It’s dissettlingly quiet here at Chez Schuler. I had thought that Ziva’s health was stressing out the other dogs but I hadn’t realized how much. Kara, our remaining Samoyed, seems pretty bummed out. It doesn’t help that she sprained her foot last weekend and has been benched all week. I’ve been taking my daily walks by myself. Mamie and Ghillie, our Australian Shepherds, have been searching for Ziva as is their nature. I think they’re puzzled. Everyone clearly misses her.

Earlier this week we received her cremains in a lovely wooden box with her name embossed on the side. It’s sitting on our hearth room mantle.

A few more articles like this one at the National Interest by Christian Whiton will convince me that World War III might very well break out in the western Pacific. My previous top candidate had been on the India-Chinese border.

Update

At RealClearDefense Josh Sternberg reports that some Eastern Europeans are hearing echoes of the Cold War in the present situation in the Western Pacific:

As the analogies between the present geopolitical situation and the old Cold War are broadly disseminated and critiqued, it is worth remembering that many in the small states of Eastern Europe have a recent memory of living next to and under the control of – or, like the Baltic states, unwillingly within – an authoritarian superpower. Once in Taipei, Vystrčil invoked John F. Kennedy’s famous Berlin speech, declaring to Taiwan’s parliament “I am a Taiwanese.” Perhaps more than any other moment, that speech shows how the Eastern European countries that threw off Soviet domination only a generation ago are liable to see Taiwan’s geopolitical position in those Cold War terms. Along with Slovakia, the Czech Republic also recently made vaccine donations, with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen hailing the gift as showing Taipei and Prague to be “firm partners on the path to freedom and democracy”. It seems that more than a few politicians in Eastern Europe feel a fraternity with small democracies in precarious geopolitical situations.

At the American Institute for Economic Research Gerald P. Dwyer digs into the numbers on inflation and finds that the estimates for 2021 are too low. The TL;DR version is that if the Consumer Price Index (CPI) does not increase at all for the rest of the year, it will have risen 3.34% for 2021. If the Fed’s preferred Price Index for Personal Consumption Expenditures (CPE) does not increase at all for the rest of the year it will have risen by 2.2%—above their target rate of 2%. If the PCI rises at trend it will have increased 6.6% for 2021 and the PCE rises at trend it will be 4% for the year.

Inflation hurts the poor, those on fixed incomes (seniors), and savers. Guess who it helps? People who invest in the stock market on borrowed money.

Exercise for the interested student: will an additional $3.5 trillion in federal spending increase prices, decrease prices, or have no effect?

RealClearInvestigations picks as its “Investigation of the Week” Paul Sperry’s post on the killing of Ashli Babbitt on January 6 of this year. I don’t believe I have commented about the events of that day since they transpired. On the day of the breaching of the Capitol I condemned it in as unambiguous terms as I could muster. In doing so I attempted to use non-agonistic, not loaded diction.

Like so many other issues these days it’s what I think of as a “reverse Moynihan”: everybody has his or her own facts and they cannot be dissuaded of them. I have no idea of how to adjudicate these positions.

There are so many things with which I agree in David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column, I wish that I agreed with his premise. Here are his opening paragraphs:

If Joe Biden stands for one idea, it is that our system can work. We live in a big, diverse country, but good leaders can bring people together across difference to do big things. In essence Biden is defending liberal democracy and the notion that you can’t govern a nation based on the premise that the other half of the country is irredeemably awful.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is skeptical: The Republican Party has gone authoritarian. Mitch McConnell is obstructionist. Big money pulls the strings. The system is broken. The only way to bring change is to mobilize the Democratic base and push partisan transformation.

If all you knew about politics was what goes on in the media circus, you’d have to say the progressives have the better argument. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene — healthy bipartisan compromise seems completely hopeless with this crew.

But underneath that circus, there has always been another layer of politics — led by people who are not as ratings-driven, but are more governance-driven.

What’s working?

