I thought that this development deserved more attention. Google is facing an anti-trust suit. Dave Michaels reports at the Wall Street Journal:

Google, the country’s dominant search engine, faces its biggest legal threat ever this week when the company goes on civil trial in Washington on allegations of violating U.S. antitrust laws.

The Justice Department’s case is aimed at Google search, and whether the company has used illegal agreements to sideline its rivals and harmed consumers and advertisers in the process. Google pays billions of dollars to Apple, for example, to be the default search engine on the Safari browser.

Alphabet-owned Google grew up during an era of more relaxed antitrust enforcement, particularly against technology companies that developed innovative—and often free—ways to explore and use the internet. Efforts to regulate Google and other technology giants have failed to advance in Congress in recent years. In the absence of such rules, the government is trying to use antitrust law to govern competition on the web and put curbs on the internet’s gatekeepers. Here are some crucial questions about the biggest U.S. antitrust trial since the government challenged Microsoft more than 20 years ago.

while at NPR Dara Kerr remarks:

The case against Google focuses on the company paying billions of dollars each year for exclusive agreements with phone makers, like Apple and Samsung, and web browsers, like Mozilla, which runs Firefox.

Those agreements let Google be the default search engine on most devices. The Justice Department say that by securing this position, Google has been able to box out smaller rivals.

DuckDuckGo is one of those smaller rivals. It has centered its search business around privacy and ensuring users aren’t tracked — unlike Google, which has long tracked users for targeted advertising. Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s vice president of public affairs, says she’s glad this case is headed to trial.

“Google has used its monopoly power to block meaningful competition in the search market by putting a stranglehold on major distribution points for more than a decade,” Bazbaz wrote in an email. “So even though DuckDuckGo provides something extremely valuable that people want and Google won’t provide — real privacy — Google makes it unduly difficult to use DuckDuckGo by default.”

The key point is that being a monopoly is not illegal but using your monopoly to extend or preserve your monopoly is.

I don’t know whether the United States has a basis for this suit or how it will turn out. We’ll know in several months. They say three but I have my doubts. My own view is that I think that Congress has been remiss and the business model used by Google (and Meta and others) should be outlawed on privacy grounds.

I don’t know how much of this suit is rent-seeking and how much is a shot across the bow but some of both of those are bound to be the case.

What struck me in Robert Kelly’s argument in 1945 that Ukraine will ultimately prevail militarily in its war against Russia was this passage:

Ukraine is slowly being well-equipped by the West, while Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel by soliciting the North Koreans for help. Sanctions on Russia make it hard to reconstitute its forces with modern weapons. And Ukraine’s will to fight is high, where Russia has had to rely on conscription.

Leaving the “well-equipped by the West” portion for a later post, I was surprised by his using a reliance on conscription as a measure of will. Not only do both Russia and Ukraine employ conscription to staff their armies, I have seen it claimed that both Ukraine and Russia are exploiting conscription as a sort of backdoor ethnic cleansing, Ukraine of ethnic Russians, Russia of Crimean Tatars.

I don’t know how to verify or refute either of those claims confidently but they are certainly interesting.

To my eye the most significant passage in Anatol Lieven’s post at Responsible Stateraft is this:

Instead of a Communist-led nationalist movement to reunify Vietnam, the Vietnamese Communists were portrayed as a force that could start toppling a row of “dominoes” that would end with Communist victory in France and Mexico. Instead of a tinpot regional dictator, Saddam Hussein became a nuclear menace to the U.S. homeland. The Taliban, an entirely Afghan force, supposedly had to be fought in Afghanistan so that we would not need to fight them in the United States.

And today, U.S. officials in their rhetoric somehow manage to combine the supposed beliefs both that Russia is so weak that Ukraine can completely defeat the Russian army and catastrophically undermine the Russian state, and that Russia is so strong that if not defeated in Ukraine it will pose a mortal threat to NATO and freedom around the world.

On the surface that appears to be a very severe case of cognitive dissonance. Or is it possible for Russia to be weak enough it can be defeated on the ground by Ukraine but strong enough that it poses a threat to all of Europe?

It is undoubtedly a case of forgetting. We are forgetting Vietnam. We are forgetting Iraq. We are forgetting Afghanistan. We are forgetting 9/11.

I wonder if the South Side voters who voted for Mayor Johnson expected him to set up tent cities for migrants in their neighborhoods. Based on their reactions I expect not.

Perhaps it’s ghoulish of me but I couldn’t help but notice that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his New York Times op-ed on fixing our immigration system identifies the influx of migrants crossing our southern border as a crisis. The message is clear. When too many migrants cross our southern border into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, it’s a curiosity. When there are too many migrants in New York City, it’s a crisis. Here’s his statement of the problem:

We have a system that essentially allows an unlimited number of people to cross our borders, forbids them from working, offers them free housing, and grants them seven years of residency before ruling on whether they can legally stay. It would be hard to devise a more backward and self-defeating system.

which is a jumble of failures of national policy and problems local to New York. While I’m in broad agreement that our system needs revision and that there is a crisis, I’m not entirely in agreement with his arguments which are a combination of the persistence theory and an appeal to emotion or his proposals which, while reasonable enough, do not appear to me to be a crisis response. He proposes that the federal government appropriate enough money to handle the influx, allow the migrants to work immediately, and pay for their shelter, food, etc. until they can pay their own way. I challenge Mayor Bloomberg to prove their is a grave demand for workers without college educations. I do not believe there is such demand and his proposal has a serious moral hazard problem.

