Here’s Peggy Noonan’s prescription for defusing the ticking time bomb of American politics from her latest Wall Street Journal column:

Everyone running for office should admit things have gotten too hot, too divided. Then they should try to cool the atmosphere. Next Tuesday will mark one week before the election. Candidates should devote the day to something different. It would be good to see every one give a speech or statement containing their most generous definition of the aims and meaning of the opposing party. A Democratic nominee might say, “Whether they always succeed or not, Republicans do want to protect the liberties that have allowed this nation become the miracle of the world.” A Republican might say, “At its best and most sincere, the Democratic Party hopes to help those in peril, and to soften disparities of wealth and opportunity.”

That’s a prescription I think has exactly zero likelihood of happening, particularly in an election year.

This is something I’ve been meaning to mention for some time but my personal firsthand experience of politicians in action is that presupposing that nothing they say is sincere is actually a pretty good first order approximation. Everything they say is said with one eye on the statement’s implications for getting votes.

But I also think that the downright hatred between those of the two major political parties is on the rises. Not only do I not think that Democrats and Republicans don’t think that those of the other party has the best interests of the people of the country at heart, I think that Republicans think that Democrats are crooks while Democrats think Republicans are only interested in seizing money away from the old, the sick, and the needy and giving it to the rich.

President Trump’s intemperate tweets or statements in speeches don’t help a bit.

That’s why my solution is not for Republicans to say nice things about Democrats and vice versa, Ms. Noonan’s prescription but to de-emphasize Washington, DC. Concentrating power in Washington just increases the heat. However, it is rare that, having tasted power, an individual is willing to relinquish it. That’s why we honor George Washington. And it’s also why my prescription is unlikely to be undertaken by the Powers-That-Be.

Something else that should be kept in mind: in a country of 330 million there will always be a few crazy people who take harsh words seriously and will act on it.

Here’s the thesis of Robert Samuelson’s Washington post column this morning:

Globalization strikes again. The latest target is entrepreneurship.

For decades, promoting start-up firms through venture capital and other methods of business investment seemed a peculiarly American strength. It has nurtured countless tech firms, including titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Americans have been duly proud. It reinforced a sense of national exceptionalism, because other countries couldn’t easily duplicate it, if at all.

No more.

He goes on to provide a bit of evidence. I don’t disagree with his thesis but I don’t think he has the right concerns. For one thing I think he’s looking at a snapshot rather than at a moving picture. What have the trends in capital investment and venture capital in particular been over the last thirty years rather than just the last couple of years?

I have the following questions for Mr. Samuelson.

1. Has the U. S. changed, other countries changed, or both? I think it’s both but the most significant change is slowing capital investment in the United States.
2. Why is global venture capital investment so concentrated in just ten cities? Does that itself suggest a problem?
3. What is the role of government in the ten centers of venture capital investment you cite? My gut level instinct is that it’s substantial and that also explains the concentration.
4. Of the 62% of total global capital investment concentrated in those ten cities, 36% is in the United States. Do we really have a problem?

I’d also like him to relate his observations to the nearly trillion dollars worth of capital flight from China over the last few years but I guess that’s fodder for a later post.

Today Sen. Bernie Sanders takes to the pages of the New York Times with an op-ed urging the U. S. to end its support of the war in Yemen:

The likely assassination of the Saudi critic and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi underscores how urgent it has become for the United States to redefine our relationship with Saudi Arabia, and to show that the Saudis do not have a blank check to continue violating human rights.

One place we can start is by ending United States support for the war in Yemen. Not only has this war created a humanitarian disaster in one of the world’s poorest countries, but also American involvement in this war has not been authorized by Congress and is therefore unconstitutional.

Welcome back to the fight, Sen. Sanders. It would have been nice for you to condemn U. S. support for the war back when Barack Obama was president and began our support for the war but better late than never, I guess.

In the op-ed Sen. Sanders hits most of the major notes—the violence of the war, our support, that the war isn’t a reaction to Iranian support for the Houthis in Yemen rather its cause. He fails to mention that one of the causes of unrest in Yemen was President Obama’s drone war but not every op-ed can be about everything.

One of the things that struck me in the article I mentioned below was the mention of Nicaraguans fleeing the more than 300 murders in the country since April. If that’s the case there are certain sections of the United States I would suggest they avoid. Chicago, with a third the population of Nicaragua, has had that many homicides over the same period.

Maybe Chicago needs a caravan.

