The video I have embedded is a debate on the question

Resolved: The U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have a serious contagious disease.

The affirmative, argued by Alex Nowrasteh of Cato, made a strictly libertarian argument that exceeded the actual resolution, arguing that the U. S. should have free immigration full stop. That was supported by a combination of reversing the burden of proof, the “no true Scotsman” fallacy (no true libertarian could oppose this), and an appeal to emotion.

The negative, represented by Francis Merton, made the Jeffersonian argument that our economy and systems of government are actually pretty fragile and would rapidly cease to exist with the massive immigration supported by the affirmative. Congressional apportionment is a key issue. In other words rather than becoming the libertarian paradise suggested by the affirmative it would become Venezuela or something very much like it.

My own view, as I have said any number of times, is that if our economy, society, government, and circumstances were today what they were in 1883, I would support the free, open immigration supported by the affirmative but they are not and that cannot practically be undone. Although I favor more legal immigration and accepting more true refugees, the present large amount of illegal immigration harms blacks and the most recent cohort of immigrants while imposing significant costs on the rest of us that we are required by law to bear and which cannot be avoided.

At Foreign Affairs Oren Cass and Gabriela Rodriguez argue for the U. S. making a “hard break” from China:

When welcomed into the international community in the late 1990s, China was still a developing nation. Its GDP was roughly one-tenth of the United States’ GDP, and in 1999, it was still one of the world’s poorest countries per capita, ranked between Sri Lanka and Guyana. U.S. leaders across the political spectrum were confident that by encouraging China’s integration into the global economy, they could ensure that the country would become a constructive participant in a U.S.-led world order. U.S. President Bill Clinton spoke for many when he declared that China’s accession to the World Trade Organization was about “more than our economic interests; it is clearly in our larger national interest.”

It has not turned out that way. Instead, China has rapidly become—by some measures— the world’s largest economy and a powerful counterweight to U.S. influence. Its state-controlled economy and increasingly authoritarian leadership have subverted U.S. investment, supply chains, and institutions. Beijing’s efforts to use global integration to enhance Chinese power and harm U.S. interests have proliferated. The Chinese government has leveraged market access to force technology transfers from U.S. firms including Westinghouse, General Electric, and Microsoft. It has dominated global markets by flooding them with subsidized goods, including solar panels, and it has forced the National Basketball Association and its players into humiliating silence on Chinese human rights abuses.

The fundamental problem is that the United States’ free-market economy is incompatible with a Chinese state-controlled one. U.S. liberty and democracy are antithetical to the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party. The United States must break from China or else become irrevocably corrupted by it.

Here’s what they mean by “hard break”:

U.S. law must, then, address the challenge of preventing CCP control over U.S. investors in China and investments in the United States. Washington should prohibit capital flows, technologies transfers, and economic partnerships between the United States and China by default.

and the balance of the article details the changes in law required to accomplish that.

The only real criticism of their plan I would raise is that I don’t think that the authors understand what is meant by “reserve currency”. That explains much of the discrepancy in the balance of trade between the two countries.

You might think that those of us who’ve been arguing for the last 50 years that a close relationship between the United States and China did not serve the national interests of the United States and that the steps we were taking would not produce the results their proponents anticipated would find a change of view on the part of those who not so long ago were making conventional free trade agreements in favor of all of those steps gratifying but, sadly, that’s not the case.

At this point I think that the repercussions of the “hard break” they describe would have effects they, once again, do not anticipate. What I think we have before us are some hard decisions.

For example, do we really believe that one country should not invade another? There are few clearer examples than China’s 60 year occupation of Tibet. Should we not be supporting the Tibetans overthrowing Chinese rule in Tibet?

And how about Chinese threatening of its neighbors? Should we not be taking more kinetic steps to oppose those?

Do we actually believe in environmental, safety, and labor standards? If so we should impose Pigouvian taxes in the amount of the competitive advantage that Chinese products have due not just to differences between their laws and ours but between Chinese enforcement of their laws. China actually has tougher environmental standards than we do. They just don’t necessarily enforce them. They don’t have an independent judiciary.

As I’ve said before I am more concerned about us than about the Chinese. I think we need to start doing what is actually in the U. S. national interest. That will be the hardest decision of all.

I found this article at the Wall Street Journal by Austen Hufford, about Bath & Body Works’s (not to be confused with the moribund retailer Bed, Bath, and Beyond) approach to shortening its supply chains very interesting:

NEW ALBANY, Ohio—A $7.95 bottle of Bath & Body Works foaming hand soap used to take three months to put together. The pieces had to travel more than 13,000 miles from China, Canada and Virginia to the company’s Ohio distribution center.

