I found this post at The Week by Joel Mathis interesting. It’s about the woes of the casual dining chains:

In much of America, a night out with the family has often meant a meal at TGI Fridays or Red Lobster. But those once-popular restaurant chains — and a few others — now find themselves struggling.

Big chains this year will “declare the most bankruptcies in decades,” said The Wall Street Journal. Among the list of battered restaurants: Red Lobster, Buca di Beppo, Hawkers Asian Street Food, Tijuana Flats and Roti. (TGI Fridays is also reportedly approaching bankruptcy, while Denny’s is planning to close 150 restaurants.) Same-store restaurant sales are down by 3.3% from last year. There isn’t any single reason. “You have the Covid hangover, labor costs,” said one executive. Some families have “pulled back on dining out,” said the Journal. But business decisions have also played a role. “High interest rates have hurt companies that gave priority to growth over profit.”

He mentions some of the factors including inflation, labor costs, and bad management but I think he’s missing some.

For example, meal kit companies are growing by leaps and bounds but experiencing many of the same things. And I’m not expert on either chain casual dining or meal kits but I suspect that they’re competing for the same customers. My cooking is better than any meal kit (not to mention Denny’s) and I know how to shop. I tend to avoid ordering from any restaurant where the food isn’t better than my cooking which is really narrowing the field. That pretty much limits me to pizza and ethnic cuisine.

To my untutored eye it looks like we’re enormously overbuilt on fast food and casual dining restaurants. I think that the fast food business model is fatally flawed for reasons I’ve explained before and I’ve never understood chain casual dining. I would rather support a mom and pop shop than a store operated by some mega-business.

I wonder if there’s any truth to this report by Chris Fitzgerald in Asia Times about the hard time the Taliban is having in Afghanistan these days:

Afghanistan’s Taliban faces growing opposition to its three-year post-conflict rule, rising threats that are gnawing at the stability the one-time insurgent group has sought to impose on the nation.

The Islamist regime appeared to be riding high just recently in celebrating the third anniversary of its second time in power with a military parade showcasing fighter aircraft and weapons seized after the US-led coalition withdrew in chaos in August 2021.

But behind the celebration and military flexing, the Taliban is contending with potent challenges on multiple fronts.

The article goes on to outline the problems today’s Taliban is having with Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF), and the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF). It would be comical if there weren’t human lives at stake.

At the Center for European Policy Analysis Edward Lucas pens an obituary for the Pax Americana:

Regardless of who wins the US presidential election on November 5th, Pax Americana’s obituaries are now being drafted. They should be long ones. The Atlantic alliance was one of the most distinctive and seemingly durable features of post-war Europe. It brought security and freedom to tens of millions of people for decades, first by preventing Communism’s spread, then by winning the Cold War, and thereafter doubling NATO membership from 16 in 1989 to 32 now.

True, the American-led security order was never healthy and lived riskily. The European end was cranky and often unreliable. Endemic underspending on defense strained American patience over many decades; so too did idiosyncratic decision-making, especially in France. Ungrateful or paranoid “peace” campaigners depicted the US nuclear presence in Europe as a menace, not a safeguard. Many Europeans were outraged by failed American wars in Indo-China in the 1960s and 1970s, by the “Global War on Terror” after 2001, and shunned the looming hard confrontation with China.

He concludes

No flowers, please. Instead, donations to any European military budget will be gratefully appreciated.

He says it died of neglect. Perhaps. I think it starved to death. The surplus we needed to feed it was exhausted.

Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, explains why the WaPo is not endorsing a candidate in this year’s presidential election:

Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.

Read the whole thing. The WaPo hasn’t always endorsed presidential candidates.

The WaPo has 2.5 million online subscribers or at least it had that many. My understanding is that about 10% of those have cancelled their subscriptions over the paper’s non-endorsement.

Not all major newspapers endorse political candidates. The last presidential candidate endorsed by the Sun-Times was Hillary Clinton in 2016.

As you may guess I receive a lot of dog-related information on Facebook. This cartoon showed up in my feed.

Anybody who invents and sells an effective Election Shirt will be a millionaire.

Here’s another piece that caught my eye. This one is a Wall Street Journal article by John Keilman about a Whirlpool factory manager:

CLYDE, Ohio—Ryan DeLand arrives at Whirlpool’s WHR 0.80%increase; green up pointing triangle washing-machine factory at 6:53 a.m., not long after day-shift workers have settled into their stations.

He steps into his office and is greeted by a whiteboard that bears the motto “stable and predictable.” He will spend the day chasing that goal despite a never-ending stream of complications in a plant that is as big as 30 football fields put together.

A lot can go wrong.

The plant has more than 25 miles of conveyors and uses more than 2,000 parts. Robotic and human-piloted vehicles zip through its aisles, while an overhead crane carries huge coils of steel. Going full blast, the factory can pump out 22,000 washing machines in a day, but even a brief mishap can stop production cold.

At 39 years old, DeLand is among the youngest leaders of Whirlpool’s 10 U.S. factories. He has a trim haircut and the brisk, dynamic manner of a football coach—he heads up the St. Charles Centaurs, his 10-year-old son’s team—and he runs the factory like one. DeLand has divided his staff into units such as defense, special teams and, in a fitting touch for Big Ten country, the run game—his term for operations, logistics and maintenance.

“The run game is about grinding out wins,” he says. “My lane is the run game.”

Not mentioned in the article: Mr. DeLand is a college graduate, a mechanical engineer. Based on industry standards he probably earns between $120,000 and $180,000.

