Movement Toward a Post-Literate Society

I've gone on in comments a bit about how many teens and twenty-somethings have trouble reading more than a few paragraphs or maybe a couple of pages and so university professors have, in general, adapted by giving shorter and shorter readings for classes.

Now the College Board has followed suit with the SAT and it looks like the ACT is making similar changes.*

The College Board notes on page 13 of its Digital SAT Suite of Assessments technical framework that two of the primary goals in changing the exam were to make it shorter and to give students more time per question. To make this happen in the new “Reading and Writing” section of the test, they shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage. Their explanation is that this model “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”

...

Finally, the optional essay was eliminated completely.

The math section has been made easier over the last 15 years as well.

*Although the author of the article is Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which is trying to compete with the SAT and ACT, the SAT published the changes and defends them.

Pāgānī

Public Accommodations

Having been born in Atlanta where the issue was important at the time, I grew up understanding that a 'public accommodation' can't discriminate in choosing whom it serves. You used to see signs in businesses asserting that 'We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason,' but in fact the government held that they had no such right to reserve. At issue was whether the future governor's restaurant could refuse to serve black customers. 

By the 1960s the Pickrick had expanded to feed 400 diners - all white. And that made Maddox a target for African-American protest. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it also brought him into conflict with the federal law. But it made him a hero to white working-class Georgians and small businessmen, who bitterly resented being told what to do by Washington.

Contrary to mythology, Maddox never beat any black people, though the day after the passage of the act, he did dent the roof of a black minister's car. He also waved a pistol and was put on trial on gun charges, but was acquitted by an all-white jury. In the summer of 1964, Maddox organised a rally in Atlanta for George Wallace and also for Calvin Craig, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

To liberals, Maddox became an ugly symbol of southern "redneck" racism. To himself, and to many of his customers, the issue was not about race but about freedom. He saw himself as a small businessman whose rights over his property were being taken from him. When he closed his restaurant, rather than allow blacks to eat there as ordered by a federal injunction, he said that "my president, my Congress and the communists have closed my business and ended a childhood dream".

Maddox lost that fight, even though he later did become governor. The principle was enshrined in the law, specifically Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

This all leads me to ask, is Uber a public accommodation? 

Uber is piloting a new option for its U.S. app that will allow female passengers to request women drivers, coming after the company has long grappled with preventing sexual assault on its platform.

The feature, called Women Preferences, will launch in a pilot stage in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit in the next few weeks, Uber said in a blog post on Wednesday. It marks the first time the popular rideshare app is bringing this option to its service in the United States after launching it in 40 other countries.

Uber joins Lyft and other taxi hailing apps, like HERide and Just Her Rideshare, that connect female passengers with women drivers.

Women drivers on Uber can also refuse to pick up men, or those who look like men. 

I don't really mind the notion because I agree that we should allow women reasonable steps to protect their safety. These don't have to turn on blanket sex discrimination. Uber, for example, already allows drivers to rate their passengers as well as the other way around, giving drivers information about the quality of the ride they might be asked to deliver. I don't often use Uber since there is no such thing way out here, but on the rare occasion that I have used it in cities I have maintained my 5.0 rating as a passenger by being courteous and tipping well. If you look at that rating you will have a reasonable confidence that picking me up will be a pleasant experience even though I am quite completely male. 

There is a broader social issue at work. Conservative women (mostly) have been fighting a pitched battle to defend female-only spaces. Although these are not themselves 'public accommodations' they often exist in the context of things that are: locker rooms in gymnasia or restrooms in hotel restaurants, for example. There seems to be some hedge for allowing sex discrimination as long as it is pointed always in the one direction of excluding males.

The Babylon Bee's got jokes (and about Ozzy and Hulk and Gaza too!), but I always wonder with our anti-discrimination laws if there is actually a real principle at work or not. Straight white males seem to be readily subject to discrimination in hiring, education, accommodation and now getting a ride back to the hotel from that meeting. LGBT folk face at least some discrimination, being formally unprotected. Even Black men are now subject to this ride discrimination thing in what seems like a 'public accommodation,' and they were the original class that Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 intended to protect. 

