Here’s another piece that caught my eye. This one is a Wall Street Journal article by John Keilman about a Whirlpool factory manager:

CLYDE, Ohio—Ryan DeLand arrives at Whirlpool’s WHR 0.80%increase; green up pointing triangle washing-machine factory at 6:53 a.m., not long after day-shift workers have settled into their stations.

He steps into his office and is greeted by a whiteboard that bears the motto “stable and predictable.” He will spend the day chasing that goal despite a never-ending stream of complications in a plant that is as big as 30 football fields put together.

A lot can go wrong.

The plant has more than 25 miles of conveyors and uses more than 2,000 parts. Robotic and human-piloted vehicles zip through its aisles, while an overhead crane carries huge coils of steel. Going full blast, the factory can pump out 22,000 washing machines in a day, but even a brief mishap can stop production cold.

At 39 years old, DeLand is among the youngest leaders of Whirlpool’s 10 U.S. factories. He has a trim haircut and the brisk, dynamic manner of a football coach—he heads up the St. Charles Centaurs, his 10-year-old son’s team—and he runs the factory like one. DeLand has divided his staff into units such as defense, special teams and, in a fitting touch for Big Ten country, the run game—his term for operations, logistics and maintenance.

“The run game is about grinding out wins,” he says. “My lane is the run game.”

Not mentioned in the article: Mr. DeLand is a college graduate, a mechanical engineer. Based on industry standards he probably earns between $120,000 and $180,000.

Everything Mr. DeLand is doing has been common knowledge in American businesses for 40 years. The difference may be that he’s actually doing them.

In his new digs (at Substack) economist Scott Sumner has a post I encourage you to read. It’s fairly lengthy post that might be summed up as “industrial policy doesn’t work”. Particularly, I wanted to share his list of prescriptions:

In a world of complexity, I look for simple rules:

1. Wars of conquest are bad. Discourage them.
2. Have mutual defense agreements of like-minded nations.
3. Don’t try to do nation building.
4. Avoid nationalistic policies like trade wars. Commerce doesn’t prevent wars, but it makes them less likely (and more costly for the aggressor.)
5. Research subsidies might help, but by far the surest way of encouraging innovation is to attract talented people and give them an economic system where innovation is rewarded.
6. The low cost solution of environmental problems is Pigovian taxes.
7. The most effective solution for poverty is growth. Some redistribution can help, but it’s a distant second in effectiveness. Zoning reform helps the homeless more than “homeless programs”.
8. Don’t do regional policies. Italy has proved beyond any doubt that they do not work. Do sound economic policy, and hope that these policies either help the region, help people move to better regions, or both.

I materially agree with those. I could nitpick his list but that’s what it would be—nit-picking.

My only observation is that I think that China is a special case and I think that tariffs, as blunt an instrument as they are, are our only way of coping with that case. It is very large. It has enormous industrial over-capacity. There is no practical way to measure China’s compliance with any bilateral agreement into which we might enter. It limits its imports by establishing quotas even when it does not make economic sense to do so. It systematically dumps goods to eliminate competition. It uses its economic influence to further its foreign and domestic policy objectives.

Consequently, I would extend Dr. Sumner’s “low cost solution of environmental problems” to include labor, health, and safety regulations and impose a Pigouvian tax on Chinese imports, i.e. a tariff, to offset the competitive advantage China achieves by emitting greenhouse gases, having low building standards, and locking workers in.

This post was inspired by a tweet by Glenn Greenwald on X:

The US has no functional president and has not had one for months, and it’s barely noticeable and barely matters because there’s a permanent unelected machine that runs the government.

You may note the resonance between that and my frequently mentioned plaint that whoever is elected president the highest priority for the new administration should be civil service reform.

The Trump fans’ approach to this which appears to be reinstating President Trump’s Executive Order 13957 which was rescinded by President Biden won’t work. For one thing it’s unconstitutional—it’s explicitly not within the president’s authority to overrule the Civil Service Act of 1883 and its subsequent reform, the Civil Service Act of 1978. As such it will simply be ignored. That’s why the reform must come from the Congress.

