In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Charles Lipson contrasts equality with the modern pleas for “equity”:

On his first day as president, Joe Biden issued an “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities.” Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees must now explain whether this commitment to “equity” means they intend to abolish “equal treatment under law.” Their answers are a confused mess.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton raised the question explicitly in confirmation hearings. Attorney General-designate Merrick Garland responded: “I think discrimination is morally wrong. Absolutely.” Marcia Fudge, slated to run Housing and Urban Development, gave a much different answer. “Just to be clear,” Mr. Cotton asked, “it sounds like racial equity means treating people differently based on their race. Is that correct?”

Ms. Fudge’s responded: “Not based on race, but it could be based on economics, it could be based on the history of discrimination that has existed for a long time.” Ms. Fudge’s candid response tracks that of Kamala Harris’s tweet and video, posted before the election and viewed 6.4 million times: “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.”

Ms. Harris and Ms. Fudge are right. There is a big difference. It’s the difference between equal treatment and equal outcomes. Equality means equal treatment, unbiased competition and impartially judged outcomes. Equity means equal outcomes, achieved if necessary by unequal treatment, biased competition and preferential judging.

Those who push for equity have hidden these crucial differences for a reason. They aren’t merely unpopular; they challenge America’s bedrock principle that people should be treated equally and judged as individuals, not as members of groups.

The demand for equal outcomes contradicts a millennium of Anglo-Saxon law and political evolution. It undermines the Enlightenment principle of equal treatment for individuals of different social rank and religion. America’s Founders drew on those roots when they declared independence, saying it was “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.”

That heritage, along with the lack of a hereditary aristocracy, is why claims for equal treatment are so deeply rooted in U.S. history. It is why radical claims for unequal treatment must be carefully buried in word salads praising equity and social justice.

Hidden, too, are the extensive measures that would be needed to achieve equal outcomes. Only a powerful central government could impose the intensive—and expensive—programs of social intervention, ideological re-education and economic redistribution. Only an intrusive bureaucracy could specify the rules for every business, public institution and civic organization. Those unhappy implications are why advocates of equity are so determined to hide what the term really means.

While I am predisposed to agree with him, to support the now old-fashioned ideas of “colorblindness” and equality, I don’t think we should close our eyes to the problems faced by millions of blacks, particularly those who live in the primarily black neighborhoods of cities.

Those problems have been exacerbated over the last 30 years by the rapid importation of immigrant workers. A generation later some of those immigrant workers have become voters, are competing with blacks not only for jobs but for political power, and don’t feel the same obligations that at least some white Americans do. Problems that were once merely difficult are becoming intractable. IMO that’s among the reasons for the anxiety we’ve seen over the last year.

I’m not as pleased as David Ignatius appears to be with the updated version of industrial policy he says in his latest Washington Post column that the Biden Administration is eager to embrace:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the commission’s chief sponsors, put the new vision succinctly in a December 2019 speech. He said it was time to recognize “the perils of free-market fundamentalism” in dealing with China and instead embrace “a 21st-century pro-American industrial policy.” That revisionist thinking now animates the Biden administration, senior members of Congress and some leading technology executives.

Like some other big paradigm shifts, this one has become obvious only as it began to displace the old laissez-faire approach to China. Behind the scenes, there’s broad congressional support for the activist stance in both parties: Nineteen of the commission’s recommendations were quietly inserted in the defense authorization act passed in January, including what could be billions of dollars in spending for new semiconductor fabrication plants in the United States.

The changes that artificial intelligence will bring to everything that touches digital technology dazzle even the most buttoned-down experts in the field. That’s why members of the commission and others close to this issue are so agitated about the need for radically increased U.S. efforts: They literally think our future is at stake, militarily, economically and even politically.

What’s driving the move toward government-directed investment in technology is a fear that China’s so-called civil-military fusion will overwhelm American effort, unless it’s matched. Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive who chaired the commission, argued in congressional testimony last month that “the threat of Chinese leadership in key technology areas is a national crisis.” Instead of leaving solutions to private companies, he urged, “we will need a hybrid approach that more tightly aligns government and private-sector efforts to win.”

