In his Wall Street Journal column William Galston does the same analysis I did, makes the same points I did, and reaches much the same conclusion I did:

In other words, President Biden’s proposal raises a real controversy. But it isn’t a moral controversy: Liberty is limited when the exercise of my liberty affects others. Nor is it a constitutional controversy, because the American system divides authority to promote health and safety between the states’ police powers and the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The controversy is over the interpretation of a federal law whose constitutionality is unchallenged. The courts will determine the proper application. Everything else is political theater.

Yes, the government has the authority to mandate vaccinations. State and local governments do and the scope is limited to their jurisdictions. Yes, the federal government has the authority to regulate interstate commerce. Is that enough to empower President Biden’s decree? I think it’s self-evident that the president cannot on his own authority produce such decrees under emergency powers. That’s too open-ended. It means he could do anything at any time to anyone which is rather clearly beyond his power.

That’s not a partisan pronouncement. It shouldn’t matter whether you agree with the president or not or like him or her or not. It’s a completely legitimate legal question and I hope the court will rule on it quickly.

Rather than commenting on the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s chortling about Europe’s self-inflicted energy production problems:

Energy prices are soaring in Europe, and the effects are rippling across the Atlantic. Blame anti-carbon policies of the kind that the Biden Administration wants to impose in the U.S.

Electricity prices in the U.K. this week jumped to a record £354 ($490) per megawatt hour, a 700% increase from the 2010 to 2020 average. Germany’s electricity benchmark has doubled this year. Last month’s 12.3% increase was the largest since 1974 and contributed to the highest inflation reading since 1993. Other economies are experiencing similar spikes.

Europe’s anti-carbon policies have created a fossil-fuel shortage. Governments have heavily subsidized renewables like wind and solar and shut down coal plants to meet their commitments under the Paris climate accord. But wind power this summer has flagged, so countries are scrambling to import more fossil fuels to power their grids.

I just want to make one point. We should ban the export of compressed wood pellets. Period. An outright ban. Heed Yogi Berra’s advice. Although in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory in practice there is.

In theory wood pellets, widely used for heating in Europe, particularly in Germany, can be carbon neutral. You cut down one tree; you plant ten. In practice we’re clear-cutting old growth U. S. (and Canadian and Brazilian) forests so that the Germans can burn them in their stoves and feel good about how green they are. It’s a lie.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the end run the Democrats are attempting around Senate rules:

Spending $3.5 trillion on a budget bill apparently doesn’t satisfy the progressive imperative. Democrats control the 50-50 Senate thanks only to the Vice President as tiebreaker, and they lack the votes to nuke the filibuster. Nevertheless, they insist that their mammoth budget bill must also include big policy changes, even if it takes bending Senate rules beyond recognition.

On Friday the Senate’s parliamentarian heard arguments from both sides on how much a reconciliation bill can rewrite immigration law. Democrats want to give green cards to as many as eight million people. Legalizing the so-called Dreamers who came here as children is a good idea on the merits, but is it a budget item? The obvious answer is no, and everybody knows it. Legalizing eight million people would have budgetary effects, but revenues and outlays are clearly beside the point.

Other non-budgetary matters embedded within the legislation include include measures to promote unionization or to encourage production of “clean energy”.

As I’ve said before I’m a ways and means sort of person and one of the things that bothers me about all of this is that it isn’t remotely democratic, either with a small or large “D”. The point man for the $3.5 trillion spending bill in the Senate is Bernie Sanders who still is not a Democrat. And a majority of a majority is not necessarily a majority—it may actually be a minority as it is in this particular case. If you’re going to wail and gnash your teeth because your political opponents are undemocratic, it behooves you to be democratic yourself and in this particular case the bipartisan support and, indeed, the Senate majority is on Joe Manchin’s side rather than Bernie Sanders’s.

Most of Megan McArdle’s comments in her Washington Post column about the kerfuffle over the Met Gala aren’t particularly interesting but her peroration and conclusion are:

Indeed, of the roughly $1 trillion that House Democrats propose to raise from high-income individuals, comparatively little is raised by closing loopholes of any sort; most of the new revenue would come from jacking up income and capital gains tax rates on individuals who make more than $400,000 a year, and from a special surtax on people making more than $5 million annually. That would, of course, be painful for the very rich, and Ocasio-Cortez’s never-never proposal for a 70 percent rate would pain them even more — but some more than others.

Status goods are positional: As long as all the other multimillionaires have to pay the same tax, people who spend a lot of money on charity won’t see their position in the pecking order change much. It might actually improve relative to the sort of rich person who likes to buy giant yachts and whatnot. That might be desirable — most of us want to encourage charity. But it suggests that kind of rich people who go to the Met Gala were not the ones most likely to be offended by her dress.

Where the dress might fail as an embodied critique of the wealth on display at the gala, it arguably succeeds as a physical symbol of one problem with progressive politics. As critics on the left and the right have noticed, that politics often seems noticeably less effective at uprooting existing power structures than it is at securing a few of the rebels access to the corridors of power and privilege. And from the outside, they often appear to be enjoying themselves in much the same fashion as the other insiders, while covering their backs with ritual denunciations that no one takes very seriously.

That hasn’t noticed only by Ms. McArdle. The editors of the WSJ have pointed it out rather archly as well. And note how well it ties in with Ross Douthat’s observations below. It isn’t simple hypocrisy; it’s using elected office to increase your power, status, and wealth.

The editors of the Washington Post observe the same thing with an undertone of despair:

Democrats do not have the luxury of expanding a needless and expensive tax break. Even if they passed Mr. Neal’s proposal intact and held the line on loopholes, they would still struggle to pay for their bill without embracing accounting gimmicks. Mr. Neal’s plan would raise $2.9 trillion, but Democrats seek to spend $3.5 trillion — and experts say the real cost of the programs they desire would be far higher than that estimate. Democrats argue that the economic growth their bill spurs would fill the gap. This is wishful thinking.

If anything, Democrats should be reexamining some obvious pay-fors that Mr. Neal failed to propose, such as closing the carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund managers to avoid income taxes. A carbon tax would help fight climate change, and it would not impact most taxpayers if a chunk of its revenue were recycled back to the public.

It takes Ross Douthat a while to build up to his point in his latest column in the New York Times but he does ultimately and I found it interesting:

Early in the pandemic a political observer might have assumed that facing a mortal threat — one that emerged in China, no less — conservatives would embrace restrictions and quarantines the way they embraced the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 expansions of federal power, while liberals and the left would accuse the right of giving up too much liberty for the sake of safety.

Something like this divide existed very early on, with conservatives like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas expressing alarm about the outbreak while liberals decried the potential racism of a “Wuhan virus” panic. But by late spring of 2020, the entire dynamic was reversed: Liberals supported tough government interventions to fight the virus, the right was full of fierce libertarians, and so it has mostly remained.

You can blame Donald Trump’s early insouciance for establishing this pattern, or the way that Covid hit blue metropoles hardest early while taking much longer to take root in rural regions. But it’s also useful to do in-group/out-group analysis, which suggests that conservatives were more willing to support limitations on liberty that fell on foreigners and international travelers — to them, out-groups — but balked at restrictions that seemed to fall most heavily on their own in-groups, from the owners of shuttered businesses to the pastors of closed churches to the parents of small children deprived of school.

For many liberals, it was the opposite. Early on the idea of a travel ban or quarantine rule looked authoritarian and bigoted because it seemed likely to punish their own constituencies, especially immigrant communities in big cities. But the restrictions that were imposed from March onward were developed within one of liberalism’s inmost in-groups — the expert class, the public-health bureaucracy — and geared in different ways to the needs of other liberal constituencies: The professional class could adapt to virtual work, the teachers’ unions could mostly keep their paychecks without risking their health, and the youthful antiracism activists of spring and summer 2020 were conveniently deemed to be exempt from the rules that forbade other kinds of gatherings.

This same pattern shows up in the debate over vaccine mandates. The mainstream right clearly found it easier to be uncomplicatedly pro-vaccine when anti-vax sentiment was coded as something for crunchy “Left Coast” parents, as opposed to conservatives skeptical of the public-health bureaucracy and sharing Facebook posts on ivermectin.

Where does that leave us?

• Politics is based on interest not principles.
• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
• Changing your mind when your team’s stakes change can be a path “to stronger principle, greater charity, or both”.

That last is pretty Hegelian and it’s hard to see how it can happen when changing your mind as new facts emerge is seen as weakness or, worse, apostasy.

How can we improve the odds of the latter actually taking place? It isn’t guaranteed. A change of positions as your team’s stakes change can also lead to a complete abandoning of principle and charity. I think there needs to be more space for diversity of opinion than is presently tolerated which is darned hard to do in the era of social media when extreme views that adhere to the ideological orthodoxy are rewarded and all other views are punished. Or can barely be heard through the din.

File this Washington Post editorial under “funny if it weren’t so sad”:

When the Biden administration first announced plans for booster shots, the rollout was to begin the week of Sept. 20. Now it appears that not all the scientific research and regulatory reviews are in place, and delay is likely. The public is confused about the reasons and the timetable for boosters. An administration that champions science-based decision-making needs to mount a strong new effort to communicate clearly with the American people.

In the announcement in August, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said, “Recent data makes clear that protection against mild and moderate disease has decreased over time. This is likely due to both waning immunity and the strength of the widespread Delta variant.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has published a series of reports suggesting that mRNA vaccine efficacy against covid-19 infections is waning. The administration’s initial plan was to give boosters eight months after inoculation, but the optimal timing has yet to be determined.

Overall, there’s a consensus that boosters may be wise for those with compromised immune systems and the elderly — they were the ones who got the early shots. But some experts have raised questions about whether a booster is necessary now for the general population. One argument, advanced by the World Health Organization and others, is that added shots would be better utilized to meet global vaccine shortages, slowing the pandemic and the rise of new variants. We have disagreed that it is either/or; both boosters for Americans and expanded production abroad should be possible. Another argument questions the interpretation of the reports on waning immunity. The reports generally document a weakening protection against infection, while the vaccines protect against severe disease, hospitalization and death. Thus, the argument goes, the vaccines are working against the worst outcomes. These experts say that some amount of continued infection is to be expected, and that the virus can never be eradicated.

What makes this “funny if it weren’t so sad” is something the editors touch on but don’t underscore sufficiently: the confusion they’re calling on the administration to dispel is of its own making. I happen to agree with the WHO: in a world of limited resources, something the WaPo does not seem to acknowledge, getting more people in other countries (in the case of the U. S. particularly in Mexico, Guatemala, etc.) inoculated at last once to my eye would seem to reduce COVID-19 in the U. S. more than a third inoculation, particularly for people who aren’t at high risk.

What’s particularly interesting about this episode is that it illustrates the remarkable continuity between presidencies. Although his supporters may have expected something else, President Biden seems intent on following the path blazed by his predecessor, sowing confusion in his wake.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead laments the end of the “liberal international order”:

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 finds American foreign policy in a peculiar place. The U.S. hasn’t stabilized the Middle East, permanently remade Afghan society or ended jihad. But no terrorist has managed to inflict another attack on the scale of Sept. 11 on the American homeland. As a result, the War on Terror has receded to the margins of U.S. politics as fears that the liberal world order is crumbling rise to the fore.

The central pillar of Washington’s post-Cold War grand strategy was a quest to build a liberal international order by promoting free trade and secular democratic governance under the aegis of American power around the world. The U.S. foreign policy establishment still believes not only that this strategy offers the best way to secure American interests, but that it represents humanity’s best hope to survive. In the era of nuclear weapons, the age-old cycle of great powers going to war with one another threatens the entire human race and must end, while global problems like climate change can only be addressed through the establishment of effective global institutions.

The more perceptive will reflect that the death knell for such an order if there ever was one started sounding long ago. NATO’s bombing of Serbia, led by the U. S., started more than 20 years ago. The invasion of Iraq was another nail in the coffin. The final nail was not abrogation of “global leadership” by the U. S. but the U. S.-led bombing of Libya in 2011. The hallmark of the “liberal international order” was adherence to international norms and “global institutions” which we had established for that purpose. None of those activities had UN Security Council approval. Such UNSEC approval as there was for the bombing of Libya in 2011 fell far short of what the U. S. actually did there.

This is the more interesting section of his column:

Two alternative visions of American grand strategy are gaining prominence in U.S. politics as globalism fades. Restrainers, who include both progressives and conservatives, want to reduce America’s footprint abroad. As the U.S. withdraws from its global commitments, restrainers believe a natural balance of power will emerge, with American allies from Europe to Asia taking responsibility for their own defense. On the other hand, global nationalists—mostly more hawkish Republicans and independents—have little regard for global multilateral institutions, free trade and visionary human rights goals, but believe that U.S. security requires an active American presence in key theaters around the world.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration occupies an unenviable spot. Its goals on issues like climate change, human rights and denuclearization would have been difficult, if not impossible, to achieve even at the height of U.S. geopolitical dominance a quarter-century ago. Today, the determined and focused hostility to American world leadership emanating from Beijing, Moscow and Tehran limits Washington’s ability to orchestrate a global diplomatic consensus around those ambitious goals.

I think that both of those alternatives rest on false premises. IMO such global leadership as the U. S. has possessed has been downstream of U. S. economic strength. That is the source of our military strength, our geo-political position, and, indeed, the only reason any other country pays any attention to us at all. What we urgently need to do is rebuild the U. S. economy. Simply stated we need to produce a lot more of what we consume. Consumption cannot be our comparative advantage.
Failing that we will continue to weaken and drift into insignificance.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, predictably, oppose the bill that just emerged from the House Ways and Means Committee:

It’s been under wraps longer than some Egyptian mummies, but the bill for the Joe Biden – Nancy Pelosi -Bernie Sanders spending agenda is about to be exposed to the air. The Ways and Means Committee draft tax increase that leaked over the weekend is a $2.2 trillion Washington money grab for the ages.

The tax proposals aren’t final, but Ways and Means will start debating them as early as Tuesday. So much for deliberation. As Chairman Richard Neal has said, publicizing tax increases too soon gives the opposition time to build. Now that the details are out, we see what he means.

concluding:

Nice of the Speaker to volunteer her colleagues for retirement.

Maybe, maybe not. The brilliance of “tax the rich” schemes is that run-on effects are a pretty subtle concept for the average voter to appreciate. Like as not they’ll just notice how the bill affects their taxes, not realizing that it could cut their paychecks, slow down raises, and make it tough for their kids to find employment.

In another editorial the WSJ editors point out something amusing:

Carried interest is the share of profits that partners in hedge funds or private equity receive as compensation as a kind of performance fee. It is only paid if the fund’s return meets a certain threshold and under current law only if it’s held for three years. We’d prefer no such provision if tax rates were low enough, but it’s a useful incentive for risk-taking in a high-tax-rate world.

But Democrats and progressives have wailed against the provision for years as a loophole and called for its elimination. President Biden has proposed killing it. Hillary Clinton claimed it’s unfair that money managers “pay lower tax rates than nurses.”

Yet when Democrats have power, they never seem to kill the provision. And, lo, the draft Ways and Means bill merely extends the holding period to five years from three. Faced with offending some of their wealthiest financiers, the Democrats are blinking. That’s fine with us as a policy matter, but this ought to be the last we ever hear about this as a loophole.

Oh, we’ll hear about it again. And again and again and again. The reason that eliminating the deduction for carried interest never seems to make it into a bill is not merely that they’re afraid of pushback from their donors but because they like having the issue to run on.

