In his most recent op-ed in the New York Times Thomas B. Edsall tries to synthesize a number of discussions I have touched on here, Teixeira and Halpin on the one hand and Kendi on the other, Shor on the one hand and Jamelle Bouie and Haney-Lopez on the other. He concludes:

In that light, it is all the more important for Democratic strategists of all ideological stripes to spell out what specific approaches they contend are most effective in addressing, if not countering, the divisive racial and cultural issues that have weakened the party in recent elections, even when they’re won.

Saying the party’s candidates should simply downplay the tough ones may not be adequate.

It makes for interesting if ultimately dissatisfying reading.

The trends do not favor the strategies being articulated by Mssrs. Kendi, Jamelle Bouie, Haney-Lopez, and Phillips which ultimately boil down to an appear to partisanship or, as some refer to it, “tribalism” for its own sake. Ten trends seem to suggest that people actually occasionally vote their interests rather than their affiliation although affiliation remains a strong indicator.

I would add that white, college-educated voters constitute a slender reed on which to base one’s plans for the future of the party. The highest percentage of college-educated people in any country hovers around 50%. Even if you have good reason to believe you can secure 100% of that segment—and there isn’t—it still doesn’t help if you lose enough of the rest.

For my part my family has been college-educated for approaching a century but I think that our national policies have been far too focused on higher education and insufficiently focused on the majority of the people who are not college-educated and whom we are unlikely to be able to send to college. I don’t see doubling down on that strategy and trying to buy off the rest with handouts makes for an appealing future.

The problems with carbon taxes are not limited to the fact that they’re regressive at this post at RealClearEnergy by Kevin Mooney correctly points out. It’s that carbon emissions increase with income. That means that the tax falls heaviest on those least able to limit their carbon emissions. That’s why this strategy:

But a leaked list of what Democrats on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee call “carbon pricing” within the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation package now gestating on Capitol Hill provides critical insight. The Senate Democrats are looking at “a per-ton tax on carbon dioxide of leading fossil fuels (e.g., coal, oil, natural gas) upon extraction, starting at $15 per ton and escalating over time…” and “a tax per ton of carbon dioxide emissions assessed on major industrial emitters (e.g. steel, cement chemicals)…” and “a per-barrel tax on crude oil,” according to the document.

isn’t the right one. The right one is along the lines of something I’ve mentioned before: a much higher tax with varying prebates that decrease with income.

Socialism means state control of the means of production (as opposed to control by owners of those assets). That’s actually a definition of “state socialism” but since in practice there is no other kind I think that’s sufficient. The most important means of production today is money.

All modern economies today are hybrids, consisting of some market forces alongside some central control. The argument today is over whether we need more or less central control of the economy; my view is that the way in which the federal government is controlling the economy should be changed. There should be less central control domestically and a lot more central control on international trade or, said another way, what we’ve been doing for the last half century has been almost completely backwards.

The irony of those who are arguing in favor of Scandinavian-style cradle-to-grave welfare systems for the United States is that they don’t really understand the systems in those countries. In general they’re even more capitalistic than we are. However, they are a lot more Lutheran. I do wish such advocates would provide examples that are multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-confessional. That doesn’t describe the Scandinavian countries in any meaningful way at least not when their systems were set up and not until very recently. The closest example I can think of is the Soviet Union.

At Medium Ian Henry Lopez takes rather strong exception to the advice to Democrats offered by David Shor and reported by Ezra Klein in the NYT to which I linked earlier. He lists the areas with which he disagrees:

1. The conflicted voters in the middle who toggle between the two parties — and thus the voters who determine elections — are not “moderate.” They are low-information voters who are not paying attention (something Shor sometimes concedes).
2. Democratic messages fail to persuade conflicted voters when they center on policy issues.
3. Democratic messages alienate voters when they are predicated on a sense of identity that voters do not share.
4. The core problem for the Democratic Party is not too many young, liberal activists, per the Politico piece the followed up the Ezra Klein review.

but most importantly:

As the Ezra Klein piece reports, Shor “and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration.” This is Shor’s most dangerous piece of advice to Democrats (and gets surprisingly little attention from Klein). For Shor, this has become an article of faith — faith, rather than reason, in the sense that Shor does not substantially engage contrary evidence.

