Christopher F. Rulo raises a very interesting point in this article in City Journal on homelessness:

By latest count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has generated headlines and speculation about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.

What is the correct policy response? Provide more homeless shelters? Provide more low-cost housing? Legalize drugs?

Is it just barely possible that we should not only provide more resources for dealing with substance abuse but change our attitudes towards substance abuse?

The New York Times reports on a court case in which a local bakery sued Oberlin College. The jury awarded the bakery a judgment of $33 million dollars, $11 million in compensatory and $22 million in punitive damages. Here’s the NYT’s take:

The dispute began on Nov. 9, 2016, when an Oberlin student tried to pay for a bottle of wine with a fake ID, and the store clerk noticed that the student had hidden two more bottles of wine under his coat, according to court papers.

The clerk, Allyn D. Gibson, a son and a grandson of the owners, chased the student out onto the street and tackled him, according to some witnesses, and two friends of the student, also students at Oberlin, joined in the scuffle. The bakery prosecuted the students, who are African-American and who pleaded guilty to various charges.

The next day, hundreds of students and others gathered in the park across the street from the general store to protest the arrests. The Gibsons accused the college; its dean of students, Meredith Raimondo; and others of actively supporting the protesters. Oberlin officials bought them pizza, authorized the use of student funds to pay for gloves for the cold weather and helped them to hand out fliers urging a boycott of the store, according to court papers.

For just over two months, the college suspended its purchase of baked goods from Gibson’s for the college dining halls. The college said that it suspended buying from Gibson’s in an effort to de-escalate the protests. The store said that the suspension had sent a message to the community that the college believed the store was racist, and that people had stopped shopping there, or went in through a back door, because they did not want to be associated with it.

Though the college resumed buying from Gibson’s it refused to issue an apology, and Gibson’s said its business continued to suffer.

The bakery’s complaint said Dr. Raimondo, had helped hand out fliers saying: “Don’t Buy. This is a racist establishment with a long account of racial profiling and discrimination.”

But the college and the police had no record of prior complaints about racial profiling, the complaint said. Rather, local merchants suffered from students shoplifting, according to court papers, and a college publication had written about how shoplifting was a rite of passage.

The incident and the article bring up a number of interesting issues. The NYT article omits a number of factors that I think are important.

Oberlin, Ohio is a small town of about 8,000 people. Oberlin College is an elite institution and one widely known for social activism and progressivism. The median income of Oberlin students’ families is $178,000. Most of the students’ families are in the top quintile of income earners. The median income of the people of Oberlin, Ohio is $51,117. This divergence provides the basis for a classic “town vs. gown” dispute.

Lorain County in which Oberlin is located is one of the many counties that has never recovered from the Great Recession during which housing values plummeted, indeed, it has suffered substantially from the loss of manufacturing jobs over the last several decades. The punitive damages awarded by the jury in the case were the largest allowed under Ohio law. I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to conclude that the people of Oberlin and Lorain County don’t have a lot of sympathy for how the college handled the situation. The college’s complaint that the judgment would harm students reminds me of the old story about the guy convicted of murdering his parents whose lawyer called for the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.

The incident in question occurred the day after Donald Trump was elected president.

The facts of the incident are not in question. The students who shoplifted pled guilty and were convicted of that and a number of other charges. There was no racial profiling involved. The college refused the Gibsons’ request to send out a letter to the students denying that racial profiling had taken place.

Is it really possible for the Dean of Students to take part in a student demonstration without the college’s having de facto endorsed the cause for which the students are demonstrating? That’s the claim that the college has made.

The bakery has lost a half million in revenue, more than half of its typical annual revenue, as a consequence of the incident and the students’ and college’s actions. The college offered $35,000 in settlement of the Gibsons’ suit against it. In the past I’ve mentioned the idea in negotiation theory of an “insult price”, an offer so ludicrous it aggravates the other party rather than encouraging an agreement. That would seem to fill the bill.

I do not know whether the decision was just or unjust or whether it will stand on the appeal which is inevitably coming. I think that the entire matter provides evidence that the concerns about “social justice warriors” out of control and abetted by colleges and universities has actual weight.

