from a complete breakdown in consumer demand, look for inflation above 3% to become the new normal.

*Inflation and prices are not the same thing. I see this error all the time even in publications that really should know better. To relate this to the example anyone who has ever taken HS physics could relate to: prices are like distance and inflation is like velocity. In the same way that velocity measures the rate of change of distance per unit time, inflation measures the rate of change of prices per unit time. To say that inflation declined from 9% to 3% doesn’t mean prices went down, it means they are still increasing, but by only 3% per year rather than 9%, just like a car travelling away from home that slows down from 90mph to 30mph is still getting further from its destination, but more slowly.

Non-Competes and the FTC Rule

            This Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a rule banning almost all employment non-compete agreements in the United States for private employers, and for all employees making less than $1 million per year. As for currently existing non-compete clauses (and there are an estimated 30 million workers currently covered by them), those that are not for executives making over $150,000 per year will be voided upon the rule taking effect in 120 days. My rough take on this is: right decision, wrong mechanism.

            That non-compete agreements are bad for low-skilled workers who have no access to legal representation to fully understand what they are signing or fight it if a previous employer sues is almost without dispute. Although, in theory, employer and employee are two parties voluntarily agreeing to a contract as a condition of employment, in practice, one side has attorneys and the other doesn’t, and the contract only enforces obligations in one direction (for instance, the employee has no rights to continued wages for the term of the non-compete agreement if they are fired without just cause or if the company closes up shop) against the party without attorneys or bargaining power. Once on the job, non-compete clauses can function as a powerful tool to suppress wages and benefits, working conditions, and so forth, since if the employee leaves, he or she is unable to legally secure employment elsewhere in many states.

That these contracts stifle wages by reducing competition amongst employers for low-wage employees (at least in the states where such agreements are enforceable) is why the US Chamber of Commerce is up in arms over the FTC’s decision—its members would face an even more competitive labor market if these contracts were outlawed. So be it. Corporations cannot advocate for free markets and unfettered competition in all other arenas but cry foul when a by definition—it is right in the NAME anti-competition practice is outlawed to increase market efficiency and fairness. After all, minds matching with capital is what drives economic growth, and allocating labor to its highest use, as expressed in wage or salary rates, is the system that coordinates the most effective matching between talent and the means of production.

I suspect that if Congress passed a law emulating this FTC ruling, the effect on employers would be somewhat ambiguous, however: they would be less able to retain current employees, but more able to poach other employer’s employees. It’s not clear to me at all that this outcome would be a net negative for all employers, but it certainly would be for entry-level employers where wages are low and labor always at a shortage (and thus the incentive for other employers to poach high). There should be some carve-outs for intellectual property concerns (an employee of Pfizer shouldn’t be able to waltz into Merck and work for them for a slightly higher wage—if this were the case, no high-intensity research business would invest in training its employees or performing R&D, knowing that such training costs can just accrue to the benefit of a rival firm once the employee leaves) or strengthening of IP law that restricts it from moving with staff to new employers in high-intensity research industries, but on the whole, this is a boon for both workers and economic freedom.

            On the other hand, this is not a decision for an unelected body of bureaucrats at the FTC, who lack constitutional authority (even in the broad interpretation of the “Interstate Commerce Clause” that prevails today) to issue such a rule, and I expect the US Chamber’s lawsuit against the rule to eventually succeed. To the extent this action starts a national conversation, Congress should, for once, act like it’s their job to…you know…legislate rather than relying on courts and executive agencies to do that for them. If the FTC’s rule were a federal law, it would be most commendable as a blow struck in favor of both economic freedom and American workers. But as an FTC rule, it is unconstitutional.

Campus Carnage: Why Are We Paying for This?

            The timing of blatantly Anti-American (ostensibly Anti-Israel, but with a good many “Death to America” chants factored in and a heaping helping of openly racist sentiment toward Jews, such as “every day is going to be the 7^th of October for you,” rhetorically slung at a Jewish student at Columbia) protests at our elite universities, the children of privilege throwing a detestable and damnable temper tantrum, comes at an awkward time for our country: on the heels of Joe Biden’s repeated (and illegal) attempts to forgive student debt. In addition to all the reasons I enumerated in a previous blog post about why debt forgiveness is a horrible idea (it removes all cost controls, as universities can raise tuition exponentially and new students will assume their expenses will be forgiven later, it is regressive wealth redistribution toward the already-wealthy, and it is, at root, immoral—a debt owed is a pledge of repayment), we may add: these protests have laid bare that many of our elite institutions are training future “leaders” that will bring the nation to (even greater) ruin.

The crop of future elites coming out of the Ivies is petulant (refusing to move off the quad at Columbia when told), imbecilic (unable to spell the word “committee” in their letters protesting the treatment of student protesters at Princeton), profoundly racist, and shockingly fragile (not able to listen to an alternate view from Speaker Mike Johnson). That many of our university systems (some notable ones, like the University of Florida system, excepted) are intent on the deconstruction of Western civilization (and even ideas like gender that easily pre-date Western civilization) is bad enough. That taxpayers are subsidizing their own nation’s funeral one Pell Grant or student loan at a time is worse. If the economic reasons for abolishing federal student loans and financial aid weren’t already evident to conservatives, these protests should be icing on the cake. No more subsidies for nonsense, and no more asking hard-working Americans to pay for their children and grandchildren to be turned into unskilled, febrile radicals.

The Trump Prosecution’s Farce in Manhattan, the Trump Defense’s Farce in Washington

            Trump’s persecution trial in Manhattan kicked off last week with jury selection, and this week began opening statements and testimony—the real trial. The whole thing is a farce. The charges are 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, on the theory that Donald Trump recorded the repayments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen as “legal expenses,” when they should have been “campaign expenses,” because the purpose of the “catch-and-kill” operation through the National Enquirer (where the publication would buy the rights to the story and then bury it) was to aid his presidential election campaign by buying Stormy Daniels’s silence about an alleged 2006 affair for $130,000. The case is preposterous. Under New York law, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor (on which the statute of limitations has expired) unless it’s to cover up an underlying crime.