Bath & Body Works decided it needed to get new products to market more quickly. The result was a production initiative with little parallel in corporate America.

Now every step of production occurs at plants just feet from each other on the company’s dedicated “beauty park” on the outskirts of Columbus. One factory makes the foaming pump and mechanism. Another makes the bottle itself, a third makes the label, a fourth makes the soap, fills the bottle, attaches the label and screws on the top. A fifth packages it. Getting a bottle to distribution is down to 21 days and a few miles. A majority of Bath & Body Works products, which are sold in its own stores, are made on site.

The effort, which started in 2008, required a lot of negotiation with sometimes skeptical suppliers. The campus includes 10 manufacturers and millions of square feet of production and warehouse spaces, with 5,000 employees working there during peak production. Bath & Body Works had sales of $7.56 billion last year, increasing annual revenue by more than $2 billion since 2019.

“I look at BBW as a composer and a conductor of a symphony,” said Bath & Body Works supply-chain executive Susanna Zhu.

Bringing production closer to home has become a priority for many companies. Disruptions from Covid-19, severe weather, trade wars, geopolitical tensions and stuck ships left consumers without the couches and hot tubs they wanted. The Biden administration is spending hundreds of billions of dollars aimed at boosting the domestic presence of industries deemed strategic, including electric cars, batteries and semiconductors.

You might find BBW’s description of their “Beauty Park” interesting, too. Although the company emphasizes supply chain risk mitigation as a primary motivation for the park, it has other implications as well including making a customization, a key aspect of modern retailing, more practical. It also has environmental implications.

From a business organization standpoint note that the “Beauty Park” doesn’t consist of plants wholly owned by BBW but is a group of independent companies sharing facilities on the same campus. As Ms. Zhu notes, it’s like conducting a symphony.

I like a lot of what economist David R. Henderson has written. I’ve been reading his stuff for years and I’ve liked a lot of it. However, when I read his post at the American Institute of Economic Research, “The Surprising Beneficiaries of American Slavery”, I’m sorry to say that I think it strongly suggests that he just doesn’t get it.

Take this, for example:

Who gained nothing from slavery? Except for the rare person who inherited an estate that slavery enriched, every contemporary non-black American gained nothing from slavery.

That is simply untrue, at least unless you hold a very narrow definition of “enriched”. Rather than lean on “enrichment”, I would rather just ask who owned slaves? The answer to that question is 20% of white Southerners owned slaves. Why own slaves if you don’t benefit from it?

Furthermore, you didn’t need to own slaves to benefit from it. For example, some of the wealthiest Northern families, e.g. the Bushes, founded their wealth on the slave trade.

And then there’s this which is thornier:

Who suffered from slavery? The slaves themselves. They were brought from Africa against their will, and they were forced to work without receiving the full value of their labor.

The slaves themselves were not the only ones harmed by slavery. It may not be intuitive but poor whites were harmed by slavery, too. Poor whites were in competition with slaves. Slavery lowered the prevailing wage as well as changing what got done.

And this which is thornier yet:

Who gained from slavery? Americans of African descent.

The late economist Walter E. Williams said that slavery was the worst thing ever to happen to his ancestors, but the best thing ever to happen to him. Why? Because instead of growing up in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Senegal, Mali, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, he enjoyed the opportunities, wealth, health, security, and freedom of the United States.

The descendants of slaves, such as Williams, received the bounty of being born in America, where the average per capita annual income for blacks is $24,509. While the enslaved people came from a variety of African countries, the five mentioned above have an average annual income of $1,650. Over a hypothetical 40-year career, the difference is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You might think the descendants of slaves suffered a financial loss because contemporary blacks have an annual income that is $17,600 below that of whites. But that’s an unrealistic comparison. If it weren’t for the forced relocations of the slave trade, those who would be getting reparations today would be Bissau-Guinean, Angolan, Senegalese, Malian, or Congolese, not American.

He bases his calculation on an error. Relatively few black Americans have 100% African ancestry. Most have at least 25% European ancestry and some as much as 95% European ancestry. If their ancestors had not been brought as slaves from Africa to the colonies, they wouldn’t be earning $1,650 a year. They wouldn’t exist at all.

Where I agree with him is that reparations for slavery for present day black Americans are unjust. They’re not just unjust but foolish, divisive, even malicious.

