During the month of August Turner Classic Movies (TCM) typically devotes its programming on each day to a different Hollywood star. The first half dozen stars for this month are Doris Day, Humphrey Bogart, June Allyson, Glenn Ford, Joan Bennett, and Diane Keaton. Today’s “Star of the Day” is June Allyson. If you get TCM in general they’re a good opportunity to see the movies of individual stars, some rarely broadcast. For the whole list see here.

There are some good Doris Day pictures, as documents if nothing else. For example, The Pajama Game captured the performances of much of the Broadway cast of the show. Except that Doris Day replaced Janis Paige as Babe. I would rather have seen Janis Paige but you can’t have everything.

At the risk of being unkind is there such a thing as a good June Allyson picture? They just finished showing a movie I’ve never seen: The Secret Heart. In it June Allyson portrayed a 14 year old. When it was made she was 29 years old. Watching it required a certain suspension of disbelief. I’ve never seen the movie from beginning to end and I suspect I never will.

On the other hand yesterday they showed Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and others of Bogart’s best.

I believe in free markets. I think they remain the most effective mechanism for organizing voluntary exchange, and I believe capitalism has produced extraordinary increases in prosperity. At the same time, command economies have repeatedly demonstrated a tendency toward inefficiency and toward concentrating power and privilege in relatively few hands.

All of that notwithstanding John Gordon Steele’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the history of capitalism left a sour taste in my mouth. Here’s his opening paragraph:

The grandeur of the Roman Empire was built on the aggregation of wealth. Using its superior military organization, Rome conquered its neighbors, took their gold and silver and sold their populations into slavery. When the empire ran out of neighbors, the Roman economy began to falter.

The Roman economy was not primarily a plunder economy. It rested on agriculture, taxation, and commerce. The Rhine-Danube frontier roughly marked the limits of the Mediterranean-style agriculture and urbanized populations that Rome knew how to administer and tax.

The populations of conquered lands remained free provincials who paid taxes to the Romans. The Romans rarely enslaved whole populations. Enslaving their populations was, however, a typical punishment for cities that resisted them.

Furthermore, Rome persisted for hundreds of years after it had reached the limits of its conquests.

Having disposed of Rome in a few sweeping sentences, Steele turns to the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism, where his account becomes more persuasive but also more selective. Much of the balance of his op-ed consists of a list of notable Britons and Americans over the last 150 years and their contributions to the English and American peoples. Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt and their railroads. Isaac Singer’s invention of the sewing machine that reduced the amount of time necessary to make a shirt from 16 hours to 2. Steel. Computers. Microprocessors.

Consider this passage:

When the PC was wedded to the Internet, the world changed profoundly in only a couple of decades. Jeff Bezos saw how the new technology could revolutionize retailing again.

I was immediately reminded of Matt Yglesias’s wisecrack to the effect that Amazon was “a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers”. Now it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that Amazon was a web services company with a near-break-even retail adjunct.

Which brings me to the core of my objection. Mr. Steele invokes the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest individuals. Of the Forbes 400 at least a third derived their fortunes from finance, real estate, or insurance. Their contribution lies primarily in allocating existing capital rather than expanding productive capacity directly. Railroads, steel mills, sewing machines, computers, and microprocessors increased society’s productive capacity. By contrast, much of modern finance specializes in allocating capital, pricing risk, and trading existing assets. Those services are valuable, but the connection between their profits and broad increases in productivity is often less obvious. And I wonder how many of those fortunes would have reached their present scale absent what market participants came to call the “Greenspan put”—the expectation that the Federal Reserve would intervene aggressively to cushion major declines in financial asset prices.

The modern financial system excels at pricing, trading, leveraging, and repricing existing assets. It is less obvious that it channels a correspondingly large share of national wealth into new productive investment. If investors expect monetary policy to cushion major declines in financial asset prices, the incentives may increasingly favor holding and trading appreciating assets over financing new productive enterprises. Mr. Steele celebrates capitalism because it rewarded those who dramatically increased society’s productive capacity. I share that admiration. My concern is that an increasing share of modern wealth derives not from creating new productive capacity but from owning, financing, and trading existing assets. If that is true, then the incentives of modern capitalism have shifted in ways that deserve far more attention than Mr. Steele gives them.

