Who's with us?

My views on immigration are a mess, all over the place.  In my heart of hearts I'd like an open-border policy, but for years now I'd concluded sadly that it doesn't work unless it's combined with a sink-or-swim official policy, softened as necessary by voluntary aid.  The ascendancy of identity politics in the last decade or so has just about finished off my convictions.  At the same time, I'm afraid I'll never quite give my heart to fierce immigration control, either; I've always thought that if people make it here somehow or other and insinuate themselves into their communities with jobs and families such that no one around them is willing to cooperate with immigration authorities to get them deported, then immigration enforcement moves right to the bottom of my priority list, somewhere below enforcement of laws against littering.  (But bear in mind that I'd like to see people drawn and quartered for littering.)

This article from AEI mentions an Australian system I'm not familiar with, which applies a point system taking into account things like high skills.  That sounds practical.  It's contrasted with a much-reviled system of giving preference to low-skilled extended family members, but I find myself hesitating here.  Surely it's a good idea to bring in immigrants who can plug into a healthy institution like an extended family.  One good thing about awarding points for high skills is that the skilled workers would arrive with the freedom to change jobs rather than be shackled to their employers by H1B visa restrictions.  My niece's Irish engineer husband is in that boat--or at least he was, I guess, until he married her.  Now he has an anchor baby, yay!  And an adorable one he is, too.

The main point of the AEI article is that there are immigration arguments that were effective in the Brexit campaign, which we should consider using here:

“Vote Leave to take back control of immigration policy. If we stay there will be more new countries like Turkey joining and you won’t get a vote. Cameron says he wants to ‘pave the road’ from Turkey to here. That’s dangerous. If we leave we can have democratic control and a system like Australia’s. It’s safer to take back control.”

The Working Class

You can tell that the winds have shifted significantly when you see an article on the American white working class published prominently in the Harvard Business Review.

Did He Seriously?

Headline: "Trump hangs portrait of Andrew Jackson in Oval Office."


Is it more amazing given that Jackson is basically the founder of the Democratic Party, or because of the Trail of Tears legacy given the fight Trump just picked with the Standing Rock Sioux?

Andrew Jackson stands at the head of a muscular tradition of American politics, one that the Democrats have completely abandoned in recent years. So repentant are they of his legacy, which included both full-throated embrace of slavery and the unabashed ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, they can hardly bear to remember that he's on the $20 bill because they put him there.

All the same, if you want a model for Making America Great -- the first time -- Jackson's hard to beat. He was ruthless, but he never once hesitated to put America first. I wonder what this portends.

UPDATE: Note Joel's objections to this characterization, and defense of Jackson, in the comments.

An Odd Thing

I can't find him in my copy of the venerable Drinking with the Saints. Must be a misprint.

And Adam Baldwin tweeted this:

There are several more 'Chain of Command' pics with interesting shots of Trump and Mattis in them where that came from.

Burns Night

Tonight is celebrated the famed Scots poet Robert Burns. Let's hear one of his poems as set to music.



This poem, titled "Cock up your Beaver," is about a young man and his new hat, and how it leads to pummeling Englishmen. What's with that face? It's a Scots song -- what did you think it would be about?

It Probably Seems More Trivial from Brooklyn

The reference is to this bit from Sarsour. If you listened to her speech at the march, she declares herself "unapologetically" to be several things, including "Muslim" and "from Brooklyn." My guess is that this kind of thinking arises from the intersection of those things.

In any case I don't mind people being unapologetic, but I would warn them against being unreflective.

Dude, Where's My Car?

Donna B., writing at AVI's place, notes the transgender discomfort with the Women's March. Tracking that back to the original story, I find this:

For 20-year-old Sam Forrey, a nonbinary student in Ohio, and their girlfriend Lilian McDaniel, who is trans, there had been other warning signs that the Women's March might be a dangerous space for them.

You're a 'nonbinary' individual who wants to be referred to in the plural? Are there three of you?

