Sigh. . .

Out of some 260 million adult Americans, our two major candidates for president in 2024 are an elderly man who will be 86 by the time his term ends and a sociopath who mounted an insurrection against the United States.

So very true. 

Oh good! A new court panic.

Having failed to rule in favor of the goofball independent state legislature theory, or take away the rights of Native Americans in regard to the Indian Child Welfare Act, and the public basically agreeing with the end of racial bias in college admission, you might wonder what terrible angst inducing, "it ain't going to happen" thing left wing court watchers can now wring their hands over.

Well, have no fear!

Robert Reich

@RBReich

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45m

SCOTUS just took up a case that could preemptively ban a wealth tax. The lawsuit appears to have been filed with the explicit purpose of outlawing a wealth tax before Dems can enact one. They're trying to torpedo one of our only remaining tools to combat raging inequality.

The Court isn't going to "preemptively ban a wealth tax".

It's crap like this that makes the left look just as goofball as the far right.

Blog Mirror: Why I’m not running for president (or anything else, thank you)

An interesting article on what it takes to be a political candidate:

Why I’m not running for president (or anything else, thank you)

Most of the time, the Supreme Court is highly predictable.

And most of the time, it actually doesn't rule "right/left".

Which is why nobody who knows anything about the law is, or should be, surprised by the recent ruling on Native American adoptions.

In order to express surprise, you have to be a legal pundit who doesn't practice law, like Nena Totenberg.

And this is also why nobody thinks that the Court is going to adopt the "independent state legislature theory".

That'll probably be a nine to nothing ruling, in spite of people like Robert Reich running around the streets declaring that the sky is falling, and Justice Thomas is a baddy.

Also, most of the time, the Court doesn't get any credit for being predictable, rational, and even boring.

What fun would that be, after all?

One of Five Fake Crises

Some of these you can debate, but this is very interesting:

5. “Out of control government spending.” Rubbish. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40 percent in the past 50 years as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product (from 11 percent to 6.3 percent). Lately, rising deficits have been driven by Social Security and Medicare (to be expected, as boomers retire), and by defense spending and George W. Bush’s and Donald Trump’s huge tax cuts that mostly benefited the wealthy and big corporations — and that will have added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.

Robert Reich:  Five Fake Crises 

Logic, the 2nd Amendement, and the 14th.

Folks like Robert Reich and other pundits who are not in the far right "let's default on the debt and destroy the global economy" camp are quoting the 14th Amendment a lot right now.

Why?

Well, consider this, it states:

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

Section 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

The argument is logical enough, and pertains to this:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, . . . shall not be questioned.

A cap on debt that operates to dishonor the debt, intentional or not,  as long as it was authorized by law, cannot be questioned.

The stupid debt caps call it into question.

Clearly, they are unconstitutional, just as pundits, including those on the left, note.  And firebrands on the right who hold otherwise are demonstrating contempt for the constitution.

So let's next consider this.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The same thing is at work here.  Not infringing, means not infringing.

The point here isn't to argue the policy or wisdom of either provisions.   Rather, you don't get to depart from the logic train once you board it.  Or, in other words, if you are a guy like Robert Reich, you can't argue that you can go ahead and infringe the Second Amendment, as it doesn't mean what it says, while arguing that you must apply the 14th Amendment, as it means what it says.  Nor can you be Kevin McCarthy, and argue that the Second Amendment is plain in its meaning, while turning a blind eye to the 14th Amendment.

They both mean what they say, but if you argue one, you must accept the other.  If you can logically argue to depart from the text of one, you must do the same as they're both so plain.

Some basic economics, for economists

The simple reason being, economist grasp almost nothing about the economy and how it actually works, on a more existential level.

Including, even why the economy exists.

And politicians, speaking about the economy, don't look at the whole, but the part, as the whole isn't very satisfactory in a right/left construct.

Indeed, left wing politicians would be horrified by a real deep reform of the economy in ways that would actually work, as would right wing politicians.

Witness the latest by economist Robert Reich:

The economic message that will get Biden reelected and give Dems a majority in both Houses of Congress

Indeed, let's break them down and look at the uncomfortable truth.

The economic goal should be more jobs at higher wages. Right?

Let's start there.  That seems reasonable enough, so I'll basically concede it. But perhaps a better position would be to state that the economic goal would be more worthwhile jobs that allow for individual family independence, at middle class reasonable wages. 

Because, what's an economy for? To serve people.

It isn't really "more decent jobs at higher wages".  Indeed, it would really be all jobs at family supporting wages.  That's not really the same thing.

