In his column in the Wall Street Journal Greg Ip sounds a theme I have raised repeatedly around here. Those urging the U. S. increase its military capability are missing something—we don’t have the industrial capability at present to support a larger military:

When the Center for Strategic and International Studies simulated a war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, the wargame ended with Taiwan still free, at grievous cost. The U.S. loses two aircraft carriers and up to 20 destroyers and cruisers; China sees more than 50 major surface warships sunk.

What looks like a draw, though, becomes a Chinese victory before long. As Eric Labs, a navy analyst for the Congressional Budget Office explains, China can replace lost ships far more quickly. In the past two years, its navy has grown by 17 cruisers and destroyers; it would take the U.S. six years to build the same number under current conditions, he said.

“In terms of industrial competition and shipbuilding, China is where the U.S. was in the early stages of World War II,” Labs said. In the U.S. now, “we just don’t have the industrial capacity to build warships…in large numbers very fast.”

What’s more with the vast litigation infrastructure in the United States (we have more lawyers than any other country in the world) any industrial build-up would inevitably be fought in the courts, stretching the build-up out even farther.

Mr. Ip continues:

Echoing the quality problems U.S. manufacturers of semiconductors, autos and airliners have experienced, defense manufacturers suffer from endemic cost overruns and delays. On average, a new lead ship costs 40% more than the Navy first estimates, the CBO says. Delivery times for submarines have grown to nine years from six.

These shortcomings matter all the more because China controls entire industrial supply chains, enabling it to deploy capacity quickly to new priorities, such as tests and personal protective equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It has put that capacity to use in expanding its military. A shipyard in Huludao that builds civilian vessels and nuclear submarines boasts annual capacity in excess of all the ships the U.S. has launched since 2014.

I’m not encouraged by the likelihood that any war with China would go nuclear very quickly.

BTW neither do we have the industrial capability to supply Ukraine at the pace the Ukrainians want us to at present (let alone supply Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan simultaneously). Most of what has been sent to them before has been from inventory. All of that is true in spades for Europe.

Chris Morris reports at Variety that television writer-producer-developer Norman Lear has died:

Writer-producer-developer Norman Lear, who revolutionized American comedy with such daring, immensely popular early-‘70s sitcoms as “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son,” died on Tuesday. He was 101.

Lear’s publicist confirmed to Variety that he died at his home in Los Angeles of natural causes. A private service for immediate family will be held in the coming days.

“Thank you for the moving outpouring of love and support in honor of our wonderful husband, father, and grandfather,” Lear’s family said in a statement. “Norman lived a life of creativity, tenacity, and empathy. He deeply loved our country and spent a lifetime helping to preserve its founding ideals of justice and equality for all. Knowing and loving him has been the greatest of gifts. We ask for your understanding as we mourn privately in celebration of this remarkable human being.”

Some of his earliest work was as a writer for Martin and Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Martha Raye Show. At 101 you can’t actually say that his death comes as a surprise but it’s certainly a loss. Mr. Lear’s death marks the end of an era for television.

At this point nearly everyone with the exception of the White House is convinced that the “two-state solution”, Israel and an independent Palestinian state existing side by side in peace, is unworkable and becoming more so. Neither the Israeli version of the “one-state solution” in which Israel absorbs both the West Bank and Gaza or the Hamas version in which the West Bank and Gaza claim the entirety of Israel as well (presumably after killing the Israelis) is acceptable and the Hamas version does not appear to be achievable by Hamas.

If none of those three alternative, what? One rather obvious alternative would be for Jordan to annex the West Bank and Egypt to annex Gaza. That alternative only has a few problems: Jordan doesn’t want the West Bank and Egypt doesn’t want Gaza.

All of which leads us to Lina Khatib’s article at Foreign Affairs. Here’s her prescription:

The ongoing war is an opportunity for Arab countries to go beyond pragmatic de-escalation with Iran and to push for the United States to develop a strategy that addresses Iran’s destabilization of the Middle East. Such a strategy would require more than the imposition of sanctions and targeted retaliatory attacks on Iranian assets in places such as Iraq and Syria. Instead, Arab countries would need to take part in setting the agenda for a long-term plan that would undermine Iran’s political and military influence. If the Big Five could see where their interests intersect, they could amplify the diplomatic gains for their individual countries while seizing a chance to stabilize the region

which in turn reminds me of a purported Bedouin saying:

I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger.

Pan-Arabism, the unity of the Arab nation, or the unity of the ‘Ummah all have asterisks alongside them. There is not a single Arab democracy, the closest being Tunisia and democracy is receding into the mists of the distant past increasingly with every passing day in Tunisia. All Arab countries are autocracies of one form or another. The idea of the “Big Five” (Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) agreeing on anything or, at least, agreeing on anything for very long is hard to believe.

At Salon security expert Bruce Schneier warns that just as one of the effects of the Internet has been mass surveillance one of the effects of artificial intelligence will be mass spying:

This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers. Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and “Hey Google” are already always listening; the conversations just aren’t being saved yet.

Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform. They self-censor, with the chilling effects that brings. Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse. Governments around the world already use mass surveillance; they will engage in mass spying as well.

