Daily Archives: 21 July 2022

“Misquote”

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US District Judge Charles Atchley, Jr, issued a preliminary injunction barring the Federal government from enforcing President Joe Biden’s (D) Executive Order and his Department of Education’s “guidance” equating sex and gender identity that

unilaterally redefin[ed] federal law to not only prohibit male-female distinctions in school sports, restrooms, and locker rooms, but also compel employers to use employees’ preferred pronouns

The Biden administration, further, is threatening to withhold “substantial federal funding” if institutions did not comply.

In his ruling, Atchley

…chided the feds for ignoring the explicit text of the Bostock decision [Bostock v Clayton County, decided in 2020] even while citing it for support, noting the majority “explicitly refused to decide” the issue of bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes under Title VII. The guidance documents “advance new interpretations” of two federal laws and “impose new legal obligations on regulated entities.”

The judge was being generous in stopping there regarding ignoring the Supreme Court’s actual ruling. Biden and Miguel Cardona, Secretary of the DoEd, knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. They easily could have been held in contempt of court for their deliberate distortion of the ruling and sanctioned accordingly.

Damping the Benefits of Globalization

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In one of the few sensible pushes members of the Biden administration is making, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, in her meetings in Seoul, Republic of Korea, pushed for the US and our friends and allies to shift away from dependency on the People’s Republic of China for supplies and instead to friend-shore the supply chain: get the supply components and raw materials either domestically or through trade with friends and allies.

Friend-shoring is about deepening relationships and diversifying our supply chains with a greater number of trusted trading partners. The purpose is to lower risks for our economy and theirs[.]

There are, of course, criticizers of such a change in emphasis.

…some economists have cautioned that such a shift could damp the benefits of globalization and lead to higher prices.

But this is to misunderstand, or to ignore, the real risks to globalization: dependency on our enemies for Critical Items in our supply chain. The PRC, for instance, already has attempted to corner the market on rare earths, and it already has attempted to use that monopoly to coerce Japan by embargoing rare earth sales and shipments to them. Russia is already restricting supplies of natural gas to Europe.

Walking away from the PRC, and Russia, and our other enemies on supply chain matters may or may not lead to higher prices; most likely, higher prices will be limited to the period of transition away from our enemies.

The higher cost, though, from continuing dependency on enemy nations is to our national security and to the uncertainty premium resulting from those enemies engaging in restricting or outright embargoing critical supply items in order to coerce.