Does the law mean anything, or are we still just playing favorites? It's hard to discern anything remotely like 'equality' in the way these things keep playing out. 

Requiescant in Pace

It was not a surprise to learn that Ozzy Osbourne had died after his farewell concert, which was only seventeen days before his death. That was exactly how Lemmy Kilmister had finished his life, down to the number of days as I understand it. 

I was surprised to read that Hulk Hogan had died yesterday, however. Terry Gene Bollea, rather, the actor who played Hulk Hogan -- although it was doubtless the Hulk's character that brought about the steroid use and physical injuries that led to his many surgeries and heart condition. 

May they rest in peace. They were both important figures in my youth, and Ozzy long before that; he was making some of his best music before I was born, and much of the rest while I was too young to appreciate it yet. 

Hanging Journalists

You can read the article the poster wanted to hang him over here, if you are so inclined. I've never met nor spoken with Mr. Stephens, but he is fielding some of the same arguments that I have myself. I take them to be honest considerations, and would hate to see even a New York Times journalist hanged over speaking what they see as the truth. Others may oppose the truth by giving their own arguments; and in defense of the Times' honor on this point, I believe that they publish at least one view opposing that one every day. Here is today's; and here is a collection of letters on both sides in response to Stephen's piece. One of them points out that the US killed 200,000 people with one bomb in Japan to force a surrender; Richard Fernandez today raises a similar point about the use of starvation to force that surrender.

Of course, if you're trying to 'globalize the intifada,' I suppose killing anyone anywhere is all right if it advances the cause. Journalists and even bloggers like Fernandez or myself are no exceptions. Death comes for all; war sometimes does too. 

Nicomachean Ethics III.10

After courage let us speak of temperance; for these seem to be the virtues of the irrational parts. We have said that temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures (for it is less, and not in the same way, concerned with pains); self-indulgence also is manifested in the same sphere.

'The virtues of the irrational parts' of the soul, that is; but of course the virtues are not themselves part of the irrational part of the soul. They are the rational parts of the soul that control the irrational parts. Courage, as you have read several times now, is concerned with fear of pains to include wounds and death; temperance, principally with pleasures not to be over-indulged. 

Aquinas' promotion of temperance over courage makes sense even on Aristotle's own terms when you remember that Aquinas pointed out that most people are more motivated by pleasure than pain; recall the talk about Helen at the gates. 

Now, therefore, let us determine with what sort of pleasures they are concerned. We may assume the distinction between bodily pleasures and those of the soul, such as love of honour and love of learning; for the lover of each of these delights in that of which he is a lover, the body being in no way affected, but rather the mind; but men who are concerned with such pleasures are called neither temperate nor self-indulgent.

Indeed, the love of seeking that most worthy of honor is magnanimity, which is going to prove to be the capstone and crown of virtue. So: the high pleasures of the soul, especially to include living in a way that is most worthy of honor, should not be tempered but embraced.

There are other things people find pleasant that should not be, even though they are not bodily pleasures:

Nor, again, are those who are concerned with the other pleasures that are not bodily; for those who are fond of hearing and telling stories and who spend their days on anything that turns up are called gossips, but not self-indulgent, nor are those who are pained at the loss of money or of friends.

The Stoics might suggest that allowing yourself to be pained at the loss of money or friends is irrational, but grief over the loss of friends falls within Aristotle's quite large concession to friendship as part of the good life. Marcus Aurelias would remind you that you always knew your friends were mortal; but for Aristotle, life without friends is much impoverished because it degrades the life of one's own mind by removing another self in whose good you can also find happiness, which is the end of ethics.

Temperance must be concerned with bodily pleasures, but not all even of these; for those who delight in objects of vision, such as colours and shapes and painting, are called neither temperate nor self-indulgent; yet it would seem possible to delight even in these either as one should or to excess or to a deficient degree.