I don't know that Reich would disagree with that, but it's important to keep it in overall mind.  Economist tend to think that all jobs are super nifty, not matter what they are, as long as 100% of everyone who can work is working, and for good wages.  

Actual people, however, don't think that way. They want decent jobs worth doing to support themselves, and their families if they have one, and most people do.

The irony here is that the left and the right have come around to the same position on this, over the year.  It's a very Soviet, warehouse the children you unfortunately had so that everyone can work, until they are old, of course, as the Boomer run the economy and it's okay if they retire.

We continue.

Yet the Fed, corporate economists, and the GOP have turned the goal upside down — into fewer jobs and lower wages. Otherwise, they say, we’ll face more inflation.

Bob can't quite seem to grasp that unless an overheated economy is slowed down, wages erode.  And the Fed, etc., isn't trying to depress wages.  Inflation itself erodes wages.  They're trying to slow inflation in the only method known to work.

He knows that, but he has a pet thesis that is, as he would put it: 

Rubbish.

And here, several paragraphs later, is the thesis. 

The Fed has raised borrowing costs at 10 consecutive meetings, pushing its benchmark rate to over 5 percent. Yet inflation has barely budged. In April, it dropped to 4.9 percent (year-over-year) from 5 percent in March — according to Wednesday’s Labor Bureau data.

Why are the Fed’s rate hikes having so little effect?

Actually, historically, that's not bad.

An ideal inflation rate would be 0%, or quite frankly slight, perhaps 1% or 2% deflation, to recover some lost ground.  5%, however, is headed in the right direction.  3% for much of my life was regarded as basically no inflation at all, and the extremely low inflationary rates we had until COVID were simply extraordinary.

Oh, COVID, remember that? The thing that closed the ports and kept good from coming in, reminding Americans that we make nothing.

A thing like that could almost have been inflationary.

A think like that may also have served to remind Americans that some of the jobs they had left, pre COVID, were awful.  Note the big decrease in long haul truck drivers, employees in an industry that had already seen a massive departure of Americans in favor of foreign nationals, and which is effectively subsidized, as we've noted elsewhere.

It's an awful job.  It's almost as if we might want to think about doing this more efficiently.

If only private companies could be induced to ship things by rail. . . .oh wait. . . 

Anyhow, raising interest rates hasn't worked as it hasn't been high enough, that's why.  5% is a joke.  It ought to be at least 8%.

And, additionally, because this inflationary cycle is global, that's also why.

Because, left wing economist, global food prices and energy prices have risen dramatically as a former far left wing operative, now politicians, and a person with a strange relationship (listening right wing politicians) with Donald J. Trump, has invaded a neighbor resulting in the first peer to peer, large scale, conventional war since the Korean War.

That's a lot of the reason why.

But, left wing economist states:

Because inflation is not being propelled by an overheated economy. It’s being propelled by overheated profits.

Okay, I'm a distributist, and I'd favor addressing this to the element it's the truth, but it's just frankly not very true.   One basic fact is that those supposedly profiteering business are taking in money that's worth less every day.  No wonder they feel they have to take in more.

But Bob says:

So, what’s causing inflation? Corporations with enough monopoly power to raise their prices and fatten their profits — which the Fed’s rate hikes barely affect.

Okay, well then let's go to a Distributist economy and limit the number of areas business enterprises can operate the corporate business form.  That would be extremely deflationary, make for more good jobs at a wider level, and be much more stable.  It'd do a whole lot more than raising taxes, as Bob suggest, which would be most likely passed on to everyone else.

Any regular economist in favor of that?

Absolute not, as they're all really just corporate capitalist economist and favor slightly tinkering with the mechanics of things. Basically, the difference between a conservative economist and a liberal economist is the difference motor heads of the 70s exhibited on whether they were Holly Carb or Edlebrock fans.

Big whoop.

But here's another uncomfortable truth.  Let's go back to the first item.

The economic goal should be more jobs at higher wages. Right?

Part of the reason that wages rose is that during COVID there was a big decrease in immigration, legal and illegal, into the United States.

For years, economist on the left and right have claimed that immigrants take jobs that Americans won't, never mind that they take what are frankly a lot of middle class jobs in some industries.  As they didn't come in, Americans took those jobs, but demanded living wages.

Supposedly, in the economist world, immigration had no impact on inflation, or jobs, and in fact boosted the economy.  They may have boosted the economy, but its now conclusively demonstrated that they did so by depressing wages.

And this worked an injustice for the native born, including the native born poor.  This was always known at some level as it provided the fuel to the occasional riots and domestic strife at the inner city urban level.

