I’m seeing quite a few opinion pieces calling for billionaires to be “abolished” (in the NYT and The Nation just to name two). I wonder how they intend to go about it. Back in the 1960s when the highest marginal personal income tax rate was 90%, there were still very rich people (Joe Kennedy’s net worth was about $500,000,000, well over a billion in today’s dollars) so pretty clearly it can’t be taxed away.

I’m completely in favor of ending subsidies to billionaires but it’s hard to drum up any interest in that.

I seem to be in a more than usually reflective mood today. In my life there has been an enormous amount of social change. Whatever you may think or read to the contrary blacks (we used to call them “colored people”) are no longer relegated to the back of the bus.

The United States has gone from a country that was 85% people of primarily European descent to 65%. Its population has nearly tripled, from 130 million to more than 330 million. 8% of the people had been foreign-born; now more than 14% are.

The likelihood not just of engaging in sex prior to marriage but having had multiple partners before marriage has increased enormously. The percentage of children born to parents who weren’t married has gone from 5% to 40%. Women working full-time jobs has gone from being a phenomenon of the poor to being not only expected but necessary. The openness of the professions to women has increased considerably.

Not only is marriage no longer between a man and a woman but we’re not even sure what men and women are.

I think it’s obvious that the nature and pace of social change is disruptive. I don’t think the society has really adapted to the change in sex roles impelled by the change in the role of women.

Here’s my question. Can a society exist without norms? I think we’re being pushed in that direction. I doubt that it can. I think that what Chesterton said holds: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything” and applies to social norms as well.

For most of my life with a few hiatuses the United States has been at war. It might have been called a police action, an intervention, an invasion, or something else but it has been at war. It has lost many of those wars. Have you ever wondered why?

For insight I recommend you read John Waters’s interview of Clausewitz scholar Donald Stoker at RealClearDefense. In it Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all considered and, to some extent, the outcomes explained. Here’s a snippet:

No one blames the troops for our failures in Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan. Rather, it is “the political leaders who have forgotten that victory matters,” historian and Clausewitz scholar Donald Stoker told me recently over the phone. And since the politicians do not believe that victory matters, our troops have found themselves trapped in endless wars that lead to defeat or stalemate, a doom loop of poor planning-leads-to-poor results, where the pursuit of war itself becomes more important than defeat or victory.

The failure to pursue victory can take many forms from the civilian leadership failing to communicate the political goals to the military leadership to the political goals having been impossible from the start.

My own view is that we should never go to war unless failure is not an option.

We are presently at war with Russia. I am sure that many will disagree with that assessment but when you buy the weapon, transport the weapon to the battle zone, sight the target, aim the weapon, and do everything but pull the trigger, I think you’re at war and arguing differently is sophistry.

What are our political goals? Ukraine’s? Are we able to achieve them? Are we willing to achieve them?

In light of all of the encomiums being heaped on Nancy Pelosi in reaction to her announcement that she would not seek another term as Speaker of the House, I thought I’d provide a little background and commentary on Michael Madigan, nicknamed “the Velvet Hammer”, who was Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives for most of the last 40 years. Let’s start with a quick summary of important events:

During Mr. Madigan’s tenure in office Illinois went from a state whose population and economy were growing rapidly, whose fiscal state was reasonably solid, and where the Democratic and Republican Parties competed for power in the state to one in which the population was declining, individuals and businesses were fleeing, it had (by some reckonings) the highest taxes in the nation, was paying higher interest rates to borrow than any other state, and Democrats held hegemonic unchallenged control. While in office Mr. Madigan became rich through property tax appeals cases handled by his law firm.

Mr. Madigan was an important Speaker. He was an influential Speaker. He was a powerful Speaker. He was not a good Speaker. As the late Mayor Daley would say, let’s look at the record.

There are quite a few people who are upset with the Federal Reserve these days. In a characteristically long and opaque post at RealClearMarkets, Jeffrey Snider declaims:

The economy is too complex to direct from the top, and any effort trying to manage this way will be as it has always been doomed to fail. This is why the entire purpose of any central bank was narrow in scope, once constrained to Walter Bagehot’s ancient dictum.

Focus on the money, let the real economy undertake the real work. Being unable to do the first part leaves these pseudo-central bankers grasping at their own analysis of the details – such as divining inflation rates and output gaps.

I suspect he doesn’t see it that way but Mr. Snider’s complaint can be interpreted as a plea for higher taxes. What’s the most direct way of reducing the supply of money? Taxation. Taxes are a means of removing money from the private economy. BTW, that’s how the present inflation puts a pin into the Modern Monetary Theory balloon. Increasing spending is politically possible, as we have seen. Raising taxes is a lot less so and it certainly cannot be done frequently or adroitly enough to operate the way MMT-ers advocate.

Unfortunately, far too many dollars are beyond the reach of the U. S. Treasury for taxation to be as effective a tool as it used to be anyway.

Meanwhile, Barry Ritholtz is even more critical of the Fed’s “quack policies”:

My job is not to give policy advice to the Fed, but to interpret what they are doing and its most likely impact on our portfolios. To paraphrase Ray Dalio, it is the role of the investor to see embrace reality and deal with it as it is.

