I’ve been listening to the old Dragnet radio program for some time now. You can take in quite a few programs driving back and forth between Chicago and Racine, something I’ve been doing a couple of times a week for the last six weeks or so. There are about 300 programs known to be extant and I’ve listened to about 250 of them. There’s no question in my mind that it’s the second best radio drama ever (the best, of course, was Gunsmoke).

After it debuted in 1949 Dragnet wasn’t just a radio program; it was a phenomenon. It won scores, maybe hundreds of awards: from the Academy of Radio Broadcasting, the Mystery Writers Association of America, various publications, and dozens of police forces, cities, and organizations gave it awards. That’s understandable. Its portrayal of working police officers was extremely realistic; the show went a long way to rehabilitating the image of the Los Angeles police force, notorious for corruption.

The show covered a wide range of topics including decidedly adult fare including drugs, prostitution, traffic accidents, and bunco as well as homicide and theft.

In short order it became not just a radio program but a comic book, a television program, and books.

It made Jack Webb who created, starred in, wrote, and produced the show not just a star but a major Hollywood figure. He produced more than a half dozen different television series some successful (Adam-12, Emergency) some not (O’Hara, U. S. Treasury, Temple Houston).

Trump is an idiot but he’s right about NATO. I think that’s what’s behind Robert Kagan’s lament in the Washington Post:

It’s little secret that President Barack Obama had no great interest in Europe. Obama, like Trump, spoke of allied “free riders,” and his “pivot” to Asia was widely regarded by Europeans as a pivot away from them. Obama rattled Eastern Europe in his early years by canceling planned missile-defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic as an inducement to Vladimir Putin to embrace a “reset” of relations. In his later years he rattled Western Europe when he did not enforce his famous “red lines” in Syria. Both actions raised doubts about American reliability, and the Obama administration’s refusal to take action in Syria to stem the flow of refugees contributed heavily to the present strain.

Obama was only doing what he thought the American people wanted. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the 2008 financial crisis, left Americans disenchanted with global involvement and receptive to arguments that the alliances and institutions they supported for all those years no longer served their interests. The Obama administration tried to pare back the American role without abandoning the liberal world order, hoping it was more self-sustaining than it turned out to be. But the path was open to a politician willing to exploit Americans’ disenchantment, which is precisely what Trump did in 2016.

NATO has never been a self-operating machine that simply chugs ahead so long as it is left alone. Like the liberal world order of which it is the core, it requires constant tending, above all by the United States. And because it is a voluntary alliance of democratic peoples, it survives on a foundation of public support. That foundation has been cracking in recent years. This week was an opportunity to shore it up. Instead, Trump took a sledgehammer to it.

As I’ve said before NATO is a military alliance. Without force readiness the other members of the alliance are clients not allies. We have had ample demonstrations, first in Libya and then in Syria, that the force readiness of even the best-prepared of our NATO allies, France and the United Kingdom, is inadequate. And Germany’s force readiness would be laughable if it weren’t so despicable.

The French are doing the best to bring their forces up to snuff of any in the alliance but they have the shortest distance to travel. Don’t perseverate on the 2%. That goal isn’t a tithe or dues; it’s an estimate of what it takes to maintain force readiness. It’s like deferred maintenance. If you delay long enough what was a small problem becomes a big one. That little crack that might have taken $1,000 to take care of now will require $10,000 you don’t have to fix. That’s the situation that Germany, Italy, and maybe even the UK are in.

Maybe the alliance is worth maintaining. Maybe it isn’t. A military alliance is a way of mitigating risks. Risks come in multiple varieties. There are the risks that come from outside forces and events, e.g. Russia could attack Estonia. There are also the risks that come from your own bad behavior. Those are called “moral hazard” and we’re guilty of it, too. IMO participating in the overthrow of the Libyan government was an example of bad U. S. behavior that resulted from moral hazard. But Germany and Italy skimping on their military spending are examples, too.

