Well, I’ve gone through the campaign sites of the top two tiers of Democratic presidential aspirants and, honestly, I find their contents pretty dismaying. With few exceptions they do not seem to have much idea of what the president actually does. They appear to be running for Senate Majority Leader rather than for President of the United States.

Not to be a pill about it but here’s Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution in which the responsibilities of the president are defined:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

It corresponds to Section 8 of Article I in which the powers of the Congress are specified or Section 2 of Article III in which the powers of the Supreme Court are defined. Note that Article II is much shorter than Article I. That isn’t an accident.

Other than in a few rare instances the amount written about foreign policy wouldn’t be enough for a good blog post. They’re more like tweets. All of them are making an assumption of something for which I see no evidence—that the world is thirsting for American leadership. Quite to the contrary I don’t think a lack of American leadership is as much in evidence as an utter void of followership.

Additionally, they are very long on aspirations and pitifully short on details. I guess that’s to be expected on campaign websites.

From a total content standpoint I would say my three favorites were Tulsi Gabbard’s, Joe Biden’s, and Pete Buttigieg’s, pretty much in that order. I thought the worst was Kamala Harris’s. Sen. Harris’s uses much the same approach in providing content as far too many supermarkets use in marketing their goods. You have to search through the entire thing to find what you’re looking for. Maybe that’s deliberate but I doubt that many will have that sort of patience.

There has been a lot of breastbeating in the media about Trump’s cancellation of a planned meeting with representatives of the Taliban at Camp David. We don’t really know if such meetings were actually scheduled but let’s suppose they were. Commentary has tended to fall into one of three categories:

• If Trump does it, it must be wrong.
• We should never negotiate with the Taliban under any circumstances.
• We should negotiate with the Taliban but the timing was wrong.

My own view is that putting boots on the ground in Afghanistan was stupid. As soon as we did so and brought down the Taliban government, we became the “occupying power” under international conventions to which we are a party with certain obligations—obligations that would be difficult or impossible to satisfy. We did need to respond forcefully but I don’t think we should ever have become the occupying power. Americans didn’t have the stomach for my preferred solution.

All of that is water under the bridge. We still have troops in Afghanistan with a primary mission of counter-insurgency, i.e. fighting the Taliban in the futile hope that a non-Taliban Afghan government will be able to stand on its own.

Should Trump be negotiating with the Taliban? When? What should the objectives of such a negotiation be?

I agree with Carl Jaison’s point in his piece at The Diplomat that an Indian-Russian alliance is more likely than not:

As India expresses keen interest in shoring up its energy supplies from Russia’s Far East, the broader contour of the development is the two countries’ strategic convergence on the region’s issues. In the Indo-Pacific, India and Russia have carved out a unique strategy to amplify their own machinations. While New Delhi has sought to break free from the U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry in the region, Moscow has come up with a compelling strategy in the form of the Eastern Economic Forum to build strategic relationships with Asian countries to limit its reliance on China. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, India might have reservations about the Taliban’s rise to prominence at the expense of the democratically elected government in Kabul but having Russia as a channel to influence the Taliban after a U.S. withdrawal could play to India’s favor.

On the China front, India is seeking to diversify its options beyond the U.S.-led initiative and encourage a multi-stakeholder approach. This works in Russia’s interests, as it should know better than to put all its eggs in the Chinese basket. Despite their growing bonhomie, Russia is better off considering expanding its ties with other Asian countries like India, Vietnam, and Indonesia than solely piggybacking on China in matters relating to the Far East, Central Asia, and Asia as a whole.

I have always found the notion of a persistent Chinese-Russian alliance bizarre. The two countries are strategic competitors not likely allies. They can form a temporary alliance of convenience in the face of an aggressive and hostile United States but that won’t be something that is durable. Believe me, the Russians are aware of that.

The Indians and Russians on the other hand are not strategic competitors, their interests are complementary and they have a common adversary: China.

I wish Mr. Jaison had elaborated on the implications of a Russo-Indian alliance. Perhaps that will come in later pieces.

