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.

There are different views of the role, purpose, and enforcement of the law. I take a pretty purist view. I think that laws should be enforced and, if there is no routine attempt to enforce them, they should be taken off the books.

But I recognize that there is another way of looking at laws. Some people look at laws as aspirational or, perhaps, admonitory in character. They are an indication of how we wish people would act but not necessarily how they will be required to act. In my opinion laws treated that way become arbitrary and are prone to abuse. There is a tendency to punish people you don’t like while turning a blind eye to infractions by people you do like.

For the last 80 years we’ve had a law on the books called the Hatch Act which limits what federal officials can and cannot do in their official capacity. One of the things it prohibits is political action, electioneering, or soliciting campaign contributions. It doesn’t apply to elected officials. It is rarely if ever enforced. I know of no case in which someone has been dismissed for violating it.

Consistent with my view I think that Kellyanne Conway should lose her job for violating the Hatch Act. Not for habitual violations of the Hatch Act because that’s not what the statute says but for violating it. I also thought that Julian Castro and that Kathleen Sebelius should have been dismissed for their violations of the Hatch Act.

Situations like the present kerfuffle illustrate why I believe what I do. I believe that violations of the Hatch Act are routine not the least because people realize they are rarely enforced. When you have a tolerant attitude towards Hatch Act violations, it inevitably leads to charges of selective prosecution when you do enforce it because it is selective prosecution.

I suspect that Graeme Maxton’s article at the South China Morning Post will cause many pundits’ heads to explode, particularly these paragraphs:

America has played its Trump hand very well. What China has achieved socially and economically over the past 40 years is remarkable by any standard. From being a poor agriculture-based country at the end of the Cultural Revolution, it has become the second-largest economy in the world. It has transformed its infrastructure by building a network of roads, high-speed railways, ports and airports.

It has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty – more than any country in human history, and in barely a generation. It has constructed vast new cities, attracted trillions of dollars of inward investment and spread its influence across the world, most recently through the Belt and Road Initiative.

While it is easy to imagine that some on Capitol Hill have seen what is coming for a decade or more, it will be hard for people in China, especially among the country’s leadership, to accept that this path to glory is coming to an end. Yet China has been fooling itself, its hopes stoked by enthusiastic foreign investors, the rhetoric of local academics and the dreams of its own people.

but I think this passage is more important:

It is the trade war that has laid China’s weaknesses open for all to see. It is now clear that Huawei, China’s big hope in hi-tech, along with ZTE and several other IT firms, are not much of a force to reckon with. Without US hardware, operating licences and software, these firms have been beached.

They are at least 10 years behind technologically and cannot develop the skills needed to survive in anything like their current form. A link to Russia does not solve this problem. Two countries without cutting-edge technology does not add up to much.

It is the same in defence, the auto industry, aviation and many other sectors. Despite decades of effort and lots of state planning, China lacks the depth of engineering skills, patents and technology needed to manufacture globally competitive high-end products. Dismantling a flight management system, a car braking system or a smartphone and reproducing the parts does not make it possible to build them from scratch.

I think he overstates the case. What I think is true is that all that was necessary to lay “China’s weaknesses open for all to see” was anything other than lying supine which is what we’ve been doing for nearly 30 years. The same is true on our southern border and with respect to NATO. All we have really needed to do hold the various countries to their treaty obligation (or targets, depending on the diction). I have never understood why we have not been willing to do that.

Stephen L. Morgan of Bloomberg has advise for those seeking the Democratic presidential nomination:

Should the Democratic Party avoid nominating Cory Booker, Julian Castro or Kamala Harris, based on the argument that they cannot win back Obama-to-Trump voters because they are not white enough? Such arguments are wrongheaded. Voters whose support is determined strongly by racial attitudes chose their parties long ago. The voters who are up for grabs are those who do not vote based on racial matters, and that is why they backed Obama in 2012 before shifting to Trump in 2016.

The message for both parties is clearer than ever: It’s still the economy, but now it’s more than unemployment rates and economic growth. The country needs a new plan to distribute the wage benefits of economic growth more broadly. Trump has a plan: So far, he has managed to talk tough on immigration and start a trade war without destabilizing the economy. Democrats need to spend more energy on figuring out how to do better. Vacuous statements about new green jobs and the economy of the future were not persuasive in 2016, and they won’t be in 2020, either.

I have simpler advice. Take everything they’re doing to woo Democratic primary voters AKA the left flank of the party and do the opposite. Maximalist positions may make them heroes with Democratic primary voters but they will frighten centrists, moderates, and people who can be persuaded. Those positions include federally-funded abortion on demand, the “Green New Deal”, “Medicare For All” in the form taken by the bill introduced in the House or be Bernie Sanders in the Senate, and pledging to put Trump in jail if elected.

At Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi scoffs at the pundits who say that Bernie Sanders is out of the running for the Democratic presidential nomination:

These stories are not based on anything. They’re space-filling guesses usually grounded in some grumbling personal complaint the outlet or pundit in question has about whatever politician they’re trashing.

It’s an annoying and condescending kind of campaign reportage. What makes it particularly ridiculous is that a lot of the people doing it were part of an epic face plant on the horse race front four years ago.

The across-the-board failed prognostications of last election season were a thing to behold. They constituted one of the larger industry-wide failures in a journalism business that has seen a few of them since the Iraq fiasco. Literally every major news outlet called the 2016 election wrong.

He has a point. Many of the pundits got 2016 wrong but the polls and more serious analysts actually got it largely right. Anything can happen, I suppose, but I do not believe that Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee for president for one, simple reason. Everything we know about the process and the individuals who govern the process tells us that it’s rigged. Not only is it rigged but it’s rigged in a manner specifically tailored to prevent Sanders or a candidate like him from winning.

I think that Sanders will get some delegates. He may even win the plurality of delegates in some states. But he will also not win any delegates in many states because he won’t get 15% of the vote. As of this writing the only candidate positioned to win enough delegates is Joe Biden.

I’m putting together an anthology post covering a lot of the issues of the day and digesting the information into tabular form. Topics will include abortion, health care, and trade and will examine the extreme views on the issues with some attention paid to what is done in other countries. As it turns out when people say “we just want what the Europeans have”, it ain’t necessarily so.

I’m accepting suggestions for topics to include in my table.

Have you ever wondered what causes hardening of the arteries? Some researchers at the University of Cambridge think they’ve figured it out and have identified a way to cure it, a commonly-prescribed antibiotic that’s been around for nearly 60 years. The antibiotic itself is not without serious side effects so I expect we’ll see more research on it.

I found that the article made interesting reading.

I found this item at the Chicago Tribune by Lisa Schenker on the views of the American Medical Association on “Medicare For All” somewhat misleading:

Doctors gathered in Chicago for the American Medical Association’s annual meeting this week are increasingly finding themselves at the uncomfortable center of a national debate over “Medicare for All.”

A group of doctors, nurses and medical students protested the meeting, criticizing the association’s opposition to Medicare for All — the idea of expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. And on Monday, the doctors at the meeting heard a speech by Seema Verma, head of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a Trump appointee who devoted a chunk of her talk to what she sees as problems with the proposal.

She told the audience, to applause, that Medicare for All would lead to higher taxes, lower payments for doctors and rationing of health care, among other things.

“We are deeply committed to helping those who need it, but while doing that, we must put the patients and their doctors in the driver’s seat to make decisions about their care, not the government,” Verma said.

So far the AMA has stood by its opposition to Medicare for All, also sometimes referred to as a single-payer system, even as it’s become a hot topic ahead of the 2020 presidential race. Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., unveiled a bill earlier this year to move to a single-payer health care system. About 56 percent of Americans surveyed earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they would favor all Americans getting their insurance from a single government plan.

I think it’s factually accurate but doesn’t really put the matter into perspective. Opposition to health care reform from the AMA in the 1960s almost prevented Medicare and Medicaid from being enacted. Opposition to reform by the AMA in the 1990s sunk the Clinton Administration’s attempt to reform health care as well. The Obama Administration succeeded in getting the Affordable Care Act passed, not the least reason being the payments to physicians written into the act. Paying for reform was instrumental in getting Medicaid passed in 1965, too.

But the AMA is not the powerhouse it was. In the 1950s 75% of physicians belonged to the organization; now 25% do. Ironically, the number of members has not changed a great deal. What has changed is the total number of physicians. In 1960 nearly all U. S. physicians were born and trained in the U. S. Now many are what are called “internationally trained physicians”, many from South Asia.

The other source of the AMA’s power is its custodianship of the Physician Specialty Codes and that it is relied on heavily by the Medicare system to determine the relative value of different procedures. You didn’t think those were determined solely by the federal government or the workings of the market, did you?

I would speculate that physicians are divided on M4A and will remain so. The devil will, of course, be in the details. A version of the plan which cuts reimbursement rates to the Medicare reimbursement rate will probably meet with greater opposition than one that doesn’t but I don’t believe any projection that has shown savings from M4A has ever assumed that reimbursement rates would be left alone.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t some internecine warfare among different medical specialties as specialists seek to preserve their proportionally higher reimbursement rates, one of the factors that distinguishes the U. S. health care system from European systems.