I’m afraid I was not convinced by Jason Riley’s WSJ column asserting that more police officers is the key to reducing crime:

The Democratic reaction to President Trump’s federal crackdown on crime was as predictable as the dozens of shootings in Chicago over the holiday weekend, which left at least seven dead.

Chicago’s violent-crime spikes during the warmer months have become too commonplace to shock us as they should. CBS News reported that during Independence Day weekend five people were killed and 36 were injured. Over Labor Day weekend in 2023 and 2024, a total of 13 were killed and 67 wounded in shootings around the city.

When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was asked repeatedly in a television interview last week whether putting more police officers on the street would help curb crime, he called that approach “antiquated” and tried to change the subject: “I believe the city of Chicago and cities across America would be safer if we actually had, you know, affordable housing.”

I will readily stipulate that Mayor Johnson is a buffoon and one could do much worse than doing the opposite of anything he suggests. Mr. Riley goes on to quote a number of studies supporting his view that more police = less crime. I genuinely wish that columnists would actually cite the studies they quote. It would be helpful.

I did a little quick research of populations, police officers, and other factors. I limited my research to the ten largest cities and the homicide rate as an epitome of violent crime. The results are a little hard to read—click on the table for a larger version:

Since it’s a bit difficult to discern any patterns from the table, I created a scatterplot:

That’s not dispositive but I think it’s highly suggestive: there is no straightline relationship between the number of police officers and the homicide rate. A scatterplot of the area of the cities is even more interesting:

I would also make the claim that factoring demographics into the findings would be revealing.

I would summarize my findings that

1. There is no strong relationship between the number of police officers per 100K population and the homicide rate.
2. There is a stronger relationship between population density and homicide rate with New York City being the great outlier. New Yorkers are a breed apart.
3. Otherwise the causes of a high homicide rate are multifactorial including population density, demographics, and how law enforcement is performed including police officers, states attorneys, and judges.

Yesterday afternoon in reaction to President Trump’s announcement that he would be deploying the National Guard to Chicago, the governor of Illinois, State Attorney General, Cook County Board President, and mayor of Chicago gave a rare joint press conference expressing their anger, dismay, and opposition. At WGN Tahman Bradley and Ethan Illers report:

CHICAGO (WGN) – President Trump renewed his push to send federal help to Chicago and announced Tuesday that he’s made up his mind about a federal surge.

“We’re going in. I didn’t say when, but we’re going in,” Trump said. “If the governor of Illinois would call up, call me up, I would love to do it. Now we’re going to do it anyway. We have a right to do it.”

This comes after Chicago saw a violent Labor Day weekend that ended with 58 people shot, eight of them fatally.

Meanwhile, the city, county and state’s Democratic leaders do not want this, but they’re bracing for federal immigration agents and another state’s national guard.

Also on Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker spoke at a press conference along with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, saying there is no emergency warranting the deployment of federal law enforcement to Chicago.

Pritzker said he’s learned armed agents are preparing for sweeping federal immigration raids. Those agents, Pritzker said, will be supported by the Texas National Guard.

When I heard about the multiple mass shootings in Chicago over Labor Day weekend, I turned to my wife and said “That’s going to be very bad timing for Pritzker and Johnson”. JB Pritzker is governor of Illinois and Brandon Johnson is mayor of Chicago. Both have been denying vehemently that Chicago had a violence problem.

All of the officials condemned the use of the National Guard as illegal. Mayor Johnson made a lengthy statement blaming violence in Chicago on the lack of national gun control laws or attention to “root causes”, generally maximalist policy positions.

I agree with them that President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to address local crime is illegal. That isn’t the president’s job. I also agree with State AG Kwame Raoul’s observation that effective law enforcement requires collaboration among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. I wish he had elaborated on how the state’s and City of Chicago’s “sanctuary” status facilitates that but he didn’t.

Mayor Johnson frequently alludes to the “root causes” of crime but has never provided a succinct definition of what he thinks they are so I will. I think the root causes of urban crime are urban black social dysfunction, particularly the erosion of the nuclear family among blacks, decline of entry-level job opportunities for young black men, criminal street gangs, private and public tolerance of street gangs, and weak enforcement of the law.