I agree with some of what James Meigs says in his post at City Journal about the Democratic presidential candidates’ climate change plans and I disagree with some but what I want to focus on in this post is this sentence:

It’s almost as if bringing down carbon emissions isn’t the candidates’ top goal.

Of course it’s not their top goal. Their top goal is to secure their party’s nomination for president. Then the prevailing candidate’s top goal will be to become president.

Something I think that very few people really realize is that everybody has a hierarchy of values. Those candidates are perfectly sincere in their support for reducing carbon emissions but they’re also perfectly sincere in their support for a dozen other goals. Those are their principles. If you don’t like them, they have others.

Those goals are arranged in a priority sequence with the next rung in the process of becoming president the topmost priority. No candidate who puts some other goal above that one can possibly prevail. It’s a lousy system but it’s the one we have.

But things are drastically different than they were when the three leading candidates were young which is now a half century or more ago. They apparently believe that they can leave the excessive promises they’ve made reaching that next rung in the dust as they reach for the next rung. I think they’re wrong but we’ll see.

I do not see how the carbon emissions they’re claiming as their objective can be achieved without embracing nuclear power, making a highly improved energy grid a top priority, and quickly adopting technologies for carbon capture but each of those would lose them votes, i.e. would be at the expense of their prime objective.

The object of power is power.

As I read James Dobbins’s plea to return “to the basics of statecraft”, reproduced at The RAND Blog, I could barely make out the outlines of actual events in his characterization of the events of the last 30 years:

Since the turn of the century, even America’s apparent successes have turned sour. Afghanistan and Iraq became quagmires. Al Qaeda metastasized in new forms throughout the Muslim world. Russia and China became more hostile. The Arab Spring turned quickly to winter. Democracy everywhere encountered new headwinds. The Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership were concluded, then rejected. An ever-growing number of books and articles bemoan the demise of the liberal world order, the erosion of democracy, and the end of the American century.

I couldn’t help but wonder how he reconciles any of the following with that worldview:

• The U. S.’s systematic dismissal and hostility towards Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union?
• Stationing troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?
• That the Muslim world has always had violent separatist movements? It is what you would expect in a sola scriptura faith without a magisterium whose holy book can be interpreted as condoning political violence.
• The drone war?
• The bombing of Libya in support of the removal of Qaddaffi?

I also wondered when in the post-war period China had ever been anything other than hostile to the United States?

In light of the enormous gap between the way Mr. Dobbins apparently sees the United States and our place in the world and mine, let me offer some of the my thoughts on the basics of American statecraft.

The United States is not the United Kingdom or France. We do not have an identifiable foreign policy, crafted by elites and coherent over time. Our foreign policy is an emergent phenomenon formed day to day by politicians, diplomats, American businesses, and the American people.

Whenever military force is used in pursuit of an objective that is war. War should never be used except as a last resort. If you can subject it to cost-benefit analysis, you should not go to war.

When our military is ultimately used, it should be decisive and dispositive.

We should never, ever go to war without enlisting the American people in the war effort first.

Our diplomats need to understand their role. They are not the sole creators of our foreign policy and they serve at the pleasure of the president.

We need diplomats with a solid core of American social and political values.

Most Americans aren’t much interested in American Empire, spreading democracy at the point of a sword, or ensuring that a few large companies prosper. They want to be secure in their property and persons, have a job, have a reasonable level of comfort in their lives, and not be fearful for their futures. They want to be able to come home after work and watch television.

What the American people want is important in our foreign policy. It isn’t the only important thing but it is important.

And i haven’t even gotten to the role of the president and the risks in persistently electing presidents who have little or no knowledge of foreign policy and little interest in it.

Speaking of magic, I think there’s a comeuppance brewing for the entire gig and sharing economy. But first, a word about taxicab regulation.

Taxicab regulation goes back to the 1840s. Taxis are regulated by federal, state, county, and city governments with most of the regulation being at the city level. You may not know it but the federal government regulates taxis by establishing standards for how taximeters, those gadgets next to the driver in the front seat of a cab that ticks off the mileage and charges for your ride, function. Notionally, the purpose of laws regulating taxis is to ensure the safety of the passengers, predictability in the amount customers will be charged, the elimination of price gouging, and allow owners and drivers to make a reasonable return. The primary mechanism that has been adopted to do that has been to create barriers to entry. The practical effect of taxicab regulation has been to subsidize the owners of permits, medallions, certificates, or whatever other barrier to entry has been put in place and increase rates.

Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, and other similar startups that depend on creeping into crevices in taxi or hotel or other regulations will all fail for a simple reason. The regulations exist for valid reasons and the crevices that gig and sharing economy startups depend on will be closed. Enjoy them while you can.

In her latest Washington Post column Megan McArdle muses over the first inklings of the comeuppance I spoke of earlier:

WeWork isn’t the only tech “unicorn” that has lost some of its magic. Uber and Lyft were probably the most famous of the unicorns — companies valued at more than $1 billion in private funding rounds. They’re also trailing their initial valuations by quite a lot since both companies went public this spring. Now another of the best-known unicorns seems to be molting. And perhaps that’s not an accident.

These companies got so famous, and got such stratospheric valuations, because they promised to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary. With Uber and Lyft, for example, investors were buying into not just a better way to hail a taxi but also an option on a future in which everyone outsources their car ownership.

The reality is that in 50 years anyone who can afford one will still own their own cars because they provide freedom and flexibility and those are worth quite a bit. You can’t get those with ridesharing services and when the dust has settled and the regulations have caught up with the technology the cost of a cab ride to the airport or grocery store will be as high as it’s been for the last 75 years.

I don’t know what the point of this Washington Post editorial is other than to exemplify how Trump is inferior to Obama in all respects:

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S belligerent nationalism and his use of trade as a political weapon are being emulated by key American allies, compounding the damage to U.S. strategic interests. One particularly acute case in point is that of Japan and South Korea, which have become caught up in an escalating feud about 20th-century grievances that animate nationalists in both countries. The result: Japan has restricted key exports to South Korea, and Seoul has announced it will end an intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo, even as both countries face a growing threat from North Korea.

[…]

All this came as a blow to U.S. diplomats who had worked painstakingly to broker the intelligence deal and to encourage the settlement on comfort women. Yet, other than issuing a statement criticizing the South Korean move on intelligence sharing, the Trump administration has made little effort to repair the rift. This, even though North Korea’s recent testing of several new short-range missiles capable of striking both South Korea and Japan has made cooperation between them more urgent than ever.

President Barack Obama made it a priority to ease tensions between these vital U.S. allies, even convening a trilateral meeting with Ms. Park and Mr. Abe to break the ice between them. Mr. Trump, in contrast, has publicly complained about the expectation that he should do something. “How many things do I have to get involved in?” he whined after getting a mediation request from Mr. Moon in July. Thanks to such thinking, the U.S. strategic position in East Asia is steadily deteriorating, to the advantage of North Korea and China.

Is it that the Japanese and South Koreans are children, unable to resolve their differences absent U. S. guidance? Is it that President Obama’s personal intervention provided a magical salve to smooth over millennium-old differences between the two countries?

Is it not possible that sticking our noses into every possible international situation actually provides the illusion of the necessity or even utility of U. S. participation when they are resolved amicably by the parties themselves? Wouldn’t it actually be better if we dispelled that illusion?

So, WaPo editors, how do you see the role of the U. S. in the world and why do the Japanese and Koreans need our help?

The suggestion that Noah Smith floats at Bloomberg for regional research parks:

Gruber and Johnson envision a string of new federally funded research parks, located in lagging regions of the U.S. They identify a number of economically underperforming cities that are rich in high-quality university programs and graduates — and that have short commutes, cheap houses and low levels of violent crime. Rochester, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, Syracuse, NY, and Columbus, OH top the list.

founders on a simple question. Do you want to live in Santa Cruz, Raleigh, or Rochester? This ill-considered idea rears its ugly head every few years. Thirty-five years ago I stood up in a townhall meeting about plans to build a research park in Evanston, where I had been living for many years, to say something along the following lines:

This is an incredibly foolhardy plan. Evanston does not have the infrastructure to support a research park. Young people cannot afford to buy homes here. There aren’t enough apartments for more people to live in. There is no way to commute in or out of Evanston.