This has also caused liberals like commentator Chuck Todd to directly claim that we're experiencing inflation as we aren't seeing immigrants come in. But what this implicitly admits is that the high American immigration rate operates to keep wages low, and that is what was depressing inflation.  Absent the high immigration levels, wages would rise to their natural level.

And that's what they've been doing.

Setting aside Donald Trump's pal, Vlad "if Czar Nikki owned I still do" Putin, part of what is going on is at attempt at wage stabilization, at American living wage levels, something that was frustrated by decades of wage erosion due to immigration.

Hogwash

That's what the most recent entry by Robert Reich is: 

The Republican threat to our children

Reich is an intelligent man, and a highly left wing one.  Like a lot of intelligent pundits, right and left, he's mastered the art of connecting the disconnected.

The two major political parties do this all the time, which is part of the reason American politics are dysfunctional.  One proposition is stated, and then a chain of them are linked in, in order to support a thesis that is, well, hogwash.

A lot of issues in the world just flat out stand on their own, or nearly so. Abortion is one example.  Reich, who perversely, given his Jewish heritage, is pretty much for infanticide in the womb without restraint, makes the BS link that "if you are pro-life, you must be pro gun control".

In truth, a lot of pro-life people probably are pro gun control. But the two are not really linked. And if they were, Robert Reich would be manning the picket lines against abortion at abortion clinics, as infanticide factories are euphemistically called.  Indeed, as the arguments for abortion are pretty much the same as the arguments for the Holocaust were, i.e., "they aren't real people", "they're a burden on real people", and therefore the two really are linked, he should be in any event.

In this article, he notes the conservative opposition to teenage gender mutilation and then links that into gun control, etc.  It's patently absurd. There's no connection whatsoever.

There are connections, however, with a host of other "liberal" laws that are not under attack and should inform an intelligent audience, or perhaps Mr. Reich.

You can't get tattoos legally as a minor.

You can't buy firearms, in spite of what Mr. Reich seems to be suggesting, as a minor.

Child labor laws do exist, in spite of what Mr. Reich is suggesting, and at a Federal level.

You can't legally bind a minor to a contract, and therefore minor's can't contract.

In more and more states, minors aren't allowed to marry, which is something the left supports.

The left, however, is bizarrely fascinated by sex, and including sex in the most odd ways imaginable.  In 2023, with so many problems facing the nation, a rational legal effort to prevent minors from being mutilated in the name of a passing and likely bogus set of theories is a good effort.

Remember eugenics?

It was a big deal prior to World War Two.

Do you remember it Robert?  You probably ought to consider that at one time it was the up and coming "scientific" "medical" theory, and so those of low IQ or who were impaired were chemically neutered, people were lobotomized, and ultimately, millions of Europeans gassed.

Transgenderism will pass as well, and just as the left has manged to forget its prior associations with things inconvenient, such as how nifty the early Soviet Union was, they'll wash their hands of this.  

Probably, trial lawyers will do the washing.

But those backing it will just go back to their comfortable lives and linking in one improbable with another.

 

Warning (if you needed it): Trump is nuts, and he’ll do anything — anything — to win

So, will Robert Reich, or Bernie Saunders, or the other "Progressives". . .

 who see infanticide on demand as a right now give the pharmaceutical industry, which before they saw as greedy, the thumbs up?

Drug Company Leaders Condemn Ruling Invalidating F.D.A.’s Approval of Abortion Pill

If not, why not?  To do otherwise would be at least a little hypocritical.

Of course, no more than being a member of an ethnicity for which mass extermination was advocated, while advocating mass extermination.

Or for advocating for democracy, while opposing it.

Hard words, I know.

But advocating for life, no matter how inconvenient, involves that.

Violence and Simple Minded Analysis

To a certain category of intellectual, left and right, everything is always explained by money.

Well, not everything is explained by money.

On this occasion, we focus on Robert Reich, who tends to be focused mostly on money, and while we sometimes enjoy his analysis, and whose columns we have linked in at this site, we find to be often acting with blinders on.

Here's Bob's latest after the recent Tennessee shooting:

The lives of our children or the greed of gun manufacturers?

This concept, that it's firearms manufacturer's greed that causes US violence, is a common one, but it's bunk.

Christmas Card of a Tennessee Representative.  It wasn't marketing by the firearms manufacturers that made this somehow seem cute or acceptable.  It was something in society that did it.

I've written about the AR15 Effect here before, and I'll be frank that the firearms' industry, which has played along with the glorification of combat arms, shares in a big portion of the blame for causing American gun culture to evolve from hunting and the field to imagined combat.  It's definitely happened. But the firearms' industry mostly followed the development, not caused it.  Indeed, some major manufacturers, Sturm Ruger being one such example, resisted the urge to make rifles with an AR15 appearance until market forces were so far down the path that continuing on in that direction was simply pointless.