"The Return of the Dreadnought"

Wretchard is on fire today.

What party is he?

Myron Magnet at City Journal:

As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to  the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.

The Tea Partiers wanted a second American Revolution that would sweep away the Administrative State that the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty set loose to devour and fatten on the carcass of the Founders’ republic, replacing a government of limited and enumerated powers with an unlimited government that rules by administrative decree and redistributes wealth as if it belonged to the governors and not the governed. No wonder Obama’s Internal Revenue Service worked to squash that movement as tyrannically as George III’s tax collectors. Let’s see if the new revolutionaries picked a leader who knows what they want and how to get it.

More Good Samaritan action

This story has South Texas a little stirred up:  several days ago, two armed guys robbed a jewelry store in a San Antonio mall.  One unarmed customer tried to intervene somehow when they were confronting another customer, and was shot and killed for his trouble.  Another customer, who was armed and licensed for concealed-carry, shot one of the robbers and chased the other out of the store with gunfire; the second robber later was arrested.  The first robber is in the hospital in serious condition.

Now it develops that the mall had previously posted signs prohibiting the carrying of weapons.  The police don't seem unduly upset; their statements focus on the reasonable response of the armed citizen and the need for others to exercise good judgment in these dangerous situations.  The mall manager is busy making statements about how his first priority is the safety of his customers, which may mean trusting and waiting for the police, who knows.  I suppose he's trying to figure out whether he's likely to lose more customers by emphasizing his gun-free policy or by congratulating the citizen who ignored it.

Personally I like the effect of knowing that, even in a purportedly gun-free mall, the chances of an armed customer in the store you're trying to rob are pretty decent.

The Texas legislature, by the way, is again considering measures to permit open carry without a license, treating the 2d Amendment as our license.  It's just the Wild West out here, ain't it?  Y'all come on down.  We have our own electrical grid, too.

Hiding the ball

Congressional testimony from AEI's Thomas Miller about why the individual mandate isn't achieving the hoped-for painless political results:

One of the strongest driving forces behind officeholders resorting to the individual mandate is the desire to substitute “off-budget” mandated private funds in place of more visible taxes that they would otherwise find hard to impose to meet their insurance coverage goals and finance additional health care spending. Making the full costs of mandatory coverage more transparent reduces popular support for the latter. The hope instead is that an individual mandate can obscure the full sticker-price shock to taxpayers because mandated private spending is not officially treated as part of the federal budget. Instead, employers and insurers are enlisted as surrogate “tax collectors” through less transparent and politically accountable means.

* * *

[A]n individual mandate often promises, but never manages, to pay for itself. In order to get lower-income individuals to comply with a mandate to purchase more insurance than they can afford, or want, to purchase, substantial taxpayer subsidies are used to fill some of the affordability gap. Insurance mandates create a perpetual conflict between their escalating costs, limited public and private resources to pay for them, and the false guarantees of richer coverage ahead. The imbalances may be financed through various combinations of higher taxes, reduced benefits, higher premiums, lower take-home pay, fewer economic opportunities, and less insurance coverage for everyone else. Doing so also reduces portions of any projected increases in new premium “revenue” expected by insurers and health care providers from expanded coverage. Eventually, some of those less-visible costs are reimposed on the initially more “fortunate” newly insured.

* * *

The penalties for failing to comply with the mandate also are rather modest in proportion to the likely average premium cost of required coverage. The predictable result was that millions of individuals calculated that it is much less expensive to pay the penalty than to purchase mandatory insurance. The law’s guaranteed-issue incentives for potential purchasers, coupled with loose enforcement of eligibility for special enrollment periods between annual open season windows, encouraged individuals to enroll “just in time” when sick and “go bare” when healthy (and pay less in penalties than in total premiums), further ensuring limited and erratic mandate compliance.

