Mamdani’s Nod in the General Direction of Stability

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The newly elected Mayor of New York City, the Socialist Zohran Mamdani, has indicated he’s taking the City’s crime problem seriously with his claim that he would like to retain Jessica Tisch, the city’s Police Commissioner.

I have questions, though.

With what authority would Tisch have actually to deal with crime and to pursue the criminals that commit them? Would she have free rein, or would he try to keep her hemmed in? He is, after all, on record calling to defund the nation’s largest police force and accusing it of racism. He was speaking from his heart then; is he now speaking merely politically, or has he evolved his views?

Assume he’s serious, even if merely arguendo. A couple follow-on questions arise. What will he do regarding both city prosecutors who decline to prosecute the criminals and that subset of them who also attempt to prosecute the victims for their heinous efforts to defend themselves?

In those few cases where the suspect actually faces trial, what will he do about city judges who insist on turning those suspects loose on no bail, and what will he do about the ordnances and State laws (over the latter which he has little influence) that mandate many of those no-bail releases?

What Will She Do with that Intelligence?

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Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum doesn’t want to deal with Mexico’s cartels (mostly drug, but they’re into sex- and child-trafficking, also, and a few other…industries) violently. Her predecessor also swore off hard-style confrontations, insisting on dealing with them with hugs. Scheinbaum wants to increase intelligence efforts in dealing with them, even including a willingness to receive intelligence from the US government. But no more help than that.

Sheinbaum said her government had accepted the US offer for help in obtaining information and intelligence, but she rejected US intervention in Mexico’s affairs. “Intervention isn’t justice,” she said.

That “intervention” was an offer to assist—not to do for or to do instead—Mexico in dealing with the cartels kinetically, which is to say, violently.

Last week, Carlos Manzo, the anti-cartel mayor of Uruapan, the largest city in the state of Michoachan, the state immediately west of Mexico City, was hugged several times, fatally so, by the cartels. Even so,

[Sheinbaum] pledged to continue with her policy of strengthening Mexico’s National Guard, concentrating on the use of police intelligence to take down violent criminals while addressing the social causes of crime.
Sheinbaum criticized political opponents who she said were taking advantage of Manzo’s killing to attack the government, and said she had ordered an investigation into the surge in antigovernment posts on social media.

When those violent criminals and/or their cartel supporters resist being “taken down?” Will she continue to answer their violence with her own hugs? So far, her response is limited to inflicting lawfare violence on those impudent enough to criticize her government’s handling of the cartels. Why not hug them, too, instead?

Scheinbaum apparently has no serious use for that intelligence, American or her own nation’s.

This is what a failing narco- and trafficking-centric nation looks like.

A Mixed Message

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President Donald Trump’s (R) tariff program is before the Supreme Court (oral arguments were heard last Wednesday), it appears to be in trouble, and I claim it’s due to his mixed messaging to us in the public.

I have long argued, especially during Trump II’s tariff implementations, that there are two purposes for tariffs, and so two kinds of tariffs. One kind is protectionist tariffs, tariffs implemented to protect domestic industries, especially those in their nascent stages and those that are national security critical. Protectionist tariffs are, in the main, badly mistaken for a variety of reasons; although, an argument can be made that protectionism related to national security is a cost of national security that must be paid if we’re to remain free as a nation.

The other kind of tariff is that used as a foreign policy tool, tariffs applied in order to persuade another nation or bloc of nations to desist from their unfair trade practices, viz., dumping product at below cost, unfair subsidies of their own domestic industries, withholding export of products critical to the importing nation’s economy or national security, or other policies to which the tariffing nation might object.

Trump has been busily touting both the revenue raised by all of his tariffs, of both kinds, while also insisting that they’re necessary foreign policy tools intended to get other nations to leave off their unfair trade practices, to “stop ripping off America,” and to mend their ways on other matters.

Which brings me to the present article by The Wall Street Journal‘s Greg Ip.