Maybe I’m misinterpreting Mr. Lopez but I detect a genuine note of disdain in his piece, disdain not just for Mr. Shor but for “conflicted” voters or, indeed, anyone who might disagree with him.

When Lenin was preparing to take over in Russia it was the first time that Marx’s theory of class conflict had even been tried in real life. One of the impediments he encountered was that the proletariat was was perversely disinterested in class conflict. They needed the (presumably benign) guidance of enlightened intellectuals to lead them to the worker’s paradise they so obviously needed. These intellectuals were the “vanguard of the proletariat”. Belief in the need for such a vanguard is called “vanguardism”.

In my view today’s “woke” progressives are engaging in a form of vanguardism. So, for example, ordinary black folk are a lot less interested in “defund the police” than they are. It’s not that they are ignorant or disengaged; it’s that they are more interested in preserving their lives and property than the progressives are.

Similarly with immigration. The most Democratic and Hispanic county in Texas is also one of the places most interested in enforcing the border and limiting immigration. That’s not because they are “low information”; quite to the contrary. It’s because they see themselves quite reasonably as being at greater risk.

Alyssia Finley’s Wall Street Journal column explores a mystery. What has delayed the release of Merck’s anti-COVID drug, molnupiravir? Was it the Trump Administration or was it a “whistleblower”?\

When Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics announced on Oct. 1 that their new antiviral pill reduced Covid hospitalizations by roughly half, some in the media blamed Donald Trump. An Axios headline: “Before Merck backed COVID antiviral, Trump admin turned it down.” In fact, Trump officials pushed for government funding to accelerate the development of the drug, molnupiravir. They were opposed by a career official, Rick Bright, whom Democrats praised as a “whistleblower.”

Mr. Bright joined the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in 2010 and became Barda’s director in 2016. The authority, part of the Health and Human Services Department, is charged with preparing for and responding to public-health threats. After Mr. Bright repeatedly clashed with HHS officials, he was reassigned in April 2020 to a lower-level job at the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Bright then filed a complaint accusing Trump officials of pressuring him to fast-track unsafe drugs and award contracts “based on political connections and cronyism.”

He claimed that even before the pandemic, they were inappropriately pressing Barda to fund clinical studies of molnupiravir, which had shown promise against other viruses in lab experiments at Emory University. Mr. Bright’s complaint alleged that George Painter, CEO of Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory, and Trump HHS official Robert Kadlec had urged Barda in November 2019 to “invest millions of dollars into their ‘miracle cure.’ ” It noted that “similar experimental drugs in this class had been shown to cause reproductive toxicity in animals, and offspring from treated animals had been born without teeth and without parts of their skulls.” But similar effects hadn’t occurred with molnupiravir. Mr. Bright rejected the Emory funding request; the decision “clearly frustrated Dr. Kadlec and further strained their relationship,” according to the complaint.

I am unable to adjudicate it.

At 1945 James Holmes explains why Taiwan does not need nuclear weapons to deter China and would be prudent to focus its attentions in other direction:

So, it seems, a nonnuclear onslaught is what Taipei mainly needs to deter. History has shown that nuclear weapons stand little chance of deterring nonnuclear aggression. A threat to visit a Hiroshima or Nagasaki on, say, Shanghai in retaliation for low-level aggression would be implausible. Breaching the nuclear threshold would do little good strategically while painting the islanders as amoral—and hurting their prospects of winning international support in a cross-strait war.

An implausible threat stands little chance of deterring.

It’s something of a relief to read someone arguing along more prudent lines when we’re seeing so much of the opposite these days. Think of it as a “man bites dog” story.

