Last week I took note of the views of the CEO of JPMorgan on the state of the financial sector and I must say it didn’t comport too closely with what I see around me or with the way actual people, politicians, and the federal government behave. Sort of like Alice’s visit to Wonderland.

This week Neel Kashkari, chairman of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, has responded to Mr. Dimon and I’m pleased to say that in his piece on the Minneapolis Fed’s site through the mist I see the contours of something that looks a bit more like the world as I see it. I recommend that you read it in full but this is the most telling sentence:

Unfortunately, regulators have taken it easy on the large banks, which today have only about half of the equity they need.

It doesn’t matter what laws are in place. It doesn’t even matter what consumers or regulators do. All that matters is what bankers do and how our politicians will respond to what bankers do and, simply put, they will act consistently with the incentives in place.

If we want to avoid future financial crises and federal bailouts of the largest, richest banks in the world, there are only a few alternatives at hand:

• Require banks to hold much higher reserves. How much higher? Think 10% to 20% rather than today’s 3% (or, in practice, 1%).
• Make branch banking illegal again. That inherently regulates how big a bank can get and small banks are much less attractive targets for bailouts.
• Get an entirely new set of politicians and term limit them severely.

We should also prohibit elected officials, appointees, and regulators from taking jobs with banks for a period of ten years after leaving office. That could be done through the tax code.

Or, alternatively, we could accustom ourselves to financial crises of increasing severity and frequency with attendant bailouts.

There are some wrong ideas that just can’t be stamped out. In his recent post at RealClearHealth physician Steve Miller assumes the truth of one of the most persistent of those ideas—the notion that there’s a true or inherent price for goods and services. Here are his prescriptions for the pharmaceutical business:

• Pharmaceutical companies have to demonstrate more rational drug pricing. They deserve to be rewarded for innovation, but at prices the marketplace can afford, not what it will bear.
• More competition means lower costs for American patients. Washington should act on policies that streamline the process for generics, including biosimilars, to come quickly and safely to market. Introducing competing versions of complex drugs into the market would save patients billions of dollars and have an impact similar to that felt by the introduction of generics decades ago.
• Payers must closely manage the benefits they provide, ensuring fairness and access while offering protections to their beneficiaries enrolled in high-deductible plans.
  And lastly, it is incumbent upon the pharmacy benefits managers to more forcefully illustrate the critical role we play in making medicine more affordable and accessible. For example, we partnered with a drug maker who was willing to lower the price of its hepatitis C drug. In doing so, we were able to provide 50,000 patients affordable access to this medication.

What mechanism will bring those happy outcomes into being? Public spirit? Good will? Sages and prophets from Confucius to Jesus of Nazareth have preached the Golden Rule for thousands of years and somehow pharmaceutical prices are still high.

Let me tell an alternative story.

• There is no such thing as true or inherent price. All prices, whether those for pharmaceuticals or those for physicians’ services, are determined based on willingness to pay.
• When third parties pay for goods and services it removes price discipline.
• When price discipline is removed, prices will always rise to what the market will bear.
• In our system of health care most payment is done by third parties.
• No cap has been placed on what will be spent.
• Consequently, prices rise without limit.
• Pharmaceutical companies are the recipients of exclusive franchises, enforced by the federal government, on their products.
• Those franchises are supposed to be of limited duration but in practice they can be perpetual.

Somewhere in that list a solution is lurking. All that remains is for us to be perceptive enough to ferret it out.

Why is the U. S. use of the biggest conventional weapon in its arsenal in Afghanistan bigger news on the BBC site, Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, and RT.com (and Google News) than it is in the New York Times or the Washington Post? About six frontpage column inches are being devoted to the story on each of the international sites and only about one on each of the two domestic sites.

At Fortune just two paragraphs of Alan Wolff’s post on “What’s Next for America’s Trade Policy With China?” sums it up:

U.S. concerns include theft of trade secrets, counterfeiting, inadequate protection of intellectual property, online piracy, industrial policies that promote domestic goods at the expense of U.S. products, subsidies, discriminatory product standards, the dumping of excess capacity, and restricted access for American services, according to a report that the US Trade Representative released last month, which included a 20 page chapter detailing America’s trade problems with China.

and

What should not be done is for the U.S. to turn a blind eye to trade-distorting practices in order to induce China to act as a responsible stakeholder on security and foreign policy issues. This is a current issue because of the President’s tweet this week.

I can’t even imagine a fair and equitable trade relationship between the United States and China or even how such a thing would come about. Not only do the Chinese authorities prefer the status quo in the absence of a robust system of civil law in China their imposing such a system would be very difficult if not completely impossible.

But American consumers like the status quo, too. They like the low prices even if China’s practices siphon away U. S. industrial capacity. One of Reagan’s wisecracks comes to mind. Recession is when your neighbor is out of a job. Depression is when you’re out of a job. As long as the present situation doesn’t threaten their own jobs most Americans will just accept the loss of jobs here and productive capacity here and continue shopping at WalMart.