I do not believe that you can make intelligent comments about crime without referring to race or ethnicity. In Chicago the Hispanic homicide rate is four times the white homicide rate and the black homicide rate is 15 times the white homicide rate. I think that much of the reason for the difference is street gangs.

It is true that there has been a sharp decline in homicide this year over last year. Courtesy of HeyJackass!:

The decline in rate has been sharpest among Hispanics.

Where I come from when something changes it’s prudent to consider what else has changed. Neither gun laws nor the “root causes” of crime have changed materially since last year. What has? I would point to two things. First, President Trump’s enforcement of immigration law and, second, Cook County has a new states attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, who is prosecuting crime more enthusiastically than her predecessor.

Ms. Burke was conspicuous by her absence among the worthies in yesterday’s press conference. I don’t know whether that’s because she’s not considered one of the “cool kids”, because she had other commitments, or for some other reason.

David Ignatius’s most recent Washington Post column on ending the war in Ukraine is such a mish-mosh of contradictions, things with which I agree, and fantasies with which I disagree, I’m not sure what to make of it:

Chess players sometimes fall into a situation they call “zugzwang,” in which any move worsens their position. The impasse in the Ukraine peace talks feels like that. But unlike chess players, statesmen aren’t bound by rules. They can escape disaster.

Here’s the deadlock: Ukraine and its European supporters want a peace deal, perhaps freezing the current front line, so long as Kyiv gets “security guarantees” for the future. But Russia demands that the West first address “root causes” of the war, which amounts to its own version of a security guarantee.

He divides “security guarantees” into “offensive guarantees” and “defensive guarantees”. Here’s an example of an “offensive guarantee”:

One tough Western approach would be reciprocity. If Putin continues to attack cities and civilian infrastructure across Ukraine, then Kyiv’s allies would give it the means to respond in kind. The weapons are ready: Anglo-French Storm Shadow cruise missiles with a range of 155 miles; German Taurus cruise missiles with a 300-mile range; U.S. ATACMS and Precision Strike ballistic missiles with ranges of 250 miles.

and here are some “defensive” ones:

I can imagine an array of military options — from a no-fly zone over Ukraine, to a rotating training and advisory force inside Ukraine, to new retaliatory capabilities if Russia keeps attacking civilians or energy infrastructure. These would be security guarantees — not for the future but immediately.

Once upon a time Mr. Ignatius was the voice of the diplomatic establishment. Is that still the case? If so, the diplomatic establishment has fallen on hard times and not merely because it’s being pressed by Donald Trump.

Our most recent experience with Anglo-French offensive capability was in 2011 during the Libyan civil war. Within a couple of days the British and French had reached the end of their ability to fly missions. Has it improved since then? I doubt it.

Who would maintain a “no fly zone” in Ukraine? Clearly, not the British and French. It would be up to us. How would we accomplish it?

Similarly, with the cruise missiles and ATACMS he mentions. We could supply the Ukrainians for a few days, perhaps a month. Then what?

Mr. Ignatius mentions an unfortunate truth:

When they approached the brink in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated mutual security guarantees: Russia pulled its nuclear missiles from Cuba in exchange for America’s pledge not to invade the island (and to secretly remove nuclear missiles from Turkey).

Said another way the crisis was ended through reciprocity. The Soviets agreed to withdraw its nuclear missiles from Cuba and we agreed to withdraw ours from Turkey. That’s an account that differs somewhat from the popular account but it is reciprocity. We don’t put nuclear weapons on your border and you don’t put them on ours. What would the equivalent version of reciprocity be in the context of Ukraine and how does that differ from the appeasement we are being warned about by opponents of ending the war who never seem to propose a resolution to the conflict that we can actually accomplish and that doesn’t involve pushing Russia’s back to the wall, risking global thermonuclear war?

Mr. Ignatius concludes with this advice:

The strategist Fred Iklé wrote a brilliant little book called “Every War Must End” during the agonizing final years of the Vietnam conflict. Two comments seem especially appropriate now. “Inflicting ‘punishment’ on the enemy is … an ineffective strategy for ending a war,” Iklé cautioned. To end conflicts, he said, “nations on both sides tend to see a peace settlement that will bring greater and more lasting security than existed before the fighting broke out.”

