I’ve got to confess that I don’t understand the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s argument about high local rental/attachment fees for cellphone 5G expansion:

Although mobile devices that run on 5G won’t be available until sometime next year, carriers are already negotiating with local officials for public rights of way to attach small cell sites—typically the size of a backpack—to street poles. But some local politicians seem to think it is their right to squeeze carriers.

Electric utilities typically charge telecom companies about $20 to attach to their poles. New York City has set a minimum $4,200 annual rent for each cell pole attachment in Manhattan. But “proposers might wish to bid more than the minimum because the order of selection of individual poles within each zone will be based on the amount of pole compensation each proposer bids,” the city says. Tony Soprano would be impressed.

San Jose, which wants annual rents between $750 to $2,500, has conditioned approvals on seven-figure donations to a “Digital Inclusion Fund” for low-income neighborhoods. The Los Angeles deputy chief information officer says the city will “need to see an equitable number of 5G permits in South L.A. and Watts” as in wealthier neighborhoods.

Let’s flip the argument around. Should local jurisdictions subsidize the build-out of 5G by private companies who will derive private profits from its deployment? Do businesses have a right to clutter up the landscape with hundreds of times more antennae and distribution boxes? Only if they’re willing to pay for it.

Allow me to make a modest proposal. Let the market decide. Let New York and San Jose set their own rental rates. Let phone companies decide whether it makes financial sense for them to pay the rental rates. In the worst case Manhattan and San Jose will become 5G dead zones but those will be their choices and they’re entitled to make them. They will eschew potential rental fees and the growth of whatever new businesses spring up to make use of the greater speed and those will be their choices, too.

I want to recommend this post from Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy to your attention. It was recommended in comments yesterday and I found it particularly good. Consider this paragraph:

believe there should be a more thorough investigation of the various accusations. At this point, I find it hard to say whether they are likely to be true or not. I also think it’s very possible that even the best feasible investigation will still leave us with little more knowledge of what happened than we have now. More tentatively, I think the burden of proof should be roughly even between the two sides.

which approximates my views on the accusations that have been leveled at Brett Kavanaugh. It’s fairly short so I encourage you to read it in full.

I only have a few things to add to it. How do you recognize when motivated reasoning is at work? One rule of thumb is when you see all sorts of special pleading or just plain ignoring of behavior in your political or ideological allies that you are condemning in your political or ideological opponents you should suspect that the positions you are staking out are opportunistic and instrumental rather than reasoned or principled.

The second is that what I see going on around me is incompatible with republican government. The basic requirement for republican government is the ability to compromise. If you believe your own views reflect absolute good while those of your opponents reflect absolute evil, where is there room for compromise?

I’m inclined to agree with Charles Lane’s assessment of the confirmation process, as expressed in his recent Washington Post column:

With the grotesque spectacle now playing out on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the United States has reached a breaking point with respect to both the confirmation process and the role of the federal judiciary in our government.

The former is dysfunctional because the latter can no longer bear the weight of all the demands a divided society has placed upon it.

We can continue trying to staff the courts based on which party can manage, through fair means or foul, to get a temporary upper hand in the Senate. We can go from Estrada to Merrick Garland to Brett M. Kavanaugh to whatever payback Republicans feel justified in dishing out to the next Democratic nominee.

Down that road lies the complete politicization of the federal courts and, accordingly, the corruption of American government as a whole.

Or we can find institutional and cultural means to lower the stakes in judicial confirmations. If a life-tenured appointment to the Supreme Court is too important to entrust to someone of the opposite party, then perhaps life tenure on the federal courts should go. Originally conceived as a means of insulating judges from political pressure, under contemporary conditions (including increased life spans) it has morphed into the opposite.

Having Supreme Court justices stand for election, Mr. Lane’s proposal, requires amending the Constitution which is why it won’t happen. If Congress had the courage to amend the Constitution we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re already in. Another completely Constitutional means for reversing course would be for Congress to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. That would enable the Court to continue to hear cases within their primary jurisdiction but ban them from broadening that jurisdiction into extra-constitutional areas. That won’t be done for the same reason Mr. Lane asserts the heat on the confirmation process has grown in the first place: the desire of the members of Congress to effect their will by undemocratic means.

