As should have been expected, the Chinese government has not been content to remain passive as the U. S. attempts to bar technological exports to China and has responded by restricting exports of rare earth metals necessary for semiconductor manufacturing. Mai Nguyen reports at Reuters:

July 5 (Reuters) – China said on Monday it will impose export restrictions on gallium and germanium products used in computer chips and other components to protect national security interests.

The decision, widely seen as retaliation for U.S. curbs on sales of technologies to China, raised concerns that China might eventually limit exports of other materials, notably rare earths, whose production China dominates.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark:

Janet Yellen arrives in Beijing Thursday in an attempt to improve U.S.-China relations, and on Monday the Communist Party rolled out the red carpet: new export restrictions on minerals that are critical for the production of semiconductors, solar cells and other tech products. Huanying, Madam Treasury Secretary.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said that, starting Aug. 1, gallium and germanium will be subject to export controls in the name of national security. China accounts for about 94% of global gallium production, and China wants everyone to know it will use minerals as a political weapon. Beijing wants the U.S. to stop limiting tech exports to China that could have military uses, even as Beijing sprints to expand its navy and weapons to push the U.S. out of the Western Pacific.

Ms. Yellen shouldn’t fall for it. The Chinese have played the critical mineral card before, notably in 2010 when they temporarily halted exports to Japan after a collision at sea near disputed islands.

The main result of that gambit was to encourage the rest of the world to produce more rare-earth metals. The U.S. Geological Survey says China’s share of rare-earth output has fallen to 70% from 98%. The same could happen to gallium and germanium.

I’ll just repeat what I said in response to President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act. We do need to produce more semiconductors here but that’s not enough. We need a complete supply chain for semiconductors that doesn’t run through China. Or Russia.

I was astonished to awaken this morning to find both the editors of the New York Times:

A first step in resetting the conversation is to eliminate the debt ceiling before its next scheduled appearance in 2025. President Biden has brushed aside calls for his administration to pursue a legal ruling that the ceiling is unconstitutional. In doing so, he is repeating the mistake he made last fall, when he failed to press for legislation to repeal the ceiling. A case pending in federal court in Boston, brought by federal workers concerned that a default would come at the expense of their pensions, offers a potential vehicle. Other legal avenues also should be explored. It makes sense to pursue a ruling while there is no imminent danger of hitting the ceiling. If courts reject the legal challenges, that would also be clarifying.

Any substantive deal will eventually require a combination of increased revenue and reduced spending, not least because any politically viable deal will require a combination of those options. Both parties will have to compromise: Republicans must accept the necessity of collecting what the government is owed, and of imposing taxes on the wealthy. Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of federal spending growth going forward, should be on the table. Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable.

That will require painful choices. But the failure to make those choices also has a price — and the price tag is increasing rapidly.

and the editors of the Washington Post:

Unless Americans are willing to live with a substantially smaller military, reduced Social Security payments, more crowded classrooms and other diminishments in what their government provides, lawmakers need to find about $2 trillion in additional tax revenue over the coming decade, on top of the money-saving budget reforms that we have detailed elsewhere. Congress’s task is to raise the money without dulling efficiency and warping incentives to grow, innovate and work.

writing about the urgent moral necessity of increasing taxes. Just to give a quick take the preferences of the WaPo editors are eliminate the “carried interest loophole” (disagree), let the Trump tax cuts expire (agree about personal income taxes, disagree about business taxes), and imposing a carbon tax (regressive).

I think there are two points worth making. The first is that taxes are by definition withdrawing money from the private sector. That always reduces economic activity.

The second is that raising tax rates is hard enough but generating additional revenue is that real kicker. Consider this graph:

As you can see although there’s considerable noise in the federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP it has remained within the same range for nearly 80 years regardless of changes in the tax code.

State and local tax revenues have skyrocketed over that period. When they declaim about federal revenues, they’re actually saying that the federal government needs to break through that 22% barrier.

I know there are lots of countries that pay a larger percent of GDP in taxes than we do. Most of them have much higher social cohesion than we do, too. As a consequence they receive more in government services than we do. Our problems are (in descending order of importance) poor ROI on government spending, too much government spending, not enough tax revenue.

I wanted to add my own musings to Steven L. Taylor’s post at Outside the Beltway so I’ll do it here. Steven opens with the Reuters article about which I wrote last week. Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

To be clear: I am not asserting some notion of guilt-by-ancestral association. But, at a minimum, understanding how a given person got where they are in the now matters. It all illustrates that as much as we want to pretend like we are all self-made, this is simply not true in the main. Even if we build most of the structure, we cannot pretend like some of the foundations upon which we build were not laid by those who preceded us. Some acknowledgment and understanding of that fact is requisite.

The rest of this post may be a bit stream of consciousness so bear with me.

I may be the wrong person to comment on this. I literally cannot remember a time when I was not aware of what slavery was, that it was evil, and had consequences, some of which may persist to the present day. I knew that slaves were sold on the steps of the old St. Louis Courthouse. I knew that’s where the Dred Scott case was originally heard and what that was. I knew what the Civil War was. At least three of my great-great-grandfathers had fought for the Union in that war.