And so too is it with objects of hearing; no one calls those who delight extravagantly in music or acting self-indulgent, nor those who do so as they ought temperate.

Nor do we apply these names to those who delight in odour, unless it be incidentally; we do not call those self-indulgent who delight in the odour of apples or roses or incense, but rather those who delight in the odour of unguents or of dainty dishes; for self-indulgent people delight in these because these remind them of the objects of their appetite. And one may see even other people, when they are hungry, delighting in the smell of food; but to delight in this kind of thing is the mark of the self-indulgent man; for these are objects of appetite to him.

You may note the oddity of Aristotle referring so much to the common judgment: 'no one calls...' is argumentum ad populum. Aristotle was not concerned with what would later come to be called the informal fallacies; his considerations on logic generally point at formal logic, which isn't appropriate to ethics (EN I.3 again). He discusses the issue somewhat in the Rhetoric, especially in Book I, but there he is talking about enthymemes rather than strict logical arguments. "However, where the general premise of a syllogism is supposed to be true, making the subsequent deduction necessary, the general premise of an enthymeme is merely probable, which leads only to a tentative conclusion," thus making them proper for ethical/political arguments. 

Nor is there in animals other than man any pleasure connected with these senses, except incidentally. For dogs do not delight in the scent of hares, but in the eating of them, but the scent told them the hares were there; nor does the lion delight in the lowing of the ox, but in eating it; but he perceived by the lowing that it was near, and therefore appears to delight in the lowing; and similarly he does not delight because he sees 'a stag or a wild goat', but because he is going to make a meal of it.

This psychology of animals is entirely speculative; I personally think dogs seem to delight greatly in the scent of hares, even when the hare is long gone and there is no chance of eating one. I've known dogs who chased rabbits with great pleasure even if they wouldn't hurt it once they caught it, just because they loved to chase them.  

Temperance and self-indulgence, however, are concerned with the kind of pleasures that the other animals share in, which therefore appear slavish and brutish; these are touch and taste. But even of taste they appear to make little or no use; for the business of taste is the discriminating of flavours, which is done by winetasters and people who season dishes; but they hardly take pleasure in making these discriminations, or at least self-indulgent people do not, but in the actual enjoyment, which in all cases comes through touch, both in the case of food and in that of drink and in that of sexual intercourse. This is why a certain gourmand prayed that his throat might become longer than a crane's, implying that it was the contact that he took pleasure in.

So, food and drink and sex is what we're really interested in here. These do often tend to get people in trouble.  

Thus the sense with which self-indulgence is connected is the most widely shared of the senses; and self-indulgence would seem to be justly a matter of reproach, because it attaches to us not as men but as animals. To delight in such things, then, and to love them above all others, is brutish. For even of the pleasures of touch the most liberal have been eliminated, e.g. those produced in the gymnasium by rubbing and by the consequent heat; for the contact characteristic of the self-indulgent man does not affect the whole body but only certain parts.

We don't usually think of the self-indulgent as being especially inclined to the gymnasium, and Aristotle seems willing to grant that exception. I do think that there may be exceptions to this exception, however; but that is a topic for another time. 

Weary of Green Wine

Appropriate music for the prior post.

Nicomachean Ethics III.9, Courage III: Paradoxes about Courage

The final chapter on the virtue of courage is short, but it contains some paradoxes that are interesting to consider. 

Though courage is concerned with feelings of confidence and of fear, it is not concerned with both alike, but more with the things that inspire fear; for he who is undisturbed in face of these and bears himself as he should towards these is more truly brave than the man who does so towards the things that inspire confidence. It is for facing what is painful, then, as has been said, that men are called brave. Hence also courage involves pain, and is justly praised; for it is harder to face what is painful than to abstain from what is pleasant.

One thing Aristotle has already said is that which of the two extremes is more important to avoid can vary both by virtue and by individual. For those who incline to the Nameless Vice of the Celts (such as apparently myself), or for the sanguine, it is much more important to attend to the things that justly ought to be feared than to the things that inspire confidence. Confidence is the problem in such cases. The virtue of courage for such people lies in taking care to be appropriately fearful.

