Australian Crispin Rovere articulates the case that war with North Korea is inevitable at RealClearDefense:

This piece focuses on the reasons why deterrence is destined for failure and war on the peninsula is increasingly inevitable. A future piece will discuss the ethics of embarking on second Korean war (and those of advocating it).

There’s one argument that goes unmentioned in his piece. Apparently, the Chinese are convinced that North Korea is so fragile that the only future remotely acceptable to them is maintenance of the teetering status quo. Any step on their part sufficient to stop the Kim regime in its headlong rush to nuclear annihilation will lead to the collapse of the regime accompanied by a stream of refugees, the North being absorbed into the South, or both.

My own view is that the only way to avoid a genuinely catastrophic war for all parties is through strategic patience in the hope that either the Chinese will see the folly of their own position or the North Koreans will make a move that the Chinese will recognize demands an answer from the United States. I see few signs that we are prudent enough to take that course.

Not long ago I showed you pictures of the house where I grew up. When I was ten we moved to a very different suburban neighborhood, to a house that they had built. That’s it at the top of the post. Offhand I would say that’s the way it looked about five years after we moved in. When we moved in there was no lawn, the yard hadn’t been graded, and there were dozens of large fallen trees stacked every which way.

How different was it? The new neighborhood was an upper middle class neighborhood, nearly all of the houses brand new, the families prosperous. Most of the men living there were professionals, business owners, or corporate executives. The old neighborhood was very blue collar, old, rundown houses, all sorts of illegal activities going on (prostitution, gambling, drug dealing). My dad stuck out like a sore thumb.

If you think that I must’ve experience culture shock, you’re right. I loved the new house but I never really adjusted to living there or in the new neighborhood. My siblings think of the new house as their childhood home but for me the old house will always be my childhood home.

Lately my wife and I have been watching ‘Allo ‘Allo! streaming on Netflix. It’s an 80s BBC sitcom which ran for a remarkable nine series, a spoof of the conventions of movies about World War II. It’s actually a lampoon of Secret War, a 70s BBC war drama. It was created and written Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, the same team responsible for Are You Being Served? and Dad’s Army.

Like Are You Being Served? it’s very broad comedy based proudly on stereotypes. It you are offended at stereotypes, you’ll hate ‘Allo ‘Allo!.

Each of the major characters has a catchphrase. For René, owner of a cafe in a small French town and the main character of the series, it’s “You may be wondering…”, followed by a synopsis of how he got into whatever fix he’s in. For Michelle, the head of the Resistance (the Resistance is entirely composed of attractive young women wearing trenchcoats and berets), it’s “Listen very closely;I shall say this only once” which becomes hilarious as the series progresses.

It has one interesting and useful convention. Broad stage accents are used to indicate that a character is speaking in one language or another. Most of the characters speak with a stage French accent to indicate they’re speaking French, the Germans speak with an exaggerated stage German accent, the British flyers with Bertie Wooster-style English accents, the Italian captain with a stage Italian accent, and so on. When Michelle, who normally speaks with a stage French accent, speaks to the English flyers and they can’t understand her she switches to their stage upperclass English accent. The device is used to humorous effect in the case of Officer Crabtree, a British spy disguised as a French policeman, who speaks with a stage French accent, bizarrely mispronouncing words (“Good moaning”), indicating that he speaks broken French.

We’re in Series 6 now. I hope they get around to lampooning Americans.

‘Allo ‘Allo! is possibly the daffiest sitcom I’ve ever watched and I find it a welcome relief from the events of the day. Be aware that it is occasionally coarse, bawdy, and employs stereotypes.

Student demands at colleges are nothing new. My dad gained a certain amount of notoriety 80 years ago with an editorial in his college newspaper demanding that co-eds be allowed to smoke on campus. However, a set of demands by a black student organization at Cornell University has made the news. For background see this article at the Cornell Sun.

The specific demand that has garnered the most attention and certainly caught my notice was this:

The Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must work to actively support students whose families have been impacted for generations by white supremacy and American fascism.

When you strip away the jargon and boilerplate, there’s a serious issue there, one that I wish received more attention.

We have a social problem in the United States and it’s only partially about race. There are grave problems among black Americans who are the descendants of slaves, a group of black Americans the sociologist Charles Moskos dubbed “Afro-Americans” . The problems include lack of economic opportunity, the collapse of the family, the street gangs that have led to Chicago’s homicide rate, and a host of others. Sub-Saharan Africans in the United States don’t experience those problems and Caribbean blacks experience them to a reduced degree.

In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s a series of measures were put in place that were at least notionally intended to address those problems. Perversely, they have been used to confer advantages on sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean blacks.

It’s not new. It’s been going on for the last 30 years. That’s deseg’s dirty secret. Preferences and set-asides have gone disproportionately to sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean blacks rather than to the African Americans, the descendants of American slaves, they were intended to help.

While I look with favor on points that have been made by some about groups as opposed to individuals and the inherent problems in trying to solve the problems of groups, nonetheless it still remains the case that Afro-Americans have special problems, if we wish to be one society rather than two as a society we need to do something about them, and some other means will need to be found to address them.

but the circumstances have changed. In his Wall Street Journal column, James Freeman argues that the U. S. economy can grow faster if only we cut taxes:

Real GDP growth in 1983 turned out to be 4.6%, followed by a remarkable growth surge of 7.3% in 1984 and another strong year after that with 4.2% growth in 1985. The U.S. economy wouldn’t slow back down to the level of Times realism until 1990.

