Author Archives: eehines

Prop Up That Industry

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants more government pressure on support for battery cars, their manufacture, and their sale to an uninterested public.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for the introduction of Europe-wide measures to increase uptake of electric vehicles, in a speech at Ford Motor Corp’s factory in Cologne, just weeks after the US car maker outlined plans to lay off 4,000 of its European workers.
In the speech at Ford’s EV factory on Tuesday, Scholz argued Germany should work to facilitate the “leap forward” towards “electromobility” by providing “support” for the country’s car industry, including by subsidizing energy costs for EV battery makers.

And this bit of contradiction:

Scholz said the support for the car industry should also aim to protect worker’s jobs….

He can’t have it both ways, except through government-mandated featherbedding. It takes fewer workers to build an electric motor and a battery car than it does an ICE motor and an ICE-powered car. It takes fewer suppliers to supply fewer parts, and fewer employees at each supplier, to provide the simpler components of a battery car than the more complex components of an ICE car.

The ripples go on from there: secondarily, all those mom-and-pop stores—diners, grocery stores, bars, entertainment venues, and so on—will get fewer customers from those smaller work forces at the EV factories and supplier plants, resulting in fewer mom-and-pops and fewer employees in surviving mom-and-pops.

No. If the battery car industry still needs overt government fiscal subsidies and mandates aimed at pressuring consumers to spend their own money on even subsidized battery cars, those vehicles and that industry aren’t ready for operation.

The only legitimate support for battery cars is the consumers’ interest in buying them in a free, competitive market shorn of government pressures. That interest isn’t yet there.

Rifles and the 2nd Amendment

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday editorial, AR-15 Rifles and the Constitution, is centered on the potential for the Supreme Court to take up the question of whether AR-15s, and semi-automatic rifles in general, are protected by the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution. My commentary here is centered on Judge Harvie Wilkinson III, who wrote the 4th Circuit’s en banc opinion upholding a Maryland law that bans the sale and possession of “assault weapons.” He wrote that such rifles

fall outside the ambit of protection offered by the Second Amendment because, in essence, they are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense.

He’s both factually wrong on this, and he, like activist judges before and alongside him, distort the 2nd Amendment’s protections to reinterpret that Amendment to say what he wants it to say rather than what it actually says. Here’s the actual text of the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Wilkinson’s factual error: AR-15s and the like are not at all military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations. They were developed around the same time as the Army’s then-new M-16, but the latter was designed for full automatic use, whereas the AR-15s of the industry were designed explicitly for civilian use in civilian environments and are wholly incapable of (full) automatic operation. They require a brand new, subsequent, trigger pull in order to fire a second round—it’s a new trigger pull for each individual round that’s fired. The only automation in the sequence is the same as with any other semi-automatic firearm (pistols, for instance): it automatically chambers the next round.

Now for Wilkinson’s cynical redefinition reinterpretation of what the Amendment says. The amendment says in so many words—and in only those words—the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. There is not a syllable in that bar, not the veriest minim of a pen stroke, that gives the government any authority at all to say what our needs are in our keeping and bearing Arms. Wilkinson’s writing is nothing more than a power grab for government and an attempt to amend our Constitution from the bench by an activist judge.

But Wilkinson wasn’t done.

Compared to a handgun, the AR-15 is heavier, longer, harder to maneuver in tight quarters, less readily accessible in an emergency, and more difficult to operate with one hand[.]

This is wholly irrelevant and only cynically offered in his effort to rewrite our 2nd Amendment from his august bench. To repeat: Wilkinson, nor any other judge, has any authority to tell us what our needs are and to presume to limit us to those judge-manufactured needs.

On the other hand, Wilkinson’s entire argument in that last is an argument for legal keeping and bearing Uzis and machine pistols: those weapons are most assuredly lighter, shorter, easer to maneuver in tight quarters, more readily accessible in an emergency, and easier to operate with one hand than those judge-hated rifles.

This is an appellate decision that badly needs reversal by the Supreme Court and a stern admonition by that Court for judges who persist in entertaining such quibbles and outright distortions of our Constitution.

Irrelevant

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Or it should be. Biden administration folks, on the way out the door, are jumping to employment at the special interest groups and lobbyists who influenced their decisions while they were in office, and they’re doing it at a higher rate than prior administrations. For instance:

Even though Trump has vowed to roll back the Biden-Harris administration’s climate agenda, these relationships will be maintained and could be strengthened as former federal employees under the current administration go to work for climate groups that will continue to lobby the agencies in support of the activists’ preferred policies.

