Rather than jumping into the scrum, let me, as they say on Jeopardy!, put it in the form of a question. Should influence peddling be a viable business plan for an elected official and his or her family? How about insider trading?

Don’t bother to argue that neither exists. Or is limited to handful of individuals. Both are widespread and commonplace.

My own view is that we need to be much, much tougher on all forms of political corruption and the appearance of political corruption. Living in Chicago can convince you of that.

It should be easy to ban insider trading by pols. Banning influence peddling will be more difficult. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.

Erstwhile actor Matthew Hennessey offers advice to the striking writers and actors in his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Your cause isn’t as righteous as you think it is. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may enjoy playacting as Norma Rae on the picket line, but don’t get carried away by the radical drama of it all. Actors aren’t saints. Writers don’t wear halos. You’re looking to “secure the bag” just like the producers on the other side of the negotiating table. Let’s not pretend this is the Dust Bowl and that Fran Drescher is Ma Joad.

Yes, you say you are fighting for the little guy—for the background player whose image and likeness gets computerized and copied by artificial intelligence without remuneration. But the Writers Guild and SAG-Aftra are trade unions. Their primary function is to force studios to hire their members and only their members. I suppose some lucky thespian who books a part with a few lines is the little guy compared with Disney and Warner Bros. But the actor slinging drinks, waiting tables and wondering how he’ll ever get a union card is an even littler guy. Full disclosure: That was once me.

The striking unions say they seek “fairness” but an unavoidable show-business reality is that the number of jobs is limited and the supply of talent is limitless. Somebody’s always willing to step in and play the part. This is the dynamic through which the producers acquire their power. It isn’t fair, but such is life. Producers frequently make bets that don’t pay off. Writers and actors don’t lose money when a picture flops yet they want in on the upside. How is that fair?

On a side note Hallmark’s When Calls the Heart has secured an interim agreement with the actors and writers. Not only will its 10th season start showing on time, it’s 11th season is already in production. It’s possible that will be among the very meager new scripted content that will be available until the first of the year. Will our torment never cease?

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Shadi Hamid writes:

According to a 2016 survey by my Brookings Institution colleague Shibley Telhami, few things predicted partisan affiliation more accurately than attitudes toward Muslims and Islam.

But Muslims who were brought into the Democratic tent didn’t necessarily align themselves with the party’s evolving views. Asma Uddin, in her book “When Islam Is Not a Religion,” describes “a tacit agreement that Muslims, as religious believers, will never challenge any of the rights championed by the Left, such as a progressive vision of gender or sexual equality.” Muslims became an integral part of the party not as a faith community with distinct theological commitments but as a “marginalized” group requiring protection from Republican bigotry.

For a time the bargain appeared to be holding and even solidifying. According to a Pew Research Center survey, in 2007 only 27% of American Muslims said homosexuality should be “accepted by society.” By 2016 that number had jumped to 52%. Many Muslims justified the shift by arguing that while same-sex relationships may be haram—forbidden by Islamic law—they weren’t so under American law.

But during the Trump years, the Democratic Party veered sharply to the left on social and cultural issues. The Republican Party lost interest in Muslims, with Mr. Trump neglecting to antagonize them during his 2020 re-election bid. The new enemy was “wokeness,” and a growing number of Muslims found themselves on the GOP side of that divide. According to the AP VoteCast Survey, as many as 35% of Muslims voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, compared with 8% to 13% in 2016.

The Democratic Party’s cultural turn has intensified. In March the Montgomery County Board of Education—the largest school district in Maryland, in a Democratic stronghold with a significant Muslim population—informed parents that they would no longer be notified when their children were reading from the school’s approved “selection of over 22 LGBTQ+-inclusive texts,” and that no opt-outs would be tolerated. Hundreds of Muslim parents have since sounded out in protest, some of them joining Christians in filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the mandate.

I think I can answer Mr. Hamid’s implied question—why are Democrats deserting Muslims? I don’t believe the Democratic leadership is thinking that far ahead. They see the views they’re championing as self-evidently righteous and believe that all right-thinking people necessarily agree with them. Their concern is focused unswervingly on the next election.

My two cents. Everything is progressing as I have suggested. People don’t abandon their culture, politics, or religion when they come to the United States or when they vote for a political party. And, as I posted twenty years ago, the irony of the present political moment is that there has been a sort of resonance between the views of Muslims and that of Jacksonians who are now largely Republicans, obvious for a century. Unless they happen to be black. But that’s changing, too.

I also think that a lot of Democrats, secular to the core, don’t understand religion, viewing it as a sort of personal preference that should be exercised privately and kept out of the town square. Religion just doesn’t work that way.