If Russia chooses unwisely to fight on, then Europe and the United States should begin providing security guarantees for Ukraine now, not later. This isn’t chess. When a game is heading toward defeat, step away from the board.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle ruminates on the termination for cause of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. After explaining her tolerance of a small amount of misconduct among officials and what “occupancy fraud” is, Megan summarizes the problems:

Retailers adopted hands-off policies that prevented employees from stopping thieves, which minimized employee injuries, legal liability and bad publicity from employee mistakes. That trade-off made sense as long as the public didn’t realize just how much it could get away with. When the internet taught us that brazen shoplifting was tolerated, those policies contributed to a shoplifting explosion — and stores were forced to take stronger measures, such as banning bags and locking up merchandise, making everyone worse off.

I worry that the Trump administration has put us, and Cook, in a similar bind.

Protecting the Fed’s independence is much, much, much more important to the health of the banking system than reducing a small amount of occupancy fraud to a slightly smaller amount. The president appears to be using government agencies such as the Federal Housing Finance Agency to pursue personal political goals, like settling scores, or replacing Fed governors he dislikes with someone more pliant. Bill Pulte, that agency’s director, should not have abetted this.

But now that he has, can we afford to say, “Well, occupancy fraud is really not a big deal, it happens all the time, and, realistically, almost no one is ever punished”? Because that’s a good way to ensure that occupancy fraud really does happen all the time, or at least more of the time, forcing banks to do whatever the banking equivalent is of putting the Target deodorant aisle on lockdown. And I don’t love that solution, either.

So unless Cook explains why this really wasn’t occupancy fraud, we’re left with two unpalatable choices: letting a public official get away with something the system can’t afford to publicly condone, or letting Trump get away with something that no one can afford to publicly condone.

The only way out of that conundrum is for Cook to tell us why what looks like occupancy fraud was actually no such thing. So I sure hope she does, and soon.

While I could focus my remarks on the problems that Congress has created in its loosey-goosey definition and oversight of the Federal Reserve, I will merely note that out in passing and instead point out the context in which Fed Gov. Cook’s termination has taken place. Recently, a record-breaking civil judgment against Donald Trump has been voided by an appeals court. The judgment was levied under a novel theory of law in which there were no victims and for which no one had ever been prosecuted before. Some are calling Dr. Cook’s termination “retribution”. An alternative framing might be consistency.

What I think we are seeing is an extraordinary decline in trust. When you can’t trust Federal Reserve governors, Presidents of the United States, cabinet officers, lawyers, judges, banks, physicians, journalists, or ordinary customers of brick-and-mortar retail stores, whom can you trust?

The answer, rather obviously, is no one. We will miss our higher trust society now that it’s gone. It means a higher level of scrutiny, policing, and more restrictive laws will inevitably be necessary.

I have had some difficulty in developing any enthusiasm for this subject. When human-caused tragedies like the shooting in Minneapolis last week take place, it is natural to search for reasons and there has been no lack of explanations. Minneapolis officials immediately blamed lax gun control laws. Other blamed mental health issues, drugs, and the problems posed by excessive societal focus on self-actualization.

I did a little research on school and church shootings. What I found is that they back to the beginnings of the Republic but have been quite rare. Even rarer are shootings in which children are the primary targets. It might be prudent to recognize how difficult it is to draw meaningful conclusions from rare occurrences.

Are they increasing in number or savagery? I can’t distinguish between those and greater public publicity.

The picture that appears to be emerging from the Minneapolis shooting incident is one in which a family was crying out for help. Apparently, the police had been dispatched to that home on multiple occasions to deal with mental health crises.

I agree that the shooter should never have been able to obtain firearms legally—the multiple police calls to that home should have been disqualifying. But even more importantly mental health resources should have been offered to that family. If they had been and had been accepted, multiple other families would not be in mourning today.

Good public policy should be the least restrictive measures that have a chance of working not the most restrictive measures which if implemented with undeviating perfection have a minimal chance being effective. Let’s think about what those might be.

I’m not interested in celebrity engagements (congratulations!) so I’ll ignore the news of the day.

