We appear to be in a fallow period for opinion writing not because nothing is happening but because very little being said is worth responding to. Most of my posts are reactive in nature, that is, I am reacting to something I have read. Right now very few are writing anything I find worth reacting to.

I’ve said my piece about the war in Iran. The objectives may be just. The initiation was not. And if just ends cannot be achieved by just means, the war itself is unjust.

I don’t disagree that our immigration laws were themselves enforced unjustly on occasion. Sadly, human beings being what they are that is true of all laws. No serious immigration regime can rely solely on border enforcement; interior enforcement is unavoidable. And once you accept that, some degree of unjust application is inevitable. That is the dilemma critics rarely confront. Given those realities I have serious reservations about the Democrats’ opposition to funding ICE.

I have yet to see proposals that genuinely increase affordability only ones that defer costs. Any plan built on subsidies without corresponding taxes simply pushes the burden forward. To truly increase affordability we cannot transfer our problems to our heirs.

I could go on but you get the point. What’s missing are neither anxiety nor activity but proposals that survive first contact with reality

I’m thinking of dropping my subscription to the Washington Post. Historically, the Washington Post has been a good barometer of the prevailing wisdom in Washington, DC. Getting the point-of-view of the nearly official inside the Beltway view was worth paying for. Since its acquisition that has become decreasingly the case. What I have paid for was insight into the Washington consensus; I wonder if the Post still reflects that consensus.

That’s less something I can document than a feeling, a vibe. What sparked this reaction in me was two recent editorials. The first was strongly in favor of the construction of data centers. The other was in support of the construction of nuclear reactors. It’s not so much that I disagreed with either editorial than that I couldn’t imagine the Post running either editorial five years ago and I don’t believe they reflected the prevailing wisdom in Washington. Five years ago both positions were at best contested and often politically radioactive within the Democratic coalition that largely defined Washington’s policy center of gravity.

I can’t tell from my outsider position 2,000 miles away whether the new publisher is intervening directly, the WaPo’s reporters and editors are trying to anticipate the view that the publisher would take in an effort at securing their jobs, or the Washington consensus has changed. From the standpoint of a subscriber, the mechanism matters less than the outcome; either would produce the same shift I sense.

I also subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. Some consider that a pro-Trump, pro-Republican media outlet but I don’t think that’s fair. I think that the Wall Street Journal is a stubbornly pro-business, anti-tax (because they see higher taxes as anti-business) journal. They frequently run editorials against Trump and the Republicans when either take positions that the editors see as anti-business. You would think that Democrats would draw a lesson from that but apparently not. The WSJ gives me a consistent, intelligible pro-business lens. The WaPo used to provide such a lens for the Washington consensus. If those converge, one becomes redundant.

The brutal truth is that I don’t need to pay to get a pro-business libertarian viewpoint. If the WaPo is no longer giving me something distinct, specifically, a reliable read on the Washington consensus, then it has become substitutable. And substitutable products are not worth paying twice for.

Opinion pieces in out-of-town journals tend to capture my attention and this one in City Journal by Thomas Savidge is no exception. I’m inclined to agree with him that despite its fiscal problems the federal government should not bail Chicago out:

Six years ago, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon sent a letter to the Illinois Congressional Delegation detailing a federal bailout request. Most requests in this letter pertained to budgetary issues that long predated Covid-19, including a $15 billion “no-strings-attached block grant.”

While the feds rejected that specific item, Illinois and Chicago received billions of federal dollars through various stimulus programs. Illinois also received a first-of-its-kind loan from the Federal Reserve. Many proponents of the Covid-19 fiscal expansion still defend this massive spending, with former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stating last year that the stimulus was necessary.

The door is open, then, for Illinois and Chicago to return to D.C. and ask for federal assistance. If granted, taxpayers nationwide will pay for the Windy City’s fiscal recklessness. And the bailouts likely won’t stop there. Officials in other cities, such as Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York, will be watching closely. If Chicago can get a bailout, why not the Big Apple?

Rather than properly manage their budgets, city and state officials may scramble to secure the next spot in line at the federal trough. Fiscal responsibility will erode as state and local officials pay more heed to federal policymakers and the terms of federal funding than their obligations to their constituents.

The only constructive way forward is for federal officials to make an explicit warning against bailouts. When fiscally mismanaged states and cities see that Washington won’t enable their behavior, they may finally make the necessary and painful adjustments to restore fiscal solvency.

The federal government should not bail Chicago out even less than it should bail New York City out. I do think that the State of Illinois for a couple of important reasons.

