I do not believe it is a coincidence that Germany, the United Kingdom, and France all adopted their present health care systems at the time of greatest national social cohesion. I think that a commitment to cost reduction is a prerequisite for adopting a single-payer system or full-on national health system (like NHS). I think that a single-payer or full-on national health system without a commitment to cost reduction would be a political, fiscal, and economic disaster for the United States. I don’t think we can afford the status quo (I don’t think anybody could).

I also think that the right way to approach our present problem is to decide what we’re trying to accomplish first and then figure out ways and means. I think the overwhelming likelihood is that we’ll shoehorn a means into the problems we’re trying to solve in an irresponsible way.

The editors of the Washington Post remark on the situation in Venezuela:

The Maduro regime has violated human rights on a massive scale, leaving hundreds of peaceful opponents dead, and it has led Venezuela into economic catastrophe. Millions of Venezuelans have fled to other countries, including hundreds of thousands to the United States. Having first been elected in 2013, Mr. Maduro forfeited democratic legitimacy in January 2016, when he purported to deprive the National Assembly of its powers because the opposition had won control the previous month. He then manipulated the political system to create a parallel puppet legislature and, on May 20, 2018, engineered his reelection through a flawed process from which both international observers and leading opposition figures were effectively barred. His inauguration as president for a new term in January, in defiance of warnings from neighboring Latin democracies, prompted Mr. Guaidó, leader of the National Assembly, to declare the presidential office vacant and himself its interim occupant, as provided in the Venezuelan Constitution — and supported by more than 50 countries, including the United States.

or, in other words, Mr. Maduro has been conducting a military coup against the government and people of Venezuela. Mr. Guaidó’s encouragement of popular uprising then is, at most, a counter-coup.

How should the U. S. respond?

The Trump administration has backed Mr. Guaidó, including — appropriately — through the use of tough new economic sanctions aimed at pressuring the Maduro regime to cede power, or persuading the Venezuelan military to oust him itself. Possibly, Tuesday’s events are a sign that Mr. Trump’s policy is succeeding; or, possibly, that there is nothing left of it but desperate measures. A hopeful sign was the immediate and unequivocal backing Mr. Guaidó received from six South American nations, including Venezuela’s four largest neighbors: Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil and Peru. By working closely with these countries, and not by intervening militarily, the Trump administration may increase the chances that Mr. López’s declaration Tuesday — “It’s time to conquer freedom” — proves out.

which you may notice is precisely the course of action I have recommended in the matter. The best thing we can do is to maintain a low profile. Let Venezuela’s neighbors take the lead. We may or may not be the “indispensable nation” but we’re not the only one.

South America is a real place with real countries that have real interests and where real people live. They are not merely appendages of the United States. Letting them take responsibility in a situation in which they have greater stakes than we is good for them and good for us.

The New York Times and multiple other media sources are reporting that there are “clashes” going on in Caracas, Venezuela subsequent to the call by the leader of the opposition, Juan Guaidó, for a popular uprising against the Chavist Maduro government:

Anti-government protesters and law enforcement officers clashed in Caracas on Tuesday after Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó appeared alongside soldiers at a military base and called for the population to rise up against the president.

“Today, brave soldiers, brave patriots, brave men attached to the Constitution have followed our call,” Mr. Guaidó said in a video posted on social media, speaking from Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base, a military airport in Caracas known as La Carlota, in a direct challenge to the government.

He has called before for the military to rise up against the government of President Nicolás Maduro, but doing so flanked by men in uniform, at a base in the heart of the capital, was a new step. With few exceptions, the military has so far protected Mr. Maduro.

Mr. Guaidó claimed that “the definitive end of the usurpation starts today,” but it was not clear how many civilians or soldiers would heed him.

I have no particular fondness for the Maduro government. I do not believe it is good for the Venezuelan people and is rather obviously corrupt. However, I also suspect that the U. S. media do not give us an accurate picture of how much support that government has in Venezuela, particularly among the poor.

We may be learning that right now.

I reamin unconvinced by Michael McCaul’s argument at The National Interest that the United States should be providing more military and security aid to Ukraine:

The free and fair election in Ukraine of new President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky reflects a positive step for Ukraine’s democratic future, but the same challenges from Russia remain. There is still the looming cloud of Ukraine’s active military conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as well as ongoing efforts by the Kremlin to sow discord and chaos through sophisticated disinformation and propaganda campaigns against the Ukrainian government and society. If we want to deal a blow to Russia, then helping challenge Putin on his doorstep sends a strong signal that America will stand by its allies wherever they are.

