In his Wall Street Journal column William McGurn laments the departure of Title 42 (the provision that allows/requires the Border Patrol to turn asylum seekers away at the border), declaiming:

Ultimately, immigration is the responsibility of Congress, and the dysfunctions now on view daily at our southern border—legal, political, humanitarian—owe themselves to the repeated failure of our legislators to put a responsible immigration infrastructure in place.

But Congress doesn’t really lead. A president does. In his zeal to do the opposite of everything Donald Trump did, President Biden quickly transformed the border into a full-fledged crisis. One example of something he threw out while putting nothing in its place: the remain in Mexico policy, which sent asylum seekers who’d unlawfully entered the U.S. back to Mexico while they waited for their asylum hearings.

But Mr. Biden’s border difficulty isn’t that he can’t get his agenda through. His problem is he has no agenda. The administration’s argument to the Supreme Court was that it wants Title 42 gone—just not yet. The whole thing is a fraud, driven home to the American people every time they hear White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre cheerily assert that the border isn’t open when everyone in the world, especially the thousands crossing each day, can see that it is.

concluding:

Still, Mr. Biden styles himself a transformational president. His best shot here would be a bipartisan immigration deal that eluded both his Republican and Democratic predecessors. This would require identifying his priorities (e.g., resolving the legal status of the two million so-called Dreamers, people who were brought here as children), making Republicans an offer they would have a hard time refusing—and then going on to sell it to Congress and the American people.

Mr. Biden, alas, shows little sign he is capable of such presidential leadership. For one thing, he would have to offer Republicans something real. Border security was conspicuously absent from the immigration reform he unveiled at the outset of his term, reducing the proposal to cheap virtue-signaling.

Selling a deal would also challenge Mr. Biden. Recently he’s treated prime-time presidential addresses to the nation as opportunities to take swipes at his predecessor or characterize anyone who disagrees with him as morally defective. But were he for once able to rise above himself, he would win whatever the outcome: Either he would succeed in getting an immigration reform where his predecessors failed, or he would win politically by showing that Republicans are the obstacle to improving security at the border.

However, President Biden has been saved or, at least, granted a reprieve by the Supreme Court as the AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is keeping pandemic-era limits on asylum in place for now, dashing hopes of migrants who have been fleeing violence and inequality in Latin America and elsewhere to reach the United States. Tuesday’s ruling preserves a major Trump-era policy that was scheduled to expire under a judge’s order on Dec. 21. The case will be argued in February and a stay imposed last week by Chief Justice John Roberts will remain in place until the justices make a decision. The limits, often known as Title 42 in reference to a 1944 public health law, were put in place under then-President Donald Trump at the beginning of the pandemic, but unwinding it has taken a torturous route through the courts.

That’s practically an ideal outcome for President Biden. He can blame Republicans, blame the Supreme Court, and point out the urgent need to re-elected him so he can appoint more progressive justices even as the limits remain in place which insulates him from accountability for an additional rush at the border had Title 42 been removed.

Despite a national bipartisan consensus on the fate of DACA beneficiaries, immigration law reform remains out of reach for rather simple reasons. Congressional progressives reject any reform which does not include EVERYONE, not just DACA beneficiaries, while Republicans reject anything that could be labeled as “amnesty”. It’s the new law of the excluded middle—the middle is excluded.

Before I leave this subject I wanted to remark on the claim you frequently encounter from Hamiltonians, libertarians, and progressives that we need more immigrants.

Imagine just for the sake of argument that there is a business that has built a successful business by buying quarters at a penny apiece. They can sell them at 20 cents a piece and make a tidy profit. When they can no longer buy quarters for a penny apiece and must actually pay 25 cents for them, it wrecks their business. No one will buy quarters for more than 25 cents apiece.

The problem is not that they need more quarters. Their problem is a flawed business model.

That’s pretty much the situation with fast food, hospitality, and construction. They’ve come to depend on a continuous, reliable flow of unskilled and low-skilled workers. Fast food is the most egregious. Fast food franchises came to prominence in the late 1950s-early 1960s which, coincidentally, was just when the oldest Baby Boomers were coming into the entry level workforce, a phenomenon that was essentially unprecedented. The franchises needed that stream of entry level workers. When our immigration laws were reformed in 1965 it coincidentally kept the spigot of entry level workers opened.