Abandoning “free-market fundamentalism” doesn’t bother me. I’ve been proposing that myself for decades. Mass engineering projects with highly specific objectives, e.g. “We choose to put a man on the moon”, don’t bother me. In the past the federal government has been pretty done pretty well by them. “Operation Warp Speed” may fit into that category. Reshoring industries vital to defense doesn’t bother me, either. I think it’s a scandal and an outrage that we’ve allowed things vital to our national defense to be sourced only from China.

But vague, potentially impossible objectives overseen by a committee consisting of elected officials, federal bureaucrats, and business executives make me very leery.

It goes back more than a century. I’ve written about it before. The chairman of AT&T wanted the entire economy to be run by a relative handful of business executives, meeting “in secret enclave” with the federal government, formulating their plans to rework the American economy. It reminds me too much of Adam Smith’s famous remark:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

which in context is less a critique of the evil intentions of businessmen than it is of public-private cooperatives which somehow rarely turn out well. Some people end up getting very, very rich while the country as a whole gets poorer.

At Newsweek Vivek Ramaswamy presents what appears to me to be a creative and novel argument that businesses may face risks for terminating employees because they don’t meet up to “woke” standards:

It’s well established that an employer violates Title VII if it fires an employee because of his religious beliefs. But was Ms. Carano expressing religious beliefs through her social media post? Very unlikely. Nor was Mr. McNeil when he uttered the racial slur, nor was Mr. Cafferty, who said nothing at all. But that’s not the end of the matter.

Often forgotten is that Title VII protects not only religious employees from being fired for their beliefs, but equally protects nonreligious employees from being fired for refusing to endorse an employer-mandated religion. “What matters in this context is not so much what [the employee’s] own religious beliefs were,” the Seventh Circuit federal court of appeals said in the 1997 Venters v. City of Delphi. What matters is whether the employee was “fired because he did not share or follow his employer’s religious beliefs.”

The real question, then, is whether wokeness in America today qualifies as a religion under Title VII. If it does, Ms. Carano has a straightforward claim of religious discrimination—she was fired for refusing to follow an employer-mandated religion.

Surprising as it may seem, the answer to that legal question is almost certainly yes. The Supreme Court’s definition of religion used to require a belief in God, but the Court abandoned that position 60 years ago in Torcaso v. Watkins. Today, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—which administers Title VII—employs a much more expansive definition: “A belief is ‘religious’ for Title VII purposes if it is…a ‘sincere and meaningful’ belief that ‘occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by…God.'” “Religious beliefs include . . . non-theistic ‘moral or ethical beliefs as to what is right and wrong which are sincerely held with the strength of traditional religious views.'”

The risk then arises from “wokeness” being a comprehensive and closely-held system of beliefs about “fundamental or ultimate matters”.

Don’t dismiss this as inconsequential. People are losing their livelihoods, including people who are not celebrities or in the public spotlight, in some cases for doing quite innocent things as Mr. Ramaswamy highlights in his article.

Is Trumpism equally a religion? I know of no one who’s lost his or her job by failing to conform to Trumpist tenets. Maybe someone can produce an example.

I really liked this piece at National Defense Magazine by Jon Harper about which states actually get the lion’s share of defense spending and contracts if for no other reason than it reminds us of the states whose economies benefit most from it:

The top 10 states were: California, $66.2 billion; Virginia, $60.3 billion; Texas, $54.8 billion; Florida, $29.8 billion; Maryland, $26.1 billion; Connecticut, $19.7 billion; Pennsylvania, $18.1 billion; Washington, $17.8 billion; Alabama, $16 billion; and Massachusetts, $15.8 billion. That adds up to a whopping $324.7 billion.

If you look at it based on how reliant the states’ economies are on defense spending the list looks a little different:

The 10 states whose economies are most dependent on military outlays — measured by defense spending as a percentage of their GDP — were: Virginia, 10.6; Hawaii, 7.7; Alabama, 6.9; Connecticut, 6.8; Alaska, 6.4; Maryland, 6; Maine, 5.8; Kentucky, 5.7; New Mexico, 5.7; and Mississippi, 5.3.

while if you look at it through the prism of defense contracts alone the list is different yet:

The top 10 states for defense contract spending were: California, $50.2 billion; Texas, $43.4 billion; Virginia, $41.6 billion; Florida, $22.3 billion; Connecticut, $19 billion; Maryland, $18.4 billion; Pennsylvania, $15.3 billion; Massachusetts, $14.7 billion; Missouri, $13.4 billion; and Arizona, $12.9 billion. That adds up to $251.3 billion, more than 60 percent of the total value of defense contract obligations across the nation.