That conflict is mild, though, compared to those that follow. He starts with an easy example, boxing (which was a slightly different sport of extreme popularity in Ancient Greece):

Yet the end which courage sets before it would seem to be pleasant, but to be concealed by the attending circumstances, as happens also in athletic contests; for the end at which boxers aim is pleasant- the crown and the honours- but the blows they take are distressing to flesh and blood, and painful, and so is their whole exertion; and because the blows and the exertions are many the end, which is but small, appears to have nothing pleasant in it.

If you have done it, you know how little you even think of the small reward of glory during the moment of taking blows in a sport-fighting contest. Your mind does attune to the tactics of victory over the particular opponent, but doesn't even think of the 'end' of receiving a medal or belt. Thus, the pleasant end is not even the goal (telos) of the action any longer, yet it has to be said to still be the motivating end. The means-to-the-end becomes the immediate goal, with the final goal no longer a consideration for the moment. 

And so, if the case of courage is similar, death and wounds will be painful to the brave man and against his will, but he will face them because it is noble to do so or because it is base not to do so. And the more he is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest goods, and this is painful. But he is none the less brave, and perhaps all the more so, because he chooses noble deeds of war at that cost.

This is the great paradox: the braver the man, the more painful the pain of death and wounds becomes. He thus has to be even braver to face these even more painful losses, because he is sacrificing something -- the very best kind of human life -- that lesser men don't have to lose. Many of them may live lives that aren't very enjoyable or happy at all; they may be from that place where (as Chesterton puts it) 'the perverse in pleasure pine and men are weary of green wine, and sick of crimson seas.' For them death could even be a release, and an honorable death much to be chosen if it gave both release and honor. 

For the truly brave and virtuous man, the virtue ends up conveying much less good, and much more pain: and yet he is the best case for the perfection of the virtue. 

It is not the case, then, with all the virtues that the exercise of them is pleasant, except in so far as it reaches its end. But it is quite possible that the best soldiers may be not men of this sort but those who are less brave but have no other good; for these are ready to face danger, and they sell their life for trifling gains.

So much, then, for courage; it is not difficult to grasp its nature in outline, at any rate, from what has been said.

Next up is temperance, a virtue that the later Christian Aristotelians especially loved to discuss.

UPDATE: On the subject of that last remark, courage suffers a significant downgrade in Aquinas' adjustment of Aristotle's ethics. Whereas it is the exemplary virtue for Aristotle, Aquinas demotes it somewhat. He mentions it in Summa Theologica Prima Secundæ Partis, and really gets into to it in Secunda Secundæ Partis. Here courage is renamed 'fortitude,' from fortis or strength, and is associated with the capacity to attain martyrdom. It is named as one of the cardinal moral virtues, along with Temperance, Justice, and Prudence.

That said, once you've mastered Aristotle's ethics you will find that the basic structure survives into Aquinas and therefore into Catholic moral teaching. For example, compare Aquinas' remarks on the voluntary and the involuntary and with what you've read of Aristotle's, and you'll see a great deal of continuity. The basic structure survives, and thus all the groundwork required to understand Aristotle is immediately useful in understanding the High Medieval moral teachings. 

A Contemporary Herald

 

Republicans notice

The MSM has suddenly decided to cover the Obama treason story, but in the David Burge sense: covering it with a blanket until it stops moving. The first stories I've seen appeared last night and this morning in the WSJ and NYT, with the time-honored "without evidence" modifiers. Both are behind paywalls, so I won't attempt to link. The gist is that the GOP needs a distraction from Epstein and made up a story out of whole cloth for the purpose. I mean, who would do such a thing? Showing extra courage, the WSJ left off any comment link.

Travel

I am taking a short business trip today and tomorrow. Hopefully I will be back tomorrow night, but air travel in high summer is dodgy. Wish me luck. 