The underlying crime that the openly political Alvin Bragg (who has ironically helped Donald Trump’s political chances more than any campaign advisor could ever hope to do) alleges is violation of federal campaign finance law. Problem: a county DA cannot enforce federal law, particularly when the federal government already looked at the Daniels payments and decided that they did not constitute campaign expenditures under federal law, and thus declined to bring charges. So, rather than directly say that the underlying statute is federal campaign law, Bragg and his minions have alluded to a “conspiracy” to cover up the story, as if the word “conspiracy” were a stand in for an actual crime as spelled out in an indictment. It isn’t. Trying to stop negative information and amplify positive information is called “campaigning.” Furthermore, the “conspiracy” statute of New York law is also a misdemeanor. Bragg’s theory is that committing a misdemeanor to cover up a misdemeanor makes it a felony. If you find that persuasive, I don’t know what to tell you….

Incredibly, even in deep blue Manhattan, I think Donald Trump is headed toward an acquittal from these ludicrous charges. The cynicism and immense logical leaps in this case will almost certainly be too much for at least a few jurors to stomach, or at least one hopes.

In a different courtroom this week, the Supreme Court of the United States, Trump’s lawyers argued today in favor of a claim of “absolute immunity” for former presidents from prosecution, so long as the conduct in question occurred during his presidency (this case is a sidebar necessary to settle before the so-called “January 6^th case” Jack Smith has brought against Donald Trump can proceed).

One of the justices asked if a president would be immune from prosecution if he ordered the military to stage a coup to keep him in office after losing an election. Amazingly, Trump’s counsel gave a non-answer that completely dodged the question. This should have been a softball, not a time to answer “it depends on the context” like you are the president of Harvard! But then again, the lawyer was representing his client earnestly: remember how Trump complimented Kim Jong Un on being a “strong head” of North Korea and frequently admired dictators for their ability to control their nations without dissent? Absurdity all around.

If Trump wins a second term, we all need to hope and pray that the “guardrails” will keep his worst instincts from overriding our constitutional system and meting out whatever revenge he has in mind, executed by whatever group of small-minded and pathetic people he could find willing to serve in a second administration after witnessing how he treated those who served in his first. But I must tell you: I have little faith that will happen, just as I have little faith that Biden will stay within the constitution if he is re-elected rather than persecuting conservatives as he has already done in his first term (see: federal law enforcement stalking PTA meetings, IRS selective enforcement, etc.). The best “guardrails” in a republic are not institutions or “norms” or procedures, but the people themselves, the voters. The people re-nominated Joseph Biden and Donald Trump as our choices, many of them gleefully and excitedly. God help us.

In other, brighter news (literally), all the trees are now leafed out in Missouri, and the forests are bright fluorescent green. Happy week to all.

Note to Joe Biden: Weakness Is Provocative

In the book “Yanomamo: The Fierce People,” anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon documents the social, cultural, and economic practices of the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon Basin, at the junction of Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. He lived among them at intervals for twenty years, usually for months at a time, just after the tribe had first been exposed to westerners in the 1950s and 1960s. One particularly striking lesson his time taught him was that the necessity of toughness to deter nonsense is universal. The tribesman would beg from Chagnon, steal items from his tent, and make unreasonable demands backed by the threat of physical force. According to Chagnon, these problems worsened during his first stint with the Yanomamo until he decided to retaliate, and to pay child “informants” (in crackers) to rat out thieves, whose hammocks or other prized possessions he would then take as retribution. Eventually, this approach worked as villagers realized they could no longer take advantage of the newcomer and gained respect for him.

Today, the Middle East stands on the brink of an all-out war. It stands on that brink because Iran does not perceive the United States as willing to deter its provocations or stand behind Israel if it launches a counteroffensive. Considering the Biden administration that has bent over backward to accommodate Tehran and publicly castigated Benjamin Netanyahu, Tehran’s conclusion is reasonable. Since taking office, Biden has attempted to revive the Obama/Kerry-negotiated JCPOA (better known as the “Iran Nuclear Deal”) that Trump sunk early in his administration, and has turned a blind eye to Iran’s funding for Hamas and Hezbollah, its plans for Israel’s eventual destruction, and its alignment with America’s main geopolitical rivals (Russia and China). Biden has overseen the re-entrance of over 500,000 barrels per day of Iranian oil production onto world markets, providing the mullahs a reliable source of income to fund terrorism and their own nuclear research.

The US administration took this conciliatory line with Iran for two reasons, both stupid: 1) To enable America to distance itself from Saudi Arabia, whose human rights abuses are obvious but whose oil America needs to keep the world economy running as long as Iranian and Venezuelan oil is under sanctions, and 2) It believed giving Iran money, freedom of action, and impunity in the region with conventional arms would both deter a nuclear weapons program and placate the Iranian regime enough for it to not start a war. Now, having given a rogue state all those concessions, the Biden administration now faces the possibility that its worst nightmare could come to pass: active wars in two of the world’s three major oil-producing regions during election year (Middle East, Russia, North America). It couldn’t have happened to a more competent, honest president….

In all seriousness, we should pray for peace in the Middle East, and in particular, for the civilians of Israel and those of Iran, some of whom will be killed should Israel decide to respond or Iran try another provocation successful enough that Benjamin Netanyahu feels he must respond. Ironically, Iran harbors one of the most moderate Muslim populations on Earth, and the extremist ayatollahs have put down widespread popular dissent multiple times in just the last 15 years to retain power. For all parties involved, Joe Biden’s wrong-headed policy of appeasement has been provocative and dangerous.

TRUMP ECHOES STEPHEN DOUGLAS ON ABORTION

Donald Trump’s pronouncement today that he doesn’t favor any national restrictions on abortion is disturbing. More stunning is Trump’s refusal to say whether he will support the Florida ballot initiative that would enshrine a right to abortion through the first two trimesters of pregnancy (24 weeks). If one’s position on abortion is states’ rights (as Trump’s now is), that begs the question: how should your state solve it?

That Trump is uncomfortable saying, “I don’t think this is a federal issue, but as a citizen of Florida I support my state’s six-week heartbeat bill,” is indicative of just how radioactive he perceives any pro-life stance to be for his general election prospects (isn’t Trump’s appeal supposed to be that he isn’t evasive like other politicians?). It is also a gut-punch for the many pro-lifers who believed Trump had changed since his pro-choice days, as he spoke at the March for Life and appointed the Federalist Society-approved justices who sunk Roe as president.  