Here’s something you may not have thought of. Some white people benefited from slavery but others were injured by it. The explanation should be simple. You can’t compete on a wage basis with a wage of zero. My ancestors mostly fell into that category—they were injured by slavery and did not derive a benefit from it. That might explain why some of my ancestors were abolitionists.

By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president he had been speaking publicly against slavery for decades. His views were known. After his election in 1860 the southern states began to announce their secession from the Republic. First South Carolina, then Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. It is not a coincidence that the Civil War started a month after his inauguration.

One thing that remains unmentioned: the percentage of white political leaders whose families benefited from slavery vs. the percentage of whites whose families did not. I suspect that the real implication is that a lot of old money is based on slavery. It should be obvious that not all whites have old money.

Steven transitions to remarks about a Gallup poll and I want to focus on those. There is a drastic difference between the views of white Americans on the vestigial effects of slavery on black Americans today and the views of black Americans. Twice as many black Americans (63%) as whites (32%) think that slavery has “a lot”. There’s actually more than one matter there. The mere difference in views is important but that’s not the only important thing. To what degree are black Americans right?

I think they are partially right but not entirely. A lot has happened in 150 years. Consider, for example, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births which is closely related to the percentage of single-parent households:

I think it’s not unreasonable to attribute the discrepancy between blacks and whites in prior to 1950 as being a consequence of slavery. But not the discrepancy between blacks and white after 1965. IMO some of that must be attributed to the Great Society program.

I’d like to see a breakdown of the rates among black women based on urban vs. rural as well. I suspect it’s a lot lower among black rural women.

In her column at the Washington Post Megan McArdle explains why she has hope for the United States:

So in honor of 247 years of American independence, let me lay out why I am still optimistic about our country’s future.

To people on the right, I would note that capital appears to be undergoing a Great Unwokening, and the hated deep state is the same bureaucracy that validated the Hunter Biden laptop suspicions and spent years investigating him. As for expert capture, yes, it is real. But over the long run, I’m more worried that political showboating will discredit experts who have true and important information to share, as happened with public health officials during the pandemic, than I am that some PhD will bullyrag parents into letting their kids identify as cats.

To the left, I would point out that the republic has survived many sudden reversals of Supreme Court precedent, as well as the discovery of all sorts of new rights, under the Warren and Burger courts. Disliking the results of judicial fiats is not the same as proving they are incompatible with a functioning democracy.

As for Trump, yes, he would, if he could, bulldoze every American institution that stands in his way — but note how conspicuously he has failed to do so. When he was president, American institutions were tested, but while they creaked a bit here and there, they ultimately held strong.

Will they continue to do so? Many on the left see Trump’s failings as the natural outgrowth of various troubling currents on the right and therefore fear he is a harbinger of even worse to come.

and here’s her conclusion:

Watch Americans dealing with one another day to day and you will mostly see them going out of their way to be nice. There are far more random acts of kindness in this country than there are drive-by shootings, and far more people acting with honesty and integrity, even when no one’s looking, than there are con men and thieves. We focus on the latter precisely because they are rare.

In a similar vein Charles Lipson expresses his reasons for hope in a piece at RealClearPolitics:

Our shared aspirations and common identity are our country’s best hope for the future. And our history should be a source of hope, as well as somber reflection.

Those ideals are not “our country, right or wrong.” They are not “our country with an airbrushed past.” Neither are they “our country as a relentless record of evil and oppression, at home and abroad.”

Rather, they are “our country as it strives to become better, to celebrate its accomplishments, to overcome its historical wrongs, to heal its lasting wounds and, ultimately, to achieve the ideals set before us in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete in our Constitution.” Whether our ancestors came over on the Mayflower, a slave ship, or a boat from Europe, escaping the Nazis, those are our shared ideals, but only if we embrace them.

What are those ideals? What are those accomplishments, incomplete as they still are? They are the promise that all men and women should be treated equally, allowed to speak freely and assemble peaceably, worship as they choose, permit others to worship, speak, and assemble as they choose, vote for whichever candidates they prefer, and live in safety, governed by laws made by the representatives they choose in fair elections. Those goals are grounded in tolerance and mutual forbearance, which are essential for a cohesive society where people come from different backgrounds and hold different beliefs.

I could fisk both of those pieces but rather than doing that I’ll try to explain why this time really is different.

First, both of our political parties are completely under the control of their most extreme third. The Trump wing really is controlling the Republican Party; the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party really is calling the tune there.

Second, neither of those factions is self-limiting. Progressivism by definition is not; there is always more “progress” to be made. What is being called “conservatism” these days is actually nothing of the sort. What are they trying to conserve? Quite to the contrary I think they are merely unhappy with the status quo and there’s no path to happiness that will satisfy them for the simple reason that it won’t work.

And the two factions really are at daggers drawn. No compromise is possible for either of them their goals are so widely separated.

Third, all of our institutions are either corrupted, debased, or weakened. Chesterton once said, accurately I think, that America is a country founded on a creed. What creed would that be now? For at least 10% of the population whatever you hold up as our common secular creed would be anathema.