That’s the very reason we turned off our Echo Dot (which we received for free) years ago and haven’t turned it back on. And the mass spying he refers to has been predicted by science fiction writers for most of the last century. For one interesting take on that I recommend the novella “Home is the Hangman” by Roger Zelazny. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that Mr. Zelazny wrote the story after having been an employee of the federal government for a number of years.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer asks a very good question:

Why does Congress exist if the bureaucracy can assert legal authority solely because it wasn’t explicitly prohibited? If federal agencies can invent power to dictate their preferred policies to circumvent Congress, we no longer have three coequal branches of government.

This problem is larger than the FHWA. Bureaucracies routinely assert authority they don’t possess. This directly conflicts with the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), which held that on matters of great political or economic significance, agencies must identify “clear congressional authorization” for their claimed authority. The FHWA’s own rationale admits it has none.

Further, the agency’s rule isn’t workable, as highlighted by comments a majority of states submitted that were concerned about or opposed to it. The rule imposes requirements with no recognition of urban and rural differences, assuming mass transit could be a solution. The notion of a bus lane through soybean fields or a subway stop at a cattle ranch is laughable. The rule suggests increased electric-vehicle adoption could help reduce emissions if mass transit isn’t viable. Never mind that EVs lack traits many rural drivers need, such as batteries that work well in extreme cold and have the necessary range for our wide open spaces.

I would ask a follow-up question. If you believe that the federal bureaucracy does, indeed, have that authority, what do you mean by ‘democracy”? I genuinely have no idea what it means in that context. Federal bureaucrats are not elected by anybody and do not serve at the will of anybody who was elected.

More than anything else his question illustrates why we need civil service reform.

At Liberal Patriot sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s advice to the Democratic Party can be summed up in one brief snippet:

Democrats should instead focus intensely on normie middle-class and working-class voters and let knowledge economy professionals fend for ourselves.

which I do not believe will be heeded.

Several things occurred to me while reading the post. The first is that the group Dr. Gharbi characterizes as setting the “agenda of the contemporary Democratic Party:

…teachers, educators and professors, lawyers, medical and psychiatric professionals, people who work in advertising, communications and entertainment, consultants, human resources professionals and administrators, architects and designers, IT specialists and engineers. Industries that provided the highest total contributions to the Democrats included securities and investment, education, lawyers and law firms, health professionals, non-profits, electronics companies, business services, entertainment, and civil service.

emerging as a political force should come as no surprise. Joseph Schumpeter predicted that 80 years ago. I quoted him at length here.

The second is how dependent professionals, educators, and civil servants are on the government (at all levels) for their livelihoods. That takes many forms including being employed directly by government, deriving much or all of their incomes from government grants or “reimbursements”, and professional licensing which Econ 101 tells us limits the supply and, consequently, raises the price.

Who will be named Time’s Person of the Year? The announcements are scheduled to be published tomorrow. I’ve already posted on Peggy Noonan’s pick—Taylor Swift. And I’ve already mentioned mine: Artificial Intelligence.

Other possibilities that have been mentioned include Elon Musk, the SAG-AFTRA strikers, and many others.

Who do you think will be named POTY?

Courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) here are the unemployment rates for the “swing states”:

All of those are lower than they were in January 2021 but higher than they were in December 2019.

Update

The CPI by state over the period isn’t readily available but here’s a graph of the historic CPI for the Midwest Region:

And here’s a graph of the change in real household income for each of the “swing states”:

Here’s the other side of the present ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. At the Wall Street Journal Margherita Stancati and Fatima AbdulKarim report:

ZANUTA, West Bank—Hanaa Abul-Kbash was home with her children in this tiny village in the occupied West Bank when she says an Israeli settler, armed with a military-style rifle, barged in telling her she had to go.

“I told him this has been my home for 21 years and that I would not leave,” recalls 43-year-old Abul-Kbash of the encounter in late-October. The man grabbed her by the collar, shook her violently, cocked his weapon and left, Abul-Kbash says. Days later, on Oct. 28, she and the roughly 250 other residents of Zanuta abandoned the Palestinian village.

Since the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, violent assaults by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank have doubled, the United Nations says. Armed settlers in uniforms have shown up in Palestinian villages threatening to kill those who don’t leave, say residents, Israeli peace activists and the United Nations.

The incidents have prompted over 1,000 Palestinians from at least 15 communities to flee their homes in the West Bank, according to the U.N. and Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem. The number is more than double the total displaced in the West Bank between the start of 2022 and Oct. 6 this year, according to B’Tselem.

It’s difficult to come up with statistics on how many people on the West Bank have been killed by Israeli settlers. Nobody’s reports can be trusted. I have no doubt, however, that the fear is real.

The Israeli government subsidizes the settlements on the West Bank. Consequently, since we provide aid to Israel and money is fungible, we’re paying for those subsidies, at least in part. In a choice between supporting Israel and supporting Hamas it is obvious, at least to me, that we should be supporting Israel. But I also believe that we should be exerting whatever influence we can to end the Israeli government’s subsidization of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.