Expanding NATO increased the risks to which we were exposed and didn’t increase the strength of the alliance one whit. Allies that aren’t prepared to fight increase our risks, too. We need to do a risk analysis. The risk of Russian attack isn’t what it was 40 years ago and we’re exposed to more risk from both our own and our allies’ misbehavior. Are the risks still worth the benefits?

In closing I’ll only point out one thing. Mr. Kagan is a liberal interventionist, some would say neoconservative, of the stripe that never met a war they didn’t like. If he doesn’t like what’s happening, I can’t help but feel that we’re doing something right.

As I read this article at RealClearHealth by Ross Marchand, what came to mind was the problems that rise from not having clear, established performance metrics. That’s a problem with many government programs. How can you tell it’s succeeding if you don’t know what its objective is or how to measure whether it’s accomplishing its objectives? For some success or failure is measured in dollars—it either fails or succeeds based on how much you spend. That reminds me of Santayana’s definition of fanaticism as redoubling your efforts when you have lost sight of your goal.

Consider the graph above. The way the European Union tells the story, the countries of Europe were able to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide by putting prudent policies in place including conservation, a carbon market, and so on.

The graph tells a somewhat different story. Every decrease in emissions, either in Europe or the United States, has been more than matched by an increase in emissions in China. In other words the Europeans and Americans have exported their heavy industry to China and along with it their carbon emissions. This hasn’t solved anything but it has put it safely out of sight and, unfortunately, out of our control.

A couple of days ago I posted a story about how the plastic in the world’s oceans was getting there by floating down China’s and India’s rivers. What the story didn’t tell us was how the plastic was getting to China and India in the first place. I’m sure some of it had domestic origins but for decades American and European cities have been sending their trash to China and, more recently, India, Nigeria, and elsewhere under the mistaken assumption that the Chinese, Indians, etc. would sort the recyclables and dispose prudently of the rest. What has actually happened is that they’ve used what was easily recyclable and thrown the rest into their rivers where it makes its way to the oceans.

For the last several decades our lifestyle has been a very convenient one of disposable diapers and neat packaging. That’s going to come to an end because the alternative is intolerable.

All of this isn’t due to some malice on the part of the Chinese. They’re just following their incentives. It isn’t their job to solve our problems for us and we shouldn’t expect them to.

The editors of the Christian Science Monitor chime in on Trump’s dressing down of NATO:

Twice in two months President Trump has met with other Western leaders, first at an economic summit in June and this week at a gathering of NATO nations. A common theme? Mr. Trump’s demand for reciprocity in both trade and defense spending between the United States and its allies.

Trump asked for more access to European markets for American farm goods, for example, while insisting that other NATO countries spend about 3.5 percent of gross national product on their military forces – as the United States does – not the agreed target of 2 percent by 2024.

[…]

On trade, Trump has slapped tariffs on imports from allies in an aggressive attempt to win an opening for more exports of US products and services. In response, a few European nations have eased restrictions on US imports.

“At a time when nations have become so unwilling to play by the rules and restore reciprocity, tariffs are a wake-up call to the dangers of a broken trading system that is increasingly unfree,” warns Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, in a Washington Post op-ed.

Trump says he is making up for the mistakes of past US presidents who gave away too much in both trade talks and in forming alliances during the cold war and afterward. Instead of seeing the US as a superpower making generous concessions for the sake of global order, Trump has in effect asked the US to be treated as an equal. Or as Gary Cohn, Trump’s former National Economic Council director, put it: “You treat us the way we treat you, or we’ll treat you the way you treat us.”

Look at it another way. It’s an acknowledgement of reality. The world of 2018 is not the world of 1948. It isn’t even the world of 1988. Seventy years ago the U. S. had the world’s only functioning industrial economy. Not only could we afford to be generous, generosity was a strategic imperative. Thirty years ago China’s GDP was just over $300 billion and the U. S.’s was nearly twenty times as large. Now we’re roughly at parity and China’s GDP may well be greater than ours. China is not only an economic power it’s becoming a military power. Thirty years ago the whole world could afford to ignore China’s failing to play by the rules. After all it was a developing country with hundreds of millions of poor people in it.

