I could not agree more with William Galston’s advise in his Wall Street Journal column:

“Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China,” President Trump declared last week in an instantly famous tweet. When skeptics questioned his authority to issue such an order, he cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA.

People who followed the ensuing debate among international-trade lawyers were likely surprised; I know I was. The president may well have the legal power to enforce much, if not quite all, of his tweet. Although he cannot literally compel U.S. companies to repatriate their enterprises from China, he can make it all but impossible for them to continue doing business there.

The language of the IEEPA is amazingly broad. In brief, once the president declares a specific emergency, he may block economic transactions of all kinds between the foreign countries or entities named in the emergency declaration and any party subject to U.S. law. The president is required to consult with Congress before instituting the block, but congressional consent is not required.

As originally enacted, the law allowed Congress to block the president’s action with a resolution not subject to presidential veto (a “legislative veto”). Five years later, in the case of Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, the Supreme Court held legislative vetoes unconstitutional. So to block an emergency declaration, Congress now has to muster a two-thirds majority of each house to override a president’s veto.

For Congress and critics of sweeping emergency powers, the bad news doesn’t stop here. Because the IEEPA doesn’t include a sunset clause, any amendments the president opposes will also require support from two-thirds of both the House and Senate.

The authority Congress has surrendered will be difficult to reclaim—unless the political parties unite to take it back or Americans elect a president who questions the wisdom of his expanded powers.

Those powers should be questioned.

The media’s take on this, as has so often been the case lately, has been wrong. The scandal is not that President Trump should say such outrageous things but that the Congress should attempt to delegate to the president such outrageous power and that the Supreme Court should defer to Congress’s power to delegate its own authority.

I would think it is obvious that you should give no power to Jimmy Carter that you wouldn’t give to Ronald Reagan and you wouldn’t give any power to Bill Clinton that you wouldn’t give to George W. Bush but apparently not. There is no such thing as a permanent partisan lock on the White House. That is a persistent fantasy but it will remain a fantasy.

Now Trump has that power.

The text of the law is here. There are presently more than 30 active emergencies under the terms of the act. All the more scandalous, it is actually a limitation on the president’s powers under the legislation it replaced, the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917.

Presumably in reaction to the Business Roundtable’s pronouncement about their commitment to stakeholders rather than stockholders, the editors of the Washington Post open with this paragraph:

AMERICA’S CAPTAINS of industry are political orphans. Until relatively recently, both political parties struck a respectful, indeed solicitous, posture toward companies and the chief executives who ran them. The near-collapse of the economy in 2008 shook the legitimacy of both capitalism and its corporate stewards, however, with lasting repercussions — prominent among them a bipartisan swing toward populism.

Both sentences are false or at least exaggerated. Neither political party has driven Fortune 500 CEOs from their doors and, indeed, they are split between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as suggested by the eye-catching graph at the top of this page.

The second sentence might have been true if the sources of the financial crisis had been capitalistic overreaching rather than just pursuing the incentives that borrowers and lenders alike had been given by the government or if the government response had been less predisposed to protect stockholders at the expense of everything else. It’s not impossible. When Sweden faced its own financial crisis some years before we did, the Swedes, made of sterner, more capitalistic stuff than Americans are, shuttered insolvent banks and sold off their remaining assets.

Let me propose some measures for making capitalism more “socially positive” by making it more capitalistic:

• When economic downturns occur as they inevitably will, do not save mismanaged companies. Save their employees. Let the stockholders fend for themselves (even if those stockholders are public employee pension funds).
• Do not allow the importing of goods from foreign companies that do not operate under the restrictions (environmental, labor standards, safety, etc.) as or more stringent than we impose on domestic companies. At the very least impose tariffs in the amount of the estimated cost of those restrictions.
• Abolish the corporate income tax. It imposes costs and encourages short term thinking.
• If you absolutely must continue the corporate income tax, restore the pre-Clinton rules on CEO compensation. They, too, encourage short term thinking.
• Impose extremely stiff tax surcharges on the private sector incomes of individuals who leave government service for the private sector for a lengthy period, at least until their Rolodexes aren’t valuable any more.
• Reforms governing boards of directors are needed.

I could go on by pointing out that most Americans’ notions of ethics and morality are about at the level of a ten year old or that I’m skeptical that any standard of morality can be maintained on a mass basis in the absence of traditional religion but those are the materials for other posts.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Brazilian journalist Leandro Narloch proposes reforms that will be counter-intuitive to many to preserve Brazil’s rainforest including:

• Support the legalization of sustainable mining.
• Favor new hydroelectric power plants.
• Support intensive agriculture and livestock.

While not unprecedented fires, mischaracterized as “wildfires” since most have actually been set deliberately, are worse than last year. I present that list uncritically. I am far from an expert on Brazilian politics or policy. The key point is that Brazil’s great problem is poverty.

I will admit that I suspect that Brazil’s agricultural policies are partially to blame but what are really needed to preserve the Amazon rainforests are better alternatives than farming for Brazil’s poor and fewer, more efficient farmers.

In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Wilfred McClay tries to draw a distinction between “genuine history” on the one hand and “weaponized history” on the other.

Genuine

A genuinely historical approach would acknowledge, even insist on recognizing, that Washington owned slaves. It would go on to consider that fact from the larger perspective of a long, important and consequential life. It would weigh Washington’s beliefs and actions carefully in the context of their time, and would take into account his decision to free his slaves at the time of his death.

Weaponized

A more disturbing example is the pell-mell rush to pass judgment against heroes of the past and tear down or rename the monuments to them—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. Are we really so faint of heart that we can no longer bear to allow the honoring of great men of the past who fail in some respects to meet our current specifications?

