I refuse to fisk Anne Applebaum’s column at the Washington Post. All I will say is that the notion that our international accords are the basis of American “wealth, prosperity, and military power” is simply laughable. Those accords are the basis of European wealth and prosperity, not ours.

American wealth, prosperity, and military power are all built on our large, free domestic market and the incentives that our formerly free country afforded to its formerly free people. Expanding those freedoms to more people, e.g. blacks and women, was an undeniable good. Where we’ve come since then with unending wars and crony capitalism is a tragedy.

I think that James Wallner is wrong in his central claim at Liberty and Law:

Properly understood, politics represents the space in which our lives unfold in community with others. And republican politics requires the existence of a shared space in which the political activity of citizens can occur. In Athens, it was denoted by the polis. In Rome, it was the res publica. And in America, the institutional venues established by the Constitution create the space where politics takes place.

We need a shared space in which to make decisions affecting society because human beings are all equal. They are all equal only in the sense that they are all different. That is, no two people can be considered the same in any respect other than the fact that they are each unique individuals possessing their own abilities, characteristics, interests, hopes and fears. And because people with different views participate in politics on the basis of equality, political activity inevitably generates conflict in the space where politics occurs. Put simply, political conflict is an essential and legitimate element in the process by which people come together on the basis of equality to resolve their differences and compromise.

Needless to say, this is not how we think about politics today. We instead hold politics in contempt. That is why we almost always look outside of the political realm for solutions to political problems. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that imposing objective truths on citizens is the only way to end political dysfunction.

We don’t hold politics in contempt. Most of us aren’t interested enough in politics to do so. We hold politicians in contempt and can you blame us? It’s a grand old American tradition, as old as the republic. Listen to any American politician these days. Do you find a lot there to respect other than the office they hold?

Alexander Neubacher pens an editorial at Der Spiegel:

Sunday night marked the end of politics in Germany as it has been known for decades. That’s not something that needs to be overly dramatized: In the Netherlands, there are more than a dozen parties in parliament and governance in the country is just fine. But there’s always a risk in trading a proven system for a new order, the advantages of which aren’t currently clear.

It is rather ironic that the party which wanted most to hold onto the old party order ended up destroying it. Unlike Merkel, the CSU has been unwilling to yield the right-wing of the political spectrum to another party. And there’s nothing wrong with that impulse, at least in principle. But putting it into practice would have required extensive political skill of the kind the CSU leadership is unfortunately lacking.

Now, the entire country must bear the consequences.

I think he’s discounting something a little too cavalierly. There is already a Bavarian independence movement which, despite the German court’s determination that the Free State of Bavaria has no right to separate itself from the balance of the German Federation, has been given new legs by Chancellor Merkel’s feckless immigration policy. Bavaria has a history, culture, identity, and politics distinct from the rest of Germany. Bavaria is the second most prosperous of the Länder and home to two of Germany’s biggest companies, BMW and Allianz. Don’t be surprised if there are more calls for Bavarian independence as Germany lurches along a path down which Bavaria does not care to follow it.

As I’ve been pointing out for decades, the ethnic states of Europe have a choice before them. They can either remain the ethnic states they’ve been and accept the consequences of that or admit “foreigners”, grant them full participation, stop being ethnic states, and accept the consequences of that. Denmark, once 98% ethnic Danish and culturally Lutheran, is trying to straddle by compulsorily inculcating Danish culture in the children of these “foreigners”. I think there will be other such experiments. It remains to be seen how successful they will be.

Since declaring independence from Spain in 1810, Mexico has had eight governments (more depending on how you count them). There is presently a very high homicide and crime rate in Mexico as illustrated by the graph above. There are areas that are in various degrees in open rebellion against the federal government, some in the control of criminal gangs that function as a sort of alternative government. There are some people who believe that all government is control by a criminal gang but that’s the subject matter for another post.

Some attribute that to the “War on Drugs”. I think it’s more a product of basic civic weakness in Mexico and the manifest U. S. preference for weak neighbors.