And that’s all it takes. Communists were never more than 10% of the population of the Soviet Union; not more than 10% of Germans were Nazis.

Finally, even as recently as 50 years ago if you couldn’t stand the conditions in one part of the country, you could move to another part and escape it. Modern communications has made that practically impossible. You can shut yourself off in isolation but you can’t actually escape.

Although I believe that Russia invading Ukraine was wrong and that we have been right in supporting the Ukrainians, I do wonder what happens to that support when the narrative that’s being pressed here in the U. S. collapses as it already shows signs of doing.

BTW I suspect that I am one of the few here who speaks with Ukrainians who are right in the area in which combat is taking place on a daily. We avoid speaking of the war.

I have been paying attention to the riots in France and to the occasional pieces in the media about them. Most are incomprehensible.

The language is a problem. “French” and “immigrant” have different meanings in France than they do in just about any other country of which I am aware. There are no hyphenated residents of France. If you profess Frenchness, you are French. If you don’t you are an immigrant. France doesn’t keep track of its citizens by race or origin.

In some ways that’s admirable. However, it does make solutions to the present unrest elusive.

At iNews Leo Cendrowicz remarks:

The rioting has also transformed the political discourse. The initial horror over the shooting of a teenager has now turned into a debate about law and order.

This is fertile territory for Ms Le Pen, who has long railed against what she sees as France’s drift into permissiveness and lawlessness. She lambasted the government on Twitter on Sunday as “a power that abandons all constitutional principles for fear of riots, which contributes to aggravating them”, adding, “Our country is getting worse and worse and the French are paying the terrible price for this cowardice and these compromises.”

She did not directly address the shooting but condemned the National Assembly for holding a minute’s silence for Nahel last week, saying, “Unfortunately, there are young people in our country every week…It’s terrible, but I think that the National Assembly should perhaps measure a little the minutes of silence that are carried out.”

And in a video address yesterday she lambasted the “anarchy”, called on authorities to declare a state of emergence or curfew, and attacked Mr Mélenchon for “conniving” and “morally exempting these criminal acts”, promising that they would face a reckoning with “the nation and history”.

to which I would point out that “left” and “right” are different in France, too.

It should be observed that French opinion to the statements of various French politicians is most favorable to Marine Le Pen and least favorable to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, effectively the spokesman for the “left-wing opposition”.

I try to avoid offering opinions on the political turmoil in countries other than my own but I do regret the violence and destruction in France. It mostly hurts the poor people of the suburbs (“suburbs” means something different, too) and it is without clear objectives. A cri de coeur rather than a call to arms.

When I read Frank Miele’s remarks at RealClearPolitics on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislature” theory:

The mainstream media (and of course their Democratic Party allies) celebrated the court’s decision in Moore v. Harper that rejected the so-called “independent state legislature” theory. The New York Times called the theory “dangerous.” Vox said the ruling was a “big victory for democracy.” Those who supported the independent state legislature “theory” were called extreme, fringe, radical, and worse. In other words, they were Trump supporters.

The only problem is that if the theory is extreme, then so is the U.S. Constitution, because no matter how much the 6-3 majority insists otherwise, it isn’t a theory at all. It is the plain language of the Constitution. Check it out for yourself.

Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution says specifically, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

It is not the governor or the courts or even the people of the state which set election rules, according to the Constitution, but the legislatures. Mind you, the state legislatures are not entirely unchecked in their decision making, but it is the Congress of the United States that provides the checks and balances, not the courts.

And as for presidential elections, the matter is even more cut and dried. Article 2, Section 1, declares, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

Notice again that the Constitution gives state legislatures the exclusive power to determine the manner in which electors are appointed to vote for president and vice president. In this case, even Congress does not have the authority to override the legislatures.

I was reminded of my dad’s complaints about lawyers whose only knowledge of the law was the U. S. Constitution.

I think that the court’s decision was completely predictable and not on the basis of left/right ideology but based on the court’s longstanding claim of the authority of legal review. That’s something else you won’t find in the Constitution. You will search in vain for that in the Constitution but it has been a persistent part of our system since Marbury v. Madison as I assume Mr. Miele learned in his grade school civics class. It will not go away peacefully.

As I read the SCOTUS opinions that’s what they were upholding. The Constitution contains important law but it isn’t the only law. There’s the common law, state laws, and the power of courts to review state and federal laws. The Constitution does not empower state legislators to ignore state law or state or federal courts.

Yesterday we lost power for about four hours. I’m keeping track of the number of times we lose power this summer. If it goes over a certain number, I plan to get a generator.

When the electricity came back on, I restarted our network and noticed something puzzling. My main PC, the fastest, most power one I have and the one I usually use for writing my posts, on rebooting successfully updated Windows for the first time in six months. I had tried every trick in the book to get it to update but no luck. And today it just updated on its own.

I can only speculate that Microsoft finally got around to fixing a problem that had prevented some small number of users including me from updating.

Jack was born in Canada and on Canada Day (July 1) as a good Canuck he put on his patriotic harness in recognition of the anniversary of Canada’s constitution.