Not Quite

Megan McArdle would like you to believe that this is all your fault. Certainly there's an element of truth to the argument, and I am sure she really believes what she's writing here.

However, the blame for the radical change in economic conditions for new American workers is not merely the result of rational choices made by ordinary citizens in the marketplace or at the voting booth. It's true that Americans as consumers buy a lot of stuff from places that get their stuff from China. Some of those Americans have the option of buying American-made goods instead. Those things are now a luxury good, but they didn't used to be: it used to be that American-made clothing factories were all around the South, and it wasn't particularly more expensive to buy American-made and American-grown cotton.

Still, the major changes to the law that enabled globalization to undercut worker wages weren't enacted because of wide popular support. They were enacted because of lobbyists from wealthy interests. Did the massive losses of American jobs and family farms following NAFTA result in a net transfer of wealth from American workers to Mexican ones? No! It turns out it resulted in a net transfer of wealth from the workers of both countries to the wealthy interests, as the interests could more easily undercut workers on both sides of the border.

[I]t is easy to see that NAFTA was a bad deal for most Americans. The promised trade surpluses with Mexico turned out to be deficits, some hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost, and there was downward pressure on US wages – which was, after all, the purpose of the agreement.... But what about Mexico? Didn't Mexico at least benefit from the agreement? Well if we look at the past 20 years, it's not a pretty picture. The most basic measure of economic progress, especially for a developing country like Mexico, is the growth of income (or GDP) per person. Out of 20 Latin American countries (South and Central America plus Mexico), Mexico ranks 18, with growth of less than 1% annually since 1994. It is, of course, possible to argue that Mexico would have done even worse without NAFTA, but then the question would be, why?

[Long analysis of why NAFTA didn't help Mexico clipped, but available at the link. -Grim]

It's tough to imagine Mexico doing worse without NAFTA. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Washington's proposed "Free Trade Area of the Americas" was roundly rejected by the region in 2005 and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership is running into trouble. Interestingly, when economists who have promoted NAFTA from the beginning are called upon to defend the agreement, the best that they can offer is that it increased trade. But trade is not, to most humans, an end in itself.

The American public isn't against trade, either. The author is right, though, to say that while we're happy to trade, we don't think 'free trade' or even 'more trade' is an end in itself. Economic activity is a means to our ends, and for American and Mexican workers those ends have been harmed rather than helped by the free trade pact.

So the blame for the 'great reset' is only partly on the people who, in 2000 or so, bought the cheap shirts from Bangladesh instead of the slightly more expensive ones made in South Carolina. The blame is mostly on those who lobbied for this law, then used the advantages it gave them to put workers in competition with each other. Very little of the 'savings' got passed on to you as a consumer: inflation was pretty strong during that period, up until the financial collapse of 2008. Your money wasn't going further.

Also, buying American didn't become a luxury good slowly over time, as a result of the buildup of rational choices made by individuals in the marketplace. It happened suddenly, as a choice made by corporate entities that forced the consumers' hand. You can't buy American goods from South Carolina at near the same prices if all the factories were closed in a rush to take advantage of wage competitions enabled by the new law. "We" didn't make that choice at all.

Neither the economic choices nor the political ones are really in the hands of ordinary Americans. Possibly we can make the political choices going forward, though quite possibly not: the entrenched interests are very strong here. Still, let's not make the mistake of thinking that Americans are just having to live with the effects of their choices as consumers. Their choices as consumers had very little to do with the forces at work here. Not nothing, to be sure: but not nearly as much as economists like McArdle would like to believe.

Easy as Riding a Bike

That is to say, not at all easy.

"Father" "Marries" "Son"

I suppose this represents a sort of progress, since what they are doing is more like marriage than it is like being father and son:

Norman MacArthur and Bill Novak, father and son, though not biologically, will soon be husband and … whatever, reports the Patch of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The pair, both in their 70s, have been together for 50 years and registered in New York City as domestic partners in 1994. But when they moved to Pennsylvania, they discovered their domestic partnership wasn’t recognized, and legalized same-sex marriage was nowhere on the horizon.

Needing to take care of estate-planning issues, the pair pursued a novel legal approach. Novak adopted MacArthur in 2000. The fact their parents were deceased removed any legal objection.

That's the problem with pendulum swings. The 'domestic partner' law might have been stable, except it ran into places that refused to grant any status at all. So first they had to 'adopt' a ridiculous legal fiction, and now we're going to radically alter the institution of marriage for a while.