Most people would rather move to Santa Cruz or Raleigh than move to Evanston.

The only enduring legacy of implementing this plan will be to uproot an historic black community that’s been in the location you want to develop since before the Civil War.

After many years of little or no occupancy the idea of an Evanston research park evaporated as silently as it arrived. Its only enduring legacy was to uproot an historic black community that had been in the location in which they plopped the research park since before the Civil War.

The reason that Rochester is in an economic slump is not just because it was a one company town and when that company folded due to management’s failing to read the trends the town dwindled with the company. It was because there just aren’t that many people who want to live in a town that gets 80 inches of snow every winter. Especially when they had other alternatives. And the very essence of the plan the two jamokes want tax dollars to pay for is to provide alternatives.

I’m in favor of more federal spending on research. The way to do that is with a mass engineering project analogous to the space program. I suggest a completely redesigned national power grid. It can be built out incrementally. At least we’d have something to show for it.

I want to commend Elizabeth Bauer’s excellent article at Forbes on Chicago’s pension crisis to your attention. It is hard to excerpt but here’s a characteristic snippet:

So, again, to repeat: when we speak of the importance of pension funding, most of the time, it can be fairly abstract and hypothetical. It’s unfair to future generations to ask them to pay what amount to basic payroll costs. There’s a risk that a plan that relies on future tax base growth could fall apart because, let’s face it, by the time you can predict that a city or state’s population is declining rather than growing, it’s too late. And giving legislators the ability to defer funding places us at risk of them succumbing to a temptation they simply shouldn’t have. (Yes, I’ve hashed this all out before.)

But this is no longer hypothetical. It’s no longer about good governance principles. It’s about impending insolvency if the city backs out of its funding schedule.

How soon is “impending”? Eight years at the longest. Possibly as soon as 2025.

Meanwhile, the editors of the Chicago Tribune declaim about the official response to the crisis:

We’re grateful to hear an elected official confront the details of the pension crisis and commit to solving it, regardless of the potential political cost. So far the responses from Springfield have been empty. A lot of: We look forward to hearing what the mayor has to say. …

Where’s the urgency?

One aspect of the problem missing from both discussions is that Chicago’s population is declining. That means that the number of Chicagoans who must pay for the misfeasance of past administrations is a million people fewer than would have been the case 40 years ago while the number of public employees who’ve retired and collect pensions continues to increase.

The state and the city depend very heavily on revenue from taxing marijuana and an as yet imaginary Chicago casino to fill the gap. They have no studies to support their assumptions about revenue. It just has to work.

That’s a disease afflicting a lot of our public policy. The preferred solution just has to work because the alternatives are too awful to contemplate. It can be seen at the federal level in personal income tax policy and in our policies with respect to Afghanistan and Syria.

As it works out there have been studies of the effects of legalized casino gambling on local economies and they tend not to be benign. Most of the spending in such establishments is from local people and they operate like a highly regressive tax.

It should be obvious that there are serious limits to how much tax can be extracted by taxing marijuana. We already have a huge black market which we’ve been unable to eradicate. If the taxes are high enough that will continue to be the case. My understanding is that revenues have fallen short of policymakers’ expectations in every jurisdiction in which recreational marijuana has been legalized.

Gov. Pritzker’s spending plans depend heavily on the proceeds of a yet-to-be-approved amendment to the state’s constitution allowing a graduated income tax. To the best of my knowledge no study has ever been done of the likely results of such a tax but its effects are already being felt—rich people are leaving Illinois in numbers.

There are really only a handful of ways to address the city’s and state’s fiscal problems. Most of the focus has been on raising taxes but that, as noted above, is already having adverse effects on our economies.

We can amend the state’s constitution to allow legislators to reduce future pension outlays. We can cut the pay of present public employees. We can reduce other spending—most of that is either Medicaid or road repair and the state’s roads are already in wretch shape as anyone who has driven from Illinois to Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, or Missouri can attest.

Or we can grow while limiting public spending to what we can afford. We are presently doing the opposite.