Monthly Archives: December 2020

Student Loans

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A letter writer in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section had a thought.

There are some degrees that are worth borrowing money for, but many aren’t. Parents and students, do your homework.

Indeed. Lenders need to do their due diligence homework much more diligently, too. Two ways to incentivize (to coin a term) the lenders: get Government out of the business of making student loans and out of the business of guaranteeing others’ loans to students.

The other way is to require the school being borrowed for to attend to be the primary lender—ideally, the sole lender.

Joe Biden’s Defense Policy

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In the context of commenting on Biden’s selection of retired Army General Lloyd Austin to be his Secretary of Defense should he become President, James Carafano wondered what Biden’s defense policy actually would be.

We know very little about what kind of defense policy a Biden presidency will deliver. The issue hardly came up on the presidential campaign trail. … The nomination of Austin doesn’t give us much of an answer.

I disagree. I think we’re pretty clear on what Biden’s defense policy will be.

This is the man who opposed the killing of bin Laden.

This is the man who decried the killing of Soleimani.

This is the man who wants to rejoin the Iranian nuclear weapons development deal.

This is the man who wants to rejoin the Paris Climate business, a business that will do grave damage to our economy while explicitly favoring the People’s Republic of China economy.

This is the man who insists the PRC is no competition, is “not a patch on our jeans,” whose Government and Party personnel “are not bad folks, folks.”

The Biden defense policy will be one of abject appeasement and a continuation of Obama’s retreat.

Why Great Britain Must Fully Separate

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…itself from the European Union.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel…stressed that the EU would not compromise on its core principles.

Neither should they. On the other hand, Great Britain cannot compromise on its core principles.

While both sides want a deal, they have fundamentally different views of what it entails. The EU fears Britain will slash social and environmental standards and pump state money into UK industries, becoming a low-regulation economic rival on the bloc’s doorstep….

On the other hand,

The UK government sees Brexit as about sovereignty and “taking back control” of the country’s laws, borders, and waters. It claims the EU is making demands it has not placed on other non-EU countries and is trying to bind Britain to the bloc’s rules indefinitely.

Great Britain and the EU are talking past each other on post-Brexit trade arrangements, and this is borne of fundamental principles that are intrinsically incompatible with each other. That conflict demonstrates pretty conclusively why Great Britain had to leave the European Union, which the nation has already done, and why a no-deal exit at the end of this month is best for Great Britain.

The People’s Republic of China and Private Economies

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The government of the People’s Republic of China does not trust the people over whom it reigns. This is illustrated by its broad distrust of those folks’ private enterprise.

Xi Jinping, long distrustful of the private sector, is moving assertively to bring it to heel.

And

The government is installing more Communist Party officials inside private firms, starving some of credit and demanding executives tailor their businesses to achieve state goals.

And

The push is driven by a deepening conviction within the country’s leadership that markets and private entrepreneurs, while important to China’s rise, are unpredictable and not to be fully trusted.

Bringing the PRC into the World Trade Organization, engaging with the nation economically—even helping the nation economically—in order to enhance freedom and prosperity for the ordinary folks of the PRC was worth the try those 50 years, more or less, ago.

It’s clear now, though, and it’s been clear for some decades, that the government men of the PRC have no intention of enhancing that freedom of prosperity. Those men intend only to enhance their power domestically, to dominate neighboring nations, and to set the global world order, replacing not just us, but the West altogether.

Yet this is the PRC that Joe Biden wants us to cozy up to.

A Misunderstanding

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This time by Europe’s nations. The annual China-EU CEO and Former Senior Officials Dialogue is a secretive congregation of 40 chief executives, top officials, and academics from Europe and the People’s Republic of China, and it was quietly canceled last month. Europe’s organizers rejected the PRC’s attempts to ban from attending anyone who dared criticize the PRC.

So far, so good.

The misunderstanding is this:

…difficult balance Europe is trying to strike between safeguarding business interests and upholding democratic values….

Those aren’t opposing interests that must be “balanced”—traded off one against the other—in order to achieve some sort of supposed optimum. They are synergistic interests, each of which potentiates the other.

But they’re far more than that, too. Each is a Critical Item for the other; if either doesn’t exist, the other cannot exist.

Democratic values provide the necessary economic framework for enhancing business interests. It is those democratic values that are at the core of liberty, in this context particularly of private property rights. John Adams recognized private property ownership as necessary for individual safety, security, and happiness. Adam Smith wrote roughly contemporaneously of the necessary role private property holds in achieving national prosperity. Hernando De Soto wrote of the criticality of private property rights to individual liberty and to the prosperity of the nations in which free peoples reside. Absent these values, the only interests that get enhanced are those of a few oligarchs and those populating the government reigning over that economy.

Business interests from within that economic framework feed back into those democratic values by increasing the economic prosperity not only of business owners, but of business’ employees and of the nations’ consumers (keep in mind, too, that employees are themselves consumers). It’s a direct feedback loop: all parties to a voluntary exchange—a business interest as carried out within that democratic framework—are made better off than they were before the exchange since each gains something of value to him that he did not have before. This applies for business-business exchanges, business-employee exchanges, business-consumer exchanges.

The feedback loop is an extended one, also. As businesses produces what consumers want, more gets consumed, which produces funds for more production, more hiring, more innovation, more of what consumers want—and greater prosperity for all participants however indirectly they participate. And, as Adams recognized, that greater prosperity enhances individual freedoms.

Europe’s prosperity—and its freedom in the face of aggressively acquisitive nations like the PRC and Russia—depends on those nations clarifying their misunderstanding.