The only observation I will make about President Biden’s announcement that he is running for re-election in 2024 is that today is April 25, 2023. November 5, 2024 is a long way away, particularly when you’re 80 years old.

It reminds me a bit of when my mom had a new furnace installed (she was in her 80s). When the installer asked if she wanted a lifetime warranty or the standard 5 year warranty she laughed.

My quote of the day is from the Roman historian Tacitus: Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges. The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.

The editors of the Washington Post remark on an after action report of sorts on the federal government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Looking back at the U.S. response to the pandemic, many setbacks and mistakes are well-known. But a closer examination by a team of seasoned experts has brought to the surface a profoundly unsettling conclusion. The United States, once the paragon of can-do pragmatism, of successful moon shots and biomedical breakthroughs, fell down on the job in confronting the crisis. The pandemic, the experts say, revealed “a collective national incompetence in government.”

This warning comes through over and over again in “Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report,” a book published Tuesday by a group of 34 specialists led by Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a history professor at the University of Virginia. Their verdict: “The leaders of the United States could not apply their country’s vast assets effectively enough in practice.”

concluding:

The United States did some things well, the experts conclude, such as the crash vaccine development and manufacturing effort, Operation Warp Speed, which was a bargain at $30 billion. But “one of the worst consequences” of the bungled response “was that Americans sensed their governance had let them down. It had let them down in performing the most fundamental task governments are expected to perform, to protect them in an emergency.”

This is a sobering, realistic assessment, one of the most important to come out of the pandemic. The nation should pay heed to it.

There are quite a few assumptions baked into their analysis. In this post I want to consider in particular how we think things should work and how we want them to work.

One way of looking at those is what might be called the “top down” or ‘the buck stops here” approach. In that way of looking at things everything that happens during a president’s term of office is the responsibility of the president. There’s a kernel of truth in that but just a kernel.

For one thing it quickly degenerates into something that might be called the “political” approach. Under that approach everything is blamed on the Republicans/Trump/Democrats/Biden. Here’s an example of that. If you focus on deaths due to COVID-19 (as the editorial does), the fact is that more deaths due to COVID-19 occurred from January 20, 2021 to present than did from December 2019 to January 20, 2021. Do you blame the deaths on Trump or Biden?

Another approach is the technocratic approach, relying on experts. The defect in this approach is that no one is an expert in everything but the temptation to parley your expertise in one field into others in which you have little expertise is irresistible. Under genuine technocracy public health experts would have determined the proper course of action, it would have been managed by those with that expertise, and ensured that it conformed to the law by legal experts. Practically no one wants genuine technocracy. What we have instead is phony technocracy is which, as noted above, people claim expertise in areas in which they have little training, experience, or temperament.

Some would prefer what might be deemed a market-based approach in which the private sector provided solutions largely unfettered. That works for some things but I don’t believe it would in a pandemic. When the poor get sick so do the rich and in a market system willingness to pay which includes ability to pay regulates the system.

My own preference would be for a procedure-based system which I think is more suitable for us fallible mortals. Under such a system legislators, the president, and judges cooperate in establishing procedures for handling contingencies with provisions for the procedures to evolve over time. They would also cooperate in ensuring the procedures are followed.

While I agree with the editors that dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic has not been our finest hour, I’m not sure what approach would be more effective when no one is actually held accountable for anything. I also note that the editors describe losing confidence in the federal government as though it were a bad thing. Is it?

I would also observe that one of the examples of effectiveness they provide, landing on the moon, took place in an America which was very different from the present one in which “the government” consisted almost entirely of white men most of whom had served in the military. I don’t believe we can or should return to that America.

Yesterday’s big news was that Tucker Carlson had left or been removed from Fox News while Don Lemon was removed from CNN. I don’t watch cable news or pay any attention to it so neither move means a great deal to me.

Various explanations have been proffered for Carlson’s departure but what seems the most likely to me is that following the settlement of the Dominion suit Fox is looking to change its highly partisan stance and Carlson was seen as an impediment to that. Similarly with CNN and Lemon.

The two situations aren’t completely parallel. Mr. Carlson was by far the most popular figure on Fox News. Clearly, he was giving his audience what they wanted. There are a number of onscreen personalities as or more popular than Don Lemon on CNN.

In my view there needs to be a sharp line of demarcation, what used to be called a “Chinese wall”, between the news and opinion segments in news media. That pertains to cable news, broadcast news, print news, and online. Such lines have eroded over the last couple of decades and the decline in confidence in journalists more generally can be related to that erosion. It will not be easy to restore the credibility that has been lost.

An alternative solution would be explicitly partisan news outlets as they have in the UK. I believe those can only work with libel laws like those in the UK which are not nearly as rigorous as ours have been. I suspect with the increasing visual orientation of the media we will see an attendant increasingly agonistic tone. That’s completely consistent with the “point of view” approach to journalism that has replaced the “5Ws” style.