I disagree with the editors in one particular. It’s not hard at all to predict how our European allies will react. Our picking up the slack has allowed them to spend on other priorities. They won’t like it.

A Westphalian order demands countries that are treated as equals. All should operate under the same set of rules including us. We can’t afford and shouldn’t tolerate European allies who are behaving like whiny adolescents or a China roving the seven seas in search of plunder. Things are going to change because circumstances have changed and because they must.

I genuinely wish that President Obama, using his typically low affect delivery, would have said some of the things that President Trump is saying to our alleged NATO allies. Alas, that was not to be. It wouldn’t have made them like the message any more but at least it wouldn’t have drawn the ire that Trump’s remarks are.

To understand where things stand now, spending is a pretty good first order approximation of military readiness. Now draw a graph for Germany or France or the UK or any other NATO country with two lines on it, one for 2% of GDP, the other for actual military spending as a percentage of GDP since 1991. The difference between those two lines is what they have to spend to catch up. It’s patently obvious they’re not going to do it but they can’t make up for their past deficits any other way.

Of course our purported allies like the status quo. We take the risks and they reap the benefits. We draw the fire while they sit in the bunker. We neither can nor should continue along our present path.

There are two radically different views of the position of the U. S. in the world. You might call them the Snow White view and the John Marshall view. In the first we are overwhelmingly strong and stand head shoulders above any other country. That has been our historical position and it hasn’t worked and, worse, is unsustainable. It assumes that the U. S. has not only the preeminent military in the world but the preeminent economy and events strongly suggest that won’t be the case. We can’t afford the one without the other. The other approach is more a primus inter pares approach. The Chief Justice’s vote counts for no more than those of the associate justices. Strong allies and a strong alliance. I doubt we can any longer get there from here.

William Galston talks about immigration reform in his Wall Street Journal column:

Let’s start with what most Americans don’t want. Last month’s Harvard-Harris poll shows they don’t want to break up families, and they don’t want to break up Immigration and Customs Enforcement either. They oppose open borders—and closed borders. They reject sanctuary cities—and a wall along the Mexican border. They don’t believe legal immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans or that they are more likely to commit crimes.

And most Americans don’t support reducing the level of legal immigration. According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, the share of Americans favoring such reductions has fallen since 2001 from 53% to 24%, while the share saying immigration should increase tripled from 10% to 32%. In fact, 2018 is the first time in the 21st century that more Americans have supported increasing rather than cutting legal immigration flows.

Despite deep partisan differences on immigration, a desire for increased legal immigration is evident across party lines. Since 2001, the share of Republicans who favor lower levels of legal immigration has fallen from 43% to 33%, while the share favoring an increase has risen from 15% to 22%. A plurality of Republicans—39%—favor the status quo, exactly matching the share of Democrats with this view.

Large majorities of Americans agree, moreover, on the kind of immigration reform they want. To begin, they overwhelmingly favor a generous resolution of the “Dreamer” conundrum: Young adults brought to this country illegally as children should be allowed to remain, work and embark on a path to citizenship if they avoid committing crimes. Support for this policy includes 80% of independents, 61% of Republicans and 69% of working-class white voters. In the face of such broad-based support, the inability of Congress to get this done is stunning. Clear presidential leadership certainly would have helped.

This public consensus extends beyond single issues. Harvard-Harris found 73% of Americans favor “comprehensive immigration reform.” This is more than an empty or ambiguous slogan. A large majority agree on tighter border security and stricter enforcement. But they are under no illusions that border security is sufficient. When asked to choose the best way to deter illegal immigration, more Americans cite verification of legal status at the workplace than any other option. While they prefer to detain illegal immigrants rather than revert to the policy known as “catch and release,” they also reject extended periods of detention. And though they reject using cities as havens from federal law, they favor keeping America a haven for those fleeing persecution in their home countries.