The problem is that what was completely workable for young entry level workers who didn’t expect those jobs to support families is not workable for immigrant workers who do expect to be able to support families. Add that the things on which additional workers depend (healthcare, education, housing, safety, etc.) are the very things whose costs have grown the most over the last 40 years and you have an unsustainable mess. The courts tell us we must provide those things for immigrants regardless of ability to pay, there’s no conceivable way they can pay for them on the wages they earn, and, to raise their wages so they could afford to pay you’d need to raise the prices of what they’re producing beyond the willingness to pay.

Those are the foundations of the impasse at which we find ourselves.

Henry Kissinger has proposed some steps for preventing World War III in a piece at The Spectator. Here’s the kernel:

Ukraine has become a major state in Central Europe for the first time in modern history. Aided by its allies and inspired by its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine has stymied the Russian conventional forces which have been overhanging Europe since World War Two. And the international system — including China — is opposing Russia’s threat or use of its nuclear weapons.

This process has mooted the original issues regarding Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Ukraine has acquired one of the largest and most effective land armies in Europe, equipped by America and its allies. A peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed. The alternative of neutrality is no longer meaningful, especially after Finland and Sweden joined NATO. This is why, in May, I recommended establishing a ceasefire line along the borders existing where the war started on February 24. Russia would disgorge its conquests thence, but not the territory it occupied nearly a decade ago, including Crimea. That territory could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire.

If the pre-war dividing line between Ukraine and Russia cannot be achieved by combat or by negotiation, recourse to the principle of self-determination could be explored. Internationally supervised referendums concerning self-determination could be applied to particularly divisive territories which have changed hands repeatedly over the centuries.

The goal of a peace process would be twofold: to confirm the freedom of Ukraine and to define a new international structure, especially for Central and Eastern Europe. Eventually Russia should find a place in such an order.

The preferred outcome for some is a Russia rendered impotent by the war. I disagree. For all its propensity to violence, Russia has made decisive contributions to the global equilibrium and to the balance of power for over half a millennium. Its historical role should not be degraded. Russia’s military setbacks have not eliminated its global nuclear reach, enabling it to threaten escalation in Ukraine. Even if this capability is diminished, the dissolution of Russia or destroying its ability for strategic policy could turn its territory encompassing eleven time zones into a contested vacuum. Its competing societies might decide to settle their disputes by violence. Other countries might seek to expand their claims by force. All these dangers would be compounded by the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons which make Russia one of the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

concluding:

The quest for peace and order has two components that are sometimes treated as contradictory: the pursuit of elements of security and the requirement for acts of reconciliation. If we cannot achieve both, we will not be able to reach either. The road of diplomacy may appear complicated and frustrating. But progress to it requires both the vision and the courage to undertake the journey.

At present the first aspect of his proposal (a Ukraine that is a member of NATO) is unacceptable to Russia and the second part (leaving Crimea in Russian hands) unacceptable to Ukraine. Sounds like an impasse to me.

One thing we should keep in mind. We can replace munitions expended by Ukraine in the conflict. We can give them more weapons. We can not replenish the Ukrainians lost and we have no idea how many of those there are. At least 15% of Ukraine’s population has already left the country. How many will wish to return?

At The Hill Carl Schramm remarks on a report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Michigan’s Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, on the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) performance during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Despite being in the spotlight, the CDC has yet to demonstrate any improvement in stopping recurring waves of COVID, nor has it generated confidence that it can prevent either monkeypox or RSV. Worse, there is concern that mRNA vaccines may be tied to fatal adverse effects. If so, the question of why the Food and Drug Administration and CDC did not require randomized clinical trials for the most recent COVID boosters to establish safety will be hard to avoid.

Thankfully, an extraordinary effort by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who chairs the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, may have provided the nation with the next best thing to a commission report. Last week, committee staff delivered a remarkably comprehensive report, 242 pages long, on the government’s response to COVID-19. Its title gives up the game: “Historically Unprepared.”