Let’s engage in a thought experiment. Assume that newly-elected President López Obrador is unable to hold Mexico together and the government collapses. What then?

I think that the assessment of the editors of the Wall Street Journal about the likely impact of replacing Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court is about right:

The first thing to keep in mind is that this is what Democrats and their media allies always say. They said it in 1987 when Justice Kennedy was nominated. They said it in 1990 about David Souter, again about Clarence Thomas in 1991, John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, and Neil Gorsuch in 2017. They even claimed the Chief Justice might overturn Roe because his wife is a Roman Catholic. Mrs. Roberts is still waiting to write her first opinion.

The liberal line is always that Roe hangs by a judicial thread, and one more conservative Justice will doom it. Yet Roe still stands after nearly five decades. Our guess is that this will be true even if President Trump nominates another Justice Gorsuch. The reason is the power of stare decisis, or precedent, and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law.

Start with the Court’s Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. The ruling was only 5-4 and Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion with a formidable dissent by Chief Justice Roberts.

Yet there’s almost no chance the Chief would reverse Obergefell now. Tens of thousands of gay couples have been married across the U.S. since the ruling. They have changed their lives based on it. Is the Court now going to tell those couples that states can declare their marriages void? Or that their property rights under marriage laws are no longer valid?

A key part of the Court’s stare decisis calculation is “reliance interests,” or how and how many people have come to rely on a precedent. Chief Justice Roberts cited reliance interests in his Wayfair dissent on state internet sales taxes this term, and its logic is even more compelling for same-sex marriage.

A different stare decisis logic applies to Roe, which was one of the Court’s worst rulings but is now 45 years old and embedded in American law. While abortion is still hotly debated, the Court has reinforced the right many times.

I don’t think I’ve ever expressed myself on the subject of abortion here. I think abortion is wrong; I think that subsidizing it would be bad public policy; I think that Roe was bad jurisprudence. I also think that Roe should not be overturned for reasons of stare decisis and on First Amendment grounds.

Contrary to the claims of some Democratic leaders, I think that Roe will continue to be the law of the land in 18 months and in 18 years. I think it’s here to stay. The most I think that replacing Justice Kennedy would do is to reaffirm another long-neglected aspect of Roe: the determination that states have an interest in the lives of the unborn.

There seems to be a widespread, even growing misunderstanding of what Roe v. Wade actually found. It found that the level of scrutiny of state laws governing abortion changed based on the number of weeks of gestation. It did not provide for abortion on demand; it did not create an absolute right to abortion. Presently, no states have an outright ban on abortion; nine states have no restrictions on abortion. I think that’s likely to continue whoever becomes the next Supreme Court justice.

Stimulus spending after structural changes have already taken place and aggregate supply has fallen isn’t Keynesianism. I don’t know what it is. Politically-motivated opportunism? Ignorance?

The editors of the Washington Post have found something about the Trump Administration that they like—its plan to move responsibility for processing security clearances through the Department of Defense rather than the Office of Personnel Management:

BURIED IN the Trump administration’s 132-page plan to overhaul the federal government is a significant policy shift that has received little attention: a proposal to transfer responsibility for background investigations for security clearances from the Office of Personnel Management to the Defense Department. As many federal employees and contractors know firsthand, this change is a long time coming.

The OPM has long been criticized for its slow processing of background checks, but complaints about its inefficiency have multiplied in the past few years. It currently takes up to 12 to 18 months to process interim clearances, and the agency has a backlog of approximately 725,000 investigations — a figure that it says could take years to bring down. As The Post reported last August, the backlog has made it difficult for contractors to fill sensitive positions and has potentially cost billions in salaries for employees who were unable to work while waiting on clearances. In January, the Government Accountability Office added the process to its “High Risk List” of programs that are urgently in need of reform to “prevent waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.”

Does that make them collaborators?