I thought that this roundtable at RealClearDefense on the tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf was interesting but ultimately didn’t cast a lot of light on the situation.

My concern about the situation is that Iran is not Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. It is much more populous, much wealthier, and much more cohesive. I think that any half measure military actions against Iran are likely to be counter-productive, inducing a “rally ’round” effect, but I don’t think that we’re politically and emotionally prepared for total war against Iran, either.

I strongly oppose going to war without the commitment to win and I don’t believe we have it.

Update

Anthony Cordesman thinks that this is the beginning of a “hybrid war” with Iran:

For all its talk about closing the Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz, Iran can now use such forces anywhere inside the Gulf, in the Gulf of Oman, in the Gulf of Aden, and in wide parts of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Iran has also shown great skill in exploiting the tensions and divisions between Arab Gulf states, and between the United States and Europe Union regarding the Iran deal.

Yet, Iranian deniability becomes progressively less credible with time. The United States and Arab Gulf states can retaliate at low levels of conflict and choose higher value targets. The risk of escalation on both sides grows with each new incident, and the patience the Iranian people will show as their lives grow steadily worse is problematic. If Iran has chosen the path to hybrid warfare, it is far from clear that it can win.

IMO trying to wage hybrid war with Iran would be ceding the initiative to the enemy, for no credible reason.

I was prepared to disagree vehemently with this article at Visual Capitalist on Bill Gates’s predictions for technological breakthroughs in 2019 but was pleasantly surprised to find that I agree with all of them. Cruise over to the link to see the eye-catching infographic.

The article is ultimately derived from MIT Technology Review which has this numbered list:

1. Robot dexterity—robot hands that can learn to manipulate unfamiliar objects on their own
2. New-wave nuclear power—both fission and fusion reactor designs that could help bring down carbon emissions
3. Predicting preemies—a simple blood test to warn of a preterm birth, potentially saving many children’s lives
4. Gut probe in a pill—a swallowable device that can image the digestive tract and even perform biopsies
5. Custom cancer vaccines—a treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to target only tumor cells
6. The cow-free burger—both plant-based and lab-grown meat alternatives that could drastically cut emissions from the food industry
7. Carbon dioxide catcher—techniques for absorbing CO2 from the air and locking it away that may finally become economic
8. An ECG on your wrist—the ability for people with heart conditions to continuously monitor their health and get early warnings of problems
9. Sanitation without sewers—a self-contained toilet that could tackle disease and unpleasant living conditions in much of the developing world
10. Smooth-talking AI assistants—new advances in natural language processing that make digital assistants capable of greater autonomy

Note what’s conspicuous by their absence: extravagant predictions about artificial intelligence or breakthroughs in battery technology. AI is there but the predictions are modest and achievable.

I’m not as convinced that the benefits predicted from the breakthroughs will actually materialize. For example, I wonder if animal-free burgers will actually result in fewer carbon emissions than the real kind in my lifetime?

You might want to take a look at this piece at City Journal by M. Anthony Mills. As it turns out social cohesion is vital for economic growth and has political implications as well:

The disintegration of civil institutions —the source of social capital—disproportionately harms distressed regions. As Tim Carney showed in Alienated America, struggling rural and Rust Belt towns that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 primary were united by the absence of not only economic opportunities, but also social connectedness and the institutions that foster it. By contrast, communities that voted for Hillary Clinton boast flourishing civil institutions, including neighborhood associations, clubs, and churches, along with stable, two-parent households.

Studies indicate a positive correlation between high social capital and economic opportunity, including mobility and wage growth. One obvious explanation holds that well-off communities have the resources to sustain vibrant institutions and social capital. This would suggest that disadvantaged regions need a combination of market forces and government assistance aimed at creating more economic opportunities. But what if social capital is not simply a sign of economic vitality, but also a precondition for it?

Read the whole thing.

In their diatribe against Sen. Bernie Sanders’s “democratic socialism”, the editors of the Wall Street Journal provide a capsule description of Sweden, frequently used by those touting socialism as an example of their aspirations:

Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 21.4%—close to the U.S. rate of 21% that Mr. Sanders calls an abomination and wants to raise.