Now, Trump and his advisors expect pro-lifers to vote for a candidate who refuses to support even a nationwide third-trimester ban, which an overwhelming majority of Americans favor. Not only that, but a candidate who expresses moral ambivalence by stating that abortion is about “the will of the people” rather than doing the right thing. If unborn children are human beings, subjecting them to “the will of the people” is as stupid and anti-constitutional as saying a majority vote could legitimize robbery or murder. If unborn children are not human beings, then the entire debate is pointless. In Trump’s confusion of the means (state freedom to restrict abortion after Dobbs) with the ends (a nation where human life is dignified rather than degraded), we hear echoes of Stephen Douglas’s political cowardice and calculation rather than Abraham Lincoln’s prudent statesmanship.

In Stephen Douglas, the diminutive Illinois Democrat preaching “popular sovereignty,” on slavery, Abraham Lincoln saw a greater threat to liberty and the Spirit of 1776 than the southern fire-eaters like John Henry Hammond, John Calhoun, and Edmund Ruffin, whose broadsides against the American Founding the non-slaveholding majority (North and South) could never swallow. Douglas said he didn’t care whether slavery won or lost in a particular territorial or state referendum, as long as the people of that state or territory held a fair election. For fear of angering voters on either side of the issue, he kept his moral opinion private, and thus obscured the fact that the struggle involved justice for slaves, not procedural niceties.

Lincoln rightly perceived that this professed moral ambivalence amounted to tacit approval of evil, and called it out in his “House Divided” speech, where Lincoln said that if Douglas’s attitude of “care not” won, then there would be no moral force to stop slavery’s expansion. The argument against slavery would become cold and procedural, not fundamental.

Dobbs allows a nationwide ban on abortion at the earliest gestational stage that can garner a congressional majority. Perhaps that’s 24 weeks, or maybe 15 weeks. Perhaps no congressional consensus exists for any such ban. A conservative standard-bearer unwilling to try to find a minimum bar for national protection of the unborn is a sore disappointment. A candidate unwilling to clearly state a moral position is much worse.

At bare minimum, any candidate desiring the pro-life movement’s support must say: “I am for this being a state decision, but I will do everything I can to protect unborn life in my own state. I will never abandon the basic conviction that abortion is barbaric and wrong. Its eventual course in America is the course of ultimate extinction, whether that takes two years or two hundred. I will never pretend that this issue can be fully settled as long as injustice is still done to my fellow citizens although practical considerations may slow our path or make compromise on that road necessary.” In case someone on the Trump campaign reads this, feel free to steal the quoted portion above with no attribution. Trump’s pronouncement today is a catastrophic error considering how many Christians otherwise repulsed by Donald Trump voted for him over abortion policy in 2016 and 2020.

In the 2016 presidential debates, Hillary Clinton foolishly tried to explain her inconsistencies on trade policy by referencing Abraham Lincoln’s politicking around the Thirteenth Amendment. Trump had the best debate moment of his political career when he responded, “She got caught in a lie, and she tries to blame the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe! Honest Abe never lied….that’s the big difference between Abraham Lincoln and you.” When the rubber hits the road on abortion, there’s a big difference between Trump and Lincoln too.

Something is off-KILTER in Scotland

In many respects, laws operate most powerfully not to the extent they are enforced, but to the extent that the credible threat of enforcement stops the illegal behavior.

For most laws, this is a wonderfully good thing. For instance, the number of robberies prevented by the existence of robbery laws is almost certainly much greater than the number of cases punished each year. For every robber audacious enough to try the crime, there are many more who look at the cost-benefit analysis, see the penalty is credible, and say “well, I guess that’s not for me.” If you doubt that, observe what has happened in US major cities that have relaxed enforcement of property crime laws and eliminated cash bail requirements, where “flash mobs,” daylight carjackings, and petty theft on such a scale that retail operations are no longer profitable enough to keep stores open have proliferated. These surges in crime are due, in large part, to the enervation of the law’s deterring force, which comes from the credibility of enforcement behind the parchment, not the words on paper.

But what about when the law criminalizes speech, as in an authoritarian country, or when it at least confuses the boundaries of legal speech? Then deterrence is no longer a good thing, but quite an evil one. Such comes to mind with the recently-passed “Hate Crime and Public Order Act,” which passed Scotland’s devolved parliament (the UK Parliament lets the various constituent nations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (all part of the UK) decide some things for themselves, although this privilege is revocable and subject to override by the Parliament as a whole) in 2021 and took effect, fittingly, on April 1, 2024. Only fools or cretins could favor it, and authorities’ defense of the law in recent days, as international criticism came pouring in, is as incoherent as it is execrable.

The law criminalizes any comments deemed to “stir up hate” against a broad array of minority groups, including immigrants, sexual minorities, transgenders, and so forth, including on social media and in private verbal conversations (!!!). First, no one should be hateful toward others, but hate has ambiguous boundaries. The bounds of what is proper political discussion or social commentary vs. demeaning are properly set by the civil society with social sanctions, not by the government with legal sanctions. To the extent the penalty for speech becomes legal, it chills speech, leaves ambiguous what is and is not permissible, makes society less truthful and open (which also stifles economic growth), and creates an atmosphere of fear, where informing on one’s neighbors or rivals is rewarded. See: Union, Soviet.

The Western nations used to understand this: while directly inciting language (“On Tuesday, I am going to rob John Doe”) is rightly a crime, anything beyond that is in the purview of social pressure to regulate, not the law. This is a bedrock foundation of a free society, and to remove it is to court authoritarianism, and even worse, a cowed, cowardly, paranoid, irresolute populace like those that exist in authoritarian nations. I have said it before and I will say it again: with the chilling of free speech, free nations are giving away an advantage more powerful than all the military spending in the world: a critically-thinking people, immersed in self-reliance, and jealous to fight for the retention of their liberties if necessary.

Scottish authorities, to the extent they have responded to media requests for comment, have said that prosecutions under the law will be rare. I don’t doubt that. But the reason for the rare prosecutions will be largely because the Scottish people will be too scared to say anything of any substance about politics. A law designed to have rare and selective enforcement is the most dangerous kind, not the most benign. Often, the threat of going to trial, of spending money on one’s legal defense, of watching one’s reputation get tarnished, is enough to silence dissent. See: Phillips, Jack. Silencing dissent is what tyrants, not free nations, do.