One of the effects of the budget “reforms” of the last 30 or so years, the end of “earmarks”, etc. is that defense spending is concentrated in a handful of mostly coastal states. Red States vs. Blue States, conservative vs. progressive, and rich vs. poor have a lot less to do with it than where the state is located coupled with historical defense spending.

Location, location, location.

At Geopolitical Futures George Friedman assesses the prospects for the Biden Administration’s reviving the JCPOA with Iran:

Politically, if Biden wants to make good on his promises, he needs to resurrect some version of the old treaty. The Iranians read this need as an opportunity to extract concessions, particularly removing sanctions but also, in the long run, minimizing the threat from the forces across the Persian Gulf. These are critical to Iran.

Biden’s problem is that he has not yet begun to govern. The first few months of any new administration is an extension of the campaign. Thus, Biden ordered an airstrike against Iran-backed militias in Syria to demonstrate that he is willing to strike at their prized covert operations. The Iranians are watching carefully to see if the left-wing of the party governs or if the center governs. Similarly, following his campaign commitment to human rights, Biden went after Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman – who, according to U.S. intelligence, authorized the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – before trying to heal whatever breach in relations it might have caused.

The United States needs the Israel-Arab coalition to block Iranian covert ambitions, so it needs Saudi Arabia to be part of it. All presidents must figure out how to square the circle of what they promised to do and what they must do. And in this sense, Biden has a problem: He is pledged to resurrect an agreement that did not really address the problem of Iran, and he must do it to show the Europeans that he is not Trump while making clear to the Iranians that he is not giving away Trump’s strategy without making a fundamental change in America’s Iranian policy. And Iran will make this as hard as possible for him.

There’s also some good stuff about negotiating strategy in the piece.

Along those lines I would observe that in negotiating and perhaps counter-intuitively a lack of options is a position of strength. That explains the Israelis’ situation. They only have one way of defending themselves against an Iranian nuclear attack. You can hardly have a stronger position than that. To the extent the Iranians believe that’s Israel’s posture it calls the rationality of their leadership into question.

Meanwhile the U. S. has lots of alternatives. The Biden Administration could just follow the Trump Administration’s lead with respect to Iran but that would be politically difficult for President Biden given his campaign rhetoric. The administration could continue to revivify the JCPOA but that’s pragmatically difficult. What do we have to offer the Iranians that won’t aggravate everyone else in the Middle East? Ending sanctions? A phlegmatic offer—they’re eroding anyway. The Germans will see to it that continues.

We could become much more aggressive with respect to Iran but that would alienate members of the president’s own caucus. Balancing politics and policy is always tricky but rarely more so than when you’ve positioned yourself as the grownup in the room.

At RealClearWorld Daniel L. Davis urges President Biden to withdraw from Afghanistan:

The best thing President Biden can do for America’s national security and the health and wellbeing of our troops is to end the war and withdraw our troops, on schedule, by May 1. Anything else will needlessly extend the futility into perpetuity.

and the only way he can do that is by rejecting the advice of the Afghan experts and be willing to take the heat for the inevitable collapse of the present Afghan government.

I would recommend that he also dump his Russia experts, far too many of whom have agendas of their own which have little to do with U. S. interests.

However, expert advice, the unsustainability of the Afghan government, and the inevitable heat when it collapses are among the reasons it’s unlikely that President Biden will withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.

I think that George Will is making some good points in his latest Washington Post column but I found it a bit disjoint. The points he’s making, both of which I agree with, are that the present state of journalism is terrible and suppressing the press freedom of news outlets you don’t like will not solve the underlying problem.

He attributes the problem to consumers of news:

There is, however, no government cure for what is, fundamentally, a problem with today’s consumers of journalism — too few readers and viewers insistent on quality and resistant to irresponsibility.

while I think that the problem goes deeper than that to the confluence of loss of gatekeeper status by major media outlets and the emergence of media outlets aligned with political parties, rather as they are in the UK. I’ve already provided my solution for that. If we’re going to have a partisan press like the UK we should have libel laws like those in the UK. The problem then would be standing but that should be resolved explicitly in the legislation.

