Monthly Archives: May 2020

A Post-Wuhan Virus Situation Supply Chain Environment

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The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based news outlet, has a five-part series in progress regarding outcomes potentially stemming from the current situation. My comments here concern remarks from the SCMP‘s third part.

Consensus is growing in Beijing that the coronavirus pandemic is set to make the world more hostile towards China, undermining the accommodating international environment that underpinned the country’s spectacular rise from a closed communist backwater into a global economic powerhouse.

With considerable justification, given the PRC’s steady drumbeat of coverup, lies, and subsequent shipment of dangerously shoddy masks and Wuhan Virus testing kits.

Aside from that, the PRC’s “spectacular rise” more accurately has been from a closed communist backwater into a closed communist global economic powerhouse.

There’s this, too:

Beijing’s pledge that China will remain investor-friendly and open its market further to foreign businesses.

This pledge is another broken commitment. The PRC has never been investor friendly.

The PRC government continues to require foreign businesses to take domestic companies as partners, for all that the domestics’ “participation” is no longer required to be a controlling interest. Such partnerships remain required, and the foreign company remains required to share critical technologies and intellectual properties with those partners. Given that PRC law requires all domestic businesses to cooperate with the government’s intelligence collecting agencies, that means those foreign companies still will be…sharing…their technologies and intellectual properties with the PRC government.

In the end, the necessary realignment of the world’s value chains needs to be an alteration of those chains to remove the PRC from any participation in any step that leaves other nations dependent on PRC production for their own national or economic (which is national) security. It may, or may not, be useful to include, to an extent, PRC production or communications facilities in those chains. However, with the lack of reliability and quality of output that the folks manning the nation’s government have chosen to ship in their response to the global crisis Beijing has unleashed, such an inclusion must necessarily be sufficiently constrained that a PRC disruption cannot threaten the security or weal of other nations.

Keep in mind, too, that PRC has long history of choosing to export dangerously bad products: powdered milk adulterated with melamine, baby food preparations with…impurities, poisoned pet food, sheets of plywood made with formaldehyde that outgasses into homes to poison the occupants.

Wuhan Virus and Higher Education

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Our colleges and universities are being confronted with “hard choices” as a result of the Wuhan Virus situation.

Every source of funding is in doubt. Schools face tuition shortfalls because of unpredictable enrollment and market-driven endowment losses. Public institutions are digesting steep budget cuts, while families are questioning whether it’s worth paying for a private school if students will have to take classes online, from home.
To brace for the pain, colleges and universities are cutting spending, freezing staff salaries, and halting plans for campus building.

But in bracing for that pain, colleges and universities don’t seem to be considering their curricula. They don’t seem to be considering cutting out the fluff and froo-froo courses that have proliferated—courses like women’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies. Courses like intersectionality.

Colleges and universities don’t seem to be considering deemphasizing intercollegiate sports—most programs of which lose money and all programs of which have lost the student athlete aspect and, with NCAA approval, have codified their semi-pro athlete aspect.

Colleges and universities don’t seem to be considering focusing their instructional programs on things that will prepare their students for making their way in the real world of post graduation: skills like critical thinking, skills like doing the work the businesses in our economy need done, whether building or programming computers, building or programming or operating factory equipment, business skills associated with operating farms and businesses.

Colleges and universities are failing the challenge.

Bail Out the States?

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section had a thought about Illinois’ fiscal situation and how to resolve it.

Why a bailout? How about a low-interest loan from the Treasury with fixed payments due on specific dates?

Illinois has chosen to renege on its promises to its public pension facilities. Why would anyone with two neurons to bump together into a ganglion believe Illinois would keep any promise to repay a loan to the Feds?

Aside from that, what would be the enforcement mechanism for a welched-on fixed payment or sequence of such welches? Would Treasury send Revenooers to seize State government bank accounts? To seize physical assets and sell them at auction? Fat chance.

No, there should be bailout in any form, no Federal money at all for Illinois. The State’s government must correct its profligate spending misbehavior and honor the commitments it already has on its books. That those requirements exist in some opposition to each other is a problem of Illinois’ creation, and it’s on Illinois to fix it without other taxpayers’ money.

New Jersey Wants Federal Dollars

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But it’s not a bailout, Governor Phil Murphy (D) insists.

“I wouldn’t call it a bailout. I would just say this is a war, we’re at the front lines,” Murphy said, stressing that his state does not want federal help at this time for “legacy” budget issues that predate the pandemic.
“We know what we got to do with the old legacy stuff, we need help with the here and now: educators, police, fire, EMS, the front-line stuff.”

Of course…. To the extent that any Federal dollars should go to States, New Jersey for instance, those dollars should go directly to the educators, police, fire, EMS, the front-line stuff; they should not pass through the State government on the way.

And: to mitigate the fungibility of money, those Federal dollars should be matched by State dollars. A State government should not be able simply to reallocate the funds it would already have been sending to “the front-line stuff” to other purposes on the premise that Uncle Sugar is picking up the front-line tab.

…if we do not get significant direct and flexible financial support from the federal government, we will be forced to make many difficult decisions about programs we all rely upon and which we will lean on in the months ahead.

What decisions to make vis-à-vis excessive public pension commitments and payouts, for instance. Regarding excessive and overwrought regulations that cost tremendous amounts to enforce and tremendous amounts for businesses and individuals to satisfy, and so that divert monies from their more efficient allocations and thereby restrain economic activity and reduce revenues to the State’s government.

Difficult decisions, indeed.

Conspiracy Theorist in Chief

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That’s Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden, as he showed with this claim about President Donald Trump.

Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held[.]

That’s of a piece with his predecessor CTIC candidate, Hillary Clinton, who insisted that Trump would never concede the election when he loses to Clinton in 2016. Which she has then proceeded to do functionally, her concession speech on the morning after the election notwithstanding. Which her understudy, Stacey Abrams, still absolutely refuses to do after she lost the Georgia governor race two years ago.

There are a few things wrong with Biden’s irrationality here. For one thing, Trump has no reason to want to delay the election; he’s well satisfied—as are many political experts, and not only those on his campaign team—that he’ll win in anything from a close election to a landslide.

The Biden conspiracy, too, is demonstrably false, as any junior high schooler knows, and most grade schoolers. Trump can’t delay the election. Its date is fixed by law as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Congress would have to change the date, which is to say each house of Congress would have to agree with each other to change the date and then on the new date to be chosen. And then Congress would have to get the President to agree or to muster a veto override vote. In each house separately.

Electors, chosen by the States and the ones who actually will elect the President and Vice President, meet the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December to hold their election. That’s another date set by law and not changeable except by the above, by design slow and cumbersome, process.

Regardless of any of that, there’s no practical reason to delay the election. Our Constitution fixes a President’s term of office end as 20 January. Full stop. Pesky law provides for the succession to the presidency if the President cannot serve—which Trump could not, if he’s not reelected, which he could not be if there’s no election before that 20 January.

With conspiracy-mongering, Biden provides another demonstration of his unfitness for office.