J.K. Rowling, author of the cosmically popular Harry Potter series (and by no means a conservative), is also an anti-trans feminist, that is, a feminist who believes men calling themselves women and then pantomiming exaggerated feminine behavior are an insult to women (she’s right). Just after the law went into effect, Rowling sent several tweets referring to biological males (including a convicted sexual offender who resides in a women’s prison….) by the correct gender, calling them “men,” and daring the Scottish police to arrest her for it. Left-wing commentators, disturbingly, see Rowling as the villain for “misgendering” rather than the convicted sex offender as the villain for….you know…sex offending (I only wish I were making this up: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/jk-rowling-scotland-hate-crime-laws-transphobic-rcna146183: See: Isiah 5:20).

But the Scottish police demurred, stating that while they received complaints over the tweets, Rowling would not be arrested upon returning to her native Scotland, as her conduct was “not criminal” under the new statute. This was a valuable test case, and hopefully will lead others in Scotland to feel free discuss their views on transgenderism honestly, but I would not be surprised if it didn’t. Few people have Rowling’s money and social capital to withstand costly litigation or defamation. It will be worth watching very closely to see if other, lowlier Scottish citizens are prosecuted under this vague and dangerous law for saying things substantially similar to what JK Rowling did.

Let us hope and pray the answer is “no,” and that the people of Scotland awaken and force their representatives to repeal this monstrosity. Scotland is the cradle of the Enlightenment, the western revolution of ideas that birthed modern capitalism, democracy, empirical science, and the free world as we know it. To see it plunged back into a place where the state uses coercion, or dares assert is has the right to, to correct “incorrect thoughts” should anguish all lovers of liberty, all people of any sense at all. Blasphemy laws were bad enough when they outlawed speaking against a religious establishment that at least had some claim to the morally transcendent. When they are propounded for the benefit of the self-admittedly amoral, such that people of conscience be terrorized to silence, atrocities are close at hand.

RANDOM THOUGHTS 3-29-24

Sometimes, my thoughts are on a single topic in a form organized well enough to be a published article (unlike this one), and other times they are single-topic posts on this blog at length. Other times, like this one, I merely feel the need to throw out some things I have been thinking about or noticing recently, but not devote much time to each. Some interesting topics that I have been mulling or monitoring this week:

· Subsidies vs. taxes and cognitive dissonance

This week, I was tutoring an economics student on the subject of “externalities,” or costs/benefits of consumption or production that are not priced into the market, or that are “external” to market participants but very real for parties not involved in the market.

The VERY short version of externalities: there are negative externalities (pollution, crime, noise, etc.) and positive ones (education, clean air and water, etc.). The problem is that the value of those costs of benefits, since not included in the market price if market actors pursue their own private self-interest, leads to inefficient outcomes (for instance, more pollution from industrial production will occur without a tax that reflects the real cost of the health effects or reduction in property values that such production generates).

The government has several options to try to “internalize” these costs or benefits back into either the consumers’ or producers’ calculus, but two of the most common are corrective taxes (for negative externalities—tax what is bad to get less of it) and corrective subsidies (for positive externalities—subsidize what is good to get more of it).

The specific example was climate change. Setting aside all assumptions about human percentage of climate change, desirability of stabilizing temperature, etc., the problem assumed that less CO2 emissions, or at least less CO2 in the atmosphere, was desirable, and asked some ways this might be accomplished. One is by cap-and-trade (dole out tradeable permits for emissions), but the obvious methods are a carbon tax (as many European countries now have) to raise the price of fossil fuel consumption and reduce quantity demanded, and thus, emissions, or to subsidize alternative energy production and methods of carbon sequestration (in other words, have the government pay people to put in solar panels or windmills, install geothermal, or plant trees, which integrate carbon into their cellular framework and take CO2 out of the atmosphere).

It hit me that both approaches are just as costly, but one is wildly more popular politically: subsidies. No one likes getting taxed, and if a carbon tax raised the price of unleaded to $6 or $7 per gallon, Americans would be (rightfully) furious. But have the government dole out the same amount of cash as the tax would raise (which it taxed from someone!!!) for clean energy tax credits. People don’t connect the dots, don’t see the cost to themselves. The cost is hidden behind extra steps, while only the benefit is visible. Understanding these tricks of the human mind when it comes to economic rationality (or lack thereof) is a powerful and dangerous thing, and can service either good or ill.

· Port mechanization, unionization, and US trade capacity and competitiveness

By now, I am sure that everyone reading this has seen news of the tragic collision between the outbound cargo ship Dali (flagged out of Singapore, manned by a crew of Indians, leased by Danish shipping giant Maersk—shades of Frank Drebin on boxing) and the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MD, which resulted in the tragic death of several construction workers and the complete collapse of the bridge (ironically, I had just been discussing material creep, material selection, and bridges with my brother, an engineering student, the previous weekend). The engineering problem of rebuilding the bridge and the human tragedy of the collapse dominate the news, and rightly so, but I found the collapse instructive in another way: as an illustration of how badly the unionized West Coast ports have damaged the resilience of America’s shipping economy.

In case you missed it, the last few years have seen repeated clashes between management and the union representing West Coast longshoremen working at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which (used to) handle most of the international trade between the United States and the East Asian nations. However, due to the unions’ refusal to budge on the introduction of more advanced technology for packing and loading shipping containers, the ports rank among the most inefficient in the world, long lines of ships waiting to dock are common, and for many companies, the 2022 strike was the last straw, causing them to re-route trade to ports on the US Gulf and East coast via the Panama Canal rather than que for California (a doubly smart decision given the increased prevalence of robbery on trains going through L.A.—criminals know they won’t get prosecuted for petty theft, and so skim a portion of the goods coming in at Long Beach and destined by rail for the US interior, leaving the rails scattered with empty Amazon boxes and cardboard). Whether the Baltimore port closure (and Baltimore is the #1 US port for handling automotive imports) will significantly delay shipments or contribute to inflation remains to be seen, but whatever the effect, it would have been more benign if the California ports operated more efficiently.

· The cars (and phones) have ears, and China has influence

Your phones, televisions, and smart devices all listen to you. What was once a conspiracy theory from your wild-eyed, once-abducted-by-aliens, Vietnam Veteran of a 6th grade math teacher (and if you didn’t have one of those, you missed out) is now common knowledge, so banal, so ordinary that it barely warrants mention. If I were to read this blog post out loud, I would see political ads and advertisements for solar panel installation for the next week, because my phone is in my pocket and I wrote this on a laptop, both of which gather data. That much is no longer surprising, although it should still disturb us despite its ubiquity (especially now that people’s likenesses and voices are so easily replicated with AI—the issue of whether your voice, habits, locational data, etc. are your property may well be a defining issue of the 21st century—if these companies are going to make fortunes selling your data, why shouldn’t you get a piece of the pie? This could be a blog post unto itself).

