Disingenuous TikTok Arguments

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The law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok entirely or have TikTok banned from the US is in front of the DC Circuit Court, and there are at least two arguments that TikTok is making that are…misleading.

The first is this one:

Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.

No speech is being silenced. Only a particular outlet—TikTok—used by the People’s Republic of China intelligence community is being acted against. That outlet would remain available were ByteDance to wholly divest TikTok, which ByteDance and the PRC, on their own initiative, refuse to do. There also are a plethora of speech pathways for precisely the same speech desires besides TikTok. ByteDance’s/PRC’s decision to let TikTok be closed will have no impact on speech.

The second is this one:

Our constitutional tradition leaves no room for the government to stop Petitioners from expressing their ideas through the editor and publisher they have chosen. The government could no more prohibit a freelance journalist from publishing in a magazine of her choice; forbid an actor from working with a particular director; or tell a musician what studio he can record in.

Of course, no one is making any prohibition of this. The decision to leave TikTok available to the freelancer (or any other journalist), the actor, or the musician is entirely in the hands of ByteDance and the PRC government. It’s their decision to refuse to let TikTok be divested that would deny access to TikTok.

“Will No One Rid Us of this Troublesome Candidate?”

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If you see Republicans/Conservatives in a restaurant, do not give them a moment’s peace. Come up in their faces.

Running Conservative politicians out of restaurants.

Extremist MAGA.

Extremist Republicans.

Republicans are semi-fascists.

Murder attempts against Republican Congressmen practicing baseball.

Overt threats against originalist/textualist Supreme Court Justices.

Murder attempts against Supreme Court Justices.

Overt lies about the troublesome candidate—e.g., would sign nationwide abortion ban, would cut Medicare.

Manufactured desire to put blacks back in chains.

Openly false fact “checking.”

He’s a threat to democracy.

The list of these lies and smears and assault-encouraging rhetoric by Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, by the press, by the Left in general goes on and on.

The deliberate attempt to divide Americans from each other and to pit Americans against each other began in earnest with ex-President Barack Obama (D) and his openly expressed contempt for flyover country Americans, and it has been exploded by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris with their extremist MAGA distortions and abortion lies.

And now we have the second assassination attempt of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

A second attempt that comes against the background of President Biden and his DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ refusal to increase Trump’s Secret Service security after the first attempt.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ carefully divisive and inflammatory rhetoric has wrought. And will continue to wreak.

These two attempts to murder a political rival, even if they’re only attempts to murder a politician who happens to be a political rival, are reason enough to elect Trump. It’s time to demonstrate to the Left that they cannot dictate to us average Americans who our political candidates will be, much less who we will elect to represent us.

Fed Rate Cut

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The Federal Reserve is at a fork in the road, and a great American philosopher once said that, having arrived at one, it’s necessary to take it. Unfortunately, the Fed is at the wrong fork, so no matter what it does, it’ll be in the longer term counterproductive, even if it’ll near-term benefit stock or bond traders, depending on which fork it takes.

The fork: cut rates tomorrow by a quarter point or a half. Greg Ip favors the latter, without recognizing where the Fed, or he, is.

The case for a bigger cut starts by examining why the Fed’s short-term rate target is now 5.25% to 5.5%, the highest since 2001. The Fed pushed it there last summer because underlying inflation was well above 3% and, with the labor market overheated, the Fed was afraid it would get stuck there. It was willing to cause a recession to prevent that.
Fast forward to today, and some key underlying measures of inflation are below 3%, some within range of the Fed’s 2% target. The labor market is cool, if not actually cold. A recession now serves no useful purpose.

The Fed’s rationalization for boosting its benchmark to 5.25% to 5.5% ignores the fact that ever since the dotcom panic and especially the Panic of 2008, the Fed has artificially suppressed interest rates—all the way to nearly 0% after the Panic, only allowing them to rise slightly off that low. It’s been only in the last couple of years that the Fed has raised its benchmark to its current level. For all of those 20+ years, including the last couple, the Fed has ignored market forces regarding the cost of money (interest rates lenders charge businesses in the latter’s quest for operating capital and capital for other uses) and continued to try to manipulate those forces.

That’s entirely appropriate when our economy is in extremis, as it was immediately after the dotcom bust and again in late 2008 through early 2009. After those two brief periods, though, with those suppressed interest rates, our economy was denied its normal rapid recoveries, with declining real wages, slow growth, and high unemployment that only slowly recovered to pre-Panic (much less to pre-Wuhan Virus Situation) levels. Those re-Wuhan Virus Situation levels, in fact, were the first time our economy was growing soundly, with increasing real wages, even a narrowing wealth gap, since that prior bust.

The fork the Fed should be taking is the decision whether to lower its benchmark rates at all or to stand pat.

With the Fed saying that its target inflation rate is nearly reached (I argue that the difference between current inflation and those 2% is just the noise of normal market fluctuation), it’s time for the Fed to say further that it’s going to leave its benchmarks in their current 5.25%-5.5% range, that it’s going to leave its benchmarks there for the foreseeable future, and that it’s then going to sit down and be quiet.