In the past I’ve complained about the nomenklatura and it has occurred to me that I might need to explain what that means. In the old Soviet Union the nomenklatura referred to the posts in government and industry, staffed by people appointed by the Party, who reliably implemented Party policies. That’s what we have here in the United States now and Mr. Greenwald is right to complain about it.

What are these policies? You will probably recognize them. They include federalizing just about everything, increasing the number of people beholden to the federal government, increasing the wages of federal employees, “liberal interventionism” in foreign policy, DEI as a priority objective, and others.

What’s so wrong with that? Look around you. The great failures of the last five years including our response to COVID-19, the botching of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the baby formula shortage, the inflation of the early years of the Biden Administration, our failure to anticipate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and our inability to meet military staffing levels can all be attributed to those policies.

Consider this, too:

That was from 2017. It’s closer to eleven million now. It does not include the 30% of state and local employees who are dependent on federal grants to the states or the many sectors of the economy that depend largely or in part on federal tax dollars.

There are about 30 million people in the top quintile of income earners. Government employees, contractors, grant employees, and the other groups mentioned above comprise a big chunk of those 30 million. The average income of federal employees is around $90,000; the median is around $80,000. That puts them at the top of the third quintile of income earners, the fourth quintile, or the top quintile. The highest paid federal employee earned more than $400,000.

I’ve been looking at a sample ballot for a week from Tuesday’s election here in Chicago. At the top of the ballot are three non-binding referendum questions:

• Should any candidate appearing on the Illinois ballot for federal, State, or local office be subject to civil penalties if the candidate interferes or attempts to interfere with an election worker’s official duties?
• Should the Illinois Constitution be amended to add an additional 3% tax on income greater than $1,000,000 for the purpose of funds related to property tax relief?
• Should all medically appropriate treatments, including, but not limited to, in vitro fertilization be covered by any health insurance in Illinois that provides coverage for pregnancy benefits, without limitation on the number of treatments?

I plan to vote “No” on all of those. If the first added the word “physically” after “interferes” and “interfere”, respectively, I would support the first. As it stands I think it is too broad.

We’ve already voted once on a graduated income tax and rejected it. I interpret the second question as taking another bite at that apple. Why not just add a referendum on whether we want people earning more than $1 million in Illinois? How about a 100% tax on the income of state employees earning more than $200,000 regardless of source?

If there are a limit on the benefit in the third question, I might support it. As written I think it would be prohibitively expensive and will either drive insurance companies out or end up falling on the state or both.

Three candidates appear in the President section of the ballot: Harris, Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I interpret that as the Illinois legislature having succeeded in rendering getting onto the ballot extremely difficult. I find none of those alternatives even marginally acceptable.

I’ve read the Trib’s endorsements on the remaining races. They’re a mixed bag. In some cases they’re endorsing the Democratic Party’s preferred candidate and in some they aren’t.

They agree with my assessment of the second ballot question, by the way.

Ruy Teixeira pronounces last rites on the latest incarnation of progressivism in the United States in his post at Liberal Patriot:

As far as progressives were concerned, they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it only remained to push the voters through it. In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.

So they thought. In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.

That’s followed by quotes from Noah Smith, Andrew Prokop, and Dave Weigel, largely in concurrence. He continues with a lengthy analysis of why it failed.

I think he’s wrong in a pretty basic way and it’s simultaneously simpler and more complicated than he realizes. Today’s progressives aren’t progressive. They’re Leninists who believe they are the vanguard of the proletariat. As such they won’t stop and they won’t admit defeat—they’ll just blame the proletariat for being too stupid and complacent to recognize the brilliance of their (the progressives’) ideas.