While I’m not fully persuaded that the underlying problem that the author calls out is pointing a finger in the right direction, I found a number of aspects of Eric R. Byer’s post at RealClearPolicy on skyrocketing costs in ocean carrier service interesting. Here’s a sample:

Companies are seeing skyrocketing freight prices and increasing detention and demurrage fees. The spot price for a container from Asia to the west cost of the United States is up by 454% so far this year, and to the east coast, rates are up by 404%. On top of this, ocean carriers have levied exorbitant fees on customers for containers they are physically unable to retrieve from the ports due to congestion, labor shortages, and limited port hours. Severe weather, antiquated port infrastructure, as well as railroad and ocean shipping mergers and consolidations have also worsened the situation.

He then generalizes the issue:

To be clear, what we’re now facing is nothing short of a complete breakdown of the U.S. supply chain. Across the country, hospitals and water treatment facilities are running out of liquid oxygen — which is used in everything from purifying drinking water to treating COVID-19 patients. Failure of a water system to provide drinking water to the community it serves would have cascading impacts, potentially including shutting down hospitals.

but while this is interesting:

Chemical distributors are also having trouble importing lactic acid, a compound used in medical devices such as pins and sutures; glycerin, an essential ingredient in antibiotic products and hand sanitizers; as well as citric acid, an active ingredient in nearly every cleaning product in your bathroom as well as most of the drinks on the shelf of your grocery store.

That last caught my attention. The total revenue represented by our total imports of lactic acid and citric acid is less than $150 million per year—that’s a, shall we say, spit in the ocean in the total scheme of things, but lactic acid and citric acid are used in so many products the cascade effects could be substantial. I was curious, however. Why are we importing either one? We actually export both of those substances and could be producing a lot more. Why are we importing them and who are the suppliers?

As it turns out we import citric acid from Canada and China (in that order) and we import much of what lactic acid we import from the Netherlands. Why are we importing? In the case of citric acid both Canada and China are dumping it on the U. S. market, something we have allowed to go on for years with all sorts of products. We can’t afford to take a blind eye to those activities any more.

In the case of lactic acid our major supplier is the Netherlands (the Netherlands!) and to the best of my ability to discover the imports seem to be an arbitrage matter as anything else.

The one thing of which I’m confident is that in dealing with commodities like citric acid or lactic acid low labor costs aren’t the reason for the imports. There is relatively little labor involved in production. It probably isn’t the cost of the raw materials, either. There are cases in which the raw materials for producing lactic acid are exported and then re-imported as lactic acid which sounds pretty perverse to me. Again, why are we importing these materials?

There is no such thing as an environmentally-friendly container ship and, frankly, I doubt that such a development is likely. The real solution is a supply chain much less dependent on long range transport. Now that we know it’s a risk we should be onshoring the production of a lot of those materials.

Mr Byer attributes the rising prices of transport to “ocean carrier greed”. I would need more data to support that explanation. Have the carriers’ costs risen? Or are they engaging in profiteering of the sort that goes on during many disasters? While distasteful and painful such behavior is not entirely malignant. It’s called “rationing by price” and sometimes it’s the best way of allocating scarce resources.

I have a very naïve question. Why is abolishing the legal debt ceiling, i.e. automatically increasing the debt ceiling when Congress appropriates more money that it has, the right solution to the nearly annual ritual of raising the debt ceiling? Why isn’t declaring any House bill that would raise spending above cash on hand out of order the solution?

Today would have been my dad’s 108^th birthday and I’ve been thinking a lot about him today. He’s been gone for well over 50 years and I still miss him. One of my greatest sorrows in life is that he died just as I was beginning to develop an adult relationship with him and before any of my siblings had that opportunity.

I have met a lot of people over the years and I’ve learned considerably more about my dad than I knew at the time of his death. I still think he’s the greatest man I’ve ever known.