This is the kernel of the piece:

Peters, a Democrat, is hard on President Trump. The president’s daily commentary offered little comfort and, more than once, useless, even dangerous, advice. Consider, however, the president was bound to rely on the CDC, an agency that consistently failed to provide him or the public with timely and accurate advice on the nature of the virus or steps that might contain its spread. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s official spokesperson, promoted a constantly changing list of largely ineffective actions. Sanitizing grocery carts did not slow COVID’s spread and some studies say social distancing didn’t help and masking with up to three masks(!) might not have either.

The linked articles on social distancing and masking are interesting, the latter in particular. It could be summarized: “they couldn’t hurt” which is roughly my view. The studies on which the article reliess have a basic flaw: comparing Italy, France, and the United States (which did not adopt masks early on) with China, South Korea, and Japan (which did) does not disaggregate the effectiveness of masks from the heightened immunity due to prior exposure to similar viruses.

I think this passage should be underscored:

Without fundamental reform, it is a leap of faith to believe that the CDC can do a better job with more resources. Peters’ report recalls that past heads of the agency failed to take even the basic steps necessary to have checked the spread of COVID, despite explicit recommendations by previous review panels. Political appointees seldom prove equal to the task of reforming their agencies. Tenured underlings know how to wait them out.

The CDC doesn’t need more money. We need civil service reform, governmental reorganization, and a greater consciousness of the realities of bureaucracies, especially that in a bureaucracy those who are dedicated to the organization itself inevitably gain ascendancy over those who are dedicated to the notional goals of the organization.

I feel I should add that I am less sanguine about the private sector than the author for a simple reason: the federal government likes to deal with big companies and the bureaucracies in big companies have the same issues as those in the federal government.

I thought you might find this statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China interesting as I did. I don’t actually have much to say about it other than that I found this passage interesting:

Third, we have followed an open regionalism to build a stable and prosperous Asian home together.

I wonder if that’s how Japan, South Korea, Philippines, and India see it?

There seems to be a difference of opinion. In his address to Congress, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy outlined his goals in the war with Russia quite clearly. Victory means a return to the pre-2014 borders and the enemy is Russia. Many in Washington and the United States more broadly think the U. S. should do whatever President Zelenskyy wants in furtherance of that goal in opposition to that enemy. As David Ignatius observes in his Washington Post column, President Biden’s view is somewhat different. There are distinct limits to what the U. S. will provide Ukraine:

This war almost surely won’t end with the total elimination of Russian war power, which helps explain why Biden actively resists the rhetoric of “total victory.” He said so explicitly in Wednesday’s White House news conference, when a Ukrainian reporter asked whether he would give Kyiv long-distance missiles that could strike Russia and provide Ukraine “all capabilities it needs [to] liberate all territories rather sooner than later.”

Biden answered that giving Ukraine such potent attack weapons “would have a prospect of breaking up NATO.” He said that NATO allies are “not looking to go to war with Russia. They’re not looking for a third world war.” Biden put it in terms of what other allies want. But avoiding a direct conflict between the United States and Russia, even as we support Ukraine’s resistance, has been one of the president’s central war aims.

and Putin is the enemy:

There’s another subtle tension in how these two leaders envision this conflict. For Biden, it’s about stopping Vladimir Putin and what Biden called the Russian president’s “unprovoked, unjustified, all-out assault on the free people of Ukraine.” Once Putin realizes “it’s clear that he cannot possibly win this war,” Biden said, then Zelensky can “decide how he wants to end this war” and seek a “just peace.”

Zelensky offered a somewhat different formulation. Like dozens of Ukrainians with whom I’ve talked during two visits to Kyiv this fall, he appears to see the enemy not simply as Putin, but Russia itself. “The Russians will stand a chance to be free only when they defeat the Kremlin in their minds,” he told Congress. He described Ukraine’s success as a victory for Europeans — the free, Western world that Ukraine has wanted to join for centuries. “The Russian tyranny has lost control over us. And it will never influence our minds again,” Zelensky said.