The Safety of Israel

Possibly in the long term it will prove to be the most dangerous place on earth, standing as it does under a Sword of Damocles in the form of a surrounding Middle East that nurtures a very deep grudge against its very existence. Still, for today, this is true.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Republican from Georgia, says he felt safer during a recent trip to Israel than he would “in certain parts of New York City or Chicago.... The whole time we were there, of course, we had security with us, but there was no restrictions on travel, we never felt threatened one bit... In fact, I can say that we felt safer in Israel than we would in certain parts of New York City or Chicago,” Loudermilk said.

“Yeah — or Baltimore, I would think, as well,” interjected host Tony Perkins.

I had no security with me at any time, indeed was walking completely alone, and still felt perfectly safe. Even in East Jerusalem, even in the Arab parts of town. Several of the Arabs told me I was very welcome, I think because they want Americans to come and see the situation for ourselves. No one during the entire trip was even mildly threatening, except the Israeli security officer who pulled me aside to question me very intensely about my business in Israel when I first arrived. That was only his duty, and I took no offense.

UPDATE: I guess my radar's a little off. I realize this afternoon that the reason these comments are a story is that the authors are implying some sort of racism in the guy's commentary. "Certain parts of New York City or Chicago"... "or Baltimore" is supposed to be code, I guess.

Well, maybe. All the same, I've been to New York, I've been to Chicago, I've been to Baltimore, and there are certain parts of those cities that are objectively unsafe. They were having riots in Baltimore just recently, and Chicago's murder rate is periodically higher than Afghanistan's. I've also been to Jerusalem, and walking around Jerusalem even alone and late at night felt perfectly safe to me.

So, for what it's worth, if you're reading racism into his remarks it may not be appropriate. He may have been making a comment about Israel, not about race in America. That's how I read it at first.

UPDATE: Not to put too fine a point on it, but last weekend: 27 shootings, 9 fatal in Baltimore. Chicago? 56 shot over the same weekend, including a child. I don't see any for Jerusalem in the same period.

UPDATE: Murders are up in Manhattan too. And according to this list, Israel's total murder rate is 1.7 per 100,000 if you discount the deaths from the war; 1.8 per 100,000 if you don't. That's not great: most of Europe does much better than this, having rates in the zero-point range. The USA is 4.7 per 100,000. The Americas are the worst place in the world overall, even worse than Africa, with an average rate of 16.3. If you break it down by cities, all the worst places in the world are in the Americas, including two US cities: New Orleans and Baltimore.

So yeah. I think dude was objectively correct in his statements.

...As If A Million Voices Cried Out, And Never Shut Up...

Apparently the Waco dust-up has created a storm of mockery.

Over in a corner of Twitter that most of white America doesn't visit (because apparently our social media networks are about as segregated as they are in real life), snark took over. Many tweeted ironically about the corrosive influence of biker culture on weekend warriors and the imperative need for white leaders to denounce the broader scourge of “white on white crime” in front of hashtags like, “#stuffthemedianeversays." Pictures of Sarah Palin and in leather biker gear popped up along below tweets about “radical white politicians, who “coddle,” and commune with, “thugs.” The subtext of all of it was clear: This is what the world’s paid and volunteer shouter corps say when the tragedies involve black people, not white.

"9 killed in Waco biker gang shootout - where are the white leaders decrying this white-on-white violence?" #stuffthemedianeversays

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) May 18, 2015

Well, here's a picture of Sarah Palin being cozy with some bikers. Tough guys, too, the kind who look like they know their way around an automatic weapon. You'd have to think twice before giving one them a gun, right?

Twitter-space may be segregated, but military/veteran motorcycle clubs are not. Those are the ones you usually see with political figures. Whatever is wrong with race in America, this kind of biker isn't it.

UPDATE: Among what is mostly a critique of media tone:

It started as a fist fight in the bathroom of the restaurant. The fight spread. People used clubs and chains and knives and guns. By one estimate, there were 30 people shooting. At least five gangs took part – six, if you count the police.

Amazingly, no bystanders were hurt or killed, even though it took place at a shopping centre on a Sunday afternoon where people were shopping and celebrating graduations.

This comes when the riots in Baltimore on April 27th over the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of police is still fresh in everyone’s mind. The difference in how the police and the press acted is striking.

I often criticize the police if I think they have over-deployed power against Americans. I think this person's argument is highly uncharitable given the performance of the police in Waco. It's also not justified by what follows in the article. A lot of ink is spilled on the difference in the way the media talks and thinks about Baltimore versus Waco, but there's nothing to justify the claim that the police acted in a "different" way.

Before the brawl -- let's call it a "riot" to avoid treating the cases as essentially 'different' in the way the article hates -- police tried to get the bar to refuse service to the clubs. When that failed, they deployed officers in overwatch positions around the gathering. They fired on the club members who were involved, and may well have killed some of the "rioters" (as they did not do in Baltimore). They mass-arrested nearly two hundred people, just as in Baltimore, and appear poised to charge nearly all of them with at least some crime. At least some of the charges look to be capital murder. If so, unlike in Baltimore, the government is planning to put people to death for participating in this riot.

Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's how you stop a riot. Shooting the rioters used to be the ordinary standard for dangerous rioting. It was clearly justified here.

Deeply Dishonest

[A]nyone who has read the text of the [TPP] agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents. I’ve actually read the TPP text provided to the government’s own advisors, and I’ve given the president an earful about how this trade deal will damage this nation. But I can’t share my criticisms with you....

The government has created a perfect Catch 22: The law prohibits us from talking about the specifics of what we’ve seen, allowing the president to criticize us for not being specific. Instead of simply admitting that he disagrees with me—and with many other cleared advisors—about the merits of the TPP, the president instead pretends that our specific, pointed criticisms don’t exist.

Emphasis added.

No lying salesmen.

No secret treaties.

Liberation

A clever matching of perspective makes windows into the past in Paris, 2014/1944.

Odd Split

What kind of controversy gets the Supreme Court to line up Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, and Sotomayor against Ginsburg, Scalia, Kagan, and Thomas?  A suit over whether Maryland counties (and the city of Baltimore) must give credits to Maryland residents who pay taxes to other states for income they earn across state lines.  This looks like a classic quarrel over whether the problem with a law is that it's lousy policy or that it violates the Constitution.  What Constitutional principle limits taxes, you may wonder, and where has it been all our lives?  In this case, the idea is that double-taxation across state lines amounts to a tariff on interstate commerce.  If you don't find that convincing, you may side with strict-interpretationists Scalia and Thomas, and wish that the problem would be solved at the ballot box instead.

The press is generally reporting this as problematic because Maryland counties and the city of Baltimore need lots of cash, which apparently is the only useful consideration when it comes to taxation policy or the Constitutional limits on state power.  Myself, I'd worry more about having to mediate disputes between states over who has the best right to glom onto every penny of income they can identify in the hands of people who are energetic enough to earn money in interstate commerce--but I suppose they've been facing that issue for a long time now, given that most states already have a system of interstate credits in place.  Ah, for the days when I paid income tax to California, New Jersey, and the State and City of New York while living in (income-tax-free) Texas.  I'm sure they put the money to good use.

From Your Lips...

I think this is right, but we'll see how it goes.

The Magna Carta on Trial

Really the trial will be of the barons who fought for it, I suppose, rather than the charter of liberties itself. The UK has decided to hold a trial for treason against those gentlemen, wierdly presided over by a panel that will include Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court.

George Washington's trial will surely follow. I suppose they're saving Justice Sotomeyer for that one.

Do What Now?

Mikey Weinstein, CEO of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has sent a blistering letter to Chief of Staff Gen, Mark Welsh, arguing that Olson's comments violate an Air Force instruction, which prohibits airmen from endorsing a particular faith or belief.

"Olson's highly publicized, sectarian speech is nothing less than a brutal disgrace to the very uniform he was wearing and the solemn oath he took to support and defend the United States Constitution," Weinstein writes.

I'm not a JAG lawyer -- perhaps Joel or Joesph W. is around? -- but I'm pretty sure it's OK to pray in uniform. Not only are there designated chaplains, but in Iraq I constantly saw groups of soldiers gathering in circles to pray before going outside the wire to do route clearance or dismounted patrols. Who's going to claim soldiers ought not to pray before such a mission?

But here's the letter, and this is what they claim he's done wrong:

2.12. Balance of Free Exercise of Religion and Establishment Clause. Leaders at all levels must balance constitutional protections for their own free exercise of religion, including individual expressions of religious beliefs, and the constitutional prohibition against governmental establishment of religion. They must ensure their words and actions cannot reasonably be construed to be officially endorsing or disapproving of, or extending preferential treatment for any faith, belief, or absence of belief. (emphasis added)

In light of your very own Air Force regulation, irrefutably on point with the matter herein, and the violation of which is proscribed as a potential FELONY under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, do you honestly NOT see any incredibly serious problems here with Olson’s statements, Mark? Please also note the controlling holding of the seminal 1974 Supreme Court case of Parker vs. Levy (417 U.S. 733), penned by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, significantly limiting the Constitutional rights of active duty military members (such as Major General Olson) vs. the same rights enjoyed by their American civilian counterparts....

Consequently, on behalf of itself and its over 41,000 active duty and veteran armed forces clients, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) hereby demands that Major General Craig S. Olson be immediately, aggressively and very visibly brought to justice for his unforgivable crimes and transgressions via trial by General Courts Martial and that any and all others who assisted him with his NDPTF speech of fundamentalist Christian supremacy be likewise investigated and punished to the full extent of military law.

So the claim is that his remarks at a prayer service constitute a felony for which he ought to be imprisoned (since that is 'the fullest extent' of punishment licensed for these 'unforgivable crimes').

Now, this is a letter posted to the internet by crackpots. Still, how strange to see the lines drawn this way by any American. It's hard to believe that this makes sense to any of our countrymen at all.

Speaking of law and order

Time for a national conversation about what society is supposed to do when violent lawlessness becomes hard to ignore?  Looks like the current trend is to run it through a race filter before we decide whether and how to crack down:

The Obama administration announced Monday it will ban federal transfers of certain types of military-style gear from local police departments, as the president seeks to respond to a spate of incidents that has frayed trust in communities across the country.

The banned items include tracked armored vehicles, bayonets and grenade launchers, according to a task force report released by the White House. Other equipment, including tactical vehicles, explosives and riot equipment, will be transferred only if local police provide additional certification and assurances that the gear will be used responsibly, according to the report.

The announcement came as Obama prepared to travel to Camden, N.J., to highlight his administration’s strategy to help reform local police departments, including efforts to increase the numbers of officers on patrol and the use of body cameras.

It's true the announcement doesn't mention race, but when I read "reform local police departments" (not mention "communities") in a statement coming from the White House recently, that's where my head goes.  Something tells me the President isn't losing sleep over the potential use of tactical vehicles in Waco.  Speaking which, are those Special Forces guys still hanging out in Texas?

Waco Goes Wild West

Speaking of Mad Max, there was some real Sons of Anarchy action this weekend:  nine dead and eighteen injured (no bystanders or cops) at what's being described as a five-gang battle at a "Twin Peaks" restaurant on Highway 35.  Police closed down the whole market area that included the Twin Peaks franchise, as well as some downtown streets and two bridges over the Brazos River.

That's more casualties than I usually expect from a news item about a dust-up.  These guys weren't just blowing off steam in a fight that got a little out of hand:  there was concentrated and effective murder.

The emphasis in a lot of reports is on "bikers," but I'd put it on "gangs."  Waco does appear to respond aggressively to this kind of thing.  There's certainly no talk of "space to destroy."

Mad Max Is Not A Feminist

Andrew Klavan writes that critics are praising the new Mad Max because it upholds the feminist ideal. I think he's quite wrong that it does any such thing. Here's his argument.

....while I consider feminism a dishonest and oppressive philosophy, I believe good feminist stories can be told. This is because even a philosophy that is a lie in general may be the truth in a specific, individual case and stories are individual and specific. Dishonest outlooks can produce honest stories. The left has been living off this fact for decades.

So while ideologically corrupt critics are going wild over Fury Road because it’s feminist, I’m not criticizing it because I’m anti-feminist. I’m criticizing it because it’s not very good. Its title character is ill-defined. His mission is emotionally muddy....

What Fury Road does have is a female warrior (played by the always-watchable Charlize Theron) who does the work that any good story would have reserved for its central character. She has a back story that matters. She performs the major action tasks. She travels over a personal arc within the plot. Some in Hollywood fear that female action leads bomb. So Fury Road sneaks the female lead in by giving the female sidekick all the good stuff to do. As a result, however, the center of the movie is empty and the story collapses into it.

I've complained often enough about the need for female warriors in contemporary movies, but they're less unbelievable in movies set at or near the modern period in which guns are available. Nevertheless, the new Mad Max is not at all a feminist film.  I'll put the counterargument after the jump so as to keep you from encountering spoilers.

Justice as Fairness

Anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer societies have long know that such societies don't split off into family groups as obviously as do more settled and prosperous societies. They've come up with an answer: the relative equality of power distribution in such societies stops that from happening. Why?

First author of the study, Mark Dyble (UCL Anthropology), said: "While previous researchers have noted the low relatedness of hunter-gatherer bands, our work offers an explanation as to why this pattern emerges. It is not that individuals are not interested in living with kin. Rather, if all individuals seek to live with as many kin as possible, no-one ends up living with many kin at all."