So over the past 20 years or so, while the circus has been at full roar, Congress has continued to pass bipartisan legislation: the Every Student Succeeds rewrite of federal K-12 education policy, the Obama budget compromise of 2013, the Trump criminal justice reform law of 2018, the FAST infrastructure act, the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, the Trump-era ban on surprise billing in health care. In June the Senate passed, 68 to 32, the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, which would devote roughly $250 billion to scientific projects.

Note that this “other layer” was also functioning during the presidency of He Who Must Not Be Named. Here’s what Mr. Brooks says is the difference:

The Biden administration has moved to separate government from the culture wars. It has shifted power away from the Green New Deal and Freedom Caucus show horses and lodged it with the congressional workhorses — people like Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Mark Warner, who are in no danger of becoming social media stars.

and here’s where we get to the problems:

The moderates are suddenly in strong shape. The progressives say they won’t support this Biden infrastructure bill unless it is passed simultaneously with a larger spending bill. But if the Democrats can’t agree on that larger bill, will progressives really sink their president’s infrastructure initiative? In the negotiations over the larger bill, the moderates have most of the power because they are the ones whose seats are at risk.

I think that’s almost completely backwards. That just isn’t the way Congress works. Safe seats are, well, safe. And, yes, progressive’s may well sink Joe Biden’s infrastructure initiative because they’re radicals. For them half a loaf is not better than none. No loaf is better than cooperation with evil. That is the way that Marcusists think.

And Mr. Brooks gets to the core of the problem:

As former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel notes, the problem with the progressive base mobilization strategy is that progressives think they’re the base. But a faction that keeps losing primaries can’t be the base. Joe Biden is the base. And Biden, and the 91 percent of Democrats who view him favorably, want to make the system work.

Every time I’ve seen Rahm Emanuel quoted recently I think “We had a guy with the same name as mayor for two terms here. Where was this guy when that guy was mayor? Progressives probably account for less than half of the Democratic Party—a higher proportion among Millennials. That means they account for 10-15% of the electorate. Equal and opposite to many of today’s conservatives they think that there are hosts of “shy progressives”, longing to come out and vote for a candidate who’ll deliver their agenda. There are no such shy conservatives or shy progressives.

But I’m not as convinced as Mr. Brooks that most Democrats are moderates. I think many of them are more, like, “what’s in it for me?”

The editors of the Wall Street Journal comment on President Biden’s electric vehicle photo op last week:

What a spectacle. We’re referring to the political advertisement that auto makers staged with President Biden on Thursday endorsing the Administration’s stricter fuel-economy rules and climate agenda. Behold Big Business colluding with Big Government to grab subsidies and raise consumer prices.

The White House previewed the electric-vehicle promo with joint statements from auto makers, the United Auto Workers and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Ford, GM and Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler ) announced their “shared aspiration” for electric cars to make up 40% to 50% of their sales in 2030. EVs make up a mere 3% of current U.S. sales, and most are Teslas.

“This represents a dramatic shift from the U.S. market today that can be achieved only with the timely deployment of the full suite of electrification policies committed to by the Administration,” including government incentives for consumers, charging stations and battery manufacturing, Detroit’s auto makers said. For “incentives,” read subsidies.

concluding:

Auto makers have been touting their increasing EV sales and claim electric cars are the “future.” Great. Then government doesn’t need to subsidize them. Steve Jobs never asked the government to pay people to buy iPhones or to finance their production.

And CEOs wonder why Americans have soured on big business. This isn’t capitalism. It’s corporate socialism, or state capitalism. We hope these corporate titans enjoy their new government “partners.” Maybe they can put Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on the corporate board.

I wish more people would talk ways and means rather than ends. Presently, about 70 million vehicles are sold globally per year. Of those about 3 million are electric vehicles. U. S.-only figures are roughly proportional to that with 15 million vehicles sold annually but it’s the global figure that’s important. To meet that goal we’ll need to increase production roughly 10-fold.

There’s about a kilogram of lithium in an EV battery. If all global lithium production were devoted to EV batteries we’d have just about enough lithium. Translation: we’ll need new sources of lithium to meet that target. It takes about five years to bring a new hardrock lithium production facility into production and about seven years to get a new brine facility into production. Translation: it will be difficult to bring new sources into production within the timeframe. And that’s just one material.