Moscow continually ignores international law and the Minsk Accords by actively supporting the rebels in Eastern Ukraine and maintains its illegal control of Crimea while also blockading Ukrainian ports from vital commerce. More importantly, Russia’s November 2018 attack on the Ukrainian Navy in the Sea of Azov occurred in neutral waters and in clear violation of freedom of navigation. While the imposition of sanctions on the Russian officials responsible for these acts by the administration on March 15 are having an impact, the biggest blow to Russia is the continuation of a free, independent, and democratic Ukraine.

I think he’s getting ahead of himself. Let the new president of Ukraine demonstrate that his government isn’t a kleptocracy as every previous Ukrainian government has been.

I understand Russia’s interest in Ukraine. Ukraine was a part of Russia for hundreds of years. The port at Sevastopol is one of Russia’s very few warm water ports. Ukraine has a sizeable Russian population.

And I understand that U. S. support for Ukraine threatens Russia. I don’t understand why threatening Russia is an objective of American foreign policy. What? We have always been at war with Eastasia?

At The American Conservative Robert Merry is stewing about the crumbling of the status quo:

When the status quo begins to crumble, the natural reaction of most people is denial. We cling to what we know, and the specter of the unknown often sends shivers down our spines. But eventually events overwhelm the denial and mock the shivers. That is going to happen in coming years with increasing frequency because the status quo is fraying in many realms of politics and geopolitics. Denial is rampant.

Perhaps the best prism through which to view this phenomenon is what we might call “sustainability.” What do we see happening in America and the world that is not sustainable and yet is not recognized as such? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Consider the recent report that Social Security costs will exceed the program’s income next year, which means Social Security will have to begin dipping into its $3 trillion trust fund to maintain benefit payments. And that trust fund, under current projections, will run out of money within 15 years.

He goes on to analyze the public debt, immigration, unipolarity as an objective of American foreign policy, and our policy with respect to Iran in a similar vein, characterizing all as “unsustainable”. I think he’s overly optimistic.

Social Security, the increase in the public debt, and our excessively truculent foreign policy can all maintain their present courses for quite a long time. Social Security may be reformed if the political heat rises enough. It’s hard to see how we limit the increase in the public debt. That has practically no constituency at this point. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that of itself it will retard economic growth but that will be dismissed as a systemic problem.

My toe in the water suggests that illegal immigration has reached a point at which pushback is beginning. How strident or determined that will be remains to be seen.

Unipolarity as an objective of American foreign policy and our policy with respect to Iran will be obviously increasingly absurd. How long we will hold onto them as their absurdity becomes more obvious remains to be seen.

There are other unsustainabilities. The concentration of wealth in the hands of the top .1% is nearing its highest level in American history, the greatest since the Great Depression. Political polarization is at its highest level certainly in my lifetime and probably since the end of the Civil War. Is that sustainable?

There is quite a bit of breastbeating in the media right now about the terrible murders in a synagogue in California. Not to rain on anyone’s parade but we’d best get used to it. There will always be crazy or just plain malicious people and there will always be means for them to act out their real or imagined grievances. There are no foreseeable measures that will completely eliminate such awful acts and, as the population grows, their incidence will increase.

In his latest Washington Post column Robert Samuelson turns to a topic that I’ve addressed any number of times here—the overblown fears of “robots coming for your jobs”:

Jobs have been eliminated; there can be little doubt of that. But jobs have also been created. The lesson from history is that inventions and innovations have typically been more than offset by employment gains. Automobiles displaced horses, and job gains were not only in manufacturing but also in gasoline stations, auto repair shops and highway construction.

Jet planes are another good example. Although they decimated most long-distance train travel, airlines now move vastly more people than trains ever did. A similar shift may be happening now. Over the past decade, 4 of 10 new jobs were created in “digitally intensive industries,” the OECD says.

On the other hand, there’s a tendency to exaggerate the significance of novel developments. Annual robot sales, though impressive, are equal to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the 571 million jobs in OECD countries at the end of 2018. As yet, they haven’t destroyed many jobs.

Indeed, it’s possible — though the OECD study barely mentions it — that the supply and demand for workers, after many years of favoring business, is slowly shifting the advantage to workers.