But the introduction of cheap, subsidized Chinese electrical vehicles (EVs) into the global market threatens to undercut western producers and to place listening devices for America’s main geopolitical adversary all across the free world, a the expense of citizens in the western countries themselves. What a deal for Xi Jinping!! Congress would be wise to restrict the sale of such vehicles (which also violate international trade law with illegal subsidies, which allow China’s products to undercut US, Mexican, German, South Korean, and Japanese automobiles), and there has been some rumbling about it, but nothing concrete yet.

If this is anything like TikTok, one of the main takeaways will be just how much sway China has over the American ruling class. As the TikTok forced sale (why is it not an outright ban? Is it somehow okay if an attention-destroying, addictive, and stupid product is foisted upon the youth by American or Canadian owners instead of ByteDance, the Chinese parent company that currently owns TikTok?) bill makes its way through Congress, there has been a stunning number of vapid, stupid, circularly-reasoned “think pieces” from across the political spectrum arguing against even forcing the Chinese to divest, let alone ban the product outright. I hope the bill ultimately gets through, but it does not go nearly far enough, and the proliferation of shilling for TikTok proves, at least to me, that the Chinese dragon’s talons are deeper into the US internal political debate than previously understood.

· State of the 2024 POTUS race

As of this writing, Donald Trump still leads Joe Biden in the popular vote average of all polls, taken from RealClearPolitics, by 1% in a head-to-head and by 2.4% when the notable third party candidates (RFK, Jr., who may capture the Libertarian nomination, Cornel West, a left-wing dingbat, and Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party nominee) are included. In late January and early February, Trump led by about 4% in the head-to-head and over 5% in the melee scenario with all minor candidates. So, the race has narrowed nationally.

Let’s go to the battlegrounds. I take “battlegrounds” to mean Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina, as several traditional swing states have become uncompetitive. Florida, Ohio, and Iowa are now much more Republican than before Trump while Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire are much more Democratic. For instance: if Florida is in play by Halloween, the race is over for Trump, and vice versa: if Virginia is in play, it’s over for Biden. The race is close in the Upper Midwest, with Trump’s leads in Penn. and Wisconsin now less than 1%, although he holds a clearer edge of 3.5% in Michigan. In the Sun Belt swing states of Arizona,

Georgia, Nevada, and N.C., it’s currently all Trump, with his leads between 3% and 5.2% in all states, although these leads were larger a few weeks ago.

On the main, if the election were held today, I think Trump would carry it by the skin on his teeth, winning Michigan and all the Sun Belt swing states for a 283-255 win in the electoral college, and it is easier to see Trump carrying one or both of the states where I now have him barely falling short (Wisconsin and PA) than to see Biden unexpectedly winning a Sun Belt swing state.

Caveat: that is today’s dynamic. A lot can change in seven months of a campaign, and the biggest liability to Trump’s current lead is Trump’s own prodigious ability to shoot himself in the vital organs with his own words. Ironically, his absence from Facebook and Twitter has been the best thing to ever happen for his political career, but we are about to enter a season where his (increasingly crazy) statements on the little-frequented site Truth Social are going to be plastered on the airwaves for everyone, not just political junkies like me, to see. That might not be pretty for Trump.

Then again, neither will it be pretty for Biden when Hunter goes to trial for tax evasion and gun crimes in June, especially considering what the Democratic platform says about taxes and guns…..If the Democrats were smart, they would replace Joe Biden at the convention with a moderate, inoffensive southern governor (Roy Cooper of N.C. or John Bel Edwards of Louisiana), or else an (unjustly) ultra-popular cultural figure like Michelle Obama, taking the landslide the GOP has gift-wrapped for them with Trump’s nomination. I increasingly have my doubts over whether they are that smart. If not, it will probably be another nail-biter.

· Death of a true statesman

In 2024, a man who put country before party, famously worked with people on both sides of the aisle, and had but precious little regard for which way the political winds blew seems like a fictional character. But Joe Lieberman, a registered Democrat most of his life, was all too real, and among his other notable courageous acts, he supported John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008 against his own party’s convention, at the exact time when switching toward the Democrats was the most popular. He did this out of a sense that Obama was not a serious leader on foreign policy, and out of friendship with the late McCain. Famously, he won re-election to the Senate as an Independent from his native Connecticut after losing his Democratic primary to a left-wing challenger in 2006.

Most of all, to listen to Liberman speak or watch his legislative action, one realized that he aimed to actually accomplish something, something of a rarity in partisan politics. Lieberman, a staunch ally of Israel and independent-minded Democrat/Independent, a one-of-a-kind cat, died this week at 82. The country could use more of his variety and fewer of the AOC/Majorie Taylor Greene variety. RIP.

MERIT BEATS PREJUDICE

In his classic The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890), then-president of the US Naval War College Alfred Mahan chronicled the British Empire’s rise over rivals like Spain, France, and Holland. Mahan explained Britain’s eventual naval and geopolitical dominance through the strategic decisions, of the British people and their leader, chiefly the decision to invest in the British Navy and merchant marine.

One recurring contrast with the French Navy in Mahan’s seminal work is particularly striking: meritocracy animated the British Navy, whereas the ancient prejudices of class and birth drove the French.

Of the British people’s disposition to let the most competent commanders and tacticians helm His Majesty’s navy, Mahan writes, “Their practical sense left open the way of promotion to [the navy’s] highest honors the more humbly born; and every age saw admirals who had sprung from the lowest of the people.” In other words, even those born to common people could rise in the officer class if they did well and showed genius. This meritocracy expanded the pool of talent available for service and ensured that the whole of the British people, not merely aristocrats, lionized the navy, for it was their navy.

In contrast, the French, whose ambitions under Louis XIV and his successors focused more on continental expansion than on maritime supremacy, employed different tactics. Again, from Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power: “As late as 1789, at the outbreak of the Revolution, the French Navy List still bore the name of an official whose duty was to verify the proofs of noble birth on the part of those intending to enter the naval school.”  In contrast to the British Navy’s efficiency and professionalism, political favoritism and the monarchy’s discriminatory and elitist instincts determined officer appointments in France. This dramatically narrowed the pool of available talent and deprived the navy of the people’s support (as Mahan recounts, even minor naval defeats would shake the French public’s opinion of the navy’s necessity, whereas even major reversals in Britain would generate calls to rebuild the navy to its glory). In this environment, it is unsurprising that French naval geniuses like Richelieu or Count de Tourville were the exceptions that prove the rule.