You may notice that the positions I’ve articulated around here are pretty close to the “large majority” position of Americans. Why then is it the Republican and Democratic leadership is so extreme in their views and out of step with that “large majority”?

In preemptive response to the retorts I presume are coming, the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy is obviously pretty extreme while both the chairman of the DNC and the deputy chairman of the DNC have spoken out in favor of open borders. Those are both extreme positions out of step with the views of most Americans.

The question remains why? I think it’s that the political leadership is in open rebellion against most Americans and are doing the bidding of a relatively small number of ardent supporters.

In his column at the Washington Post Robert Samuelson considers why wages aren’t increasing:

According to government figures, there are now 6.7 million job openings — a record high— and “the rate at which workers are quitting their jobs is higher than it was before the onset of the Great Recession,” writes economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute in a column for Bloomberg. Still, as yet, wages haven’t exploded. One intriguing theory asserts that psychology and norms have changed, writes Strain.

“People who entered the labor market during and after the Great Recession have lived through some rough times and don’t have strong memories of better times,” he writes. “I’m sure that many workers — both relatively new entrants and those with long experience — have had moments when they felt lucky to have a job at all. Even though the economy has been strengthening for years, are workers reluctant to go into the boss’s office and ask for a raise? Likewise, are employers used to resisting increases in their payroll obligations?”

Maybe.

The reasons he considers include:

• Continued slack in the labor market
• Demographics
• Increases in non-wage compensation
• Compensation for downwards inelasticity of wages
• Wages actually are growing but the data are being misinterpreted
• Slow growth in productivity

and I think they’re all factors in varying degrees. I can only speak from my own experience.

I do see various forms of non-wage compensation not just including benefits like health care which were unheard of in the companies I worked for 40 years ago but appear to be pretty common now. Things like snacks in the lunchroom, the company furnishing lunch once a week, or various company social activities. when you total them all up they amount to less than $1,000 per employee, a drop in the bucket when you’re talking about average employee compensation of wages and benefits in the high five figures or low six.

Forty years ago I got a raise every year and regular promotions. I’ve been working for the same company for the last four years (an eternity in my sector) and, despite glowing performance reviews and obvious contributions to the company’s bottom line, I haven’t received a raise or a promotion. Granted at my level there isn’t a lot of room for promotion but the level of responsibility I’m taking on is at the upper middle management level while my title is a pretty lowly staff title. I confronted my boss about that at the end of last year and I’m thinking of doing that again. I’m in a pretty strong bargaining position.

I think that employers are living in the past and I mean the past of 15 years ago not the past of 35 years ago. In that past of the early Aughts anybody could be replaced by a worker brought in from offshore at a fraction of the salary, at least in their imaginations. The reality today is closer to that you can replace somebody with a strong work ethic and experience with someone with no work ethic or experience. Maybe. You also might end up paying twice as much to an outsourcing company for a worker that needs constant oversight.

On TCM today they ran Sterling Hayden pictures. I don’t see how you can present an anthology of his movies without showing Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. Johnny Guitar has the well-worn Western plot: sheriff and gambler fight over dancehall girl. Except that in the case of Johnny Guitar the sheriff and gambler parts were played by Mercedes McCambridge and Joan Crawford while the dancehall girl part was played by Sterling Hayden. We didn’t invent the gender-switch movies we’ve had a spate of lately.

My guess is that in 50 years today’s batch of gender-switch movies will look as campy as Johnny Guitar does now. If they held an intramural scenery-chewing contest, it would probably look a lot like Johnny Guitar. Some directors can direct women (George Cukor) while others can’t. IMO Nicholas Ray falls into the latter category.