Journalist Francisco Toro urges the United States to pursue the more maximal objectives:

Thankfully a complete—or near complete—victory for Ukraine is no pipe dream. Thanks to Western backing, Ukraine’s technological edge on the battlefield is proving decisive in ways Moscow failed to anticipate. The latest $1.8 billion weapons package making its way to Ukraine will only deepen the imbalance. Russian forces’ morale and material problems are real and worsening, and Putin has few options for addressing them. And while control over an increasingly russified Crimea looks likely to remain unresolved even in the best-case scenario for Ukraine, the prospect of repelling Russian forces from the whole of the Donbas no longer looks like a pipe dream.

Which are all good reasons to hope President Biden means what he says when he pledges to help Ukraine. Ukraine did not choose to begin this conflict, and nor did the West. But together, they can choose to win it.

What’s the U. S. interest? I might say that a prosperous Russia at peace with its neighbors and thirty years ago I thought that goal was achievable. I no longer believe that. I have more confidence in saying what is not in the U. S. interest:

• global thermonuclear war
• an even more nationalist regime in Russia
• extermination of the Ukrainians as an ethnicity
• a Ukraine that is a permanent U. S. dependency
• partition of Russia into a score of statelets, all squabbling with one another and their neighbors

Control of the Crimean peninsula and its role as the protector of ethnic Russians everywhere have been Russian policy goals for 200 years. The Russians are unlikely to relinquish them to sue for peace with Ukraine. Any of the outcomes in the list above are more likely than that.

Here at Chez Schuler December 25 is divided into two pieces. In the morning we celebrate Christmas; in the evening my birthday.

It was a very garden-y Christmas for me this year. I received seeds for exotic hybrids and gear for planting them. I’ll post more about the source of the exotic hybrids and gear when I have some experience with them.

Some of the things for which I received seeds (or IOUs for seedlings) were for things I’ve never grown before: squash and potatoes. It will be an adventure. Fortunately, there’s this thing called “the Internet” and I’ll be using it to research the care and feeding of squash and potatoes for the next several weeks or months.

We haven’t celebrated my birthday yet. My wife always makes me a birthday cake. We’ve settled on a recipe that we love. She made the cake yesterday and it looks lovely. I don’t believe I’ve posted the recipe we use. Maybe I’ll do that in a day or so.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to my readers, friends, and family! May your holidays be joyous and restoring.

Update

No Christmas tree this year so no picture. Or, more precisely, we have two Christmas trees: one artificial tree we bought some time ago in the hearth room at the back of the house and an Advent tree in our front window that was coopted into a small Christmas tree. We thought that Jack might not have been tree-friendly.

Scott Grannis pretty clearly thinks that the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee has worn out its welcome:

When all is said and done, the Fed has but one job: to keep the demand for money in line with the supply of money. When the supply of money exceeds the demand for it, inflation is the result, as Milton Friedman taught us long ago and which the experience of the past several years shows us. (I should add that, according to their official mandate, the Fed is also charged with maintaining full employment, but we’ll put that aside, especially since they now hint that they won’t feel comfortable until they see the economy weaken significantly.)

Beginning early last year, the demand for money fell even as the supply of money (best measured by M2) continued to rise. It’s no wonder that inflation rose. In fact, rising inflation confirmed that the demand for money was failing to keep pace with the supply of money. But beginning about 6-8 months ago, when (not coincidentally) the Fed started to raise interest rates, inflation started to decline. This, we know now, was early evidence that the demand for money stopped falling, while at the same time the M2 money supply started shrinking. My recommendation to the Fed, therefore, has been to give the economy time to adjust—they had done plenty enough.

concluding:

Does the Fed really want to crush the housing market by hiking rates further? I think they will come to their senses pretty quickly and back off of their recently-announced tightening pledge. The demand for money is soaring and that means inflation will continue to decline. Nobody needs higher rates right now.

IMO the Federal Reserve governors are making a powerful argument they should be replaced by robots. Consider this graph (sampled from this FRED blog post):

That’s an imperfect indicator of what would have happened, of course, since it doesn’t take into account the effects of action. But notice in particular the period from 2000 onwards. Had the Taylor Rule been followed the fed funds rate would have been adjusted earlier and in all likelihood we would have been saved from the misery created by the Fed’s tardiness.