First, the state has been leeching off Chicago for most of the last century. The preponderance of state revenues are derived from Chicago and that has been true for a very long time. Turnabout is fair play. The downstate belief that Chicago is the leech is poorly founded as the table at the bottom of this post documents.

Second, a considerable portion of the city’s budget is devoted to public employee pensions, making up for decades of fiscal profligacy. The state is compelling Chicago to make up for profligacy of which it is itself guilty.

And neither the city nor the state can tax its way out of the consequences of having kicked the can down the road too long. Tax increases would only hasten the flight of those with the income and wealth on which their revenues depend. No, the only remedy is allowing the city and state to restructure public employee pensions, something presently barred by the state’s constitution.

[continue reading…]

Although the U. S., Iran, and Israel agreed to a temporary ceasefire in Israel and the U. S.’s war against Iran, any ceasefire seems to be largely on the part of the U. S. Israel openly declared that for its part the ceasefire did not include Lebanon and its attacks there seem to have escalated if anything as have Hezbollah’s. According to the Institute for the Study of War there has been no material change in Iranian attacks against the Arab Gulf States and it continues to threaten traffic through the Straits of Hormuz.

As has been the case since the start of this war I have little idea of what is happening beyond press releases, which I consider to be largely propaganda, and what I can garner from open source outlets like the ISW.

My reaction to Iran’s “10 point plan” was different from that of the “unnamed official” that Axios said was “maximalist”. Demanding an end of economic sanctions and reparations for damages, Iran’s offer was more than that. My interpretation was that it was an insult bid.

Here’s how an insult bid works.

Seller: I want $1,000 for it.

Buyer: How about $500?

Seller: $900.

Buyer: How about 50 cents?

In commercial settings, an insult bid usually signals negotiations are over. Given his career experience I strongly suspect that President Trump understands them that way. His response (raise the asking price) supports that. In diplomacy it can sometimes be posturing but it often serves the same function. That is supported by reports that Iran has cut off negotiations.

I have never known it to be a good sign. It suggests to me not only that Iran is not ready to concede but that at least one side may be misjudging its leverage in the negotiations and therefore the range of outcomes actually available to it.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

The Trump Labor Department to its credit has taken steps to make it easier and less costly for farmers to hire seasonal guest workers on H-2A visas. Last fall the department relaxed a Biden wage mandate that required farmers to pay guest workers on average $17.74 an hour—and as much as $19.97 an hour in California—in addition to providing housing and transportation.

The United Farm Workers (UFW) sued, arguing that easing the wage mandates for guest workers will undercut pay and demand for American workers. Vice President JD Vance makes a similar argument in support of reducing legal immigration.

and

Restrictionists say farmers could attract more U.S. workers if they increased wages. DOL disagrees: High wage mandates have “not resulted in a meaningful increase in new entrants of U.S. workers to temporary or seasonal agricultural jobs.” Farmers received applications from U.S. workers for only 182 of 415,000 positions advertised in the last fiscal year.

I see no way that we could spend the last 35 years declaiming that everyone needed college educations, that the future belonged to knowledge workers, subsidizing higher education, and discouraging manual labor without its decreasing how appealing American workers find such jobs. Those jobs were performed overwhelmingly by native-born workers relatively recently. It is something that has been happening for a long time and cannot be reversed immediately. While working conditions, seasonality, and geography plainly matter, they cannot by themselves explain the near-total collapse of domestic applications; that points to a deeper shift in perceived status and life trajectory. Or the timing, which coincides nearly perfectly with the sharp decline in native-born manual laborers. In multiple regions and across decades, the pattern has been consistent: when native-born agricultural workers attempted to organize, they were rapidly replaced often within a single season by more vulnerable labor pools. The difference is the enduring and persistent propaganda program in which we have engaged, misguidedly in my opinion.

Higher wages might increase the number of applicants at the margins but their very low number strongly suggests something else at work.

We also need to recognize that there are some economic activities in which we have no absolute advantage, which are unsustainably costly to do here, and which should not be performed domestically. From my point of view that implies closer, friendlier relations with neighboring countries, particularly Mexico.

It also highlights something I have advocated repeatedly: the need for a true guest worker program especially for Mexican workers without paths to citizenship or other embroidery.

Before it disappears I wanted to take note of this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by former Zelensky economics advisor Alexander Rodnyansky;

A stable and genuinely sovereign Ukraine remains in Europe’s interest. But if Europe wants to support Ukraine as a future member of the West rather than merely as a glacis against Russia, its policy has to change.