Let’s talk about a security guarantee for Ukraine. That’s something Ukraine needs for a ceasefire let alone for a more permanent peace.

My proposal is that France and the United Kingdom should provide security assurances for Ukraine. The U. S. should not.

There are many advantages to that. Although their forces are somewhat delipidated today those two countries have had armed forces at a high level of readiness in recent memory. No other European country (other than Russia) has. They do not border Russia or, presumably, have territorial ambitions there.

Neither France nor the UK has invaded Russia in force in two hundred years (they did invade Russia a century ago but not in force).

Poland borders Russia and has territorial disagreements with it. Germany invaded Russia in force 85 years ago, killing an entire generation of Russians in the process so Germany is out.

Guarantees from France and the UK would, presumably, not be as threatening to Russia as a U. S. guarantee. And the U. S. already guarantees France’s and the UK’s security. We provide their backstop as it were. Consequently, if anything short of President Putin’s maximalist demands (acknowledgement of Russia’s possession of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk; “de-Nazification” of Ukraine; demilitarization of Ukraine; Ukraine not admitted to NATO) is to lead to an end of the war in Ukraine, I would think that a ceasefire, a path to EU membership for Ukraine, and French and British security guarantees might be minimally acceptable.

Lately I’ve been reading complaints from British, French, and German pundits that Europeans don’t want to risk their lives to provide Ukraine with a security guarantee. That may be the nub of the problem.

In a 1977 amendment to the Federal Reserve Act the Fed received the so-called “dual mandate” of maximizing employment and maintaining stable prices. Its mandate is not to maintain stable inflation which is how it has construed its mandate. It is to maintain stable prices.

Being able to redefine your goals yourself to what is relatively easy to do rather than something that’s quite hard to do is a pretty cushy gig.

Whatever its goals the Fed failed miserably in achieving them from 2020 to 2024. I don’t see how anyone can defend the Fed in good faith with that recent track record.

Something resembling the alignment of all of the planets has occurred. The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal all have editorials opposing the firing of Lisa Cook as a governor of the Federal Reserve.

New York Times, “Where’s Your Evidence, Mr. President?”

President Trump’s attempt to fire the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook is a grab for power in defiance of the nation’s laws, and if it succeeds, it will be to the detriment of the nation’s interests.

When Congress created the Fed in 1913, it gave the president the power to appoint the central bank’s governors, but it did not grant the power to remove them at will. Mr. Trump does not appear to regard that law as a binding constraint. He has made clear that he wants to replace the Fed’s leaders because they have resisted his demands to lower interest rates. In pursuit of this goal, he now says he is firing Ms. Cook because of “potentially criminal” behavior.

The law does allow the president to remove Fed governors “for cause,” and Mr. Trump has not presented any evidence of wrongdoing by Ms. Cook, an economist whom President Joe Biden appointed to the job three years ago. Mr. Trump has asserted that she “may have made false statements on one or more mortgage agreements.” We have two words for the president: Prove it.

Washington Post, “Here are the consequences of a president politicizing the Fed”

It’s not hard to find mistakes in the Federal Reserve’s recent history, but Donald Trump’s latest attempt to erode the institution’s independence is dangerous. The president wants lower interest rates, but any benefits coming from that would probably be outweighed by supercharged inflation and the economic hangover that comes with it.

On Monday night, Trump announced that he would try to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, whose term otherwise expires in 2038. He cited an unproven allegation of mortgage fraud that one of his appointees dug up and broadcast on social media, but Cook denies wrongdoing, and her attorney says she will “take whatever actions are needed” to stay on the job.

That fight could reach the Supreme Court. The conservative majority has been friendly to the idea that the president can fire executive branch employees at will. Yet the Fed, the justices wrote in May, is “a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

Wall Street Journal, “What if Trump Runs the Federal Reserve?”

President Trump has long wanted to control the Federal Reserve, and on Monday night he made his power play by firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook. A central bank with even a semblance of independence may be the casualty.

Mr. Trump has resisted his itch to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell on the savvy advice that he could rattle markets and trigger an extended court battle. But Ms. Cook said Tuesday she’ll challenge her removal, so Mr. Trump will still get his legal fight in what could be a landmark case.

