Over what period and under what conditions do historical commemorations make sense? So, for example, IMO Veteran’s Day (Armistice Day) and Memorial Day (Decoration Day) no longer serve their historic purposes and the purposes they do serve are not ones that should be promoted by the federal government at all.

This must be my day to disagree vehemently. Now I disagree with Jayati Ghosh’s diagnosis of the real problem with free trade at Project Syndicate:

Some argue that free trade is being demonized simply because people do not understand what is in their own best interest. But that is both patronizing and simplistic. Even if free trade is ultimately broadly beneficial, the fact remains that as trade has become freer, inequality has worsened.

One major reason for this is that current global rules have enabled a few large firms to capture an ever-larger share of the value-added from trade. Specifically, the proliferation of global value chains has enabled powerful multinational firms to control the design, production, and distribution of traded goods and services, even as various segments are outsourced to smaller firms far from final markets.

Nonsense. The real problem with free trade is that there isn’t any. No government wants it. Free trade removes a powerful lever for helping their friends or punishing their enemies. To the best of my knowledge no government in the history of trade negotiations has ever negotiated a free trade agreement including the United States.

We have negotiated managed trade agreements, replete with winners and losers. Is it any wonder that under such circumstances most of us will be losers?

As is not unusual I disagree with this assertion by John Tamny in his latest offering at RealClearMarkets:

Left alone, economies and markets never go haywire when natural market forces are putting out to pasture the weak, only to redirect the previously underutilized resources of the weak to higher uses.

That is false and even the slightest knowledge of economic history would have made that clear to him. The National Bureau of Economic Research, the official scorekeeper of recessions in the U. S., lists every recession since 1857. At least the first eight of those took place while the federal government maintained a laissez-faire policy. That doesn’t even include the many famouse crashes and panics that took place before 1857. And Mr. Tamny has apparently never heard of the Tulip Craze or the South Sea Bubble, two times when economies went hayware without the benefit of state intervention.

That having been said in the article Mr. Tamny has a point. What happened in 2008 has been widely mischaracterized, probably because “financial crisis” sounds so much better than “regulatory capture crisis”. Make no mistake federal or hybrid government institutions knew about the problems, recognized that they were problems, and had the authority to prevent the crisis but did nothing, presumably because they thought they were profiting from it or might profit from it.

And they were right! Tim Geithner, the Forrest Gump of the crisis, was actually promoted for his misfeasance and nonfeasance. And I have yet to see any proponent of activist government explain how they would prevent regulatory capture which at the very least casts a pall over their preferred solution. I’ve made any number of suggestions of how that could be done but I don’t expect any of them to gain any support.

So we’ll just have another boom and bust, the brunt of which will fall on the people least able to cope with it.

Every once in a while some stalwart soul proposes “breaking up” the large tech companies—Google, Facebook, Amazon. I agree with them that the three companies are powerful, that they have monopolies which they have used illegally either to preserve their monopolies or to expand into other areas, both of which are illegal. What they haven’t proposed is how could they be broken up?

When John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was broken up more than a century ago, it was done so along geographic lines. The same thing was done when the Bell System was broken up 35 years ago. How would you break Amazon? Geographically? The very idea is absurd.

That may be the reason that despite its bad behavior Microsoft was left intact. No one could figure out how to break the company up while letting the pieces remain viable. Basically, it was a mediocre operating system company joined with a mediocre development tools company joined with a mediocre office productivity applications company. The components mutually reinforced each other.

You could divide Amazon into a web services company and an online retailer. The online retailer might not last long on its own. It has lost money for most of its history and continues to just barely hold its own.

How about Google? Facebook?

IMO these tech giants can be regulated out of existence but there’s no practical way of breaking them up.

I wish more people would pay attention to Noah Smith’s observation in his post at Bloomberg about land reform in South Africa:

Zimbabwe expropriated its remaining white-owned farmland without compensation, handing it over to black farmers. This resulted in improved agricultural yields, rising incomes for farmers and reduced rural poverty. But the new small farmers didn’t end up using all of the land that was given to them, and total agricultural production suffered. The production of maize, a staple crop, fell by more than half during the early 2000s and 2010s, and the country was forced to start importing food. The country famously became an economic basket case under President Robert Mugabe, suffering hyperinflation and an economic crash. But interestingly, maize production recovered to its earlier levels in 2017, and some argue that land reform’s positive effects will ultimately prove more enduring than Mugabe’s economic mismanagement.

So if South Africa decides to go through with extensive land reform, it will be important to get things right. Farmers should only be given as much land as they’re willing and able to use, and they should be supported by high-quality training and agricultural extension services. Crucially, the government should allow the market to dictate what crops the new small farms grow, rather than issuing orders about what to plant. These policies will help make land reform a success, hopefully alleviating South Africa’s unemployment and setting it on the road to economic development.

Every country, repeat every country that has developed successfully has done so by moving relatively unproductive labor resources from agriculture to manufacturing and other more productive employment of labor without losing agricultural production. I’m more skeptical of South Africa’s seizing land from white farmers than Mr. Smith is. I think that strategy is more likely to be used as a way of cultivating political support through giving land to the ruling party’s allies than it is to promote development. I’m also more skeptical of the legal and moral underpinnings of it. I don’t think the Bantu-speaking black South Africans have any greater moral claim on the land than those of European descent do. Yes, whites are a minority in South Africa. Yes, the white minority abused the black majority during Apartheid.

But the ancestors of the Bantu-speaking people of South Africa began their trek from West Africa in the 13th century, arriving in what is now South Africa around 1600, just about the time that the ancestors of the Boers began their trek north from the Cape.

And what of the “Cape Coloured”, the descendants of the people whom the Bantu-speaking people ousted from their land and were living in what is now South Africa before either the Bantu-speaking or Dutch arrived? Will the land be restored to them or will it be given to cronies of Cyril Ramaphosa and other ANC bigwigs?