The problem is not limited to Fox News as the House members who want to conduct an investigation would have it:

On Feb. 22, two California Democrats, Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, sent to AT&T and other entities letters declaring that “the right-wing media ecosystem” — they named Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network — has produced “our current polluted information environment.” The pollution is undeniable.

In response Mr. Will points out some egregious examples outside the “right-wing media ecosystem”:

So are progressives’ contributions to it, e.g., their obsession with 2016 “Russian collusion,” their ludicrously solemn and extensive interviewing of Stormy Daniels’s felonious lawyer, Michael Avenatti, and their beatification of New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) during the pandemic.

but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The problem didn’t start with Fox News et al. and it didn’t begin in the run-up to the 2016 campaign, gaining steam during Trump’s tenure as president. Dozens of examples could be cited, e.g. “if you like your healthcare plan you can keep it” which went from being fact-checked as true to being the lie of the year, and go back a century or more.

Keep in mind there’s more than one way for the press to slant the news including:

• What they report
• How they report it
• What they don’t report

That last is vitally important. Examples include FDR’s wheelchair and JFK’s sexual escapades while president.

It is blithe to suggest that people merely get their news from multiple sources with contrasting viewpoints and make their own judgments but that would require a commitment of time and energy most people are unwilling to make. We’ll never have the confidence in any journalist that we had in Walter Cronkite because the Internet just makes it too easy to do our own fact-checking and social media make it easy to make our criticisms public. I don’t see an easy workable solution to the problem of “fake news” other than the one I’ve proposed.

Responding to the charges of sexual misconduct against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that seem to be emerging on a daily basis, in her Washington Post column Ruth Marcus wonders what we’ve learned in these 30 years after Anita Hill’s charges against then-Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas?

Every high-profile sexual harassment case raises, and helps resolve, questions of crime and punishment: what behavior is acceptable, how workplaces should respond and what price must be paid.

At this late stage, in 2021, one could be forgiven for wondering, with no small degree of exasperation, whether the perpetrators will ever learn. So it is possible to examine the stream of allegations about Cuomo and ask: Really? Has nothing changed?

But there is another, more hopeful interpretation: What once was commonplace — bosses asking out subordinates, co-workers making crude sexual remarks — is now understood to be forbidden, a career-killer.

To be truthful I don’t think that’s what we’ve learned at all. I think there have been major transformations in private workplaces but for elected officials we’ve learned that as long as you don’t resign and the press doesn’t turn against you, you’ll weather the charges.

There are multiple reasons the press might not turn against an elected official accused of sexual misconduct including

• They like you
• They like what you stand for
• They’re afraid of you
• They harnessed their own fates to yours

In a New York Times opinion piece Spencer Bokat-Lindell underscores a point I made earlier—that the present pandemic may well proceed as the 1918 one did, calling out reasons to be optimistic:

• The vaccines are a scientific marvel.
• The rollout is speeding up.
• Cases have plummeted.

and reasons to be pessimistic:

• The U.S. outbreak is still very bad.
• The vaccine messaging has been confusing.
• Vaccine hesitancy is polarized.
• Rich countries are hoarding vaccines.

concluding when a remark about how we’ll know it’s over:

So how exactly will we know when the American outbreak is “over”? In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal proposes the “flu test”: 100 Covid-19 deaths or fewer a day, which is about the number of Americans who die every day from the flu.

“Right now, the country as a whole is still reporting close to 2,000 deaths a day, and just two weeks ago that number was more than 3,000,” he wrote last week. “So, if we’re going by the flu test, we still have a very long way to go.”

Left unasked is whether the ongoing deaths due to COVID-19 will be instead of the deaths due to seasonal flu, on top of those deaths, or some of each. I’m guessing largely instead of seasonal flu deaths but to be completely accurate some of both.

There are other reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic. The media have one less motivation for polarizing the policy responses to COVID-19 than they did six months ago which should change the landscape of messaging and public reaction. A year later and we still don’t have a good handle on susceptibility to COVID-19. We know that some people are more susceptible than others. For example, those over 65 seem more likely to develop serious COVID-19 and those over 80 more likely to die of it. But there may be many more risk factors than age. We just don’t know.

We don’t have a complete handle on the long-term implications of having contracted the disease. In all likelihood we’ll be dealing with “post-COVID-19 syndrome” for the foreseeable future.

And we don’t know what the long-term effects of the various vaccines will be. We’re presently conducting what are probably the largest field trials in human history.