There’s a good, dispassionate, non-partisan, informative article on the caravan of people making its way from Guatemala and Honduras through Mexico presumably to the United States at The Guardian:

Thousands of Central American migrants, including men, women and entire families, are marching through southern Mexico, in the hope of reaching the US.

The group has grown steadily since setting out from the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on 12 October, but the exact size is unclear as there is no single organizing group.

Mexico’s interior ministry put the figure at 4,500 on Tuesday; local officials in the town Huixtla estimated the number of participants at closer to 6,000, while UN officials said there were 7,200 migrants.

Read the whole thing. They do ask the most relevant question: what will the people in the caravan do when they reach the border?

Most of the people who make it to the border are likely to turn themselves in to US authorities and claim asylum, although a few – mostly younger men – have said they will attempt to cross illegally if that is not possible.

Trump has said he will not let caravan members in, but the US is legally obliged to consider the cases of asylum seekers.

I have no idea whether the caravan is spontaneous, a planned strategy, or some of both but it definitely has a whiff of Cloward-Piven about it—destroy the system by overwhelming it.

What can I say about the five pipebomb-containing packages sent to George Soros, Hillary Clinton, President Obama, John Brennan, and Eric Holder? Here’s the FBI’s statement:

Between October 22 and 24, 2018, suspicious packages were received at multiple locations in the New York and Washington, D.C., areas and Florida. The packages are being sent for analysis at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.

“This investigation is of the highest priority for the FBI. We have committed the full strength of the FBI’s resources and, together with our partners on our Joint Terrorism Task Forces, we will continue to work to identify and arrest whoever is responsible for sending these packages,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “We ask anyone who may have information to contact the FBI. Do not hesitate to call; no piece of information is too small to help us in this investigation.”

[…]

The packages were mailed in manila envelopes with bubble wrap interior. The packages were affixed with computer-printed address labels and six Forever stamps. All packages had a return address of “DEBBIE WASSERMAN SHULTZ” [sic] in Florida. Packages identified to date were addressed to:

• George Soros
• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
• Former President Barack Obama
• Former CIA Director John Brennan, care of CNN
• Former Attorney General Eric Holder

The package addressed to former Attorney General Holder did not reach its intended destination, but was rerouted to the return address in Florida.

Don’t do it. Don’t make excuses for it. Don’t get ahead of the reports.

What else is there to say?

If something is 99.994% right, is it 100% wrong?

Annual health care spending in the U. S. is presently about $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. In 1970 U. S. per capita health care spending was about $355. In inflation-adjusted terms health care spending is something grown something between sixfold and thirty-fold, depending on how you calculated it.

That cannot be attributed to pharmaceutical company profits (drugs are about 8% of expenditures) and it cannot be attributed insurance company profits. The numbers just don’t add up.

What gripes me about the Republicans’ approach to health care reform is their childlike belief in the magical ability of markets to reduce costs. Markets could reduce costs but not without denying care to tens of millions of people and probably not even then.

What gripes me about the Democrats’ approach to health care reform is their childlike belief in the magical ability of a single-payer system to control costs. It’s not magic. It’s commitment. It’s willingness to deny care and raises to people working in the health care sector. If Democrats could demonstrate for me their willingness to cut costs, I’d be willing to vote for a single-payer system. In the absence of such commitment it’s just a ticket to an unpayable bill.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle points out what should be obvious but apparently is not—that we don’t have the time for a protracted national dialogue on immigration. Not months or years but days:

Trump is of course wrong to cast fact-free aspersions on desperate people seeking a better life. But the left is wrong if they think that making that observation ends the argument, because even a caravan of nothing but decent, hard-working people would raise big questions. There are billions of decent, hard-working people living in the world. Do all of them have a right to migrate to the United States merely because doing so would make them better off?

Immigration restrictionists and advocates both struggle with that question to some degree, depending on the scale they use when considering it. On the macro scale, restrictionists find it easy to say, no, of course we can’t let in every single person who wants to come, because doing so would transform the country into one that few Americans of any political persuasion would want to live in.

If we decide to admit the people in the “caravan”, on what basis would we reject the next and the next and the next? The number of people involved is truly vast—estimated to be in the tens or hundreds of millions all told. The level of tax and transfer required to clothe, house, feed, transport, educate them (and their children!), and provide for their bodily needs is truly unimaginable. It just has too many zeros.

If we decide not to admit them, we need to figure out how to do it. Merely dispersing them will only delay the inevitable.

We don’t have a lot of time to decide.