My response to the crisis at our southern border would be to send our military to the border to control it including enough JAG officers to adjudicate the asylum claims and handle them immediately. Mayor Bloomberg is right about one thing: the preponderance of people coming across our southern border are fleeing poverty and gang violence which are not legitimate causes for asylum. Undoubtedly, that’s why the overall percentage of asylum claims granted is under 50%. The job-seekers impede our ability to handle the claims of people fleeing political and religious persecution which are legitimate causes for asylum.

Somewhat ironically, the editors of the Washington Post declaim that President Biden and Congress should worry about the burgeoning federal deficit and debt:

In 2023 — with the economy humming along — the federal deficit is spiking to $2 trillion, according to calculations from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group. That’s double last year’s deficit. The deficit has been this high and surged this fast only during global crises such as World War II or the covid-19 pandemic. This isn’t supposed to happen in a good economic year, in which tax revenue rises and fewer people need government aid.

and

Federal debt is on track to hit a record level by 2029, meaning it will be higher as a percentage of the U.S. economy than even World War II’s peaks. And it will only get uglier from there if politicians continue to ignore it.

concluding:

Getting the United States on a better fiscal track requires significant, broad-based change that includes tax increases, spending moderation and modest reforms to Medicare and Social Security. We know it’s hard. We spent months coming up with our own debt plan this year, and we received many angry letters. But delaying action means the problem gets worse and the solutions become more painful.

Don’t blame me. I opposed both President Bush’s and President Trump’s tax cuts and have argued for Medicare and Social Security reform for decades.

The significance of historic deficits and debt is that increasing spending now would place fiscal policy and monetary policy at cross-purposes.

What needs to happen is that the United States needs to produce more of what its people consume not less. Keynesian strategies for economic growth only work when aggregate product exceeds aggregate demand. That hasn’t been the case for some time. Furthermore, the Republicans’ preferred economic strategy, reducing taxes, was effective in Reagan’s time but it’s a lot less effective now. Now tax cuts just increase the deficit.

Lately I’ve been taken to task for relying too heavily on the rate of inflation as a measure of economic health. Let’s consider some others.
Real median household income

Since 2019 real median household income in the U. S. has declined sharply.

Household net worth

When adjusted for inflation household net worth has declined.

Manufacturing activity

As a percentage of GDP manufacturing is at an historic low. When adjusted for inflation, manufacturing activity has declined.

Exports

When adjusted for inflation U. S. exports have declined.

Sales of existing homes

The sales of existing homes are down sharply.

Sales of new homes

Sales of new homes are down, too.

What about unemployment (I hear someone say)? Yes, unemployment is back down to 2019 levels but that statistic must be considered with an asterisk. Labor force participation is down since 2019:

That means that the actual number of people working has declined since 2019 and, as I have previously noted, that cannot be explained by more people pursuing higher education because college enrollments are down, too.

Update

Youth unemployment

The youth unemployment rate is too high. That can’t be blamed on retiring Baby Boomers.

If you’re not aware of it the notorious “food pyramid” has been replaced by MyPlate.

I dutifully entered my age, weight, height, and activity level and I was presented with my target calorie consumption (for either losing weight or weight maintenance) and the proportions of each food group (fruits, grains, vegetables, protein, dairy) I should consume.

The weight maintenance plan they presented to me is just about twice my daily calorie consumption and my weight has been rock steady for quite a while. I believe my weight would soar were I to eat as MyPlate proposes.

No wonder Americans are obese.

I am genuinely surprised at Nicole Friedman’s victory dance over housing prices in the Wall Street Journal:

Home prices aren’t falling anymore.

After declining on a year-over-year basis for five consecutive months—the longest run of declines in 11 years—U.S. home prices rose in July.

The surprisingly quick recovery suggests that the residential real-estate downturn is turning out to be shorter and shallower than many housing economists expected after mortgage rates soared last year.

Scarcity is a big reason. High interest rates have prompted homeowners to stay put rather than buy new homes and take on more expensive mortgages, resulting in an unusually low inventory of homes for sale.

Many potential home buyers have given up their search because mortgage rates recently hit a two-decade high. But the homes that do list often still receive multiple bids, driving up the final sales price.

The result is a market in which the overall volume of transactions has fallen dramatically. Sales of previously owned homes are now down about 36% from January 2022. But prices are generally holding firm outside of a few trouble spots.

For most buyers the price of a home is not the first consideration. The first consideration is the monthly mortgage payment and that is highly dependent on prevailing interest rates.

That’s why we don’t really know what’s going on with the housing market these days. Will the Fed raise interest rates, lower them, or leave them the same?

Consider this:

Taking that into consideration would you say that a crash in the housing market has been forestalled?

I can almost excuse analysts and journalists who’ve never lived through high inflation and attendant high interest rates. Almost.

This year my wife engaged in an experiment. She planted potatoes and the picture above illustrates our harvest. We harvested and ate a few a couple of weeks ago (they were delicious).

She says it puts her in touch with her Irish ancestors.

She’s eager to do it again next year.