At the French National Center for Scientific Research Jean Mariani and Danièle Tritsch throw cold water on transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and the larger Gold Rush to unlikely technologies:

Behind this myth, a colossal business based on economic interest is on the move. Trans-humanists are the pure product of a society in which financial potentates, banks, multinationals and political groups enjoy unfettered domination. They are busy creating a real “economics of promises ” (Yves Frégnac, Science 2017) (the notion that simply investing huge sums of money will be sufficient to vanquish disease and provide us with more efficient brains, eternal youth and immortality). Yet a number of private interest groups (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon) have recently been attempting to define “good practices” particularly with regard to the ethical questions involved.

In the face of such claims, some epistemological perspective is needed and we must be aware of our cultural bias if we are to distinguish between the effects of advertising, demiurgic promises and the reality of scientific progress. The point is not to reject out of hand all intra-cerebral implants, gene therapy, bionic prostheses or stem cell selection, but to remain vigilant about the proposed uses within our system.

I would add that another of Ray Kurzweil’s pet ideas, “the Singularity”, is looking ever more farfetched with each passing day. I don’t challenge Mr. Kurzweil’s scientific or technological acumen. I question his knowledge of history. The rate at which basic advances in science and technology are being made is slowing not accelerating. It is the rate at which exaggerated claims for science and technology are being made that is accelerating. Indeed, that’s true of all sorts of things at which a fast buck can be made.

I’d be willing to bet that one century froom today no more than 1% of Americans will be over the age of 100. Unfortunately, there’s no way I could collect on the bet.

You might want to read Bill Roggio’s analysis at RealClearDefense of whether our Afghanistan strategy is working:

Nicholson’s briefing paints a picture of Afghanistan that does not comport with the facts on the ground. He does not seem to have a grasp on the state of the fight, and his reading of the political situation and negotiations with the Taliban is incorrect. The press, perhaps sensing that Nicholson was struggling to put the best face on Afghanistan as he prepared to relinquish his command, asked tough questions. The press conference was cut off in what appears to be a technical issue, however it appears there was no attempt to reestablish the link.

Nicholson will be turning his command over to General Austin Miller, who during his senate testimony, refused to define the Taliban as an enemy of America. It remains to be seen if Miller, like all of the generals who have preceded him, will continue to provide rosy assessments of Afghanistan as the country continues to slide into anarchy.

Bill’s piece is more a fisking of statements by Afghanistan commander Gen. John Nicholson than anything else. IMO the only sense in which our Afghanistan strategy can be said to be working is that we’re still funding it. We need to come to a sober understanding of whether three consecutive presidents have been lying about the importance of Afghanistan to our foreign policy and security. I don’t think there’s any other word for it.

It’s imperfect but if you’re interested in a pretty fair introduction to the enormously complicated Medicaid system, this piece at The American Interest by physician Mark Hammer is not a bad start. Here’s its conclusion:

Without thoughtful reform, Medicaid will ultimately be forced to decrease the number of its beneficiaries, decrease services covered, and shift more costs to enrollees and the private sector. In desperation the Trump Administration has already begun doing many of these things to the extent permitted by administrative discretion. It won’t be enough.

Over the last 40 years Medicaid spending has increased 5-fold in real terms, faster than health care spending overall. That’s mostly the result of higher prices and mission creep. Some of the mission creep was an intentional feature of the Affordable Care Act.

Medicaid’s spending will grow rapidly for the foreseeable future. Many people aren’t aware of it but Medicare doesn’t cover nursing home care. Nearly 2/3s of those in assisted living or skilled nursing facilities are having the bill paid through the Medicaid system. Most of those people are people who made decent incomes while they were working but through various strategies, dodges, and so on manage to inveigle themselves into the Medicaid system. As the Baby Boomer retire, age, and die, something that is happening at an accelerating rate, so higher Medicaid spending is inevitable.

And Medicaid is killing the states. Here in Illinois, for example, Medicaid accounts for about a third of total state spending. Medicaid, public employee salaries, and public employee pensions are the three biggest line items in the state budget here and they’re all growing rapidly even as the state’s population is declining.

I don’t know if reorganization, the cost control measure proposed in the piece, could be effective. I do know that Medicaid’s enormous complexity and the breadth of services it includes are among the reasons I’m skeptical of the practicality of the “Medicare for All” that’s becoming a litmus test for Democratic office-seekers.

I disagree vehemently with Nikolas Gvosdev’s prescription at The Hill:

Yet any successor to McCain must realize that to succeed him, stirring speeches about American leadership and calls to arms to fight tyranny around the world are not enough. Indeed, “McCain-esque” rhetoric is insufficient to address the reality that growing numbers of Americans are questioning the central principle of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus: that the sustained deployment of U.S. power around the world is indispensable for managing an international system that promotes peace and stability through greater integration and interconnection and creates conditions for the spread of liberal values.

Just as America’s military power derives from the resourcefulness and abilities of ordinary soldiers and non-coms and not just a great officer corps, America’s power and influence in the world derives from the strength of its economy. That in turn is derived from the efforts and dedication of ordinary Americans not just a handful of Steve Jobses or Jeff Bezoses. If a great officer corps were all that was important, Germany would have won the Second World War.

Pursuit of GDP is futile, especially GDP increasingly based on borrowing and overconsumption. We will not have a vibrant economy based on a handful of overvalued trillion dollar companies but because most Americans work with commitment and dedication at jobs they think are worthwhile.

Americans are tired of a foreign policy that consists of invading and overthrowing the governments of countries that don’t pose a security threat to us. Aggressive war does not promote peace and stability. Inter that foreign policy with the dead.