I disagree with Richard Haass’s remarks at Project Syndicate concerning Northern Ireland. Here’s the meat of it:

Some of what explains the accord’s success is specific to Northern Ireland. But other factors have broader relevance, providing guidance for approaching conflicts elsewhere, even the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The most fundamental lesson is that diplomacy can succeed only where and when other tools cannot. Successive British prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair – created a context that by the late 1990s gave diplomacy a chance. This required two things: First, the UK introduced sufficient security forces so that those in Northern Ireland who sought to shoot their way to power could not succeed. Violence could not be prevented from disrupting lives, but it was not allowed to create political facts.

Everything he says in the balance of the piece might well be true but he leaves out an important development. In the late 1990s the IRA was largely being financed by private contributions from the Irish diaspora, particularly Irish Americans. You couldn’t go into an Irish pub here in Chicago without somebody passing the can for contributions at some point. Everybody knew where the contributions went.

But then disaster struck on September 11, 2001. The U. S. experienced a major terrorist attack of its own and nearly overnight the contributions dried up. Terrorist attacks just weren’t that romantic any more.

When the contributions dried up the bargaining table looked a lot more attractive.

This piece by Alexey Gusev at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is hard to excerpt meaningfully but easy to summarize: there is no practical way to divide Russia into statelets. If it happens at all it is unlikely to happen peacefully.

The feature above was shown yesterday on ABC’s This Week. I found it interesting but unsatisfying. For example, there was no mention of an earlier wargame with a similar scenario I reported on a few weeks ago. As you may recall the outcome of that session was that Japanese preparedness was an absolute essential.

There’s an old joke. Two diplomats are attending the funeral of a third diplomat. After standing there, solemnly, for a while, one turns to the other and asks “I wonder what he means by this?” The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of something interesting:

China’s Ambassador Lu Shaye was asked on Friday on French TV whether he considered Crimea to be part of Ukraine under international law. In 2014 Russia occupied and annexed Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine since the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

Mr. Lu didn’t stop at Crimea. “Even these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have effective status, as we say, under international law because there’s no international accord to concretize their status as a sovereign country,” Mr. Lu said. The “as we say” is a nice diplomatic touch since the only international law that Beijing recognizes is what serves its increasingly imperial interests.

The diplomat is saying that the many countries that declared their independence when the Soviet Union dissolved aren’t independent at all. That would include Ukraine, but also the three Baltic states, Moldova, and the countries of central Asia like Georgia and Kazakhstan. The clear implication is that Russia is justified in its attempt to conquer Ukraine, and perhaps the other countries too.

At one level that’s a bit of sophistry. If taken at face value he is saying that in China’s opinion Article 2 of the United Nations charter is meaningless. Even the United States which has many treaties with Canada and Mexico respecting our shared borders, does not have an “international accord” securing that border other than bilateral ones. Very few countries have actual international accords on their boundaries. In more specific terms he is asserting China’s right to attack or invade Taiwan at any time and that such an act of aggression would not be a violation of China’s obligations under the UN Charter.

That leaves we me to wonder what he meant by that?

Joseph Addison once observed that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. As if to instantiate that claim, outgoing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has made a very good observation to the members of the African American Mayors Association, report on here at Crain’s Chicago Business by Judith Crown:

Noting that the city of Chicago procures $4 billion in goods and services every year, she said, “Surely some of those contracts can go to Black- and Brown- and women- and veteran-owned businesses. It’s different tools and levers that we can pull, but it’s all centered around equity and righting historic wrongs.”

The mayor may not be aware of it but 11% of city contracts are let to black-owned businesses, 14% to businesses owned by Hispanics, and 7% to businesses owned by “Asians”. I put that in quotation marks because I despise that classification, lumping as it does people from very different backgrounds into one single classification. Chicago’s population is 29.2% black, 28.7% Hispanics, and 6.8% “Asian” (no further breakdown to distinguish between Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.). I don’t much like the term “Hispanic” either but that’s a topic for another post.

In other words the city contracts let to black-owned businesses and Hispanic-owned businesses are substantially below their percentage of the population. Why?

There are actually several good reasons and none of them is directly related to racism: clout, business strategy, and fiduciary responsibility.

“Clout’, defined by Mike Royko 50 years ago as “political influence, as exercised through patronage, fixing, money, favors, and other traditional City Hall methods” is what accomplishes practically everything in Chicago and I have little doubt that it is essential in allocating city contracts. Clout depends less on what what your political influence is now than upon what it has been and will be. Chicago’s black population is declining and in all likelihood will continue to do so.

Racial “set sides” place minority-owned businesses in a peculiar situation. As these businesses grow they need to make a decision. They can depend on racial set sides until they reach a certain size and profitability. They can either stop growing or start competing with some very large businesses which potentially means they’ll get even less in the way of city contracts.

And, of course, believe it or not small elements of fiduciary responsibility actually leak into this tidy system. Even black-owned businesses must be qualified, i.e. they must have the skills and wherewithal to execute the contracts they’re receiving. Furthermore limiting the size a company can reach to remain qualified for racial set asides is a form of basing the decision on need.

So there you have it. it’s darned hard to let more contracts to black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses.