Reuters reports that the merger of Kroger and Albertsons has been blocked at least temporarily:

Dec 10 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge blocked the pending $25-billion merger of U.S. grocery chains Kroger KR.N and Albertsons (ACI.N), opens new tab on Tuesday, a win for the Federal Trade Commission that Kroger has said would likely scuttle the deal.

The FTC argued at a three-week trial in Portland, Oregon, that the merger would eliminate head-to-head competition between the top two traditional grocery chains, leading to higher prices for shoppers and reduced bargaining leverage for unionized workers.

The ruling, which could be appealed, is a big victory for FTC Chair Lina Khan and the Biden administration in their bid to counter inflation at the checkout. Americans’ discontent over a lingering rise in grocery prices since the pandemic was a key theme in the run-up to President-elect Donald Trump’s win in November.

U.S. District Judge Adrienne Nelson agreed in the ruling that the merger was likely to remove direct competition between the two grocers, which would make it unlawful.

I’m suspicious of such mega-mergers generally. In this particular case I suspect the primary beneficiaries would be a handful of stockholders.

Personally, it may mean that our Mariano’s store will remain open for a while. If the merger went through it was slated to close.

The editors of the Washington Post open their reaction to Assad’s ouster by telling the truth:

To Mr. Assad we say: Good riddance. The speed of his downfall is testament to the illegitimacy of his awful rule, marked by mass executions, torture and support for terrorism. During the past 13-plus years of civil war, the regime depended on Russia, which carried out devastating airstrikes, Iran and its Lebanese proxy group, Hezbollah. But Russia had withdrawn troops for its war with Ukraine, Hezbollah has been decimated by its war with Israel, and Iran, also weakened by clashes with Israel, wrote off Mr. Assad.

For Syrians, the nightmare of Mr. Assad’s misrule is finally over. But euphoria over his ouster must be tempered by questions over what comes next.

It might be tempting to assume that anything is better than Mr. Assad. That would be a mistake. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the main rebel group behind the current offensive, is an al-Qaeda offshoot that once had links to the Islamic State. Deemed a terrorist organization by the United States, HTS is led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who fought U.S. troops in Iraq. Mr. Jolani has lately been trying to project a more moderate image and convince Syrians that all ethnic groups would be welcome in the post-Assad Syria. In the Idlib region of northwestern Syria, which it controls, HTS has provided protections for women and religious minorities but has also been accused of human rights abuses and authoritarian rule.

They also ask some of the right questions. Will the post-Assad Syria be pluralistic? Will there be retribution against old regime officials or the military?

As to their assertion that Syria is in the U. S. interest, it’s in the U. S. interest because we’ve been aiding our own enemies. They’ve already explained why that’s unlikely to turn out well. Let’s hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.

I also note that the word “Alawite” does not appear once in the editorial. Here’s their conclusion:

The Middle East badly needs a success story: a pluralistic, democratic Arab country committed to upholding human rights. For more than 50 years, Syria under the Assad family regime epitomized so much that is wrong about the region. With engaged diplomacy, the United States can help write a brighter next chapter for this strategically located, and long-suffering, country.

As I type this we have the 1938 movie A Christmas Carol, being shown on TCM, on as background noise. I smiled when I observed June Lockhart as Belinda Cratchit in the cast with her father, Gene, and her mother, Kathleen. That must have been an experience for her.

She’s still alive. She’s 99 years old and remarkably little changed since 1938. She’s apparently reasonably vigorous and remains in touch with the many who’ve played her children over the years including Billy Mumy, Angela Cartwright, Marta Kristen (Lost in Space) and Jon Provost (Lassie).

All I can say about John Kass’s latest piece is that he really detests Barack Obama, doesn’t he? You can get what you need to know from its title: “To Move Forward, Democrats Must Oust Obama”.

I don’t believe that President Obama is running the Democratic Party. He reminds me more of Hamilton’s warning in Federalist 72:

Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to be raised to the seat of the supreme magistracy, wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?

I don’t know who’s actually running the Democratic Party at this point. Maybe nobody. Maybe it’s like feudal Japan where those actually in charge maintained such a low profile that nobody knew who they were.

I wanted to call attention to a passage in Ruy Teixeira’s critique “economic populism” at The Liberal Patriot:

Speaking of regulations, economic populism has nothing to say about the radical reform we need in the country’s regulatory and permitting structure so that, well, stuff could actually get done. As Ezra Klein points out:

The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later—four years—the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

Appalling. There are innumerable other examples. How about the $42 billion allocated in the 2021 infrastructure act to provide broadband access to underserved, primarily, rural areas? Three years later, almost nothing’s been done. Or how about the $7.5 billion allocated by the IRA to build half a million EV charging stations? So far, a grand total of seven! This should be completely unacceptable.

I would suggest a simpler explanation than the ones that Mssrs. Teixeira and Klein are proffering for how much government capital projects cost in the United States. We pay more than any other country for each mile of highway, each foot of bridge, and so on.

The simple explanation is that the purpose of these projects is not to build roads or bridges, build high-speed rail, provide rural broadband, or EV charging stations. The purpose is to employ people, particularly lawyers and administrators, in the projects to provide them. Delivery is not just unimportant it might actually be deleterious to that objective.

It’s also how Chicago went from “the City That Works” to “the city with the lowest credit rating of any major city” in a couple of decades.

Before I let it pass I wanted to take note of another passage in the WSJ editorial I just cited which took me up short:

Start with the reality that Medicare and Medicaid, two government programs, cover about 36% of Americans. Both pay doctors and hospitals below the cost of providing care.

They should know better. They’re subscribing to the “true value” theory of pricing. They should understand economics better than that.

About 1% of physicians have opted out of Medicare. About 93% of physicians accept Medicare. That doesn’t sound to me like something that’s “below the cost”. That sounds more like their bread-and-butter business.

The editors of the Washington Post lament the social media reactions to the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare last week:

The motivation for the brazen and seemingly premeditated assassination of a health insurance executive in midtown Manhattan remains under investigation. The likeliest theory is that a hooded gunman, armed with a pistol and apparent silencer, killed 50-year-old Brian Thompson because he was chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, which provides health insurance coverage to more than 50 million Americans. Shell casings found at the scene — upon which the words “delay” and “deny” had been scrawled — imply that this killing stemmed from a grievance related to coverage decisions by Mr. Thompson’s company or others like it.

As most Americans quickly recognized, there is no justification for taking a life in this manner — yet on social media, expressions of not just understanding but support for the crime also gained traction in the aftermath of Mr. Thompson’s death. Many people made crude and depraved jokes, such as “my condolences are out-of-network.” Others said flatly that the insurance executive deserved what happened to him, comparing the victim to a serial killer.

Even academics and journalists chimed in. CBS’s morning show aired a segment on Friday on the “deep frustration with the health insurance industry” that highlighted several angry TikTok videos. “I’m having a hard time being empathetic,” a woman says in one of them. Céline Gounder, a CBS News medical contributor, said vigilante justice is never warranted but added: “We’ve gotten to a point where health care is so inaccessible and unaffordable, people are justified in their frustrations.”

If you are not familiar with the title of this post, it is Latin, attributed to the orator Cicero, and is translated as “alas, the times; alas the customs”. Rejoicing at a murder is a sign of our debased times. There is no justification either for the murder or for rejoicing in it.

Does anyone seriously believe that anything good will come from heinous acts of murder or the equally heinous defense of them? The likelihood is that their consequences will be more expensive health care.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, remarking on the murder, declaim:

The unidentified shooter’s motive still isn’t known, but he may have dropped a hint with the words “deny, defend, depose” on his bullet casings. This mantra was popularized by trial lawyers suing private insurers for denying claims more than a decade ago. Social media mobs are exploiting the tragedy and proclaiming that Thompson had it coming.

“And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” former Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz wrote on Bluesky, a leftwing social-media site. “People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering,” she added. “As someone against death and suffering, I think it’s good to call out this broken system and the ppl in power who enable it.” Ms. Lorenz is far from alone as an apologist for targeting CEOs.

We realize that facts and reason don’t matter when a political culture descends into “Lord of the Flies.” But if fixing the system is really the goal, how about looking to Washington? Private health insurance in America is far from perfect. But the insurance problems sparking an outcry owe mainly to government policies that distort markets and force rationed care.

Today on the “talking heads” programs I’m seeing a re-emergence of claims that healthcare is a human right and demands for “Medicare for all”. I would love to see how they reconcile those beliefs with conflicting ideas like a right to property, against involuntary servitude, our de facto open border, and physician autonomy. Even the most progressive states in Union have rejected the notion of healthcare as a fundamental right.

Based on what’s being reported now, the dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s government has been overthrown by Syria rebels and Assad has fled the country.

Bashar al-Assad is a bad guy. No doubt about it. But my joy at his having been overthrown is allayed somewhat by the conditions under which it has happened. The Syrian rebels are not good guys either and we have, heedlessly in my opinion, been supporting them.

The Middle East is complicated. For the United States at least it is not true in the Middle East that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. So far this morning I have heard the word “Alawite” once and that was in passing and without explanation.

The Assad government was a government of Syria by it Alawite minority. The Alawites live in the northeast of Syria. They comprise about 15% of Syria’s population. They are Arab Muslims and profess a version of Shi’a Islam (a different version than is professed in Iran).

While I hope that the overthrow of Assad will lead to a liberal democratic government in Syria, I am under no illusion that is likely to happen. What I think is far more likely is that Syria will descend into complete chaos for some period followed by a radical Sunni Arab authoritarian government. There may well be massacres of Alawites. The Sunni majority in the country has conducted such massacres multiple times in the past. They were suppressed by the Turks and then by the Alawites. What happens now is anybody’s guess.

With a hat tip to Tyler Cowen I want to take note of this post by Pieter Garicano:

These answers, according to a recent paper by Olivier Coste and Yann Coatanlem, two French entrepreneurs, miss the point: the reason more capital doesn’t flow towards high-leverage ideas in Europe is because the price of failure is too high.

Coste estimates that, for a large enterprise, doing a significant restructuring in the US costs a company roughly two to four months of pay per worker. In France, that cost averages around 24 months of pay. In Germany, 30 months. In total, Coste and Coatanlem estimate restructuring costs are approximately ten times greater in Western Europe than in the United States.1

These costs kick in when a major venture has failed; it follows that the higher the probability of failure in a sector, the greater the relative disadvantage for Europe. The lack of repeat founders and ‘audacious’ venture capital are symptoms of this underlying malady.

Consider a simple example. Two large companies are considering whether to pursue a high risk innovation. The probability of success is estimated at one in five. Upon success they obtain profits of $100 million, and the investment costs $15 million.

One of the companies is in California, where if the innovation fails the restructuring costs $1 million. The other company is in Germany, where restructuring is 10x more expensive, it costs $10 million (a conservative estimate)

The expected value of this investment in California is a profit of $4.2 million. In Germany the expected value is a loss of $3 million.

I first became aware of this almost fifty years ago when I was a manager for a large German company. They liked hiring Americans at the time due to the flexibility it provided.

While Mr. Garicano’s observations are about capital investment I think the more pertinent issue has to do with mergers and acquisitions, so many of which involve not just capital but reorganizations. The key point is that reorganization is so costly in Europe companies are disincentivized from doing it.

The dynamism obviously has benefits but it has costs too and IMO our present approach worked well when we were creating new jobs rapidly but it’s much less acceptable now. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. I think that large companies should be if not outright prevented at least disincentivized from acquiring small, innovative companies. I don’t think that doing something and then being acquired by Microsoft, Meta, or ABC should be a viable business model. There are too many cases in which these vast conglomerates acquired competitors to mine their technology and then put them out of business.