The Wall Street Journal takes note of goings-on in China:

President Obama’s climate leadership sure gets results fast. The very next day after the Environmental Protection Agency’s anticarbon broadside, China suddenly concluded it is on the wrong side of history and decided to limit its emissions too. Or so many liberal Americans are choosing to believe.

He Jiankun, a senior scientific adviser to the Chinese regime, told an academic conference in Beijing this week that China would adopt “an absolute cap” on carbon in its forthcoming five-year plan, the 13th since 1953. Reuters reported the comments as a political breakthrough ahead of the U.N. treaty gabfest later this year in Lima, Peru, and the report got America’s anticarbon Rockettes kicking.

Too bad Mr. He later advised Reuters that he was merely tendering “my personal view” and that “what I said does not represent the Chinese government.” He added to the New York Times that the cap is only under study and “I’m not a government official.” If Mr. He isn’t careful, he’ll wind up like the health, food and railway ministers executed for various Chinese scandals.

That’s just the latest in a series of official and semi-official pronouncements by the Chinese authorities on the subject of reducing emissions, none of which have been acted on to any great degree. Chinese investments in alternative energy are largely devoted to subsidies for export. There’s a laowei sucker born every minute. The Chinese also recently announced that they were de-emphasizing solar and wind in favor of hydroelectric and natural gas. That I believe.

Pay attention to what the Chinese do rather than what they say. The target audience for most statements is the gullible.

She’s old, bedraggled, and nearly blind but she’s happy. She loves being out in the yard. No matter the conditions she’d rather be outside.

I found an interesting confluence of ideas between this op-ed at the Wall Street Journal on income inequality contrasting the experiences of Red States and Blue States and the article I mentioned previously on real-life economic experiments. The places with the greatest income inequality are Washington, DC, New York, and Connecticut. These are also not coincidentally the places where its citizens are most concerned about income inequality.

Here’s my modest proposal. DC and the two states can take strenuous measures to reduce income inequality. In five years we’ll come back and see how things have fared. Any predictions?

There’s a discussion at the New York Times over the effects of the setting too high a minimum wage. Two economists say that setting too high a minimum wage will slow the rate of job growth and prevent many young or unskilled workers from finding work. A lawyer and a venture capitalist say it would be beneficial.

Economist Arindrajit Dube muses that we’re conducting a real life experiment:

The good news is that the somewhat long ramp-up period in Seattle will provide us with an occasion to learn from this experiment and offer opportunities for course corrections. So we need to be open to evidence on what we see on the ground: if Cylons increasingly occupy check-out counters at the Space Needle while humans ring up the Big Macs in Tacoma and Portland, voters in the Emerald City would be well advised to recalibrate their wage standard. But if it turns out businesses can absorb this increase without a substantial reduction in less-skilled employment, then it’s the rest of the country – and dare I say the economics profession – that might need a rethink.

While I agree that more knowledge is necessary I think he errs in believing that course corrections are possible. I think that minimum wages operate as ratchets and once set are politically nearly impossible to revise downwards. You can only wait until inflation reduces the wage in real dollars for you, wreaking havoc with the local economy along the way.

My understanding is that the scholarship suggests that a moderate increase in the minimum wage doesn’t have much effect on employment or job creation but that the consensus among economists is that large increases in the minimum wage will in fact reduce both.

I think it’s possible that local conditions might warrant an increase in the minimum wage but that such increases might have consequences that reach well beyond the original locality. We’re seeing that right now. I can believe that a $15 minimum wage in Seattle where the unemployment rate is 5.3% can be absorbed by the local economy. Seattle’s local minimum wages incentivizes politicians in Chicago where the unemployment rate is 10.6% to push for our own $15 minimum wage and here it might well throw people out of work or make it harder for them to find work. Not to mention driving businesses on which the poor depend out of the city or even out of the state.

Chicago politicians can always deny responsibility on a “hoocoodanode” basis.

In the wake of the prisoner exchange that resulted in the release of captured American soldier Bowe Bergdahl by the Taliban people from the president to generals to pundits. I wonder where this myth originated?

The reality is somewhat different. When the cease fire that brought a halt to the Korean War (it’s still not officially over) took place although the North Koreans released about 500 American prisoners the Pentagon believed that they continued to hold nearly a thousand more, as published by the New York Times in 1996.

Whether American prisoners remained in Viet Nam after the accords concluding the Viet Nam War were signed in 1973 is a matter of some controversy. The Pentagon and several Congressional investigations have insisted that none were but activists have accused the Pentagon and Congress of conducting investigations with directed findings. It’s possible that several hundred American prisoners were left behind in Viet Nam and never released. We can’t really be sure.

I think the truth of the matter is that insisting that we never leave soldiers behind is believed to be more conducive to maintaining morale, that the idea is more aspirational than reality, and that we can, do, and have left prisoners behind. The only way to assure otherwise is to insist on unconditional surrender by the enemy and be willing to back that up with action. That’s a strategy we haven’t followed for 70 years.