Even if the reform were to make it through the Congress, I suspect that any such move will be faced with lawsuits as a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. I’d also be curious to know why it takes OMB 18 months to process interim clearances. Is it just the very large number or are there specific bottlenecks? Or are they just slow?

I hasten to point out that the editors only note one side of the equation:

the backlog has made it difficult for contractors to fill sensitive positions and has potentially cost billions in salaries for employees who were unable to work while waiting on clearances

The other side is that the time involved in processing the applications also costs money.

Mark Janus, the plaintiff in the case Janus v. AFSCME in which the Supreme Court ruled that non-union members should not be compelled to pay agency fees, takes to the pages of the Washington Post to articulate his position:

Why don’t politicians just say no to the demands of the unions when they know the state can’t afford them? Because the unions bankroll into office the same people who ink their contracts. Unions are among the top spenders in elections, and they make sure that people who don’t support their demands lose their seats.

Since its contract expired in 2015, AFSCME, which I am required to fund even though I am not a member, had increasingly used the possibility of a strike to push the state toward accepting the union’s demands for higher salaries and benefits. I couldn’t stand by anymore while these policies were bankrupting the state. That’s why I asked the Liberty Justice Center to represent me and take my case to the Supreme Court.

I would gladly forgo my annual raise because it’s more important to me that the state get its financial house in order. I would happily have my pension converted into a 401(k), instead of piling more obligation onto the bankrupt pension fund. But I haven’t had a choice about either of these, and I have been forced to pay for a private organization that I don’t want to be a member of to negotiate for things I don’t believe in.

Union leaders said I did have a choice: Quit my job. Agree with the union or quit my job as a government worker. Think about that for a minute: To be a government worker, you have to agree with and fund a private organization?

In Illinois and in Chicago in particular, public employees are compensated very well. The state has the lowest credit rating of any state which means it pays more to borrow, the highest property tax of any state, and Chicago has the highest sales tax of any major city. Meanwhile, businesses and individuals are leaving Illinois so those who stay are stuck holding the bag. Property values in Chicago have been stuck where they are for twenty years even as property taxes have doubled.

All of these taxes are regressive—they fall hardest on those least able to pay. It’s really time for a change in thinking in Springfield and vowing to tax, spend, and borrow more is no change. It’s just more of the same.

One of the reasons that Illinois is in the fix it’s in is that during Rod Blagojevich’s term of office he funded pay increases for public employees by not putting money into the public employees’ pension trust fund, simultaneously increasing the ultimate pension liability while making it more difficult to pay. That’s the sort of creative accounting we need to change.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been elected to be Mexico’s next president. This article in the New York Times strikes me as about as fair a representation as you’re likely to see in a U. S. newspaper:

Mr. López Obrador, who vowed to cut his own salary and raise those of the lowest paid government workers, campaigned on a narrative of social change, including increased pensions for the elderly, educational grants for Mexico’s youth and additional support for farmers.

He said he would fund his programs with the money the nation saves by eliminating corruption, a figure he places at tens of billions of dollars a year, a windfall some experts doubt will materialize.

Realistic or not, the allure of his message is steeped in the language of nostalgia for a better time — and in a sense of economic nationalism that some fear could reverse important gains of the last 25 years.

I wish him good fortune. As in the United States, I suspect that corruption is so widespread and endemic in Mexico that it is the system rather than a perversion of the system. It probably isn’t even thought of as corruption.

Update

The editors of the Wall Street Journal aren’t happy about the election’s results:

This election has dramatically altered Mexican politics. The once-dominant PRI is now a minor party. Its losses are a repudiation of current President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government. The center-right PAN is now the largest opposition party in Congress, but it too is weakened and will have to rebuild after divisive internal battles that undermined Mr. Anaya’s candidacy.

Some 30% of registered voters were millennials, who have no memory of the one-party state of Mr. López Obrador’s youth. They are dissatisfied with Mexico’s status quo and have voted for a change. Let’s hope the change they get isn’t back to the future of state economic control and peso devaluation.