I think that’s pretty clear evidence that the decision not to adhere to the Taylor Rule is a political one rather than a technical one. Is anyone else bothered by technocrats being enlisted to make political judgments?

I wanted to remark on Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington and address to a joint session of Congress. I think he had multiple objectives. The first, of course, was to refocus the West’s and particularly the United States’s attention on the war in Ukraine. There had been some signs of flagging support.

I think he also wanted attention. Take it from someone who comes from a family of professional entertainers: a desire for attention is part of the package. He got it. He’s a world figure. Name two other Ukrainian presidents.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in Ukraine and I honestly don’t know how anyone else can, either. Practically everything we hear is propaganda from one side or another. The United States will supply more arms to Ukraine. Since those are produced primarily in the U. S., giving Ukraine arms also functions as a sort of backdoor subsidy to the manufacturing companies.

This is actually very good news. The Pentagon and State Department are doing what they can to verify both sides of the Ukraine aid equation, reports Joe Gould at DefenseNews:

WASHINGTON ― With Congress on track to hit $100 billion in aid this year to help Ukraine repel Russia, the Pentagon’s law enforcement agency is watching for signs of fraud and abuse in the contracts being awarded.

The Defense Criminal Investigative Service’s Ukraine focus is on the Pentagon’s many speedy contracting actions and on the potential black market diversion of U.S. aid, said James Ives, principal deputy director for DCIS, which falls under the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General. No contracting fraud has become public so far.

“The risk is very real by virtue of the fact that we’re dealing with such an incredible volume of items, many that have warfighting capabilities, and we’re doing it very quickly,” Ives said in an interview. “Any time where you see accelerated efforts of this nature, there’s potential for all sorts of activities that should be of concern.”

There’s a side to the equation other than the procurement side and they’re taking care to look after that as well:

In an effort to head off criminal exploitation in activities related to Ukraine assistance, Ives in September led a team of DCIS investigators on a trip to Poland, a hub for the transfer of foreign military equipment and supplies to the Ukrainian government. The visit was meant to spread the word that fraud, abuse and diversions should be reported.

“A good deal of our efforts right now are making sure we’re out and about, letting folks know that when these facts come to the government’s attention, investigative agencies need to get involved,” Ives said. “It’s an effort to remind folks that although we understand there’s a need to engage in this accelerated procurement that’s going on, there’s a need to bake oversight into the process.”

Potential reports could come from the Pentagon workforce, which Ives called the inspector general’s “eyes and ears on the ground,” as well as senior leaders. Meanwhile, he said, investigators received assurances from the Ukrainian government that its officials take potential weapons diversion seriously and, along with the U.S. State Department and military officials, will report any instances to the watchdog agency.

“They fully understand that accountability is expected,” Ives said of Ukrainian officials. “They obviously have a vested interest in ensuring they have the correct processes in place … and they’re certainly aware that any issues need to be brought to the [U.S.] government’s attention.”

Ives said DCIS coordinates with the State Department and other U.S. law enforcement agencies, and it also maintains “a really strong network of international partners within the law enforcement community.”

While the Defense and State departments said they haven’t found credible evidence of diversion of U.S.-provided weapons, both say they are taking steps to safeguard those weapons.

Small teams with the defense attache office within the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine have conducted inspections, which include keeping records of aid before it’s handed over and then tracking it from border logistics hubs to the front line, a senior defense official told reporters in October. The Defense Department is also training Ukrainians to provide data from areas where U.S. teams cannot go.

Still, I can’t help but wonder who watches the watchers? It wouldn’t take a lot of corrupt inspectors to result in major diversions of materiel. Not only do we need to ensure that they reach their intended recipients, we need to take steps that they aren’t used against us in some future action.

The piece concludes:

“High-value, accelerated contracting can lead to significant fraud, waste and abuse, and oversight is absolutely paramount when it comes to these types of situations,” Ives said. “We certainly saw in Afghanistan and Iraq that some of the most significant fraud schemes we’ve ever seen came in the early stages of those engagements, where oversight wasn’t a prime consideration. That lesson, I believe, has been learned.”

$100 billion here and $100 billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. With such a volume and such a velocity, considerable care needs to be taken to avoid fraud.