The current benchmark levels are historically consistent with 2% inflation, albeit it’s a noisy relationship. That noisiness, though, is the normal operation of an open and free market, and it’s time for this instrument of the Federal government to get out of the way of our open and free market. Inflation will bounce around in a range, and interest rates, if left alone, will bounce around commensurately as the two, along with other forces in the market, all work to correct each other back to this rough level.

The Addiction of Government Handouts

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It’s not the handout recipients who are addicted that are the problem, although their addiction is tragic in its own right. It’s the government men and women who are addicted to giving handouts who are the problem. The former are individual problems, even though those problems aggregate. Government men and women, though, are inflicting their nation-level addiction on the nations over which they reign, and their addiction is a national security threat approaching existential as they render their nations helpless against aggressor nations. That is immoral enough, as those government betray the same people they’re charged with protecting.

The immorality extends, though, when it comes to Europe’s NATO member nations. European NATO governments provide canonical examples of both immoralities.

When the Cold War ended, European governments slashed their military budgets and spent a windfall of several trillion dollars on social programs—a popular policy with voters when Europe faced few external threats and enjoyed the security protection of the US.
Now, European nations are finding it difficult to give up those peacetime benefits, even as the war in Ukraine has revived Cold War-era tensions and the US tries to shift its focus to China. Most are failing to get their armies in fighting shape.

The German army, in particular has been shrunk to a paltry 180,000 men and women, a large fraction of whom are in non-combat jobs, and not even combat-supporting jobs at that. The German army has only a couple hundred tanks, a large fraction of which are not operational. The army, by Government politician conscious decision, is not capable of defending itself, even as it trickles out arms to Ukraine. The decision to not defend gets worse [emphasis added].

During negotiations for Germany’s 2025 budget earlier this year, Finance Minister Christian Lindner wanted to free up money for defense by freezing social spending for three years—letting it lag inflation. The move was rebuffed by other parties in the governing coalition…. Spending on military aid for Ukraine was cut to €4 billion, about half this year’s level.
What the coalition parties did agree on was a €108-a-year increase over two years in Kindergeld—an annual €3,000 payment per child to all families, regardless of income. Today, that benefit alone, payable for offspring up to age 25, costs more than €50 billion a year, as much as Berlin’s annual Defense Ministry budget.

Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck articulated very clearly the addiction and its immorality, although he didn’t recognize it.

The idea—we are dismantling the welfare state because we need more money for the military—I would find fatal.
Social spending is necessary to keep the country together.

Leave aside the foolishness of that claimed threat of dissolution from any lack of socialism. Even such a one as Habeck can recognize that an intact nation that has been conquered and occupied through its government’s refusal to defend that nation has been functionally dissolved.

The lesson: it was easy to swap guns for butter; reversing the trend is far more challenging.

Any rational person—even a government politician—knows it’s far easier to get addicted than it is to break the addiction.

Nor is Germany alone in these immoralities. Here are just a few of the one-third of NATO members whose government men have chosen not to enable their nations to defend themselves or to come to the aid of their fellow members.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has refused to put a date on [any increase in defense spending relative to GDP]. Military spending in Italy and Spain, meanwhile, sits under 1.5%.

The immoralities and the betrayals are done deliberately, as these men and women refuse even to try to curb, much less to control, their addiction.

The immorality extends one more time: those government men still refuse to prepare their governments and to enable their defense establishments to defend the nations over which they rule, and with that failure, they betray their fellow NATO members by rendering themselves incapable of aiding their fellows against an invasion. Instead, they create their nations as dependent on the treasure, and especially the blood, of their fellows should they be the target of attack.

These conscious and continuing moral betrayals by NATO member nations render NATO a waste of American money, and blood.

That’s the price of addiction—it even prevents those responsible for it from resisting it.

At What Cost?

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The headline and subheadline say it all:

Ignore the Defeatists. America’s Strategy Is Working in Ukraine.
Kyiv remains far from victory, but the US is achieving its primary goal: containing the spread of Russian power

The strategy of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Number Two, Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, vis-à-vis Ukraine, far from working, is an utter failure and wholly immoral. This so-called strategy is not one of helping Ukraine win its fight for survival against Russia’s barbaric invasion; rather, it’s one of keeping Ukraine from losing its fight.

The news writer’s lede:

As summer turns to fall, the news from Ukraine has been harrowing. Across the country, Russia has been attacking civilian targets, destroying residential buildings, schools, and hospitals. Russia has been steadily degrading Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, ensuring that Ukrainians have a very hard winter ahead of them. In the next few months, fresh waves of Ukrainian refugees could well be pouring into Europe.

By slow-walking delivery of most of the weapons Ukraine needs at the rate at which it needs them, by limiting the targets against which Ukraine is permitted to use our…largesse…and by withholding outright many other of the weapons Ukraine needs, all the Biden-Harris administration is doing is keeping the AFU in the field steadily bleeding, soldiers being maimed or killed outright, Ukrainian civilians, women, and children being explicitly targeted by the barbarian—and keeping the barbarian’s war continuing.

On top of that, this slow-walk and withhold only runs up our own costs in dollars and equipment, and that is leading to increasing disgruntlement among Congressional politicians with their concerns about what we’re actually getting for our money and equipment, and their concerns about whether we should continue those costs—even at the expense of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and to survive the barbarian’s invasion.

Containing the spread of Russian power? I wonder what impact on Russian power an outright Ukrainian victory would have.