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius says there’s a lot to be encouraged about in the way the war in Ukraine is progressing:

Considering the failure of Russia’s conventional forces, there’s an obvious danger that Putin might turn to the domain in which Russia remains a superpower: nuclear weapons. But that would be even riskier for Russia than for the West. Any demonstration of Russia’s battlefield nuclear weapons would draw a devastating U.S. conventional military response — and probably cause the loss of China as an ally.

Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.

The phrase “other than for the Ukrainians” is a telling one. I have heard such wildly conflicting reports on what has happened in Ukraine that I have no idea how to assess that. For example, the estimates I have read of the number of people who have left Ukraine vary from 6 million to 30 million. The estimates of Ukrainian soldiers killed or wounded vary even more dramatically—anything from 20,000 to 700,000. What the actual figures are matter a lot.

I don’t see the solidarity that Mr. Ignatius does, either within NATO or in the world. Ten times as many people live in countries that aren’t aligned with the NATO view than in countries that do. Has the war isolated Russia or has it isolated the U. S.? And how do we know? I do think our European allies are united in not wanting to commit their own soldiers to the conflict but would be delighted if we did.

Based on recent reports it actually looks like Russia plans to foreclose Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

And at Responsible Statecraft Daniel L. Davis, who has been skeptical of Ukrainian victory all along, writes that Ukraine can’t win:

Trying to put a good face on the situation, Western officials and analysts told the Washington Post on Tuesday that “Ukraine’s military has so far embraced an attrition-based approach aimed largely at creating vulnerabilities in Russian lines.” That is not accurate. The UAF haven’t “embraced” an attrition-based approach, they have changed tactics to leading with small groups of dismounted infantry to try and penetrate Russia’s leading trench lines out of sheer necessity. Leading with armor simply won’t work, and if Ukraine had persisted in trying large armored assaults, they would have continued dying in large numbers.

The problem for Kyiv is that this “approach” is virtually certain to fail. The military geography of this entire region of Ukraine is characterized by open, flat terrain, interspersed with thin forest strips. Because Russia owns the skies and has considerable drone capacity, any time the Ukrainian soldiers move in the open, they are immediately subjected to artillery or mortar fire. If any armored vehicles move in the open, they are likewise quickly destroyed. The best the UAF can do is infiltrate small numbers of infantrymen into trenches where Russian forces are located.

It’s not that Zelensky’s forces are “going slowly” forward, it’s that they aren’t attaining any of their initial tactical objectives on the way to the Azov coast and it’s precisely because the combat fundamentals necessary to win are largely (and in some cases entirely) absent. They flatly don’t have the human resources or physical infrastructure necessary to succeed.

Now, it is always possible that Russia could suffer sudden political collapse, such as what happened in 1917, and Ukraine could still emerge successful. That, however, is extremely unlikely and Kyiv would be unwise to base their future hopes upon such an event.

I find lots of the reports puzzling. For example, although considerable glee was expressed at the Ukrainians’ latest attack on the Kerch bridge in the Western media, all of the damage reports I could find including the Ukrainian suggested considerably less damage than the first attack on that bridge.

In Foreign Affairs Max Bergmann argues for “regime change” in Russia:

Such a speech from Biden would assert that the obstacle to the West’s positive relations with Russia is Putin. Biden could remind Russians that when he entered office, he sought to engage and work with Putin, holding a summit in June 2021 with him in Geneva. Months later, Putin launched his unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine. He has demonstrated to Western leaders that he cannot be trusted and therefore cannot broker a lasting peace. He has lost all credibility. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for him for alleged war crimes. As long as Putin leads Russia, the United States and Russia will be adversaries and U.S. sanctions will remain in place.

adding an argument that Putin’s replacement could be no worse:

The prevailing assumption is that a Russian hard-line nationalist would be most likely to replace Putin. But Putin is already a hard-line nationalist.

I find many things in the piece puzzling. He confuses replacing a man with regime change, common in the Western press. If Putin were to be replaced it is very unlikely to be constitute regime change any more than electing Joe Biden president did.

Another is his assessment of Putin. He isn’t a “hard-line nationalist” but more of a centrist from a Russian perspective. Poll after poll has shown strong support of the war by Russians. Indeed, it appears to be the case that more think that Putin has been too lenient than that he has been too harsh.

I also find his account of the Prigozhin episode puzzling. Okay, what happened two weeks ago and how do you know? I’ve read explanations going every which way including that Prigozhin’s march towards Moscow was at President Putin’s behest to provide a pretext for removing military leaders who were inconvenient. I have no idea what happened and don’t honestly know how anyone else does, either. It remains mysterious.