If there were an ounce of sincerity in the present campaign to bowdlerize our history, the very people proclaiming the mortal necessity of the bowdlerization would be deserting the Democratic Party. For most of a century the party’s main annual fund-raising event has been called the “Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner” for good reason. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson laid the foundations of the Democratic Party. If the United States has not transcended its original sin, slavery, it is manifestly impossible for the Democratic Party to have done so.

But people and history are more complicated than that. We must learn to embrace history’s contradictions rather than trying to bury them. We cannot do so through perseverating on our sins. Don’t confront me with my failings. I have not forgotten them.

James Mellaart, a sort of real-life Indiana Jones and quite a rascal, once said of archaeology that it wasn’t a science, it was a vendetta. That isn’t just true of ancient history. It’s equally true of more modern history if not more so..

I will only make one point about the New York Times’s “1619 Project”. For the rest I’m in general agreement with Robert Cherry’s observations at RealClearPolitics:

Cotton, while an important product, was never central to American economic development, and at its peak in 1850 it accounted for about 6 percent of GDP.

Here’s my point. Nothing is ever neutral. It is either helpful or harmful. Things either get better or worse. They do not stay the same.

IMO the NYT’s project is intentionally divisive. It will not lead to greater racial understanding or amity. Quite the opposite.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is about to face her first major challenge as mayor. WGN News reports that the Chicago Teachers Union, undeterred by an independent fact-finding report, are poised to strike:

CHICAGO — The Chicago Teachers Union took a step closer to going on strike after rejecting an independent fact-finder report on Chicago Public Schools.

At a news conference Monday, Chicago Teachers Unions President Jesse Sharkey formally rejected the report, which became public Monday. Read the full report here.

Among several issues, the union is unhappy that CPS may reduce the number of school librarians. Mayor Lori Lightfoot had campaigned on a promise to have a librarian for each school.

The CTU has already been offered a 16% raise over the next 5 years which they have deemed inadequate. Over the last five years Chicago’s population has declined. Presumably, they want to levy higher taxes on Chicago’s shrinking populace. As a point of comparison my pay is exactly what it was five years ago and my house is probably worth less than it was five years ago.

Will the new mayor repeat Rahm Emanuel’s missteps? I am not sanguine. I strongly suspect she will.

Presently, there are three candidates for president in the Democratic field who have credible chances of winning the nomination: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. The editors of the Washington Post have evidently decided that the weakest in that pack is Bernie Sanders and have decided to go after him. In response to his climate change proposal they write:

As with practically every grandiose program Mr. Sanders proposes, we are left wondering what the democratic socialist would actually do as president. Nothing resembling his climate plan could pass Congress, even with a strong Democratic majority. Mr. Sanders typically retorts that he will lead a political revolution. But he will not change the fact that the nation is ideologically pluralistic.

On climate policy, the key is to get the most bang for the nation’s buck. The task is so large that direct government spending on projects such as power plants is a recipe for unconscionable waste. Mr. Sanders’s promise to divert national wealth into proven boondoggles such as high-speed rail is another red flag.

No central planner can know exactly how and where to invest for an efficient and effective energy transition. That is why economists continue to recommend that the government take a simple, two-pronged approach: invest in scientific research and prime the market to accept new, clean technologies with a substantial and steadily rising carbon tax. People and businesses would find the most effective ways to avoid the increasingly high, tax-inflated costs of using dirty fuels. Maybe that would mean building huge new solar farms throughout the country. Maybe it would mean massive energy efficiency gains driven by home retrofits or new appliances. Maybe it would mean continuing to accept some role for nuclear power.

I wonder if they appreciate the peril in the position they just articulated. Bernie Sanders is not the only “central planner” in the Democratic field. They’re all central planners, most importantly, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are.

If only there were a system which in which local issues and local variation in ideology and needs could be addressed on a systematic basis. Perhaps we can create a federal bureaucracy stationed in Washington, DC to tackle that problem.

The editors of the Washington Post point out that there are critical shortages of certain categories of workers:

OCCUPATIONAL AND physical therapists. Religious workers. Plant operators. Railway personnel. Construction workers. Maintenance and repair workers. Firefighters. Social workers. Nurses. Funeral workers. Truckers. That’s only a brief sampling of the jobs in the United States for which there are severe shortages of available employees, and way more openings than applicants.

and then point to their one-size-fits-all solution to the problem:

rational immigration system, one that meets the labor market’s demands for workers in an array of skill categories and income levels, is the obvious antidote to chronic and predictable labor deficits. Unfortunately, the Trump administration, heedless of the pleas of employers, has implemented and proposed measures whose effect will deepen existing and future shortages. And it has done so even as the unemployment rate, now 3.7 percent, continues to bump along at near-historic lows.

Just to take the category of workers with whom they open their editorial, they are right that there are critical shortages of speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists, particularly localized shortages but their solution is claptrap. We can’t fill those jobs by importing workers. To do a satisfactory job in those fields you must be fluent in English and be equally fluent in our cultural norms in a way that is only possible for someone reared in the culture.

In many places the issue is not that the wages being offered are inadequate. It’s too late to address one of the primary reasons for the problem—increased demand. We have known there would be more elderly people in 2020 for more than 70 years. It has hardly snuck up on us.

More to the point the number of positions in programs has not kept pace with the increase in population being served and the requirements have inflated equally rapidly. Increasingly, doctorates are required.

I also can’t help but wonder if one of the reasons for the shortages is that young people are simply not aware of the opportunities and with such a long launching pad it’s difficult to prepare for jobs in those fields without having started in high school.

On the talking heads programs this morning I heard quite a few people complaining about the fires in Brazil. I think we should all be able to agree that’s a Bad Thing.

However, I’m a bit confused. Are people unaware that Brazil is another country? What do they have in mind for our controlling what Brazilians do? How will changing our behavior change the behavior of Brazilians?