Sweden has no inheritance tax, while Mr. Sanders wants government to tax just about everything you have at death. Or perhaps Mr. Sanders doesn’t want voters to figure out that Sweden, like most European cradle-to-grave welfare states, imposes a 25% VAT that soaks the middle class.

Like other universal government-run health care systems, Sweden rations care. But at least people can utilize private care if they choose. Mr. Sanders recently said there would be no exceptions for Americans to his Medicare for All plan. Sweden also offers universal school vouchers, which may be why its students outperform those in the U.S. Mr. Sanders wants to ban charter schools and force kids into union-run public schools.

Sweden’s GDP growth rate is the same as ours. Our two countries are 27th and 28th, respectively, in the prevalence of suicide. We have roughly the same rates of alcohol abuse. Our rate of drug abuse is significantly higher than Sweden’s.

We have more than 30 times the population of Sweden. Our per capita GDP is 20% higher than Sweden’s (however measured). Sweden is much more equal as measured by Gini coefficient than the United States.

Sweden set up its former cradle-to-grave welfare state when it was much more prosperous and had been so for some time and when it was much more homogeneous than it is now. Until rather recently Sweden was more than 90% ethnically Swedish and at least culturally Lutheran. Roughly 70% of the people in Sweden are still ethnic Swedes. Political support for its welfare state eroded as its population became more diverse.

I’m probably being remiss in not remarking while World War III potentially starts in the Persian Gulf. If you haven’t heard, there have been some attacks on oil tanks in the Persian Gulf. The U. S. says that Iran is responsible. Others say not. I’ve even seen some claims of a false flag operation with the objective of ginning up support for a war with Iran.

I don’t know what’s happening. There is a lot of fog of war. I don’t form opinions until I have some notion of the facts and I don’t think we do yet. Stay tuned.

Which of these would you prefer?

1. A president who told you he or she would accept opposition research from another country but lied about it because he or she actually wouldn’t.
2. A president who told you he or she would accept opposition research from another country and told the truth.
3. A president who told you he or she would not accept opposition research from another country and lied about it.
4. A president who told you he or she would not accept opposition research from another country and told the truth.

My preferences in descending order would be D, B, C, and A. A is a fool. Such a person should not be president. D is a completely honest, decent individual, something rarely encountered in politics for a reason expressed in a proverb: “Better to be hung for a goat than a lamb.” We generally treat Ds and Cs exactly the same. Cs are the norm in politics.

A B is what is referred to as “an honest knave”.

I can see how intelligent people could differ in their responses. There is a certain value to somebody who gives the expected answer. It all depends on your hierarchy of values.

Let’s add some wrinkles. Does it matter if the individual actively solicited information from the other country? Do it matter whether the country is an ally or an enemy?

Other than in wartime I don’t think we have either allies or enemies. There are just shades of gray.

At RealClearPolicy the organization No Labels present five facts about the U. S.-China trade war. Here they are:

1. According to CNBC, one in five U.S. companies claims that Chinese companies have stolen their intellectual property within the past year.
2. The South China Morning Post reports that profits of state firms are hitting record highs as the number of entities under government control have decreased.
3. A major point of contention in U.S-China trade talks is the practice of “technology transfer,” in which the Chinese government forces U.S. companies to turn over their tech secrets to Chinese partners as a condition of gaining access to the country’s enormous market.
4. Right now there is a heated race to pioneer 5G, or fifth-generation mobile networks, and China has the leading edge.
5. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 3.4 million U.S. jobs were lost between 2001 and 2017 because of the U.S. trade deficit with China.

Read the whole thing.

In my view in order to maintain a healthy economy and a healthy society we need people working in primary production and factory workers as well as menials, professionals, artists, and rentiers. A society based solely on those latter four groups will not be a healthy one but that’s the direction in which we are heading.

I believe in free trade but one way free trade will destroy our country. We have put off the reckoning for far too long and the longer it has been delayed the more difficult it will be to reverse. If you have a better plan for that than tariffs, please propose it.