Still, I cannot help but observe that the FOMC response to pandemic-induced inflation is blunt, excessive and unnecessarily painful to the middle and lower economic earners.

The Fed could learn from the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.”

They did harm by remaining on emergency footing of zero for way too long, and then missing the initial rise of inflation straight through their 2% target. Now, they are massively overcompensating by chocking off the economy to the point of recession.

The main point of his piece is that while 60% of inflation is due to excess demand the other 40% is due to supply bottlenecks but all of the Fed’s attention is focused on that 60%. My retort would be that a fundamental principle of optimization is to focus efforts where there’s a greater return. But, honestly, that’s not that much greater a return. I agree that more attention should be devoted to increasing supply. In fact I’ve been saying it for decades. There doesn’t seem to be much appetite for it.

At DefenseOne Maseh Zarif and Mark Montgomery take note of a proposed expansion of Section 889 of the National Defense Authorization Act, summarizing one of the provisions tartly:

you can do business with the federal government or you can have a significant dependence on Chinese chips, but you cannot do both

and another nearly as much so:

The first element will prevent the federal government from purchasing and using goods that contain Chinese chips made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC; ChangXin Memory Technologies; or Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp., or YMTC. Given the evolving nature of China’s semiconductor industry and its proclivity to “re-imagine” named entities and provide them with new names, the provision also includes “any subsidiary, affiliate, or successor” of these companies.

That’s something relatively few Americans recognize. While there may be dozens or even hundreds or thousands of brands, there are certainly far fewer distinct providers than brands.

Three observations. First, this seems like a good but long overdue start to me. It cannot be overemphasized. If our defense supply lines are dependent on a single country other than the U. S. it creates a bottleneck, a vulnerability, a potential point of attack. That doesn’t just apply to China. It applies to Germany. Or Israel. It’s simply too great a risk.

The second observation is that I wonder how they plan to enforce it? Take the vendors’ word for it?

The third should be clear from the second observation. While necessary I suspect that ensuring that our defense supply chains don’t run through China will be far harder and take far longer than they realize.

Today House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would not seek election to the House Democratic leadership in the next Congress. The two next most senior Democrats, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Whip James Clyburn, have both signaled they likewise would not seek leadership roles.

That’s quite a changing of the guard—all three are members of the Silent Generation, i.e. more than 7 years old.

That raises an interesting question: who will be the Minority Leader in the next Congress?

Some have mentioned Hakeem Jeffries as a possible successor to Speaker Pelosi who’s been a prominent member of the House leadership since 2003. Rep. Jeffries, 52, has served in the House since 2013. Others have mentioned Katherine Clark. Rep. Clark, 59, has also served since 2013. Pete Clark, 42, having served since 2015, has also been mentioned.

So, place your bets. Who will it be?

Kevin Drum provides a pretty good summary of what I think about this subject:

Mandatory E-Verify works. This is why business conservatives hate it. Building a wall, by contrast, is little more than emotional symbolism, which is why social conservatives love it and business conservatives don’t care one way or the other.

So what did Donald Trump do? Naturally he built a wall and ignored E-Verify. Business conservatives were happy since they knew the wall was little more than a con with no lasting impact. What did the Florida legislature—which was 70% Republican at last count—do when they were given a choice? They voted down mandatory E-Verify. Business conservatives were satisfied yet again and social conservatives were just sort of confused. They’d been suckered one more time.

So the answer to who really controls the Republican Party is: business conservatives. Nearly everyone who’s really thought about it agrees that the most effective single thing we could do to rein in illegal immigration is to pass mandatory E-Verify at the national level and fund it with fines levied on employers. That would piss off business interests, which is probably the best indication that it’s actually effective. It’s also why it’s consistently dead in the water.

Now, this would reduce ordinary illegal immigration, but it wouldn’t necessarily have any effect on asylum filings, which represent a whole different problem. That requires a massive expansion of the judicial system so that asylum cases can be resolved quickly and fairly.

I’m not completely aligned with this part:

So the answer to who really controls the Republican Party is: business conservatives.

since I don’t think that the Republican Party is completely homogeneous any more than the Democratic Party is. I think the party is run by those who contribute to or work on campaigns. Many of the former are business conservatives while many of the latter are social conservatives.

In addition I think that Kevin is underestimating the impact “mandatory E-Verify”, as he puts it, would have on asylum-seekers. Something between 50% and 85% of asylum requests are rejected for one reason or other. When these “asylum-seekers” are interviewed, they’re frequently very frank. They’re looking for jobs and they know that filing a request for asylum is the way to remain in the country and work until their request is decided. If they can’t get jobs here, they will be greatly demotivated to come at all.

One thing Kevin does not mention: a wall is only as strong as the most corrupt border patrol officer. It will be breached wherever that officer is and the coyotes will spread the word very quickly.

So, as should have surprised no one, Donald Trump is running for president in 2024. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020; I won’t vote for him in 2024. I honestly don’t see how Republicans can but I’m not a Republican.

As far as I can tell it will provide the media and the Democrats a bête noire to warn and run against for the next two years at least.