So it's a lot more fair that modern society, because in a hunter-gatherer society they all want the same thing but nobody gets it. Justice, at least on the contemporary model of justice-as-fairness, was achieved before the dawn of civilization! One wonders why we ever walked away from such a paradise.

I would tell you what Aristotle said about that from a position much closer to the dawn of civilization, but you can probably already guess: that justice means something besides mere equality of suffering. It might have something to do with structuring a society to enable pursuing and sometimes even actually achieving the excellences of which human nature is capable.

Those ideas are somewhat out of favor at the moment. I'm very much interested in democratizing the idea, so that people who are ordinary working class people can have access to the things they need to pursue excellence if they work hard and honestly. I'd like to see society structured in such a way that people are less likely to be rewarded for catering to lower desires, where virtue is rewarded and vice is not. All the same I think that, surely, examples like this ought to call into question the idea that justice is in any way reducible to fairness. I'm not sure that fairness is even a proper part of justice, though I haven't made up my mind that it isn't either. Whether or not fairness is in any way part of justice, it's certainly not the whole.

Forgiveness, Fatherhood, and Mad Max

A great deal of this strikes me as wholesome.

What does fatherhood mean to you?
There's such a blissful sense of otherness that I can't remember what it was like to not have children. I used to think a lot about myself. I still do, I guess. I mean, I have the capacity to indulge in myself. My primary relationship was with myself, and that was interrupted irrevocably when I found out I was going to be a father. It cut out so much... from my head. There was the idea that in order to look after someone else, you must first truly look after yourself. I need to be fit and good to go and get [things] done. I was healthy and already had a lot... behind me—rehab and all that—but I didn't have an anchor. A child is an anchor. And it gets heavy. Is your son going to be a reflection of you? Fear of becoming your father. And then the fear of not becoming your father. All of these conversations which were nice to think about and hypothesize about before are now immediately connected. . . .You can't un-have a son.

You can't un-have a father, either.
All of that stuff with your father falls by the wayside as you realize how inept you can be as a father yourself. And you can't really beat on your parents. I used to have a lot of hang-ups—legitimate hang-ups—about my parents. But then I dialed back the clock. My old man must have been 28 or 30 when he had me—he must have been... terrified. You only have yourself to measure from. A lot of stuff I had to forgive. I wasn't going to move forward in a healthy manner if I didn't start letting go of some pretty major stuff—stuff which held me back while I was young. Serves no purpose any longer now that I'm a father myself. It's impossible to be perfect, you discover. I look back at the flaws of my father and the things that made me say, "I won't do this, and I won't do that. I'm going to do this differently." There's no difference between my dad and me as a dad. I'm becoming my father in some ways, and I'm grateful for that. By no means am I a great father, but fatherhood has helped me focus on what I need to do to become a better man.

There's a lot of swearing if you follow the link. Doesn't bother me at all, but I'm kind of enamored with the idea that there's a time and place for it. This is probably as good a place as any, but when you post to the Internet you can't be sure of the time.

Armed Forces Day

How did Britain Get a Prime Minister?

John Derbyshire spells it out for us.

In those days the monarch was still a force in ruling Britain. He could, in theory at least, dissolve the actual government and form a new one more to his taste. There had, however, been a change of dynasty in 1714. Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, had failed to produce an heir despite having endured seventeen pregnancies.... The law required a Protestant monarch, so Anne’s nearest Protestant relative, the German George of Hanover, was shipped over to be George I....

Unfortunately George I couldn’t speak English. He had rehearsed a little speech to make when he landed in England, to reassure the English that he had come for the good of all. He got the grammar mangled though, and proclaimed: “I haff come for all your goods!”

Unable to follow the debates of his ministers in the council chamber, George got bored and stopped showing up. Walpole, already the alpha male among the King’s advisers, took over the vacant chair.

Accident of history, then, brought on by preferring a Protestant to an Englishman. Or a Briton, I suppose, since the more recent kings had been Scots.

Mad Max

So if any of you were thinking of going to see the new Mad Max, I went. It's a pretty amazing two hours. Heavy Metal acts push a line between hardcore and absurd, and they always risk pushing just a little too far and becoming ridiculous. This movie pushes just as far as you possibly could, but if it crosses the line it does it only in a few moments that are so intense that you've probably lost precision in your bearings.

Joe Bob Briggs will give it an awesome review someday.

Holyfield v. Romney

To the death!



Wait, not to the death. Sorry.