I think that Peggy Noonan is underestimating just how different the upcoming election is from those of recent memory in her piece in the Wall Street Journal:

My mind goes to something that I hope doesn’t sound facile because I don’t mean it in a rote, small way. But this country has gotten through a lot. It can take a lot of tension. It was born in it and is used to it. We made it through Shay’s Rebellion and Vietnam, the McCarthy era and the 1960s. We made it through the Civil War, and we will make it through this. We are practiced at withstanding trials. We have a way of forging through. We should take inspiration from this.

Let’s list some of the ways in which this election is different:

• It is the first presidential election conducted with such a high proportion of immigrant population in the country in at least a century and possibly ever.
• It is the first presidential election conducted since Grover Cleveland in 1892 in which a president not re-elected for a second consecutive term is seeking re-election.
• It is the first presidential election to my knowledge in which a sitting vice president has ever neither run on his record as vice president nor distanced himself from the sitting president. Hubert Humphrey’s views on Vietnam were different than LBJ’s. George H. W. Bush ran on his record as did Al Gore.
• It is the first presidential election to take place after a riot at the Capitol.
• It is the first presidential election to take place during two major wars in which the United States is heavily involved.
• It is the first presidential election in which the incumbent was not seeking a second term since LBJ.

and they’re all going on at once. I could go on. This is a very unusual election. There are in effect two incumbents and one of them is straddling running away from her record and running on it while the other is being castigated as an undemocratic, fascist threat to democracy.

This is a presidential election like no other. In some ways it is like the contest between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland with considerably increased acrimony and precedents of legal challenges and chaos.

You might want to read this description of the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina by Nancy Rommelmann at RealClearInvestigations. Here’s a passage I found telling:

Ramsey had been in Weaverville, a town of about 5,000 people 11 miles from Asheville, at her elderly mother’s home when Helene hit. As for how terrifying it initially was that morning: not very.

“I slept through it,” she said. Her main concern, when she woke up and saw the power was out, was being unable to make coffee. She decided to walk to a nearby Bojangles.

Forty-five minutes later she was back, the scene she encountered outside both impassable and making no sense. Dozens of big trees lay across the suburban street. Climbing over limbs and under fallen power lines, she came across three men using chainsaws to cut a hole in the fallen trees. Did they know what had happened? They did not; they had no cell service. Ramsey checked her own phone. No signal. Overhead, she heard the whomp whomp of a Chinook helicopter. What the hell was going on?

It was not until that night, when a neighbor used a power inverter to hook a car battery to his television, that Ramsey would begin to learn of the damage caused by Hurricane Helene. The flooding appeared to be the worst since The Great Flood of 1916 when the region experienced 26 inches of rain. Helene would dump 30 inches, or more than 40 trillion gallons, though Ramsey would not know as much for days; no one could, not with all communications cut, and roads crisscrossed with downed trees, and some washed away entirely. Other than by helicopter, there was no way in or out, and in some cases, people could not reach their closest neighbors, to say nothing of the outside world.

Help nevertheless got through. “That first day, people brought us gas, water,” said Ramsey, who let those who could not get home, or no longer had homes to get to, crash on her floor. Where some blamed the government for not immediately rushing to the rescue, Ramsey praised the self-reliance of her neighbors.

“Hillbillies and rednecks are a community. They want to talk about how Podunk we are and backwards. But no, we got this,” she said. “We need outside assistance, obviously. But we came together immediately.”

It is neither an indictment of the federal government response to the disaster nor a lionization of it but rather an account, largely relying on first person accounts, of how ordinary people came together under extraordinary circumstances.

Gabriel Elefteriu’s proposal at Brussels Signal for restoring global stability rests on four factors:

• First, a new system for managing great power relations.
• Second, we’ll need a new global security architecture.
• Third, we’ll need a new arrangement for global trade and economic relations.
• Finally, we need a new cooperation system for planetary protection.