More typical is the story of Comte d’Estrees, who commanded the French fleet at the 1673 Battle of Texel, part of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, in which the English and French allied against the United Provinces of Holland, then Europe’s maritime and commercial powerhouse. There, the Dutch had so little respect for French competence that the Dutch admiral, de Ruyter, only sent a small fraction of his fleet to contain the French ships while he engaged the rest of his navy against the more menacing and better-commanded British fleet. Mahan recounts that D’Estrees often deferred to the advice of his subordinates to hide his own incompetence, became angry at reverses he did not comprehend, and “had been made vice-admiral two years after he first went aboard ship” (emphasis mine). In the long-run, the British Navy repeatedly bested the French and ensured that the island kingdom would dominate the coming centuries through its expansive holdings and lucrative sea-going commerce.

Today we laugh at the French’s noblesse oblige and discrimination in determining their officers. But how little room we have to laugh!! Today’s America is more obsessed with accidents of birth than the French monarchy of yore. Most universities in the US today, the gateway not to one profession but to all modern high-powered professions, have not “one officer” as the French naval academy had, but dozens of admissions officers and DEI consultants whose sole sundry task is to “verify the proofs” of one’s race or sexual orientation (they fumbled Elizabeth Warren’s application).

As if requiring Asian applicants to score hundreds of points higher on the SAT than white or Hispanic counterparts to get into the same school creates a more trusting or more cohesive body politic. As if teaching young people to obsess over their racial and ethnic differences rather than respecting those differences but focusing on our commonality as Americans produces more empathetic and productive citizens. This obsession, and the class of connected pseudo-professionals, are first-order threats to America’s future.

Just this week, an article appeared in Marginal Revolution detailing how companies inclined to build semiconductors (a vital component of most industrial products) in the United States with CHIPS Act subsidies are recoiling due to DEI requirements buried in the much-ballyhooed bill (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/03/dei-vs-the-chips-act.html). To quote the original op-ed, “Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime.” Intel and Samsung determined that the cost of dealing with American litigation and worker mismatch is not worth collecting free money. This madness must stop.

If we wish to see a new American century, we must return to our roots as a meritocratic society rooted in competence, hard work, and an equal playing field where we treat each other as we deserve, and not as our fathers deserved. Otherwise, the ship for American competitiveness will soon sail.

AGAINST A ‘CASHLESS SOCIETY’

In the last several years, as the rate of debit card and mobile payment system usage has skyrocketed around the world, many people have called for a wholesale transition to a “cashless society” in which physical coin and bills are either directly outlawed as a means of payment or are de facto discontinued by the preponderance of businesses that no longer accept cash. To be sure, there are some benefits to the new instant payment systems, including: lower counterfeit losses for retailers, no spread of pathogens on physical currency, lower losses from theft (and less incentive for robberies, if the criminals perceive the victims as less likely to have cash), easier tracing of illegal activity, and easier transactions across distance (particularly international boundaries) without loss of time for payments to clear. Even I, lover of old-fashioned greenbacks and collectible coins that I am, find myself using a debit card for all but a few transactions these days, and relying on electronic clearinghouse systems to transfer digital dollars between bank and investment accounts, as opposed to getting cash out of one institution and then physically hauling it to the other. The benefits of responsible usage of the electronic payment systems are myriad and undeniable.

However, there are also massive downsides to the complete disappearance of cash, and given late political developments around the world especially, those who love economic liberty should fight to ensure that even if cash’s share of purchases continues to decline from its current place (Americans use cash for 20% of transactions according to the San Francisco Federal Reserve as of 2020, down from over 30% as recently as 2016 and an outright majority at the turn of the millennium). Two primary advantages of cash, and disadvantages of cards and electronic bank reserves or payment apps, stand out as a reason to hold emergency physical cash, to at least occasionally transact in cash, to refuse patronage at establishments that eschew cash, and most importantly, to mount the utmost political resistance possible if a proposal to replace the USD with a digital dollar goes from the abstract to a real proposal.

First, cash triggers the brain’s pain centers. That seems like an odd reason to defend and encourage its usage, right? But by causing pain, the prospect of relinquishing physical cash helps us to really prioritize our spending, to be intentional with the fruits of our labor rather than mindlessly giving them away by automatic deduction or swipe. When you have to give something real in exchange for the goods or services rendered, the loss feels every bit as real as the thing acquired. The transaction is accurately estimated in the mind’s cost-benefit calculus, rather than being tricked by the fact that, in case of a card or phone transaction, you still have the card or phone after the purchase. It doesn’t feel like you have to truly give anything up, and thus, you spend more. Way more. By some studies, people who exclusively use plastic debit and credit cards outspend those who use cash, holding all other factors including income level and size of purchase constant. Imagine what 20% less money spent would mean for your ability to save and invest every month, for your net worth a decade from now, and for the extra room (or lack thereof) in your closet. If you are struggling to budget or turn a respectable income into a secure net worth and peace of mind, START BY USING CASH. It will force you to budget. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use cards once this skill has been acquired, but still doing cash transactions now and then to remind yourself of the fact that goods and services cost something real never hurts. America’s larger businesses might love for this dynamic to disappear and consumer spending to reach higher and even less sustainable levels, and this is the chief reason that in any future fight to prevent a digital dollar, American Fortune 500 companies will be a formidable counterweight inside the conservative coalition.

Secondly, and much more importantly, cash is anonymous and secure against confiscation attempts, that is, not instantly traceable and hackable. Privacy is the bedrock of a free society. Not secrecy, which conceals things that should be public and which are dangerous, but PRIVACY, which keeps private those things that are properly so. Privacy is not the opposite of transparency, but the balance BETWEEN transparency and secrecy. It is that which reserves and intimate space for things, that keeps alive the particularity of things, whether financial transactions or human interactions (that the digitization of all life has led to a cheapening of all human bonds through the elimination of the private sphere is another post for another time). Does the government, your bank, or a life insurance company buying your data from Visa have a right to know that you like king size candy bars on Fridays, or that you gamble $100 when you drive through Oklahoma on vacation, or that you bought a 12-gage? Nope. You can willingly divulge such information if you wish by using a debit card, but an option to keep such things a private matter by using cash should always remain possible.