Everything Mr. DeLand is doing has been common knowledge in American businesses for 40 years. The difference may be that he’s actually doing them.

In his new digs (at Substack) economist Scott Sumner has a post I encourage you to read. It’s fairly lengthy post that might be summed up as “industrial policy doesn’t work”. Particularly, I wanted to share his list of prescriptions:

In a world of complexity, I look for simple rules:

1. Wars of conquest are bad. Discourage them.
2. Have mutual defense agreements of like-minded nations.
3. Don’t try to do nation building.
4. Avoid nationalistic policies like trade wars. Commerce doesn’t prevent wars, but it makes them less likely (and more costly for the aggressor.)
5. Research subsidies might help, but by far the surest way of encouraging innovation is to attract talented people and give them an economic system where innovation is rewarded.
6. The low cost solution of environmental problems is Pigovian taxes.
7. The most effective solution for poverty is growth. Some redistribution can help, but it’s a distant second in effectiveness. Zoning reform helps the homeless more than “homeless programs”.
8. Don’t do regional policies. Italy has proved beyond any doubt that they do not work. Do sound economic policy, and hope that these policies either help the region, help people move to better regions, or both.

I materially agree with those. I could nitpick his list but that’s what it would be—nit-picking.

My only observation is that I think that China is a special case and I think that tariffs, as blunt an instrument as they are, are our only way of coping with that case. It is very large. It has enormous industrial over-capacity. There is no practical way to measure China’s compliance with any bilateral agreement into which we might enter. It limits its imports by establishing quotas even when it does not make economic sense to do so. It systematically dumps goods to eliminate competition. It uses its economic influence to further its foreign and domestic policy objectives.

Consequently, I would extend Dr. Sumner’s “low cost solution of environmental problems” to include labor, health, and safety regulations and impose a Pigouvian tax on Chinese imports, i.e. a tariff, to offset the competitive advantage China achieves by emitting greenhouse gases, having low building standards, and locking workers in.

This post was inspired by a tweet by Glenn Greenwald on X:

The US has no functional president and has not had one for months, and it’s barely noticeable and barely matters because there’s a permanent unelected machine that runs the government.

You may note the resonance between that and my frequently mentioned plaint that whoever is elected president the highest priority for the new administration should be civil service reform.

The Trump fans’ approach to this which appears to be reinstating President Trump’s Executive Order 13957 which was rescinded by President Biden won’t work. For one thing it’s unconstitutional—it’s explicitly not within the president’s authority to overrule the Civil Service Act of 1883 and its subsequent reform, the Civil Service Act of 1978. As such it will simply be ignored. That’s why the reform must come from the Congress.

In the past I’ve complained about the nomenklatura and it has occurred to me that I might need to explain what that means. In the old Soviet Union the nomenklatura referred to the posts in government and industry, staffed by people appointed by the Party, who reliably implemented Party policies. That’s what we have here in the United States now and Mr. Greenwald is right to complain about it.

What are these policies? You will probably recognize them. They include federalizing just about everything, increasing the number of people beholden to the federal government, increasing the wages of federal employees, “liberal interventionism” in foreign policy, DEI as a priority objective, and others.

What’s so wrong with that? Look around you. The great failures of the last five years including our response to COVID-19, the botching of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the baby formula shortage, the inflation of the early years of the Biden Administration, our failure to anticipate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and our inability to meet military staffing levels can all be attributed to those policies.

Consider this, too:

That was from 2017. It’s closer to eleven million now. It does not include the 30% of state and local employees who are dependent on federal grants to the states or the many sectors of the economy that depend largely or in part on federal tax dollars.

There are about 30 million people in the top quintile of income earners. Government employees, contractors, grant employees, and the other groups mentioned above comprise a big chunk of those 30 million. The average income of federal employees is around $90,000; the median is around $80,000. That puts them at the top of the third quintile of income earners, the fourth quintile, or the top quintile. The highest paid federal employee earned more than $400,000.

I’ve been looking at a sample ballot for a week from Tuesday’s election here in Chicago. At the top of the ballot are three non-binding referendum questions:

• Should any candidate appearing on the Illinois ballot for federal, State, or local office be subject to civil penalties if the candidate interferes or attempts to interfere with an election worker’s official duties?
• Should the Illinois Constitution be amended to add an additional 3% tax on income greater than $1,000,000 for the purpose of funds related to property tax relief?
• Should all medically appropriate treatments, including, but not limited to, in vitro fertilization be covered by any health insurance in Illinois that provides coverage for pregnancy benefits, without limitation on the number of treatments?

I plan to vote “No” on all of those. If the first added the word “physically” after “interferes” and “interfere”, respectively, I would support the first. As it stands I think it is too broad.

We’ve already voted once on a graduated income tax and rejected it. I interpret the second question as taking another bite at that apple. Why not just add a referendum on whether we want people earning more than $1 million in Illinois? How about a 100% tax on the income of state employees earning more than $200,000 regardless of source?

If there are a limit on the benefit in the third question, I might support it. As written I think it would be prohibitively expensive and will either drive insurance companies out or end up falling on the state or both.

Three candidates appear in the President section of the ballot: Harris, Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I interpret that as the Illinois legislature having succeeded in rendering getting onto the ballot extremely difficult. I find none of those alternatives even marginally acceptable.

I’ve read the Trib’s endorsements on the remaining races. They’re a mixed bag. In some cases they’re endorsing the Democratic Party’s preferred candidate and in some they aren’t.

They agree with my assessment of the second ballot question, by the way.