I found the piece terribly skewed. Here’s an example:

The legacy UN system has clearly failed, and the US-led Western Alliance – broadly speaking – has also proven unable to deter major state aggression in Europe and the Middle East. This fact should not be in dispute, after Russia has literally invaded Ukraine and Iran has literally attacked Israel. Only China is still holding back over Taiwan, but it’s not clear for how long. It should be obvious to everyone that whatever “international security system” we think we still have in place right now, it is not working.

What’s missing from that statement? Leading the way in the chipping away at the “UN system” has been the United States, first by its invasion of Iraq and then by its destabilization of Libya, far in excess of the Security Council mandate it received for defending civilians there.

I think this statement of the creation of the United Nations Security Council is mistaken:

This was the original idea behind the P5, the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Their special right of veto reflected their great power status and role in shaping global affairs via the UN.

It ignores that the veto-wielding members of the Security Council were all Allies during World War II.

It’s also fraught with bad assumptions. Do the “four policemen” still want global stability? I would argue that China definitely does not. I think it’s looking for a new, different stability. I believe it is seeking the respect it believes it deserves which IMO would amount to primacy. That is intrinsically destabilizing. There can be only one.

Another bad assumption is that there is some sort of enforceable law to govern trade and economic relations. There isn’t and assuming there is weakens countries which abide by the rule of law.

I agree that restabilization is highly desirable but I would build it on somewhat different bases. First, we need to acknowledge that other countries have interests. We don’t seem to recognize that. Second, we need to start living up to our own putative standards.

Most importantly, I would stop seeking multi-lateral treaties in favor of bilateral agreements. In the past we have been able to negotiate those and adhere to them. Why not now?

Otherwise we should just recognize that it isn’t stability we seek but global hegemony. That comes at a price and I remain unconvinced we are willing to pay it or should be.

At The Spectator Yascha Mounk laments about the end of what has mischievously called the Pax Americana:

Would either Kamala Harris or Trump be willing to risk the lives of American soldiers to maintain American deterrence in the Taiwan Strait? (Trump previously remarked that protecting the island wasn’t even possible: ‘Taiwan is 9,500 miles away. It’s 68 miles away from China.’) And failing boots on the ground, would either candidate be willing to impose sanctions that meaningfully hurt China’s economy if those same policies also lead to a serious economic shock back home?

The answer to both questions is likely no. Trump, for instance, has publicly lamented that ‘immensely wealthy’ Taiwan took America’s chip business; echoing remarks he has frequently made about Europe, he called for the island to ‘pay for its own defence.’

This bipartisan retreat puts America in a strange position. It would be easy to believe that the will to play the world’s policeman has gone. In some quarters, the obituaries for what, until recently, was thought to be the world’s only remaining superpower are already being written. Historian Harold James dubbed the country ‘late Soviet America’ in the dying days of Trump’s first presidency. Niall Ferguson, meanwhile, now concludes that, in what he considers the new cold war between America and China, it’s the former rather than the latter that resembles the Soviet Union.

The irony of this is that Americans would just like to do what our European allies have been doing for the last 40 years: letting someone else pay for their defense so they can use that money for food, healthcare, education, etc.

I would challenge the claim that we have been serving as the world’s policeman. We don’t observe the rule of law. We attack whom we want to when we want to. That’s the “Batman theory” of America’s role in the world. We attack those we don’t like when it suits our fancy.

In response to Mr. Trump’s claim about Taiwan IMO Trump’s remarks cited above are a good example of my problems with Mr. Trump. They’re mistaken. Taiwan is paying quite a bit for its own defense. Its defense spending has declined considerably relative to GDP compared to what it was 35 years ago (2.3% today vs. 50% 35 years ago) but that’s because its GDP has grown so rapidly over the last 35 years, much of that due to the growth of its semiconductor industry.

Some say that Taiwan’s semiconductor industry has just out-competed those of other countries. I think that’s some of it but I don’t think it’s the whole story.

As I’ve said before I don’t believe we can afford to be the “world’s policeman” without tightening our belts and home and rebuilding our manufacturing sector. I don’t believe that either a Trump Administration or a Harris Administration will do that.