Not necessarily.

If the incoming Trump administration personnel are true to the terms of their selection for nomination, and if the kitchen cabinet DOGE group, with their goal of reducing the size of the Federal government work force (among other goals), has sufficient influence in Congress, those lobbyists and special interest groups should have little influence, especially with fewer bureaucrats available to be…lobbied…and so easier to keep under control by their government bosses.

In an ideal operation, they should be irrelevant altogether. Especially, they should be ignored if they’re employing ex-Biden administration officials, given those worthies’ utterly failed, damaging even, policies.

A Bad Ruling

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US District Judge Richard Bennett (Maryland District) ruled that the US Naval Academy can continue to use race as a “factor” in its admission decisions. Never mind that the Supreme Court recognized in its Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard decision that using race in determining admission fitness is intrinsically racist.

This is a terrible ruling on two counts (at least). One is Bennet’s decision to ignore the Supreme Court’s rescission of Chevron Deference as a factor in assessing the legitimacy of a regulation or, by extension, a law. Bennett, in his ruling, chose to ignore the Supreme Court’s rulings in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless v Department of Commerce, the two cases the eliminated Chevron Defense as a court decision criterion. Bennett deliberately chose to apply the Chevron technique to his USNA ruling. He closed his ruling with this:

In short, this Court defers to the executive branch with respect to military personnel decisions. Specifically, as noted by Justice Kavanaugh in Austin v United States Navy Seals, “the President of the United States, not any federal judge” ultimately makes such decisions.

Bennett chose to elide in that cite that Austin predates Loper and Relentless, and so any deference aspect of Austin is overridden by them. At least as tellingly, Bennett chose not to disclose that Kavanaugh was writing in the Court’s decision to stay the case pending a lower court’s decision and, more directly to the present matter, that Austin concerned the Navy’s decision to mandate vaccination against the Covid-19 virus; it was wholly irrelevant to any question of the place of race in getting into the Seals (or the Navy or any of the Navy’s training institutions) in the first place.

That’s the technical part of this bad ruling. Bennett also wrote this:

The US Naval Academy is distinct from a civilian university. … During the admissions procedure, which is distinct from that of a civilian university, race or ethnicity may be one of several non-determinative factors considered.

More briefly treated by me, but far more important because it’s on the merits of the matter, is the question of racism in our government institutions. Racism is racism regardless of where it is practiced. That it’s done by our military academies in no way legitimizes it; on the contrary, it deprecates those academies and their ability to train the officers who will lead our men and women in combat. Bennett’s ruling is every bit as racist on this side of the question as was then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D) decision to refuse to integrate our military on the other side. Race must be wholly irrelevant in admissions (and everywhere else), neither emphasized in order to block nor emphasized in order to push forward.

This is a ruling that badly wants overruling on appeal.

Go Ahead On

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A person asked MarketWatch whether it would be all right to wear a MAGA hat to work, given that some coworkers had worn Kamala pins to work. Quentin Fottrell’s response was weak. He began with this:

You may be seeking likeminded coworkers, but you could end up creating division instead.

Not at all. Any division associated with wearing the hat or those Kamala pins is “created” solely by the political hysterics who manufacture objection to anything they don’t personally approve.

Then he added this, after a long dissertation on matters only tangentially related:

For you, a MAGA hat could mean more secure borders, but to someone on the opposite end of the political spectrum, it could represent an anti-immigration stance. Similarly, for you it may represent Trump’s survival after he was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, but to a coworker it could bring to mind that the president-elect is, whether you agree with the verdict or not, a convicted felon.

That’s Fottrell’s—and those “others'”—dependence on the Left’s Newspeak Dictionary definition, and his projection of that definition onto the questioner. The actual definition, from American English dictionaries is simply Make America Great Again. Despite Fottrell’s claim, the hat and the slogan mean only support for Trump and for America, neither more nor less. Characterizations of Trump based on that, it bears repeating, are merely figments of the imaginations of political hysterics.

Then Fottrell closed with this:

Don’t jeopardize your paycheck or workplace harmony. You would miss either one after it’s gone.

The former, maybe, if there are actual employer repercussions, which would be illegal, whether or not resisted. Fottrell misunderstood the latter though: the existence of the question demonstrates that the harmony already is absent.

The questioner should go ahead on and wear the hat. On the other hand, it’s foolish to be provocative for provocation’s sake. Maybe the questioner could stick to Trump-supporting jewelry on a scale similar to those Kamala pins or use a Trump-supporting coffee mug.