The confirmation process will remain broken along with our politics. It’s a positive feedback loop that doesn’t lead anywhere good.

At Atlantic Andrew Cragie asks several questions without answering them or, indeed, even attempting to answer them:

In a likely redux of the 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, Washington appears headed for dramatic public testimony by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the woman who’s accused him of sexual assault when they were teens, research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford. After negotiations over the weekend with Ford’s lawyers, Judiciary Committee Republicans announced on Sunday afternoon that a hearing was set for 10 a.m. Thursday.

But what should that hearing look like? How can senators determine what happened at a high school house party in the 1980s? How should they treat a private citizen who has come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against a man up for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court? How should they treat the nominee who categorically denies assaulting anyone, ever? What should be the standard of proof?

and continues by quoting Washington Sen. Patty Murray:

“What a horrible message to young girls today. What a horrible message to young men today, that they can get away with this. Let’s get this right.”

But what does that mean? As I said in an earlier post, confirming someone who had acted as Dr. Ford has accused Judge Kavanaugh would be a grave injustice. It would also be a grave injustice to treat an innocent man as though he were guilty on the basis of an uncorroborated accusation.

Statistical incidence tells us nothing about individual cases. Acting on that basis is a sin—the sin of stereotyping.

I continue to think that the Senate Judiciary Committee needs to have hearings of some sort of on the accusation levelled at Brett Kavanaugh. I think that some sort of hearing is politically necessary, required for Senate decorum, and important for the integrity of the Court. It should not be a public hearing. It could be via in-person testimony or by affidavit.

I think there are four interrelated but distinct questions involved:

• Is Brett Kavanaugh qualified to be a Supreme Court justice?
• Is the accusation leveled against him true?
• Is an unsworn accusation alone enough to disqualify him?
• Was Sen. Feinstein’s revealing of the accusation consistent with Senate rules and decorum?

and they’re being jumbled together. Each needs to be decided. My answers are I guess, I don’t know, no, and no.

I also confess to not understanding the thinking of most of those involved in this matter including the president, the Senate majority leader, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the nominee, his accuser, and Sen. Feinstein. I think there’s a lot of faulty risk assessment going on.

I don’t expect you’ll read this report from CSIS in which they advocate assessing NATO partner contributions to the alliance by value rather than in dollars:

The CSIS study team ultimately arrives at four major conclusions about measures of European security investment:
• Given the state of analysis, and particularly the lack of data transparency across the alliance, it is difficult today to confidently measure states’ contributions to NATO.
• Meeting the goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense is an insufficient measure of security commitment and capability. The same is true for the threshold of spending 20 percent of defense resources on equipment. Both measures can send powerful signals of commitment to the alliance, but in some cases those signals may add more noise than clarity.
• A better approach is to build an array of metrics. Each metric examined in this report is helpful for better understanding how and where member states contribute, but they are strongest when considered together. Much useful data is collected by NATO but is not released publicly. NATO officials have suggested that the alliance collect a variety of useful data. Publicly released data, however, is scarce. Better data standards and improved data releasability would further expand the range of credible measures NATO could use to publicly communicate allied and partner contributions.
• In particular, there is a vital need for publicly available output measures of transatlantic security. NATO’s recent “Four 30s” initiative is a positive step in this direction. It sets a collective capability goal for the alliance of being able to deploy 30 battalions, 30 air squadrons, and 30 warships in 30 days. NATO should build on this initiative to inject more unclassified output measurement into its discussion of contributions. Priority output measures include deployability; sustainability; days on deployment; and fulfillment of NATO capability targets.

The study produces a variety of different metrics. Two things stand out from their metrics. None of them make Germany look good and none of them make the countries admitted to the alliance during the expansion rounds of the 90s and 00s look good and they look even worse from a cost-benefit standpoint.