I think that the U. S. should just estimate the cost of China’s bad behavior to American industries, impose a tariff in that amount on China’s goods, and let the chips fall where they may. I said that ten years ago and it’s just as true now. The chance of that happening is roughly zero.

I think the scales are beginning to fall from Fareed Zakaria’s eyes if his recent Washington Post post column is any gauge:

Liberals have to avoid Trump Derangement Syndrome. If Trump pursues a policy, it cannot axiomatically be wrong, evil and dangerous. In my case, I have been pretty tough on Trump. I attacked almost every policy he proposed during the campaign. Just before the election, I called him a “cancer on American democracy” and urged voters to reject him. But they didn’t. He is now president. I believe that my job is to evaluate his policies impartially and explain why, in my view, they are wise or not.

Many of Trump’s campaign promises and policies are idiotic and unworkable. It was always likely that he would reverse them, as he has begun to do this week on several fronts. Those of us who opposed him face an important challenge. We have to ask ourselves, which would we rather see: Trump reversing himself or Trump relentlessly pursuing his campaign agenda? The first option would be good for the country and the world, though it might save Trump from an ignominious fall. The second would be a disaster for all. It raises the quandary: Do we want what’s better for America or what’s worse for Donald Trump?

I presume he thinks that question is rhetorical. Our problem is that it’s not.

I think there’s a substantial fraction of Americans, not limited by race, gender, or political party, for whom politics is strictly “zero sum”. In game theory terms that means “I win and you lose”. Indeed, if you do not lose they do not believe they have won.

In his jeremiad about American amnesia at Bloomberg View:

In an unsettled time, with an unsettling president, many Americans are unsure of their conception of the world and their country’s role in it. What should the United States be doing – if anything – to shape the global order? To answer this question, we need to better understand ourselves and our history.

Americans regularly make three curious – and contestable – claims about peace, world order and their country’s role in achieving both. First, they often assume that they are a peace-loving people, and that our republic has been a force to promote amity and stability in the world. Second, they assume that peace is an unalloyed good, both a tool and product of progress, providing incontrovertible benefits; war and conflict, meanwhile, have brought nothing but misery and disaster. Third, they see peace and order as the natural state of the world, and view any actor or force that disturbs this harmony as both anomalous and deviant, to be identified, isolated and eliminated.

Francis J. Gavin fails to take into consideration something basic about American opinion. American opinion is a mosaic not a monolith.

Jeffersonians have no illusions of a peaceful world and are wary of attempts at making peace by making war. Hamiltonians only oppose war when they’re asked to pay the tab. Jacksonians always assume unlimited war and are outraged when they must play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Wilsonians have no opposition to war waged to further their goals. American opinion is forged from the interplay of those wildly differing views.

Most American politicians campaign as though they were Jacksonians but vote like Wilsonians.

I mentioned a while ago that I’m a big fan of old time radio and that I was listening to old Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar programs.

After YTJD had been broadcast in its five day a week, 15 minutes per day format for about a year, it returned to its old format of one 30 minute program for a week. It wasn’t quite as good as the serialized format. There’s a real limit to the scope of the story you can tell from beginning to end in a half hour slot.

That continued for the next five years. The program was still good. Not quite as good as in the serialized format but good. Then at the end of 1960 disaster occurred. CBS decided to move the production of the program from Los Angeles to New York. Bob Bailey, whose voicing of Johnny Dollar boosted YTJD head and shoulders over radio’s other hardboiled detective programs, refused to go and he was replaced by Bob Readick.

And it was flat. Lackluster. The stable of New York radio actors just wasn’t up to the standard set by the LA cadre. Athena Lorde, veteran radio actress and the wife of radio actor Jim Boles, stepped in ocasionally but, honestly, Virginia Gregg had set a pretty high standard as a femme fatale. Russell Thorsen, John Dehner, Harry Bartel, Vic Perrin, Parley Baer, the whole YTJD repertory company couldn’t be replaced. Jack Johnstone was still writing the scripts but it was produced and directed by somebody else. Even the musical direction was different.

When YTJD was cancelled in 1962 it marked the end of radio drama. It didn’t just die; it was murdered.

How to defend yourself against United Airlines:

I’m sad to say that I disagree with the thesis of Thomas Carothers and Richard Youngs’s article at Foreign Affairs. I think we are witnessing the twilight of democracy. I don’t believe it can survive the abandonment of moderation and dispassionate reason we are seeing everywhere today. I believe those are artifacts of a literate society while our society is post-literate.

I don’t know what sort of society will succeed a liberal democratic one but I’m pretty sure it will be some form of authoritarian one. Keep in mind that the overwhelming preponderance of people in the world including in the United States and Europe have little or no interest in liberal democracy.