The preponderance of the evidence is that automation creates new jobs and new types of jobs. Yes, there are fewer master weavers than there were 300 years ago but more woven goods are being produced at higher quality than ever before with more people employed under better conditions with higher wages for producing them. Yes, there are fewer smiths than there were 150 years but more goods made of iron and steel are being produced at higher quality than ever before with more people employed under better conditions with higher wages for producing them. And so on.

What we really have to fear is not a robot job apocalypse but the modern day equivalent of master weavers and blacksmiths having the power and motivation to protect their own jobs from automation, keeping those jobs artisanal and expensive.

The very best course I took in college was a history of modern Japan. It was essentially a graduate-level discussion course, there were just ten of us in it. The midterm was at the end of the first week of classes. It was a multiple choice names, dates, and places factual-type test, designed to ensure that we knew something about Japan.

Each of us picked a topic relevant to modern Japanese history that interested us, researched it, and presented our findings to the class. I think that mine was giri and ninjo as they apply to modern Japan.

One of the women in the class asked the instructor if she could present on the women’s movement in Japan. She was directed to find another topic because “there was no women’s movement in Japan”.

All of that came flooding back to mind when I read this piece in the New York Times on the upcoming ascension ceremony of Naruhito:

Under the Imperial Household Law, which governs the line of succession as well as most matters of protocol related to Japan’s monarchy, women in the royal family are not permitted to be in the room when the new emperor receives the sacred regalia signifying his rightful succession to the world’s oldest monarchy.

But the prohibitions go much further. Women are not allowed to reign on the throne. In fact, women born into the royal family must officially leave it once they marry, and none of their children can be in line to the throne.

Apparently, there are some things which have not changed greatly over the intervening years. I am told that public opinion in Japan favors an expanded role for women. Since Japan is a consensus society that itself suggests that there have been a few changes.

If the women’s movement in the United States were worthy of the name it would be more engaged in the role of women all over the world. In much of the world the situation is still pretty medieval if not neolithic. As it is the women’s movement in the United States appears to be primarily a movement of upper middle class white women, given the lack of interest in real women’s lives outside that group.

I strongly recommend reading this study at RAND on the factors that allow U. S. military interventions to succeed:

Using an original data set of 145 ground, air, and naval interventions from 1898 through 2016, this report identifies those factors that have made U.S. military interventions more or less successful at achieving their political objectives. While these objectives were often successfully achieved, about 63 percent of the time overall, levels of success have been declining over time as the United States has pursued increasingly ambitious objectives.

As should surprise no one the critical success factors are:

• Massive use of ground forces
• Narrow political objectives
• The quality of the institutions of the host nation

or, in other words, if you were looking for a project that was doomed to fail, our adventure in Afghanistan would be hard to beat.

It wasn’t all that long ago when nearly all Americans were committed to a generally balanced federal budget. Jefferson did. Jackson was. FDR was. Even Keynesians thought (as Keynes did) that it should be balanced over the business cycle. That all changed in 1960 and it’s been that way ever since as this post by Christopher DeMuth at The American Interest on a speech by Pat Moynihan in 1986 points out. Here’s a snippet:

And here was Pat’s big, singular insight. Listen again to his strange admonition which seemed to come out of the blue: “The temptation is real to use debt not as a form of investment, but a means of consumption. Far from the denial of gratification, it can, and frequently does, reflect just the opposite.” Frequently does—he is not expounding Leviticus. And now consider his sally about borrowing a trillion and throwing a party. Pat was well aware of Reagan’s robust military buildup; he supported it and wanted it to continue. But he saw that something else was afoot. The public was not restive but festive. It was, he emphasized, getting what it wanted.

The flaw in this “borrowed benefits” theory of government is that it assumes a much more prosperous United States a generation from now than is the case today—forever and ever, amen. It assumes that Americans will be better able to pay in 25 years than they are now.

Are those still good assumptions?

As I have said before, I think we can run small deficits for a very long time without dire economic effects. The problem is that isn’t the case now and is unlikely to become the case for the foreseeable future. Also note than “can” and “should” are two different things. I think we should balance the federal budget over the business cycle but the Congress is incapable of that sort of restraint. I also think that the reduction of deadweight loss is a better fiscal strategy than tax cuts but that’s the fodder of a different post.