To an extent, manufacturers deserve some blame for popularizing weapons that have a combat aura to them, but perhaps the NRA, which went from focusing on hunting rifles and target rifles to frequently featuring combat sort of firearms, in an effort to boost the fear of its members deserves some too.  Indeed, blaming manufacturers puts the cart before the horse.  The AR15 has been around since the 60s and served in military hands for many years before it obtained its current reputation.  The gun didn't create its own specialized market, but the market somehow evolved around the gun.

But it's not just that.  It's something deeper.  Bob's fellows have cried for years about how killing infants in the wombs is A-OK, as women get to go to work, their bodies flushed of infant, and that's kid, while indoctrinating a culture that killing a perceived problem somehow remains wrong.  You can't really have both.  The culture at large has gone from one in which many individuals had experienced military service and left it behind, to one in which men in uniform, nearly any uniform, are absolutely worshiped.  Presently the political left is busy ripping down what few standards remain, if they can, proclaiming such nonsensical monikers as LGBTQIAP2S+? real, when clearly they're delusional.

And we're surprised our politics have become extreme, and some violently unhinged?

Does that mean that we aren't at the point where legislation regulating semi-automatic rifles, of some sort, remains beyond being considered?  Politically, that probably is where we are at.

But make no mistake, even if legislation passed tomorrow placing semi-automatic rifles into the same category as fully automatic ones, it wouldn't address having dumped the mentally ill out on to the street and treating them as normal, flooding the streets with drugs, some legal and illegal, and continuing to have policies that treat the labor pool as if its 1953 rather than 1923.

That's going to take a lot of work, and neither political party has the slightest intent of engaging in it.

Related Threads:

Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Bank collapses, The Economy, Modern Work. A meandering trip through the punditsphere.

I haven't commented on the recent bank collapses at all here, as banking doesn't interest me much.

First National Bank in Meeteetsee, circa 1901.

It should.  Economics does. But banking doesn't.  Given that, I tend to think this probably isn't as big of a crisis as it's being portrayed.

Indeed, I think it isn't.

Not that it isn't important.

A couple of observations, however, on the observations.

On This Week and Meet The Press, Elizabeth Warren was on, meaning she was doing a full court press over the weekend.  Both of her interviews were nearly identical, as both interviewers let her backtrack on a question to give her full, long explanation of the history of this topic.

I have to say, her explanation was good.  I don't know if it's correct, but it was good.  And that's saying something, as I frankly can't stand Elizabeth Warren.

One thing she continually noted is how we weren't watching these big banks like we were "small local banks".  I don't know if that's true either, but she was full of profuse praise for small local banks.

Hey, I'm a distributist and a localist, so I like small banks.  Is there an argument here for keeping small local banks local?

Seems like there is, although with a modern economy you're going to need big financial institutions.  She wasn't arguing otherwise.  It's just an interesting aspect of this.

One member of the banking committee was asked if these banks were "too big to fail" and he flat out said yes, an interesting example of political honesty.

Of note, while the banks are sort of being "bailed out", those who are really emphasizing this right now seem to fail to appreciate that FDIC insurance is being used for this, which suggests that the insured face amount of $250,000 is really way too low.  It probably ought to be more like $1,000,000 at this point.

Robert Reich, whose opinions I have a love/hate relationship with, used the opportunity, predictably, to hammer the rich, writing:

The undeserving rich

Putting the bank bailout in context

A while back I saw somebody commenting to one of Reich's Twitter feeds on this topic, which he's obsessed with, that Reich was rich himself.  According to an online source he has a net worth of $4M, which would mean, quite frankly, that in contemporary terms, he really isn't.  Shoot, half of that could be his house alone, depending upon where he lives, with the house not really being all that much.

Reich's article is an interesting one and basically amounts to an argument that post Reagan, the economy has been rigged to favor the upper 1%, more or less.  That's not how he puts it, of course, but is basically what he believes.  He notes that workers incomes haven't really gone up in 40 years.

All that is true, and from a Distributist point of view, is a nifty argument, the problem is however that the percentage of Americans who are "wealthy" has increased remarkably in the past 40 years.  Indeed, some demographers worry that the American middle class is disappearing not because the middle class is sinking into poverty, but that the upper middle class is moving into wealth.

In real terms, almost nobody, save for people on the street, something that wasn't tolerated 40 years ago, is poor the way the poor were, say, in the 1960s.  Prior to 1950, the middle class was mostly lower middle class and lived on the edge of poverty, That's just not true anymore.  And poverty was by and large worse in real terms at that time, than now.  It's easy to forget that as we have a 1) Norman Rockwell view of the past and 2) we always think our own times are worse than they really are.