The situation for cobalt, another material needed for EV batteries, is even worse. Even if we were to devote 100% of annual global cobalt production to EV batteries it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Another way cobalt is more difficult: nowadays most lithium production is in Australia while most cobalt production is in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In his most recent Washington Post column George Will laments the present attacks on standardized testing and, indeed, on the very idea of meritocracy:

This cultural moment is defined by the peculiar idea that America has such a surplus of excellence, it can dispense with something that should be rejected as inequitable — rigorous competition to identify merit. Progressives are recoiling from the idea that propelled humanity’s ascent to modernity: the principle that people are individuals first and primarily, so individual rights should supplant rights attached to group membership.

Progressives’ unease with society measuring merit when allocating opportunity and rewards is discordant with the nation’s premises. And rejecting meritocracy at a time when China — the United States’ strongest geopolitical rival ever — is intensifying its embrace of it is “an act of civilisational suicide,” Adrian Wooldridge warns.

He continues:

So they attack selective public schools that base admissions on standardized tests. All uses of such tests, and Advanced Placement high school classes, and other sorting procedures are stigmatized because they produce disparate outcomes, which supposedly reveal “systemic racism.” That dangerous dogma collides with this fact: Substantial cognitive stratification is inevitable in modern, information-intensive societies. As Wooldridge says, there cannot be sustained economic growth without meritocracy.

and

Some progressives, who are more interested in minimizing inequality than maximizing opportunity, insist that not even industriousness makes an individual deserving is because it is an inherited trait. However, less loopy progressives rightly warn that there can be inherited hierarchies in meritocratic societies. America does fall short of Thomas Jefferson’s hope for “culling” talent “from every condition of our people.” SAT prep classes are not models of social diversity; parents are conscientious (this is not a vice) about transmitting family advantages to their children.

with his peroration:

It is a virtue of meritocracy that it produces inequality. “You need,” Wooldridge writes, “above-average rewards to induce people to engage in … self-sacrifice and risk-taking. Reduce the rewards that accrue to outstanding talent and you reduce the amount of talent available to society as a whole.”

I don’t think the problem is with standardized testing. I think it is there are so few different standardized tests that are or have historically been accepted by prestigious schools. In other words it is a problem of centralization, bureaucracy, and, in fact, that there are prestigious schools in the first place. That Goldman-Sachs, S&P Global Ratings, or Harvard Law (or, going farther down the food chain, Cravath, Swaine & Moore) draw so many from Ivy League schools is not a confirmation of the superiority of those individuals. It’s a ratification of the admissions policies of those schools which are in part meritocratic, in part elitist, and in part who knows what?

Shorter: the problem being attacked isn’t meritocracy so much as that the definition of merit is so crabbed.

I would add that China has a millennium-old tradition of meritocracy, going right back to the imperial civil service examination. It was, in fact, true that a peasant’s son who passed the exam received a lifetime job in the imperial civil service. However, it was a lot easier for the child of a rich man to pass the exam.

However, I don’t think that George Will has read the code. Those rejecting merit or industriousness as a basis for compensation reject America as it has been historically. Rather than seeing it as benign they think it is and was malignant. Surely anything would be better. What are the contours of that “anything”? I’m not sure they know but they are convinced that it would be an improvement because of the benignity of their motives.

There is an article in the New York Times including offerings from multiple different contributors which the NYT refers to as “bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment”. They include:

• All workers shall have the right to form and join labor unions.
• Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
• The word ‘person’ shall apply to all human life — born or unborn.
• International law shall be part of American law.
• The right of the people to have privacy and be secure against searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects, including their data and metadata.
• The Supreme Court shall be expanded and its powers limited.
• No state or city shall restrict people’s movement.