An argument I often encounter is that we've got to have the individual mandate because we have EMTALA, so uninsured people will get free (to them) but expensive (to us) emergency room care when we might have treated them more cheaply with preventive care at clinics. Setting aside whether preventive care really is cheaper, I remain skeptical whether you really can force people to pay in advance for their uncertain future health benefits when (1) they don't or can't afford to plan ahead effectively otherwise, and (2) it's fairly clear they'll have acceptable options if they roll the dice instead. This is why I say that solving the healthcare cost problem for some people is always going to be an issue of charity, whether we face it or not. If we're going to do it, let's do it, not pretend we can make them pay for their own charity.

And so we're left with people like me, who are absolutely by-golly going to be insured one way or another--but in a delusory quest to force it on people who resist it, we have to take my own insurance away and make it inhumanly difficult to replace.  But if I refuse to vote for Clinton I'm a racist misogynist who doesn't care about the poor.  

Does Nobody Remember Project Exile?

If President Trump wants to "send the Feds to Chicago," he doesn't need any new tools. All he needs to do is instruct his Justice Department to prosecute felons taken with guns, or drug dealers taken with guns, according to the standards of Project Exile. Those laws are still on the books, and this Clinton-era program had the support of the NRA, so there ought to be no political cost for doing it.

The number of shootings in Chicago would fall rapidly once the gangsters realize that the probable penalty for getting caught with a gun under these circumstances has risen from ~30 days in the local jail to 5-10 years in Federal prison. My guess is it won't even take very long, or require very many convictions, to change these people's attitudes about whether or not it's worth carrying a gun as a disqualified person.

They might still knife each other, but the shooting epidemic ought to be readily solvable with existing authorities and not much additional effort.

So I Guess We're Doing This Wall Thing

Immigration orders on deck, including a construction order for 'the Wall.' Over/under on Mexico finally paying for it?

"A gilded despair"

Funny how now that some of the right people are thinking about TEOTWAWKI prep, it's time to think mournfully about the breakdown of civility.  And clearly the breakdown isn't the sort of thing we saw in Ferguson or the Pink Hat March, but the behavior of those awful people who elected Trump, not realizing the danger that he was going to become a fascist dictator.

I worry about Trump in a lot of ways, but honestly not that he'll be a fascist dictator.  I worry that he'll be ineffectual or wobbly, not that he'll be wildly successful in becoming Kim Jong Il.  It's already pretty clear he won't wobble on a number of conservative issues, so perhaps I'll have to grit my teeth only over trade protectionism and Keynesian stimulus spending.  I don't see any support for my initial fear that he would be ineffectual, either, but we haven't yet gotten into the nitty-gritty of any legislation.  I will cheer if he slaps the Republicans around and keeps their eye on the ball.

"If it's a no, we'll give them a quick no."

A prompt up or down: that alone would be a solid basis for any regulatory reform.  But reviving the Dakota and Keystone projects is enough to make me cheer the new administration even more loudly.  Their treatment under the prior administration was a travesty.

Where Were You Eight Years Ago?

Chuck Schumer intended to make a reasonable point that Obama didn't receive a courtesy that Tom Cotton was asking for on behalf of a Trump nominee. He ended up opening himself up for a hard-hitting comeback.

Yippe-ki-yay

I wondered about that remark in the inaugural address about Islamic terrorism.

It's the waiting list that kills ya

Prospective VA head Shulkin encounters difficulty.

Accept 90% allies

And say "Yes" to success, advises Kurt Schlichter to his fellow disappointed movement conservatives:

Again, don’t be the guy staring into the mirror saying “Well, I’m perfect. I guess those people who voted for Trump because I was failing to meet their needs are just stupid for prioritizing their interests over my preferred ideology.”

You don’t have to love that Trump is the Republican president, but you should at least put aside your wounded pride long enough to seize the opportunity he presents. Don’t let your hurt feelings consign you to a chair in the corner where you pout, arms crossed, as Trump accomplishes a bunch of the things you’ve been promising for the last couple decades but never delivered.

OK by me

Even though he's a Harvard puke, I'll be happy with Gorsuch on the Supreme Court.