Just to refresh your memory my views on spending and taxation are:

• I am neither a minarchist or an anarcho-capitalist.
• I think that we should be willing to pay for what we spend.
• I think we should want government to do less than we seem to.
• I think all transfer payments should be strictly means-tested (and stop a lot lower than median wage).
• I think that transfer payments should be focused on the poorest people in the U. S. which largely means rural blacks and people who live on Indian reservations.
• I think that we should abolish the personal income tax and replace it with a value-added tax, prebated to make it progressive. The reason we don’t do what every other developed country does is that the main purpose of the income tax is to increase Congressional power.
• I think that we should abolish the corporate income tax. It is an inefficient tax.
• I don’t have a problem with running deficits from time to time. I think that running large deficits should be reserved for compensating for shortfalls in aggregate demand. That isn’t our problem at present. Our problems at present are shortfalls in exports and business investment, too many imports, and, indeed, too much dependence on personal consumption expenditures.
• I agree with the Modern Monetary Theorists to the extent that I recognize we can run deficits indefinitely as long as our deficit is lower than the increase in aggregate product. That isn’t the case now.
• I think we should pay much more attention to increasing aggregate product than we have been for the last several decades.

Here in an article by Jack Herrera in Texas Monthly of all places is more confirmation of a point I have been making for some time:

In an interview with Javier Villalobos in early June, Fox Business host Stuart Varney presented his guest with a riddle. Villalobos, a Republican, had just won the mayoral election in McAllen, the Texas border town at the end of the last great curve of the Rio Grande. Varney, barely containing his glee, wanted the politician to help viewers understand the victory. “Your honor,” Varney addressed Villalobos, “you are right on the border, eighty-five percent of the voters in your county are Hispanic, you are a Republican, and you won. Can you explain that? Because not many Americans expect a Hispanic electorate to go for a Republican mayor!”

Villalobos promptly set Varney straight. “I think a lot of people know, or should know, that Hispanics generally are very conservative.” His triumph, he explained, wasn’t stunning; he had simply met his voters where they were, with a “conservative agenda” of low taxes, limited government spending, and pro-business policies. Satisfied, Varney moved on to other questions familiar to South Texans who make national news. What did Villalobos think of the border wall? What about “illegal entry” of migrants? This part of the interview should have been routine. But Varney had apparently not learned the name of the town where Villalobos had been elected, mistakenly (and repeatedly) referring to McAllen as “McLaren.”

and

Banking on an identity-based appeal, Democrats last year trotted out the sort of bilingual messaging in South Texas that has played well among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and Puerto Ricans in New York, focused on a celebration of diversity and immigration. Republicans, by contrast, recognized that Hispanic South Texans share many of the same values as non-Hispanic white voters elsewhere in Texas and swept in with a pitch about defending gun rights, promoting the oil and gas industry, restricting abortion, and supporting law enforcement. Republicans proved more persuasive.

That comports completely with my observations. Here’s something else interesting:

David Shor, an iconoclastic data scientist who has polled South Texas extensively, explains that about 40 percent of American voters are conservative, 40 percent are moderate, and 20 percent are liberal. Those numbers don’t vary much by race or ethnicity, whereas party loyalty does.

What Democrats should worry about is that embracing progressive social issues will turn conservative blacks against them. If that happens there will be a major realignment. This is the key point:

While Hispanic South Texans are proud of their Mexican heritage, many do not consider themselves to be “people of color” at all.

All this means that, despite Democrats’ blithe assurances, demography is not destiny. Texas will indeed have a Hispanic plurality soon. However, “Hispanic” describes neither a race nor a political loyalty.

All along I have seen the phrase “people of color” as a rather desperate attempt on the part of black politicians to get Hispanics to make common cause with them to keep them from losing relevance. The reality is that there ain’t no such thing as “people of color” and that reality is likely to hit home in many cities as the number of Hispanic voters rises.