In a free society, by definition, not everything can be the government’s business. Cash ensures that this remains the case, and whatever crime reduction (likely illusory) promised by the cashless society is not enough to counterbalance the threat of a government that could freeze or confiscate its citizens’ entire liquid net worth with the click of a button, and less so when those citizens would then have no way to do business, since they do not have cash. Those who doubt that such depredations are possible (nay, I say, inevitable) need look only to the Canadian trucker protests of 2021 or the current German treatment of AfD supporters, where domestic political opponents of the ruling party in supposedly free societies had bank accounts frozen under anti-terrorist laws. The elites of our own United States have not been shy about calling Trump supporters “insurrectionists” despite the fact that they constitute 40-45% of the country. Do you really think that such a vindictive and fragile leadership class could be trusted with so awesome a power as to decide who can participate in the economy and who can’t? The question answers itself.

So if you visit a pub for St. Patty’s Day or take a day trip this weekend, here is an idea: celebrate the Emerald Isle while wearing green…and using greenbacks.

“No HUMAN BEING IS ‘ILLEGAL’?”

Last night, President Biden harangued his way through a tedious, misleading, demagogic, ridiculous State of the Union address, with precious few exceptions. As politics has become less interesting to me in the last several years, my post today is not primarily to dissect Biden’s SOTU address, although I do offer a general assessment in the three paragraphs below before delving into the main topic.

A brief general take on the address: Biden is hoping to scare Americans into re-electing him with the specter of Donald Trump’s return. He may well succeed, but is himself likely to scare many voters into Trump’s camp by doubling-down on progressive causes, including a federal abortion law, increased subsidies for failed green energy companies, harsher rhetoric for Israel’s self-defense than Hamas’s unprovoked attack, and implicit insinuation that the half of America’s citizens supporting Trump are lesser beings supporting a “threat to democracy” (a sentiment that takes some chutzpah to utter when your own party just got a 9-0 chastening at the Supreme Court for trying to remove the opposition from the ballot!!).

Biden’s statements on economics, the deficit, and taxation were old-school progressive demonization of success and twisting of the numbers to paint a “soak the rich to solve everything” canvas start to finish, and don’t deserve the dignity of an analysis. Ditto for his insane border section, in which he claimed he needed Congress’s permission to enforce existing US immigration law, and pretended that Republican obstruction to a weak border bill, not his administration’s own neon “amnesty and long wait times for an asylum hearing” signs, lifting of Title 42, and ending of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, were responsible for the border surge. The temerity to make such a backward claim with a straight face is astonishing.

Biden’s strongest moment was his opening with the danger of Russia to the Western World and the US interest in containing the conflict in Ukraine, echoing Reagan’s peace through strength, although he argued against a straw man here, implying Republicans were in Putin’s corner. The vast majority of GOP opposition to further Ukraine funding comes from the realization that America’s own weapons stockpiles are running short as shells are expended in Ukraine, and that continued aid for Ukraine jeopardizes our capacity to handle other conflicts that may arise in Asia, not love or even sympathy for Putin. Had Biden presented a plan to increase our defense industrial capacity and weapons production rather than just scapegoating the opposition and pretending no trade-off exists, this would have been a much stronger argument. But he straw-manned the opposition instead, and then immediately followed up his hollow exhortation for unity with a divisive, barbaric call to reinstate nationwide abortion access throughout all of pregnancy despite what the voters in any state may believe.

Thus much for the speech itself. My main purpose here is to address one of the rare moments of truth in Biden’s speech, and the revealing reaction of the most progressive of his fellow Democrats to such.

In the course of his “I can’t do my duty without your permission at the border” nonsense, Biden was heckled by someone on the Republican side of the aisle who called him out for nursing student Laken Riley’s horrific death (detailed in the last blog post) at the hands of an illegal immigrant. Biden briefly detoured from his prepared remarks to acknowledge the tragedy (but, of course, mispronouncing the name of the deceased), stating, “Lincoln (sic) Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal, that’s right,” and expressing sympathy for the family before continuing with his speech. You would think that, to the extent anyone found something in that objectionable, it would be the mispronunciation of “Laken,” right? Wrong.

Many progressive Democrats, tipping their hand that they no longer believe in the most fundamental elements of national sovereignty, are mad that Joe Biden used the word “illegal” to describe an alleged murderer. I wish I were joking, but after the address, Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) took to X, formerly Twitter, to proclaim proudly (and stupidly): “Let me be clear: No human being is illegal.” Other Democratic representatives including Chuy Garcia (D-Illinois) and Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) echoed the sentiment and compared Biden’s rhetoric to (gasp!) Donald Trump’s, stating that the use of the word “illegal” is “incendiary and wrong.” Well, not quite as wrong as murder, and in actuality, the word is not “incendiary,” but accurate.

As someone who went to a liberal arts college with a left-leaning cultural atmosphere and a prominent Amnesty International chapter (and, all fairness to that group, they do yeoman’s work around the world, some of which is noble, some of which I strongly disagree with), I have been hearing some variation of “No human being is illegal” for the better part of a decade now, and I understand its appeal. It seems empathetic, compassionate, clear-cut, morally righteous. How can being a person be illegal?

IT ISN’T, but that isn’t the crime of illegal immigration. The crime is not being a person, it is entering a place without the permission of the authorities that govern the place, and the reasons for needing such permission are manifest, myriad, and obvious: national security, public health and safety, economic policy, and the basic sovereignty of the people. No one is saying that, for instance, being John Doe is illegal, but John Doe violating a nation’s sovereignty by entering without permission is.

To analogize in a way a left-leaning person might understand: I frequently visit state and national parks. Many have either entrance fees, operating hours, or both, and all have some form of rules for conduct (some stricter, some less so). If I went to the Yosemite, snuck past the toll booth by entering on foot to avoid the $25 fee, and then proceeded to start building a cabin on national park grounds, what might happen to me? I’d get deported. Not from America, but from Yosemite. Would anyone find it credible or anything other than asinine if I protested, “No human being is illegal!! You can’t remove me!?” The crime wouldn’t be being Nathan, it would be breaking the park rules and entering without the permission of the National Park Service.