UPDATE (Wednesday evening): That went about as well as you could ask for a run to the Deep South at this time of year. Only one flight delay, out of the four legs, and I got in eventually. Good trip. 

Shin Godzilla and Japanese Political Sentiment

Due to the insistence of a young relative, I recently watched the 2016 movie Shin Godzilla. I started out watching just to do something with him, but it turns out the movie is a great reflection of Japanese sentiment about their own politics and Japanese-US relations, with some jabs at the international community thrown in. Godzilla was always a political comment, a kind of Japanese Frankenstein story about nuclear power, sometimes with an implied criticism of nuclear weapons and the US, but this movie throws it in the viewers' faces. It's a political rant with a monster in the background. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Maybe at some point I'll set aside some time to write about what's happening in Japanese politics right now with the rise of apparently Trump-inspired "far right" populist parties, but if you want an entertaining overview of what many Japanese are feeling, the movie is a really good start, I think.

Some quick notes: 

During the US occupation of Japan, we wrote their current constitution. Article 9 of that constitution bars Japan from having a military and the US promised to protect Japan. Nevertheless, the Japanese established Self-Defense Forces (SDF), which look very much like a military. Paradoxically, they did this partly at US insistence when we turned our attention to the Cold War and stopped worrying that Japan would re-arm and try to rebuild their lost empire.

After WWII, a very strong pacifist sentiment developed, so the creation of the SDF was challenged. It went to their supreme court with the final ruling being that Japan can have forces to defend itself from invasion, but nothing that could be used to project power. There are many legal restrictions on their use and capabilities. Japan cannot legally have aircraft carriers, for example, because they are tools for force projection and not considered purely defensive.

As for the movie, the ending didn't quite seem genuine to me and I wonder if establishment politics didn't get involved in this rather anti-establishment political statement. But I'll save that for a possible future post.

Meanwhile, here's the trailer and then the greatest song ever written about Godzilla.

A List that Don't Exist

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A Hopeful Note from the Grateful Dead

Jerry Garcia's politics were not all that political; as the article explains, he disdained politicians and avoided their campaigns for power and office. He had what strikes me as a hopeful vision of America:

Mr. Garcia lived among artists and built up a community around him that was, psychologically and in some ways practically, impervious to government power.... He admired those who also lived beyond the government’s authority — the Black Panthers and the Hells Angels, to name two groups — though Mr. Garcia did not so much confront the government as simply refuse to accept its authority over him.

The government’s power, he insisted, was “illusory,” a myth that took real form only because people accepted it. “The government,” Mr. Garcia said, “is not in a position of power in this country.”

I think there is something to that. The government is not entirely without power, but it extends much less far than the government itself wishes it did. We see little enough of them here in the mountains.

Nicomachean Ethics III.8: Courage II

Continuing from Friday, more of Aristotle's thoughts on courage. Today Aristotle wants to talk about things that are sometimes called courage, but that he doesn't think are the genuine article.

Courage, then, is something of this sort, but the name is also applied to five other kinds.

First comes the courage of the citizen-soldier; for this is most like true courage. Citizen-soldiers seem to face dangers because of the penalties imposed by the laws and the reproaches they would otherwise incur, and because of the honours they win by such action; and therefore those peoples seem to be bravest among whom cowards are held in dishonour and brave men in honour. This is the kind of courage that Homer depicts, e.g. in Diomede and in Hector:

First will Polydamas be to heap reproach on me then; and

For Hector one day 'mid the Trojans shall utter his vaulting

harangue:

Afraid was Tydeides, and fled from my face.

This kind of courage is most like to that which we described earlier, because it is due to virtue; for it is due to shame and to desire of a noble object (i.e. honour) and avoidance of disgrace, which is ignoble. One might rank in the same class even those who are compelled by their rulers; but they are inferior, inasmuch as they do what they do not from shame but from fear, and to avoid not what is disgraceful but what is painful; for their masters compel them, as Hector does:

But if I shall spy any dastard that cowers far from the fight,

Vainly will such an one hope to escape from the dogs.