Therefore, the Reich argument, the way it's made, really doesn't hold water.

Which gets us to the fact that  the best arguments for addressing the modern economy actually have to do with Social issues, as in Social Justice in the classic Pieper sense, rather than economics.  

What people like Reich, or Warren, edge up on is arguing that life was "nicer" when there was a big middle class.  That's true.  And many things that are unobtainable to even the upper middle class and the lower wealthy class were then, as there were very view super wealthy.  But lib economist don't go there as they are, frankly, just a little left of center on the capitalist scale.

Put another way, the difference between liberal economist and conservative economists is very slight.  Both main camps are fully vested in capitalism and are, beyond that, invested in the theory that a capitalist economy is its own good, rather than the distributist concept, which is another free market concept, that any economy only serves to serve people.

Hardly anyone is going to argue that in the lib or con economic camps, but it's true.  The theory is always that we do this or that for the economy, and then this or that happens to people, rather than considering what do people want, and what kind of economy best serves that.

A really interesting example of this, I'd note, is that really left wing economist essentially join industrialist in concepts that really only serve industry.  They seemingly don't know that.

For example, you'll see left wing economists, and politicians with strong interest in economic topics, argue that we need abortion so that women can work, or that we need government funded day care so that women can work.

This is really only liberal in that it takes the liberal view that pregnancy is some sort of freakish medical aberration that needs to be medicated into extermination or, if a person is so unfortunate that a child is born, it needs to be separated from the Dear Worker.  Beyond that, it's pure industrialism.

The big achievement of industrialism early on is that it took men off of family farms and family workshops and sent them off all day long to work.  In the 20th Century, it started to do the same for women.  Abortion and birth control were big industrial successes, as they meant that there was a way to separate women from biology and all those problematic little people.  Of course, it turned out that people had children anyhow, so daytime child concentration camps had to come about in order to address that.

This, really interestingly, is one area where the extreme left and industrialist have all come together.  Communists, for example, boosted the "let's warehouse all these little problems so that the mothers can toil" approach to things, whereas quite a few modern businesses have put in day cares so that they can take the "time off to raise children: . . no, just bring the little urchins into the business day care".

Here's an area where Reich and company have a real wage point, but not in the manner that they might imagine.  Part of the reason that wages have remained low over 40 years is that we've practically doubled the work force in relationship to the population.  I.e., if where you had 200 adults and 100 workers 40 years ago, now you have 200 workers.  More workers equal less pay.  

Now, I'm not saying that women shouldn't work.  I'm just saying that in our modern economy, they've been compelled to work.  And one way or another, in the modern economy, employers have had to accommodate children in the workplace where they would have resisted even 20 years ago.  

A lot of people are refusing to work now, it seems, or so the society wide rumor has it.  And that does seem to have some merit.

Chuck Todd, on the Meet the Press, noted a labor shortage in his early part of the show this pasts weekend, attributing that to a "restrictive immigration policy".  

Todd is apparently delusional.

The US has the most open immigration policy on the planet.  What the country has been working on, not too successfully, is halting illegal immigration.  That's what Todd really means.  Clamping down on illegal immigration is creating a labor shortage, in Todd's mind.

Illegal immigration actually serves to depress wages for the same reason noted above.  Illegal workers in the country means more workers, and that means lower wages.  D'uh.

All of which suggests, on this topic, that addressing illegal workers would mean a rise in wages, which we have been seeing.  Isn't that what we wanted?  Well, it is inflationary, at least temporary, but having suppressed wages for years, some of that's going to occur until it levels out, which it ultimately will.

All of that gets back to this, what do people want out of the economy?

I suspect they want something of their own.

Blog Mirror: Two notable presidential conversations with Zelensky

 

Two notable presidential conversations with Zelensky

Blog Mirror: How do we get democracy back into presidential elections?

 

How do we get democracy back into presidential elections?

Blog Mirror: Office Hours: Fake brand competition, monopoly power, and inflation

An interesting article by Robert Reich on monopolies:

Office Hours: Fake brand competition, monopoly power, and inflation

Of course Reich, like most conventional economist, even though on the left, points this out, but then starts whistling pasts the graveyard on it.  The solution to this sort of thing, and it is an obvious problem, is a much more distributist economy.  Not simply slightly adjusting the dials on the Sherman Anti Trust Act or corporate tax rates, although both of those need to be addressed.

Blog Mirror: My mother was wrong: The problem with “everything works out in the end” reassurance

 

My mother was wrong

The problem with “everything works out in the end” reassurance