In closing this post, let me suggest one simple rule of thumb for assessing the commitments of the partners. Which countries make NATO operations possible? In the history of the alliance has anyone ever said, “Gee, if we could only get Germany on board, we could do X”?

The Cato Institute has published a white paper (PDF) on their notions of what a free trade agreement between the U. S. and the U. K. would look like. I’m glad to see that they mentioned this:

Historically, free trade agreements have not been about “free trade” per se. These deals are better characterized as managed trade agreements because they tend to simultaneously liberalize, divert, and stymie trade and investment flows. Whereas some parts of these agreements clearly reduce barriers, other provisions work to insulate incumbents and the status quo from dynamic, competitive forces.

Here’s the basic outline of their plan:

• Zero tariffs on all goods (agricultural commodities, primary industry resources, and manufacturing industry goods);
• Zero discriminatory nontariff barriers, which means no discrimination by either party in the content or exercise of the laws, regulations, or practices affecting the provision of services of either party, including no restrictions on the entry of businesspeople in the conduct of the provision of business services;
• Zero restrictions on competition for government procurement;
• Zero restrictions on foreign direct investment in the economy;
• Zero restrictions on cross-border data flow;
• Elimination to the fullest extent possible of impediments to expeditious customs clearance procedures for both imports and exports;
• Preclusion of the adoption of antidumping or safeguard measures between or among parties; and
• Strict prohibitions against the use of nontariff barriers, such as performance requirements, restrictions based on scientifically unsubstantiated public health and safety concerns, and restrictions based on national security concerns that fail to meet certain minimum standards.

That barely scratches the surface of what would be required and even that is politically impossible. Said another way we will continue to have managed trade for the foreseeable future, even with the United Kingdom.

If we are to have managed trade, it should be managed so that many, many more people benefit from it than at present. Our present strategy of managing trade subsidizes the wealthy and throws the unprotected to the wolves.

There is a very interesting graph on this subject at Global Macro Monitor which I encourage you to take a look at and consider. There have clearly been some tremendous changes over the last ten and the last fifteen years and they aren’t appreciated nearly enough.

I think that political scientist Ian Bremmer is overestimating the effect that the shaking of confidence in the U. S. caused by the financial crisis of ten years ago had on U. S. standing in the world. From his opinion piece at Time:

The financial crisis and all that followed sharply exacerbated these negative attitudes by calling into question the long-term viability of Western capitalism. (If the U.S. can’t properly regulate its own banks, how can it serve as a model for developing countries?) The search for an alternative model took on new urgency.

A decade ago, China wasn’t yet ready to offer one. But the U.S.-based meltdown presented Beijing with an unprecedented opportunity to showcase the virtues of state-driven economic development. The country’s political leaders demonstrated their ability to respond to the crisis with fast and effective emergency measures. In 2008, China’s economy was smaller than Japan’s. Today it’s more than twice as large–and about equal to the combined total of the 19 countries that use the euro. As China’s economy expanded, so did its influence.

To the contrary I think that America’s position in the world almost entirely stems from the power of the U. S. economy and our military which are intertwined. Fifteen years of indecisive war had already cast doubts on our military and somewhat more than a decade of foolish trade and economic policies were so much more significant in weakening both of those sources of power that the financial crisis as such pales into insignificance alongside them.

Since the financial crisis continued indecisive war and the Obama Administration’s inadequate response to the Great Recession have further diminished our primary sources of power. On that latter point, you cannot have it both ways. If additional stimulus can wring more growth from the U. S. economy, the Obama administration’s “2% is as good as it gets” claim is essentially refuted and its response was inadequate.

What to do now? We need major course corrections. It’s not too great an exaggeration to say that we need to reverse the major economic, trade, and foreign policy trends of the last twenty-five years. Less consolidation, less financialization, less offshoring (particularly to China), less intervention. Less subsidizing the rich.

I have no real hope that we’ll do any of those things which to my mind means that we will continue to squander money and lives and our influence will continue to recede. As I suggested yesterday, those bemoaning a return to “the jungle” in international affairs are really mourning the decline of U. S. influence.