And those who give them their posts, and beat them if they retreat, do the same, and so do those who draw them up with trenches or something of the sort behind them; all of these apply compulsion. But one ought to be brave not under compulsion but because it is noble to be so.

In our time and country, we tend to think of the citizen-soldier as the ideal exemplar of courage. Ours differ somewhat from the ancient Greek and Trojan cases in that we have an all-volunteer military; thus, our fighting men and women are in fact choosing military service freely rather than being compelled by laws to serve. This makes them better than the citizen-soldiers that Aristotle is talking about on his own terms. He would likely have admired those who elect to enlist in the United States Marine Corps, knowingly choosing an especially hard service; or those who choose the Army's combat arms. The portions of the service for which you must volunteer multiple times -- for example special operations or Airborne, where you have to volunteer first for the service and then again for the hard selection process -- would have drawn his admiration and approval, I think.

We do share his disdain for citizen-soldiers of nations that assign their NCOs or officers to kill any soldiers who don't press forward, as the Soviets were said to do in WWII. We generally agree, I think, that service under such compulsion is less noble and more based in fear than true courage. I also think that we tend to sneer at the indiscipline of such an army, or such a nation as cannot command loyalty from love instead of tyranny. 

Hector is usually considered a noble figure, but it is true that in the end he flees from Achilles. (Iliad XXII). Achilles is the favorite Greek example, but he had an unfair advantage that kept him from harm in almost all circumstances; I think of Odysseus as the best example of Greek courage because his courage was coupled with practical wisdom. This question is debated between Socrates and the Sophist Hippias in the Lesser Hippias or Hippias Minor, in which Socrates takes the position that Odysseus was the greater; philosophers usually treat that document as ironic or a reductio ad absurdum, but I think there is a serious point being made therein.

More after the jump; this is a longer chapter.

The NYT Validates MAGA

I'm beginning to suspect that there may be something to the President's charge that at least part of the Epstein story is a scam; and the reason I think so is that the whole of the media is piling onto it the way they have done with other Uniparty-backed scams. Today, for what I think is the first time ever, the New York Times published a piece asserting that MAGA has a valid complaint about something.

For those who don't want to read the whole thing, on the question we have been especially interested in -- whether there were intelligence ties, and if so to whose agency -- the reporter interviewed is agnostic. She says she is aware of the theories, but has no facts herself on which to base any reporting. They do mention Maxwell's father's ties to Israeli intelligence and Mossad, so they aren't trying to hide from that, but there just isn't enough information in public for reporting -- just for speculation of the sort we have been doing.

The No Banter Bill

Britain's House of Lords proposes banning pub banter. As The Free Press points out, this is on top of some pretty substantial existing bans on speech:

If the bill goes into law in its current form—and there is not much to stop it now—Britons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting. The law will apply to pubs, clubs, restaurants, soccer grounds, and all the other places where the country gathers and, all too frequently, ridicules one another....

[S]exual harassment and workplace harassment are already unlawful in Britain. So are “spreading malicious rumors,” “picking on or regularly undermining someone,” and “denying someone’s training or promotion opportunities” on grounds of age, sex, disability, gender reassignment, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion, or belief, or sexual orientation. The Equality Act of 2010 also makes employers primarily responsible for preventing the “bullying and harassment” of employees by other employees.

Where the Banter Bill strikes new ground is by making employers liable for employees’ feelings about their customers, too. It will allow employees to define “harassment” under the lowest of thresholds: taking offense.

Expect that in California soon, I guess. The new frontier for 'free speech' is not being allowed to say anything anyone finds offensive in public (or online). 

Immigration "reform"

As a nation, we scarcely have an immigration policy--certainly nothing that commands any widespread consensus. My own views on immigration have been all over the map over the decades. Congress makes noises about "comprehensive" reform, which seems to be a euphemism for legislating the border out of existence. Before the second Trump administration we routinely heard that the existing legislative structure was unsustainable, though conservatives argued that it was merely unenforced, a conclusion that seems to have been borne out by events of the last six months.