At The National Interest Harry White considers the circumstances would lead us to go to war with China:

The administration has hoped that Beijing will think that everything in Asia is important to America—from overlapping maritime claims with Vietnam to Japanese sovereignty. But from Beijing, it looks possible that nothing in Asia is that important to America, or at least not important enough to go to war with China over. Whether that’s accurate or not, it’s a thought that is slowly creeping into the minds of some of America’s allies too—and it has them worried.

There is a danger that this thinking at cross-purposes could precipitate a crisis, and that crisis could turn into a war. China might cross an actual American redline, which ironically, the White House won’t have articulated clearly enough to avoid antagonizing Beijing.

I strongly suspect that the Chinese believe that there are no circumstances under which we’d go to war with them. That is, perhaps, the most dangerous situation imaginable. Have a nice day!

As you might expect, the editors of the Wall Street Journal are vehemently opposed to the EPA’s recent ruling on emissions by coal-fueled power plants. In today’s editorial they take an interesting tack—that in this new policy the administration is stranding Democrats from “energy-producing states” in favor of “green liberals” from coastal states:

This will have far-reaching implications, especially for Democrats in energy-rich states and especially this year. Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton would never have dreamed of rolling out this EPA regulation five months before an election. Mr. Obama is willing to risk it now because his second term is winding down and he wants to put in place as a much of a legacy as he can. But he’s also gambling that money from green liberals like Mr. Steyer can help stave off the loss of the Senate in energy states.

What strikes me about the charts that accompany the editorial is that they only tell half the story and that the position of the coastal states can only be described as cognitive dissonance. Of course Washington, DC, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Delaware, and California don’t have as much “carbon intensity” as Wyoming, West Virginia, or Louisiana. DC and California import most of their energy, gas, and water. They also don’t depend on manufacturing to employ their workers or provide a tax base for the spending of their state and local governments. But their lifestyles would be impossible without those carbon-intense states. I wonder what the average commute distance in Los Angeles is compared with the average commute distance in Shreveport.

In my earlier post on the subject of the prisoner swap for Taliban prisoner Bowe Bergdahl, I said that I thought it was a difficult call and one I was glad I did not need to make. This morning Ruth Marcus:

Don’t count me among those who pronounce with certitude on the wisdom — or folly — of the Bergdahl deal. It was an agonizingly hard call, one that requires more knowledge than is publicly available about the dangerousness of the five Taliban officials and the United States’ ability to keep tabs on them once released.

and Kathleen Parker:

The United States does negotiate with terrorists; the president will circumvent laws as circumstances require; Republicans and Democrats will be summarily outraged as party affiliations seem to require.

We might also add that processes will be “truncated,” as President Obama described the exchange, and these are “hard choices,” as Hillary Clinton put it, cleverly employing the title of her new book.

Which is to say, war is tricky and we have no idea what we’re willing to do until the ball is in our court.

both writing in the Washington Post echo my thoughts. Ms. Marcus’s instinct is to oppose the swap; Ms. Parker’s to support it.

When I wrote I did not take notice of the law requiring that the president give Congress 30 days notice before releasing prisoners from Guantanamo. Although I’m still of mixed mind on the swap itself, I think that the president should have conformed to the law and notified Congress. That’s not a partisan position or even a political judgment. Both Congressional Democrats and Republicans have said much the same thing and the Democrats saying this are not merely those fighting tough re-election campaigns. Painting it as a purely partisan position is in fact the partisan and political position.

The president’s supporters have defended the president’s position using the same logic as used by the Bush Administration to condone torture and in some cases quoting from those statements. I think the Congress has the stronger legal position based on these two clauses in Article I, Section 8 of the U. S. Constitution. Among Congress’s enumerated powers are the powers:

11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

and

14: To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

The Congress has acted under its enumerated powers. In violating the law, it is the president who has threatened the separation of powers. The key point here is that the president doesn’t just get to do whatever he wants. The president must obey the law and is bound by it just like the rest of us.

The Supreme Court has recently affirmed and re-affirmed that Congress cannot resort to the courts to compel the president to follow or enforce the law—impeachment is Congress’s only recourse. The president is coming far too close for my taste to giving Congressional Republicans the pretext they’ve sought for some time.

James Taranto makes a good point: if the cause of the lousy management we’ve had for the lasty decade or so at the federal level is structural problems in the federal government, viewing the federal government as the primary vehicle for effecting change smacks of Maslow’s Hammer:

If Klein is right to find fault with the structure of the federal government, then the federal government in its current form cannot be “the primary answer to the nation’s ills.” Fundamental restructuring of the federal government is another necessary condition for progressivism’s success.

To agree that these are necessary conditions is not to establish that they would be sufficient ones. But that’s an abstract point. If progressivism cannot succeed absent these two exceedingly unlikely contingencies, it is as well to say it cannot succeed. The problem is ideology, not just competence.

I think our problems are more complicated than that. Recent presidents haven’t been recruited from among army generals or successful private sector managers. They’ve been bureaucrats, apparatchiks, and career politicians without meaningful managerial experience. For more effective government we’d need to change the structure of the federal government, our political system, and just about everything else about our society. That’s so high a price I can’t imagine it happening.

So expect more incompetence and expect it good and hard.