To my eye those proposals vary from those that can never be passed as an amendment, those that are unnecessary, those that are ill-considered, to those that are extremely ill-considered. I suspect that which category you would assign them to varies depending on your ideological preferences. Spoiler alert: I think the last is extremely ill-considered. I get his point. It’s just excessively broad and will horrible run-on effects. I also think that only one of them is particularly bold and that one has absolutely no chance of passage.

I have a number of changes I would like to make but I think that this one is the most important:

Every law shall embrace but one subject and matter properly connected therewith, and the subject shall be briefly expressed in the title.

There is a common thread running through the articles I want to comment on today. I’ll try to connect the dots later.

Before I get to the article I’m commenting on, let me set out what I believe and what I’d like to happen. I think that

• The U. S. had much greater income and wealth equality 50 years ago than it does now.
• Increasing income and wealth inequality are corrosive to a free and liberal society.
• We cannot reduce income and wealth inequality via the tax code.
• We should restrain the growth of rent-seeking, particularly among those in the top 10% of income earners, more strenuously than at present.
• We cannot reduce income and wealth inequality without controlling immigration into the U. S.
• We should adopt immigration systems like those of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, countries with which we have much in common historically, socially, and linguistically>
• We should reduce uncontrolled immigration by addressing both the push and pull factors involved. Of the two reducing the pull factors is much easier and quicker.

Now, onwards to the Washington Post’s editorial on income and wealth inequality:

Over the course of this series, we have made the case that inequality of wealth is a serious problem in the United States. Disparities between the wealthiest 1 percent and the bottom half are far larger in this country than in other democratic capitalist countries, and far larger than can be justified as reward for productive effort. Indeed, to an unhealthy degree, wealth in the United States is being gained through unproductive activity — “rent-seeking” — or simply through inheritance. Well-designed government interventions can reduce inequality from the top down, through more aggressive taxation of capital gains and estates, and from the bottom up, through better-targeted support for homeownership, higher education and retirement savings.

I don’t believe any of those measures can have material impact on income or wealth inequality. They are predicated on false assumptions. The tax code proposals do not take into account something that every seasoned policymaker understands: people change their behavior in response to incentives or, in this case, disincentives. And the “better-targeted support” is cargo cult thinking. It confuses causes with effects.

They go on to challenge the observations in a WSJ editorial on which I commented earlier:

A new study has indeed found that the share of U.S. private wealth held by the top 5 percent of people ages 40 to 59 was 45.4 percent in 2019, including the value of future Social Security benefits and pensions, as opposed to 63.5 percent without them. The study confirmed that, between 1989 and 2019, the top 5 percent’s share of total wealth grew by 10 percentage points factoring in Social Security, as opposed to 15 percent without doing so. A 2020 paper, done by University of Pennsylvania researchers using different methodology, found that, including Social Security, the top 1 percent’s share of wealth remained essentially unchanged between 1989 and 2016.

Even taking pension wealth into account, however, wealth distribution in the United States remains far more skewed toward the top than in peer countries, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found when it estimated the impact in 2018. Given this context, the fact that a government intervention — Social Security — mitigated wealth inequality would seem to bolster our argument that additional interventions could reduce it even more.

and that’s where I want to focus my attention. What is a “peer country”? That could be assessed in any number of ways, e.g. members of the OECD, countries that are not ethnically homogeneous and are in the top 10 in terms of population, etc. Is any country that does not have a 1,500 mile land border with a country with a per capita income a third or a fifth of our own really a “peer country”?

Among members of the OECD income and wealth inequality is high here, among countries that are in the top 10 in terms of population our income and wealth inequality is low, and there are no other countries with a 1,500 mile land border with a country with a per capita income a third or a fifth of our own.

IMO there is only one straight line way to reduce income and wealth inequality in the U. S. and that is to control immigration into the United States. As I have mentioned I think we need laws like those of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, a general agreement that they should be enforced, and an agreement that we should not be hinting at easing such laws.

Alternatively, we could accept that our peer countries are actually countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Chile and income and wealth inequality are part of the package.

Note, too, that the period during which Social Security mitigated inequality was one during which immigration into the U. S. neared zero.