I used to be rather a fan of amnesty for anyone with a clean rap sheet and a credible work record. Later, I came to believe that there must be a third requirement, which was demonstrating that the illegal immigrant was not on the dole. I believe we cannot have both open borders and a welfare state. I concluded some time back that the welfare state can't be eliminated, at least for citizens, which left only sealing the border to all but immigrants we reasonably concluded were not here for the purpose of launching a criminal career and/or a lifetime habit of going on the dole.

In the background, there always were the arguments about the impact of cheap illegal immigrant labor on the wage scale for working citizens, especially on the low end of the scale. These arguments echoed the endless debate over the minimum wage. I've never favored a minimum wage, believing it only converts low-paying jobs into outright unemployment. As a result, I was never swayed much by complaints, coming from the progressive side of the debate in the past, that the real problem with open borders (legal or otherwise) was the downward pressure on wages, and my views didn't change when, to my surprise, the same argument was embraced by the newly populist GOP.

My views changed when it became obvious that the solution proposed for the downward pressure on wages was to blow the doors off the welfare state. Imagine my amazement when Congress began to inch toward legislation withholding welfare from illegal immigrants and beginning to deport them in serious numbers.

I read an article today accusing the GOP of misrepresenting its rationale for deporting illegal immigrants. The thinking goes: we can't deport immigrants because we can't get citizens to do their jobs at the prices employers want to pay. But hasn't that always been the argument for the minimum wage? Who says employers are entitled to a supply of laborers who are willing to work for an infinitely low wage? If the business can't be sustained without workers willing to work at that low wage, the business will not stay in business. Whatever Americans wanted offered at that price won't be available. That's always been true; it's why we can't afford house-servants of the sort that rich people used to think were necessary to a civilized life. Nor are we likely to solve the problem by making up the difference by paying lots more taxes so that impoverished workers can afford to work for us and still have a lot of basic but expensive needs met by welfare. We can't legislate a free lunch into existence; anything "free" is paid for somewhere, by someone. Not even confiscating all the wealth of Bill Gates or Elon Musk will change that more than temporarily.

What I'm left with is this: we'll find out what jobs free Americans will do at the price employers can afford to pay. If those jobs can't be done, we'll figure out how to adjust to new prices for goods and services that used to be available to us at the old price, which depended on a combination of crippling levels of taxes to support a welfare state and unfair employer leverage over a workforce required to live in the shadows. We'll alter our priorities about the goods and services we are and are not willing to forgo. Maybe we can't have as many avocados or houses as large as have become customary in recent decades. But also maybe a lot of teenagers and adults new to the workforce will be able to find work for a change. People don't tend to stay in entry-level jobs at entry-level wages forever, but they sure can stay in the unemployed welfare underclass forever.

The power of the eternal purse

I knew progressives would be unhappy with the rescission bill, but I didn't understand that they would consider it a reversal of the constitutional order:

Our Constitution gives Congress the ‘power of the purse’ for a reason. It ensures federal spending is controlled by people’s elected representatives, not an all-powerful executive. It’s a crucial check against the expansion of presidential power.

This rescissions bill fundamentally alters that balance.

Republicans, including President Trump, enacted a funding bill that included this money for foreign aid and public broadcasting only months ago. Then they reversed course and voted to cut those programs. By walking back those commitments, congressional Republicans showed, yet again, they will refuse to stand up to President Trump, even for things they support.

This seems off-base. If Congress can approve spending, why shouldn't it also be able to cancel it? The real rub seems to be that rescission operates like a delayed line-item veto, which undermines the ability to approve spending favored by only one party by holding hostage spending critical to the other party.

Now there is much wailing over the fact that Congressional factions can no longer count on spending "deals" to be binding. There is more talk than I can ever before remember hearing about Democrats' shutting down the government. I'm not sure how effective a strategy that is, since the party in power can designate essential spending to survive, which is not a power I'd want to give to the DOGE factions if I were leading the Dems in Congress.