After noting that a) a significant percentage of voter don’t like either Trump or Biden and b) Democrats have some serious problems in winning over those voters, Ruy Teixeira observes:

Certainly Democrats can point to issues like abortion where Democrats do have an advantage, even with the swing group discussed here. But perhaps they should consider a Plan B, where the success of the Bidenomics pitch is not assumed and compromise is not anathematized. As I have argued previously, Democrats have generally dealt with culturally-freighted issues by some combination of ignore (change the subject) and attack (our opponents are hateful bigots who want to roast the planet). The latter now seems like the preferred Democratic approach. But there is a third way, if you will, that would fit nicely into a Plan B.

That approach is to defuse. This means moving aggressively to neutralize vulnerabilities in cultural areas by (a) dissociating the party from extreme positions in their own ranks; and (b) embracing a common-sense approach to these issues which typically aligns well with both Democratic values and public opinion.

Why, indeed? I’ve already provided my answer: the party leadership actually supports all of those “culturally freighted” ideas. They can’t defuse the situation without defenestrating themselves.

At the Eurasia Daily Monitor Hlib Parfonov takes note of something I pointed out some time ago. Ukraine is running low on personnel for its campaign against the Russians.

According to classified and partially open-source data, as of January 1, 2022, the population of Ukraine was 31 million, while the State Statistics Service of Ukraine reports 34 million, though there are problems with the methodology used to arrive at this number (RBK, September 16, 2022). The population dropping from 48 million to 31 million in 20 years is normal, especially as Ukraine has experienced multiple crises and outmigration waves during that period. According to Eurostat, approximately 4.9 million Ukrainians received residence permits in the European Union alone between 2014 and 2022 (Ec.europa.eu, accessed July 25) and approximately 3 million did so in Russia (Ukrinform, April 23, 2018). Subtracting from this figure the number of Ukrainians in the occupied territories (approximately 2 million), as well as those who left the country, the current estimate for Ukraine’s population comes to around 20 million.

and

Considering that Ukraine has a population of about 20 million citizens, and given that the most recent data on the number of people mobilized into the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was last announced more than a year ago (at the time, it was reported that more than 1 million people had been mobilized), some estimates can be made based on how many new brigades have been created, the approximate number of those wounded and the calculations of the Ukrainian Ministry of Veterans Affairs regarding the potential number of combatants (up to 4 million) (Forbes.ua, July 8, 2022; Mva.gov.ua, May 23). Keeping in mind that Ukraine’s mobilization is permanent and that many have been wounded, the estimated number of mobilized Ukrainians totals about 2 million.

What does this mean for Ukraine? It means that 10 percent of the population is now involved with the armed forces, signifying that Ukraine’s mobilization reserve is rather small, with those pensioners who did not leave the country accounting for 10.7 million people (Pfu.gov.ua, July 12). All this means that Ukraine has approached a critical threshold with its personnel needs.

During the Vietnam War, in the South Vietnamese army, the percentage of conscripts to the population was 11.7 percent (Jcs.mil, accessed July 25). And this ratio was a painful blow to the state economy, and in general, almost all of it was sponsored by the United States. During World War II, Finland began to experience significant domestic problems when the number of conscripts reached between 14 and 15 percent of the general population. As a result, personnel shortages grew in certain professions, which led to significant consequences for the Finnish economy (Kinnunen and Kivimäkib, Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations, 2012). Similarly, in Ukraine, members of the Verkhovna Rada claim that there is a shortage of personnel in the energy, industrial and military sectors due to the mobilization of workers (Antikor.com, July 18).

At least in theory munitions can be replaced fairly readily. In practice it’s actually harder than that at least in part because we don’t have as much heavy industry as we used to. What you can’t replace nearly as readily is people.

Contrary to what was suggested in comments not long ago what most Americans believe about immigration doesn’t matter. That is clear from both the findings of Gallup and Pew Research is that there is actually a consensus in the United States on immigration. It approximates what I’ve enunciated here. In general immigration is good for the United States. Legal immigration might even be increased but the situation at our southern border needs to be brought under control.

That the situation at our southern border is in fact out of control is pretty obvious. Since President Biden assumed office around a million “gotaways” have entered the United States, more than a half million in 2022 alone. “Gotaway” is the terminology the Border Patrol uses for individuals observed crossing the border who were not apprehended.

Why do the positions held by our political parties not reflect those priorities? My interpretation is that both parties are under the control of the most extreme quarter of their membership.

In the Democratic Party that’s the progressives. Nancy Pelosi was a founding member of the House Progressive Caucus. Hakeem Jeffries was a member in good standing of the caucus. Each left the caucus when they assumed a leadership role. Among the Republicans it’s the Trump supporters.

If you have an alternative explanation for why neither the Congress nor the White House follows policies consistent with the views of most Americans on immigration, I would be interested in seeing it.

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.