In the same way that the National Park Service runs Yosemite National Park, the citizens of the United States, through the preamble of the Constitution (“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”) and the laws adopted by their representatives pursuant to that Constitution, run the United States. To enter without permission of the same (and the American people are, by and large, very permissive about welcoming new Americans who are willing to do it the right way) is to violate the laws of the nation. Violating laws is illegal, and the people who do it wittingly are law-breakers, whatever their other virtues (see: James 2:10, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government). Thus, “illegal immigrant.” It’s the correct term, not “undocumented migrant” (which makes it sound like someone just lost their documentation, when, in fact, they never had any). If that phrasing bothers you…too bad.

Thoughts on the laken riley tragedy

Last Thursday, a Venezuelan illegal immigrant who does not deserve to be named brutally killed 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley of Athens, Georgia, on her morning jog. According to the police, the perpetrator assaulted Riley (possibly attempting rape) on her run but faced severe resistance and, in a panic, killed his victim, then disfigured her skull after dragging her to nearby woods in a feeble yet sinister attempt to conceal her body and identity. The autopsy revealed that Riley died as a result of the blunt-force trauma of the perpetrator’s blows. Such a paragraph is difficult to write without despairing, and first pausing to note the obvious: such a crime deserves severe punishment, and Riley’s family should be kept in prayer for the horrible tragedy that has befallen them.

That said, due to the illegal status of the predator, there is a significant amount of national press coverage and political controversy surrounding the case. Democrats are attempting to frame the case as an example of a sensationalist media that highlights cases where immigrants commit crime, while Republicans are blaming the attack on President Biden’s border policies and demanding stricter immigration controls.

For a little geographical context, Athens, where the attack occurred, is home to the University of Georgia (Riley had transferred from there to Augusta University, about two hours away, but apparently either still lived in Athens or was visiting). As you might expect from housing the state’s largest university system, Clarke County, which includes Athens, is a very liberal bastion surrounded by very conservative rural Georgia counties. In the 2020 election, Biden carried 70% to Trump’s 28% in Clarke County, while Trump won all the surrounding counties with between 66% and 79% of the vote.

As you might expect for a very liberal college town, Athens has a very progressive mayor, Kelly Girtz (D). At a grilling press conference the other day, a few interesting nuggets came out that I want to reflect on, as lessons for moving forward to ensure tragedies of this sort do not happen, and aren’t tied up in politics when they do.

First, and most obviously, even very liberal voters have a maximum tolerance for permissiveness when it threatens their own communities, and it was reached in Athens. Mayor Girtz was heckled, booed, and called a liar by his own constituents for stating that his “sanctuary city” policy for Athens had nothing to do with Riley’s death. That heckling and booing happened in a Biden +45% city. When reality, however tragically, exposes the cost of progressive craziness, even many previous believers blanche. They don’t become conservatives (usually), but they do become open to specific reforms that reign in the worst and most extreme instincts of progressive activists.

Secondly, even in the face of tragedy that was obviously the result of wrong-headed policy (e.g., if Athens were not a sanctuary city attracting illegal immigrants with the promise of protection from any possible deportation, the perpetrator would not have been in Athens, and thus would not have killed Riley), those committed to the ideology of open borders and the free flow of people across them will not recognize the obvious, but will demand curtailments of US citizens’ liberties while appealing to statistics.

In his press conference, Mayor Girtz re-emphasized in the wake of the killing that, on the whole, immigrants, even illegal immigrants (who are marginally more violent than legal immigrants, one of the lowest-crime cohorts in the US) are less likely to commit violent crime than US citizens. This is true. But it is also irrelevant. When a US citizen carries out a crime versus one of his or her countrymen, it is a tragedy on par with what happened to Laken Riley in physical terms, but in legal and political terms, it is different. Citizen-on-citizen crime is not entirely avoidable. It is as old as civilization itself, and it is one of the risks we bear by choosing to live in societies versus as hermits. People hurt each other, thus the need of a justice system.

However, every crime perpetrated by an illegal immigrant is a crime that should not have occurred at all, because that person should not have been here to commit it. This is fundamentally different than a crime being committed by someone who we all agree had a right, either by birth or naturalization, to be here. We agreed that the person was part of our body politic. Not so with the illegal immigrant. There was never any societal consent to his or her presence, and thus the crime adds grievous injury to legal insult. That such a person is less likely to commit a crime than the average American doesn’t make those instances where crimes are committed any less atrocious or the failures of will in enforcing our southern border that made such crimes possible any more defensible.

Think of it this way: if we admitted 1 million legal migrants from Mexico and Venezuela after congressional debate, and they went through a legal process to become citizens or at least legal residents, and then one committed a murder, that would be a tragedy, but one that resulted from our calculations as a nation that we would make a certain decision and that the benefits of the new citizens (who could be screened for previous criminal convictions in their home countries as part of the naturalization process) outweighed the risks. Tragedy, but the result of an action the nation took, a risk we chose to bear. Again, make those 1 million illegal immigrants, and it’s very different. No one consented to this. No one thought it through. The nation did not soberly weigh the risks and benefits, screen the entrants, and decide who could contribute to America. The crime happened as the result of thoughtlessness, apathy, and a lack of will to execute the laws of the United States. That is infuriating.

The simple fact is that, without Mr. Biden’s completely voluntary termination of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy and accompanying Title 42 restrictions on asylum claims based on pandemic emergency powers, the perpetrator of these crimes would likely not be in the United States. Neither would thousands of others who peddle drugs, join gangs, or commit violent crimes, a vanishingly small minority of illegal immigrants as they might be. The resort to statistics is ridiculous. The point of an immigration system is so that we can make decisions on who to admit individually rather than relying on crude aggregate data to reassure ourselves that the people we let into the country AFTER THE FACT are probably mostly okay.

Thirdly, the drumbeat in response to violent crime in America continues to be the same: more surveillance, less privacy, less liberty. In his press conference, mayor Girtz emphasized that the city of Athens was investing in things like “a real time crime center” and a “mobile surveillance trailer” to curtail crime, as if the problem were citizens that, in this entirely digital, trackable world in which we live, still have too much privacy, rather than the obvious: too few cops with too little freedom of action, and too many bad actors with too much freedom of action.   

I have a better solution than curtailing liberty to make a culture of permissiveness and anarchy only marginally safer: stop attracting illegal immigrants, stop easing the burden of criminals to post bail, stop defunding police in liberal jurisdictions across the United States, stop the prosecutorial flaccidity that lets criminals back out onto the streets despite their obvious threat to the lives and liberties of others, and let those citizens who abide by the laws have the fruits of their birthright and their obedience: liberty and privacy. Laken Riley should still have hers.