Monthly Archives: July 2018

Are Syrian Refugees Human?

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Syrian MFWIC Bashar al-Assad wants Syrian refugees to come home.  The civil war is winding down, after all, and soon everything will be jake.

But obstacles the regime is throwing up to their return show that President Bashar al-Assad—mindful of the strain refugees are putting on neighboring countries—is willing to use the exiles as bargaining chips to secure foreign aid and sanctions relief, Western diplomats and analysts in Beirut say.

Al Assad still doesn’t see his own people (I’m using “his own” loosely) as human beings. To him, they’re not human at all, just chits to be cashed in for dollars and euros.

Are Tariffs Protectionist?

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Certainly, they can be.  And tariffs, for a long time, were intended to protect domestic industry from foreign competition as well as being a major source of income for a nation.  Our own nation was a skilled practitioner of the tariff arts for our first 125+ years and again during the Great Depression and the aftermath.

And that’s the line the Koch brothers are taking with regard to President Donald Trump’s tariff impositions.

The urge to protect ourselves from change has doomed many countries throughout history.  This protectionist mind-set has destroyed countless businesses.

That’s also the line Trump says out loud, often, when he talks about tariffs.  As the old saw goes, though, actions speak louder than words, and it’s useful also to consult the actions Trump has taken vis-à-vis tariffs.  Those actions include the following:

  • offering markedly lower tariffs on all goods and services to Mexico as part of NAFTA renegotiations
  • offering a zero-tariff regime to the G-7
  • offering a zero-tariff, zero-subsidy, zero-non-trade barrier regime to the G-20
  • agreeing in principle to a zero-auto tariff arrangement with the German auto companies, the latter which are pushing their government to push the matter with the EU
  • despite the G-7’s and G-20’s craven refusal even to discuss the matter, getting agreement with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to work toward a zero-tariff, zero-subsidy, zero-non-trade barrier agreement between the EU and the US

Tariffs also are a tool of national policy and have little necessarily to do with protectionism.

Stop Tiptoeing

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Most Federal Reserve officials agree on the path for interest rates over roughly the next year: proceed with gradual increases until borrowing costs reach a level that neither slows nor spurs growth.

You bet.

The big question, however, is what to do after getting to that so-called neutral setting. The answer will largely depend on how inflation behaves as unemployment falls, and they are poring over recent research for clues.

The Fed should stop agonizing and being namby-pamby.  If it wants a 2% basic inflation rate, the rate it says is consistent with growth neutrality, as its existing goal stands, the Fed should set its benchmark rates at levels historically consistent with that rate of inflation, accept that inflation will fluctuate around that level, and then sit down and be quiet.

Those historically consistent rates are the Goldilocks level—or more accurately, the Goldilocks band.

College Admissions and Diversity

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Harvard is claiming that it needs to select preferentially for race in its admissions in order to achieve its student body diversity goals.

…it has tried alternatives to race-conscious affirmative action to diversify its undergraduate student body, but such efforts would harm both the diversity and academic strength of the class.

This is nonsense.

“Affirmative action” programs, giving preferential treatment as they do (however small the preference is claimed to be) to persons based on their race (and/or sex in most other such programs), are fundamentally racist. More broadly, when there are limited classroom seats (let’s say) discriminating in favor of one group—whether by race or by merit—necessarily discriminates against other groups: those not preferred.

Harvard’s claim that they need race-based affirmative action admissions is at best cynical. Were Harvard serious about improving diversity, they’d be moving to improve the quality of education in K-12 schools so that diversity would fall out of the merit of those graduates and not out of race-based selection. Harvard is silent on its actions in that milieu.

Who’s Doing the Blocking?

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Yoram Hazony has a book coming out—The Virtue of Nationalism—that he wanted to advertise on Facebook.  Fat chance.  After he accepted Facebook’s Boost Post process, he got some boosted postings of his book, and then he got

Your ad was not approved because your Page has not been authorized to run ads with political content.

Never mind that the book is a history of the rise of the nation-state and a comparison of nationalism with imperialism.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s about nationalism, and so it’s political.

Hazony wrote an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal outlining his ultimately failed effort to get Facebook to let him promote his book on that social medium. The sub-headline on that piece summarizes the problem from Hazony’s perspective:

The robots won’t let me advertise my book on nationalism

His concern is mis-aimed, though. Hazony’s book advertising is not blocked by any Facebook algorithm (“robot”); it’s being blocked by Facebook’s management team. Facebook’s algorithms only do what they’re programmed to do. Facebook’s management team employs the programmers who program the algorithms, and those programmers are only doing what their bosses have employed them to do.

Facebook’s censorship is the direct result of instructions from Zuckerberg and his senior management team members.