I did not know whether to laugh or to cry when I heard that the Chicago Public Schools planned to balance its budget by relying on additional state spending. From Paris Schutz NBC 5 Chicago:

The Chicago Board of Education approved an amended $10 billion budget plan that relies on $150 million in additional funding from the state on Thursday, despite warnings that it would be out of balance and could lead to drastic mid-year cuts and layoffs.

A marathon and contentious Chicago Board of Education meeting came down to the wire after hours of debate, testimony, meetings, and lobbying.

“I’m asking the board to pass my budget,” said CPS CEO Macquline King in her opening statements, warning that failure to pass by Thursday’s deadline could lead to a delay in the start of the upcoming school year and a failure to meet payroll in the immediate term.

This budget is built on funding that has not been approved. Unless the state ultimately provides that money, CPS will face the same fiscal problem later in the year.

IMO CPS’s first line of recourse for balancing the budget should be reducing excess capacity. According to Illinois Policy the CPS has nearly 300 schools that are underutilized (meaning a utilization of 70% or less) including a high school designed for 1,000 students with fewer than 30. The cost to operate that high school is estimated at $55,000 per student. Maintaining facilities that empty diverts money from classrooms and places additional pressure on taxpayers.

Given those figures, refusing even to consider substantial consolidation appears fiscally irresponsible.

It also presents an interesting conundrum. The political question is whether Gov. Pritzker will support additional aid for CPS. Outside Chicago, further funding for the district is unlikely to be popular. Supporting higher taxes or additional borrowing to finance it could also carry political costs. Whether those considerations outweigh pressure from Chicago remains to be seen.

I thought it prudent not to bundle this into my last post on the war with Iran. Last month President Trump announced and signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I think that was imprudent. Have we learned nothing?

When the Shah was in control of Iran we aided Iran in its own nuclear development program. The Shah was overthrown in 1979 and ever since we have opposed the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions. To me at least the moral of the story was clear: we shouldn’t depend on authoritarian states to remain aligned with us indefinitely. Governments change, sometimes literally overnight, and yesterday’s ally can become tomorrow’s adversary.

The same lesson applies to Saudi Arabia.

From the earliest days of our war with Iran I have maintained it did not meet the standards for a just war and I opposed it. Those remain my views.

Don’t construe that as my believing the present Iranian regime is good for us, the Iranians, or for the world. I don’t.

My question today is how will the U. S. achieve the objectives it has articulated for the war? I just don’t see it.

Even “boots on the ground” (which I think remain very unlikely) would make it difficult to achieve that.

I have no insights into the inner workings of Donald Trump’s mind or those of his advisors. My best guess is that the administration believed applying enough military pressure would encourage the Iranian people to overthrow the regime themselves. That hasn’t happened.

So, now what?

In her Wall Street Journal column after a lengthy discourse on Anthony Fauci diary and Congressional testimony, Peggy Noonan has some thoughts I found worthy of reflection:

Looking back on the public-leadership aspect of the pandemic—while we were in the trauma and fear of the first months, while we were banging pots at 7 p.m. to thank hospital workers, and scientists were zooming to find out more about treatments and protocols, and earnest medical officials were showing up on cable explaining what they believed to be true—a lot of people tried to do a lot of good things. But it all became pretty political pretty fast, pretty insidery and groupthinky, and pretty smug as the previously obscure became famous overnight.

It all came together and yielded a little societal Chernobyl.

The reactor blew, causing a calamity. The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

She concludes:

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

I see things a little differently from Ms. Noonan. I don’t think the pandemic made politicians, bureaucrats, physicians, or scientists less trustworthy. It revealed institutional incentives that had always existed but had rarely been so visible. Given sufficient authority and sufficient time, institutions tend to evolve in ways that serve their own interests as well as their stated missions. More than a century ago Max Weber noted that bureaucracies, in particular, gradually come to place institutional interests ahead of institutional purposes. The pandemic did not create that tendency; it exposed it.

And the reality is that we are on our own. We always have been and always will be. Ultimately, each of us remains responsible for exercising judgment rather than surrendering it to authority. We simply shouldn’t allow elected officials and appointed bureaucrats to remain in positions of authority indefinitely. They cannot be a substitute for prudence. Free citizens should seek expert advice but they should never surrender their own judgment to experts, politicians, or bureaucracies. Institutions can inform prudence; they cannot replace it.

I want to agree with those of my commenters who are very tired of the brouhaha surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci. Enough, already. Let him depart from public view.

Nonetheless, there are several issues that deserve scrutiny and which don’t involve Dr. Fauci personally. First, should any appointed federal official be allowed serve in their posts past age 70? If J. Edgar Hoover had retired at 70, it would have been during the Johnson Administration. If Dr. Fauci had retired at 70, COVID-19 would still have been in the future.

Second, we still don’t know a great deal more about the origins of COVID-19 than we did in 2020. It may have originated in an animal, it may have been a lab leak, or something else. As I’ve said before, I think we’re unlikely ever to know much more unless China presents evidence while defending itself in a civil suit for damages in a U. S. court. That in turn would require changes in the federal law governing sovereign immunity.

I’ve been sitting on this post by Matt Yglesias for a while. In the post Matt chides President Trump for not trying to get an immigration bill passed:

American immigration law is complicated, and almost every provision of this vast corpus reflects some political compromise reached long ago, often under different circumstances. I think it’s fair to say that almost none of it is optimal.

Lenin said of the bureaucracy, “better fewer, but better.” When it comes to immigration, I don’t see it that way. We should try to be more selective, but we should also want more immigrants to come to the United States than ever. So while I agree that many of the current visa programs aren’t ideal, unlike Stephen Miller or Elon Musk, I don’t have my hair on fire about it.

What’s crazy, though, is that for how much conservatives rant and rave about immigration, the Trump administration isn’t even seeking legislative changes to American immigration law.

Now I’m going to go into what may seem to be a long diversion but isn’t because I think that Matt has the wrong end of the stick.

I’ve been pretty clear here about what I think that immigration policy should be. In short

• We should accept more genuine asylees than we do. An asylum-seeker is already defined in statute. It isn’t just someone from a poor, violent country or someone who wants a job.
• We should have a temporary workers program. Many of those who come here do so primarily to work. They have only marginal interest in becoming Americans.
• We should have some sort of DACA program to normalize the status of those brought here as children who’ve never lived anywhere else.
• Beyond that the law should be enforced. It should be enforce vigorously but not harshly. Admittedly, that’s a difficult line to tread.

Note that those preferences can only achieved by a) changing the law and b) enforcing the results. The opinion polls from both Gallup and Pew Research suggest that lots of Americans think pretty much the same way that I do. However, there’s certainly a spectrum of opinion.

At the extremes are two caricatures, “cartoon versions” of the parties’ positions. Those cartoon versions are:

• Republicans want no immigration.
• Democrats want open borders.

Neither description accurately characterizes most Republican or Democratic voters but each party’s rhetoric often caters to those extremes. Most people are somewhere between those poles.

The challenge that we’re facing is that both Democrats and Republicans are catering to their most extreme wings—the cartoon versions.

But this is the first point I’m trying to make. A president can move substantially toward a restrictionist immigration policy simply by enforcing existing law more aggressively. Democrats can only achieve the cartoon version of their views by not enforcing the law. Those may seem to be symmetrical strategies but they’re not. Enforcing the law strictly is the president’s job. Not enforcing the law is dereliction of duty.

My second point is this and I think it’s where I deviate most from Matt’s view. The executive branch should first faithfully enforce existing law. Once that’s happening those who want different law bear the burden of persuading Congress to enact it. If President Trump can achieve the cartoon version of policy above just by enforcing existing law, why should he change the law? Changing immigration law is Congress’s responsibility. If Democrats want a more permissive system, they should persuade Congress. If Republicans want a more restrictive system than existing law provides, they should also persuade Congress.

I wanted to commend Tomas Pueyo’s most recent Substack to your attention. In it he documents a distressing claim: the UK, Europe, and Canada are abandoning freedom of speech. His evidence is pretty convincing.

For decades I’ve been pointing out that we in the United States are operating under a delusion if we think that rights that we take very seriously are universal. Those include freedom of speech and of the press.

It is also true that rights considered fundamental in other countries are, shall we say, considered otherwise here. For example, in the UK there is a “right to cross the land” enshrined in Magna Carta. Here we call it “trespassing”.

In yet other countries establishing a church is an article of faith.

The key point is that other countries are different from us. That should be obvious but, apparently, is not.