Speaking of the 1990s, toward the end of that decade some observers once again discovered reasons that purportedly showed why America’s best days of economic growth were behind her. In the July-August 1997 issue of Harvard Business Review, an economist named Paul Krugman skillfully argued why a group of “new paradigm” economists were wrong to think that Americans could expect faster economic growth.

[…]

Mr. Krugman insisted that “it is time to get serious: an economic doctrine, no matter how appealing, must be rejected if it cannot stand up to well-informed criticism. We would like to believe that the U.S. economy can grow much faster if only the Fed would let it. But all the evidence suggests that it cannot.”

By an amazing coincidence, Mr. Krugman published his piece right around the time that President Bill Clinton was signing the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which included, among other benefits, a cut in the federal tax on capital gains.

In hindsight we know that even as Mr. Krugman was drafting his explanation of the limits to U.S. growth, the U.S. economy was shifting into a higher gear. 1997 would turn out to be the first of four straight years in which real GDP growth averaged more than 4%.

Tax reform was not all that happened in the early 1980s. Paul Volcker had thrown the economy into a tailspin to bring double digit inflation under control. And the Reagan Administration launched an enormous program of deficit spending.

The Trump Administration would like to do the same things—reduce tax rates and borrow from future economic growth. There are some good reasons to believe that won’t be as effective now as it was 35 years ago.

For one thing the federal debt was about 40% of GDP when President Reagan took office. Now it’s about 100% and there’s good reason to believe that higher debt levels suppress economic growth.

Secondly, people in the top 10% of income earners pay most of the income tax and, consequently, they will get most of any foreseeable tax cut. Will whatever they do with the additional money result in more domestic economic growth? IMO there’s good reason to doubt it, rooted in their present behavior. Why aren’t the top 10% of Americans spending more on goods produced domestically, why aren’t they starting new businesses, and why are so much of their savings in financial instruments?

Third, the best prospect for stimulating domestic economic growth is by cutting the payroll tax, the federal tax actually paid by most Americans. That isn’t on the table and, due to structural changes in the American economy, even that won’t result in as much domestic economic growth as might otherwise have been the case.

That isn’t to say that I don’t believe the greater economic growth isn’t possible in the U. S. I think it is but won’t be accomplished by cutting taxes or spending beyond our means. Reduce the burden of regulation to what is actually needed. Stop picking winners and losers in the economy. Roll back subsidies. Limit the growth in the wages of public employees and those who depend on tax dollars for their incomes to a level the communities they serve can bear. Let businesses import the workers they actually need but don’t let them use imported workers to push wages down.

That’s much harder lifting than cutting tax rates. Which is why it won’t be done.

It’s not even past. In a sort of counter-point in the Washington Post, Lan Cao present five myths about the Vietnam War:

1. The Viet Cong was a scrappy guerrilla force.
2. The refugees who came to the U.S. were Vietnam’s elite.
3. American soldiers were mostly draftees.
4. Enemy forces breached the U.S. Embassy in the Tet Offensive.
5. South Vietnamese soldiers were unwilling and unable to fight.

to which I’d add one more: the Vietnam War was unpopular. It had majority support until at least 1968.

If Ken Burns actually believes that Americans lost their ordinary trust of the federal government as a consequence of the Vietnam War, as suggested in this interview of him at the Washington Post, his vision of American history is seriously twisted, skewed. As anyone who’s actually looked at the history with an open mind can tell you, not trusting the federal government has been the default position for Americans for most of its history. 1940-1970 was an aberration, the consequence of the one-two punch of the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s not a coincidence that Americans elected Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency four times and Americans had an unprecedented trust of the federal government.

The federal government took that trust and did exactly what you’d expect from it: overreached. That the second-longest war in American history coincided with that period of trust isn’t a coincidence, either.

I have lived through the longest war in American history and the second longest, the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. We have been at war for much of my adult life. Enough.

I agree with the editors of the New York Times that gerrymandering is wrong. I disagree with their implication that only Republicans gerrymander districts. The reality is that political parties who control state legislatures gerrymander districts.

I’ve posted the picture at the top of this post at least a half dozen times. That’s the Illinois Fourth Congressional District. It’s vaguely horseshoe shaped, in some places just one block wide. It was constructed explicitly to ensure the re-election of Luis Gutiérrez. The Democratic Party has had control of the Illinois legislature for decades.

The Illinois Fifth Congressional District in which I reside is likewise gerrymandered to ensure that a Democrat is elected from it. My ward is gerrymandered to protected Marge Laurino. And so on.

The editors’ partisan implication reflects either their own partisan biases or a misunderstanding of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering concentrates minorities whether racial, ethnic, economic, or political to protect incumbents. Simple as that. When in power either party does it unless actively prevented.

I wish that the editors had explored ways and means a little more. While I’m sure that the justices of the Supreme Court can disallow certain district maps, I’m not sure I see any way for them to ban gerrymandering.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. If FT Alphaville is right, you were probably better off financially in 1998 than you are now:

The median American family was richer in 1998 than it is now, and it also has about 30 per cent less wealth than at its peak in 2007. That measurement was obviously inflated by the housing price bubble, but even so the decline can nonetheless be understood as a massive shock to the value, real and perceived, of the typical household’s collateral. Other methodological approaches, perhaps using a different deflator, might yield a more hopeful trend, but the devastation wrought by the crisis remains hard to overstate.

but it was the graph at the top of this post that caught my eye. Note how nicely it explains a point I’ve made here repeatedly, that if you’re worried about income inequality you should be as worried as much about the top 2-9% of income earners as about the top 1%. The subsidies received by that group are enormous and their lobbying is commensurate with their subsidies.