Lawyers often stretch the facts to make their case, but even so, this was quite the howler from US Solicitor General John Sauer in defense of President Trump’s tariffs at the Supreme Court on Wednesday: “They are not revenue-raising tariffs.”

Ip, with that lede, stripped his Sauer sentence of its context. The rest of what Sauer was saying is that their purpose, as a foreign policy tool, is to persuade the targeted nations to change their ways. That these foreign policy tools also happen to produce money is deeply secondary. Ip later acknowledged that, but not until deep into his piece. Sauer again, originally:

“The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental. The tariffs would be most effective, so to speak, if no person ever paid them,” because they would have achieved their goal of changing another country’s behavior, or diverting all American purchases away from imports to domestic goods[.]

And that’s the problem with Trump’s rhetoric here. He’s made no distinction in his program between tariffs as protectionism and revenue-raising, the latter which is a Congressional prerogative and not Executive, and tariffs as foreign tools, which is an Executive prerogative and not Congressional.

This is a milieu where Trump’s studied vagueness in his rhetoric may well backfire. Keeping adversaries suitably confused as to our intentions through ambiguity can be highly useful. However, American law, and so our courts—especially our Supreme Court—deal in clearly stated specifics within each case that comes before them. Vague, especially, internally conflicting, speech is properly disdained by judges and Justices.

Trump’s contaminating his use of tariffs as foreign policy tools with his use of tariffs as protectionist policy may well produce the elimination of his tariff program in toto. That would be to our nation’s economic ill, and to our nation’s national security detriment.

Whose Inheritance Is It?

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A son wrote to The Moneyist, worried that because he makes so much more than his siblings and freely lives like it he’ll be cut out of his parents’ will. He closed his letter with this paragraph, and Quentin Fottrell seems to have made a meal out the distraction contained in it, instead of giving the short and sweet answer that the question needed.

My siblings don’t make nearly as much as me. They’d say I’m crass or rude for saying that. I’m concerned that my parents are going to strike me from any will/inheritance. If siblings earn different amounts, should that be the primary driver for how much they should get?

Fottrell opened with most of the right answer.

Your parents can divide their estate as they see fit.

Unfortunately, he went on to talk about siblings being differentially poorly- (or well-) off, and so the lesser well-off can receive a larger slice of their parents’ pie. He then proceeded to suggest, over several paragraphs, that the letter-writer’s arrogance and self-importance could well play a role in any parental inheritance decision. Never mind that Fottrell had no evidence in the letter that that played a role, although the letter-writer seems to have made no effort to hide his financial success under a bushel.

Fottrell would have done well to end his response with that opening sentence. He would have done better to add this short bit to that opening: the estate, the inheritance, is the parents’ money and assets and no one else’s. It’s their property to do with as they see fit, and no one else has any claim on it, whether child, parental sibling, or stranger. Parents have no intrinsic duty to leave their money, their assets, to anyone in particular, and they can leave it to no one at all and let the State sort it out.

Full stop.

Weasel Words

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The People’s Republic of China’s governing claque of men and women are engaging in them. Again. Or still. This is The Wall Street Journal‘s lede:

China will loosen its export restrictions on semiconductors made by Nexperia, its Commerce Ministry said….

However.

China will allow exports of Nexperia chips for eligible cases, the Commerce Ministry said Saturday, without specifying the criteria.

Meaning, I fearlessly predict, that Nexperia’s exports from the PRC will be slow-walked, blocked, and otherwise interfered with for the foreseeable future. Just as with any other non-PRC company doing semiconductor business from inside the PRC. Lacking export criteria, the PRC has left itself wiggle room for blue whale pods in which to employ those weasel words. The PRC’s Commerce Ministry also made no mention at all regarding loosening export restrictions on rare earth magnets or rare earth ore.

Nexperia—and everyone else outside of the PRC—would do well to move their raw material production, assembly, and manufacturing facilities—all of them, not just those related to rare earths—entirely outside of the PRC.