What qualifies Mr. Bergmann to make such sweeping pronouncements? I’ve read his CV and to my eye it looks like that of a typical apparatchik.

As multiple cities worldwide record their highest temperatures ever, I find there are several points that should be made. We don’t know that the heatwave presently being experienced is a consequence of anthropogenic global warming. We also do not know that it isn’t. Arguendo let’s assume it is.

In his Wall Street Journal column Holman Jenkins makes a reasonable point:

If the goal were to reduce emissions, the world would impose a carbon tax. Then what kind of EVs would we get? Not Teslas but hybrids like Toyota’s Prius. “A wheelbarrow full of rare earths and lithium can power either one [battery-powered car] or over 90 hybrids, but, uh, that fact seems to be lost on policymakers,” a California dealer recently emailed me.

His numbers apparently originate with Toyota, setting off a small donnybrook in the green lobbying community. The same battery minerals in one Tesla can theoretically supply 37 times as much emissions reduction when distributed over a fleet of Priuses.

This is a shock only to those who weren’t paying attention. It certainly isn’t lost on government. Chris Atkinson, the Ohio State University sustainable transportation guru whose slogan I’ve cited before—“the best use of a battery is in a hybrid”—was a key official in the Obama Energy Department.

Our policies don’t exist to incentivize carbon reduction, they exist to lure affluent Americans to make space in their garages for oversized, luxurious EVs so Tesla can report a profit and so other automakers can rack up smaller losses on the “compliance” vehicles they create in obedience to government mandates.

Mining the required minerals produces emissions. Keeping the battery charged produces emissions. Only if a great deal of gasoline-based driving is displaced would there be net reduction in CO2. But who says any gasoline-based driving is being displaced? When government ladles out tax breaks for EVs, when wealthy consumers splurge on a car that burns electrons instead of gasoline, they simply leave more gasoline available for someone else to consume at a lower price.

IMO the point he makes that is correct is that hybrids should be preferred over EVs. I disagree with him on carbon taxes.

He might be correct if the taxes being proposed actually changed the incentives of those who produce the most emissions but they don’t. Carbon taxes are regressive. And producing carbon emissions increases geometrically with income. A carbon tax won’t dissuade Bill Gates from owning dozens of home, convince Jeff Bezos that his mega-yacht is unaffordable, or cause all of the very rich from flitting around the globe in private aircraft but all of those produce carbon emissions far beyond anything produced by you or I. They will cause the poor to choose among food, healthcare, and cooling their homes in the summer.

A final point that should be made is that Tucson, Phoenix, multiple cities in Texas and some of the other southern cities complaining that it’s too darned hot, shouldn’t exist at all, at least not in their present form. Their existence requires lots of water and air conditioning with the power to run it. I laughed out loud when I heard the mayor of Mesa, Arizona declaim that they planned to plant a million trees.

The rule of thumb is that an established tree needs about 10 gallons of water per inch of trunk diameter per day. Where do they plan to get the water? Mesa gets a lot of its water from the Colorado River. Arizona’s allotment from the river was just decreased—they won’t be getting millions of gallons more from it per day.

Trees do help, though. I recall a tour I was taking in Los Angeles years ago in which the tour guide observed that before the Spanish came the Los Angeles basin was hot and dry. When the Spanish came and planted orange, lemon, and olive trees, it became cooler and more humid. When the Americans came they tore out the oranges and olives, paved the areas where they had been, and it became hot and dry again.

To me the moral of the story is that there are some places that shouldn’t have large populations.

One last observation. I grew up in St. Louis without air conditioning. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Also via MSN this piece from the Wall Street Journal provides four different answers to the question that forms the title to this post. The answers provided are:

1. When Putin leaves power
2. When Ukraine says it ends
3. When Ukraine has recovered all of its pre-2014 territory
4. The war in Ukraine will never be over

Read the whole thing.

#1 is flatly wrong. Putin is not the greatest hawk in Russia or the most determined to restore former glory. Those most likely to succeed him are more hawkish and determined than he is.

#2 misstates the relative strength of Ukraine vs. Russia. It assumes that we have the will and ability to continue to supply Ukraine as long as Ukraine cares to fight and that given that Ukrainehas the ability to continue fighting indefinitely. That’s wrong, too.

#3 assumes that is Ukraine’s only objective.

I think that #4 is possible but it’s also possible that, assuming NATO does not enter the war directly, Ukraine will eventually lose the ability to continue fighting.