That starts with honesty. Europe should admit that self-preservation is now a central motive of its support. It should also stop treating military endurance as the only measure that matters. Aid should be tied to battlefield needs and to institutional development: legislative function, transparency, anticorruption enforcement, competence rather than the blind celebration of supposed political savvy, limits on arbitrary power, and a clear understanding that wartime necessity cannot become a permanent political principle.

but even more to a comment in the ensuing thread of that op-ed by Yuri Victor Vizitei which I will quote in full:

This piece is part of the political struggle within Ukraine and I would caution an uninformed reader to make any assumptions or come to any conclusions.

“The most significant controversy surrounding Rodnyansky is his very public break with President Zelensky following Ukraine’s largest corruption scandal since the war began. In November 2025, Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption agencies (NABU and SAPO) unveiled “Operation Midas” — a $100 million bribery and money-laundering scheme centered on Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear power operator. The scheme’s alleged architect, Timur Mindich, was a co-owner of Kvartal 95 Studio — the media company Zelensky co-founded before his presidency.”

The problem is that NO ONE high enough in business or politics in post Soviet space is “clean” of some level of corruption. It’s more often a struggle between camps, not right or wrong. This is a direct failure of the West to “clean” the post USSR space of left over Soviet influencers. We didn’t want to invest any money in it, and didn’t see them as a risk. SO we didn’t execute on a Marshall plan equivalent as we should have. That gave us Putin and unending corruption.

We should see Ukraine today as the bulwark against Putin and Russia. As well as a potent future EU member, but only after the shooting war. Trying to sort out politics in Ukraine now is fool’s errand. It’s not that Mr. Rodnyansky is wrong or right. It’s just that we can’t know all of the history and realities involved here.

What I want to draw attention to is corruption. It is endemic in Ukraine’s system. It won’t vanish with less connection with Russia. It shouldn’t simply be dismissed. It is structural not episodic therefore it must be mitigated rather than just wished away. Failing to recognize that is our mistake not the Ukrainians’.

That means that we must be vigilant in our oversight of how the aid we provide to Ukraine is used and that cannot easily be done from 5,000 miles distance which implies more direct, embedded oversight and conditionality than we have been comfortable with.. If the objective, Ukrainian independence, is to be achieved, that is something we cannot avoid or delay in doing.

It’s good news that the WSO from the F-15 downed by Iranian fire has been rescued. Hopefully, his injuries are not too severe.

I have continued to follow the U. S.-Israeli war on Iran as closely as I could through open sources, particularly the Institute for the Study of War, and the usual limitations that entails. To the best of my ability to determine the following is the present status of the war:

1. The U. S. is not losing the war in operational terms.
2. The number of Iranian counter-attacks have largely plateaued and they have not been particularly effective.
3. The Iranians can probably maintain their present level of counter-attack for an extended period.
4. The Iranian regime is unlikely to surrender.

Taken together, these conditions suggest a conflict in which the U.S. is neither losing nor on a clear path to winning, and in which the definition of ‘victory’ remains unclear. I continue to think that the war is illegal and imprudent. That does not imply that I want the Iranian theocracy and/or the IRGC to win.

Where is Ambrose Bierce now that we really need him?

Artificial Intelligence, n.: Intelligence that would be sent back to the kitchen if it were food and delivered to your table in a restaurant.

Authenticity, n.: A carefully curated simulation of spontaneity.

Bipartisan, adj.: Approved by members of opposing parties who agree it will not cost them their seats.

Blockchain n.: A solution whose problem has not yet been located.

Climate, n.: Long-term consequences crafted by short-term, instant-gratification thinkers.

Democracy, n.: Governance by the uninformed, for the unqualified.

Education, n.: The systematic suppression of facts to protect fragile minds from reality.

Enshittification, n.: The swift, inevitable decline in quality of online platforms once users are hooked.

Influencer, n. One who is paid handsomely to pretend they discovered oat milk, sunrise, or having opinions.

Stakeholder, n.: Anyone who will be blamed if the outcome is poor and credited if it is good.

Stakeholder Capitalism, n.: An ingenious system whereby corporations lecture you about morality, climate, and equity while maximizing shareholder value through Chinese supply chains and addictive dopamine loops.

Work-Life Balance n.: A mythological state, like Atlantis, frequently referenced and never reached.

I do not claim that all or, indeed, any of those are original.

Soliciting suggestions for additional entries.

Updated

Slop, n.: poorly crafted uninteresting content created by artificial intelligence rather than poorly crafted, uninteresting content slapped together by human beings

Viral, adj.: Content that spreads infectiously, like a virus, and has the same effect on the stomach.

Em dash, n.: A hyphen that has been told it is special.

Update 2

Affordable housing, n.: Housing paid for by someone else.

Ally, n.: An ally is someone who supports your cause right up until the moment their own interests are better served by not doing so.