The Cook firing is a calculated putsch. Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte teed up the dismissal last week when he posted a criminal referral for Ms. Cook on social media. He said she may have committed mortgage fraud by claiming two different homes as primary residences on mortgage applications in 2021, which may have enabled her to get favorable loan terms.

Intentionally misrepresenting information on a mortgage application is wrong and a federal crime. But we haven’t seen the details or Ms. Cook’s explanation. There’s also a question of selective prosecution, since Mr. Pulte’s crackdown on mortgage fraud seems to be aimed only at Mr. Trump’s opponents. Ms. Cook deserves more due process than a presidential declaration of guilt on Truth Social.

The criminal referral is a threat to other Fed governors: Cut rates, or else. It is also a pretext to fire Ms. Cook “for cause.” The referral, Mr. Trump wrote to Ms. Cook, provides “sufficient reason” to believe she “exhibits the sort of gross negligence in financial transactions that calls into question your competence and trustworthiness as a financial regulator.”

In reading these editorials a number of common themes emerge.

First, the editors are clearly not particularly fond of Donald Trump. Nor am I for that matter.

Second, they don’t know what “termination for cause” means. In the private sector it means termination based on behavior of the individual—malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance. Or it may mean a difference in policy views between the employer and the employed. Somewhat like “rational basis” in legal terms it means there’s a reason. It doesn’t mean “guilt beyond reasonable doubt”.

For federal civil service employees “termination for cause” is much more restricted. It means misconduct, performance deficiencies, loss of security clearance, or criminal conviction and there are due process requirements. That brings me to the third point.

I have long been skeptical of public-private hybrids of which the Federal Reserve is one. I do not believe that the Constitution empowers the Congress to create institutions outside the scope of the legislative branch and that are not subordinate to the president.

Is the Federal Reserve a department of the executive branch of government or a private organization? If it is a private organization whose employees the president may terminate for cause, then President Trump is acting within his authority in terminating Ms. Cook. If Federal Reserve employees are government employees they should receive civil service protections and otherwise be treated like civil service employees including how they are paid. That would mean that President Trump has acted wrongly in terminating Ms. Cross but it also means that Federal Reserve governors are being paid twice what they should be paid.

Shortly after the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 (at that time the Secretary of the Treasury was chairman of the Federal Reserve) President Wilson importuned the Fed to create war bonds. It acceded. Said another way, the Federal Reserve was politicized almost from its creation. Complaining about it now is a bit late.

Well, there isn’t much question what the editors of the Wall Street Journal’s primary concern is today. They devoted both their featured editorial position (upper left corner) and their featured op-ed position (center column top) to it. It’s the federal government’s acquisition of 10% of Intel’s stock.

Rather than fisking or citing either of those pieces I’ll just give my opinion. I, too, think that having the U. S government acquire ownership of private companies either in part or in whole is a very bad idea. Inevitably, the purpose of such acquisition will not be either to produce more or put the company on a financially more solid basis. It will be to boost the fortunes of a mismanaged company, get a say for appointees or bureaucrats in the operations of the company, strengthen the company’s unions, or some other sketchy reason.

I’m also opposed to industrial policy in any form. That puts me at odds, apparently, with the WSJ and both political parties. The only sort of “industrial policy” in which the federal government should engage is tax policy. IMO the corporate income tax should be abolished (on economic efficiency grounds). For revenue we should depend more on consumption taxes than on income taxes. We should be taxing things we want less of rather than things we want more of. We tax employment. We tax income. We should be taxing consumption.

The problem with industrial policy in the U. S. is that we aren’t authoritarian enough, we aren’t socially cohesive enough, and we aren’t sufficiently observant of the laws for it to work effectively. Yes, that puts us at a disadvantage compared with China. We should employ solutions that rely on our strengths rather than foundering because of our weaknesses.

The best industrial policy we’ve ever had is the space program in the 1960s. It was focused on doing something quite specific and it created the modern U. S. economy. More recently, the best industrial policy we’ve had is “Operation Warp Speed”. Similarly, that was focused on accomplishing something quite specific. The way I’ve been phrasing it is that we’re relatively good at mass engineering projects.