Monthly Archives: August 2014

A Trade War

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Russia has announced that it won’t buy certain goods from certain of the nations that are sanctioning Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and its fomenting of rebellion in eastern Ukraine. This is a trade war that Russia shouldn’t be expected to win.

For one thing, Russia’s economy is the size of Italy’s and more moribund, so any trade war can only hurt Russia relatively more than it can hurt the far larger economies of the US, the EU, Australia, Canada, even Norway, who are the targets of the Russian boycott.

For another thing, here are some facts related to this boycott.

[Russia has] banned imports of meat, fish, milk and milk products, and fruit and vegetables….  The ban has been introduced for one year

[Russia] may also introduce restrictions regarding imports of planes, navy vessels, and cars…

And

Russia depends heavily on imported foodstuffs—most of it from the West—particularly in the largest and most prosperous cities such as Moscow, where imported food fills an estimated 60-70% of the market. Food and agricultural imports from the US amounted to $1.3 billion last year, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and in 2013 the EU’s agricultural exports to Russia totaled €11.8 billion ($15.8 billion). [This is against GDPs of $17.3 trillion and €13.1 trillion for the US and the EU and ₱75.8 trillion ($2.1 trillion) for Russia.]

A year, though, is plenty of time for the banned sellers to find new markets, which reduces the long-term need to sell to Russia at all. This, in turn, produces a capacity functionally to embargo Russia with respect to those goods—not by explicitly and legally refusing to sell to Russia, but by voluntarily and economically selling elsewhere instead.

A year also is plenty of time for Russia to find other sellers: Latin America, Turkey, other ex-Soviet nations, and so on. Russians won’t starve. However, the reason these other sources aren’t current suppliers is because the boycotted nations can sell into Russia at lower prices than those alternatives. These alternative sellers will, almost necessarily then, cause higher prices in Russian stores.

Ukraine, Russia, and the US

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Matthew Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, had some thoughts on this during a live interview on Fox News, and repeated in Fox’ online feed. These remarks were made in the context of a warning that Russia will use the Russian surrogates’/Ukrainian separatists’ situation as a pretext to invade Ukraine to resolve a cynically made-up “humanitarian crisis.”

We don’t want a war. We cannot win a war against Russia. You know, this is not Al Qaeda. This is not the government of Saddam Hussein. This is the Russian Federation, the inheritors of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. We cannot get dragged into this war. But by the same token, the Ukrainians can’t win it by themselves.

If we keep going with sanctions, it’s a dead-end process. We can continue to do it for moral reasons to show that we’re doing something, but we’ve also got to have an endgame negotiation that the Russians are part of.

He’s right, and he’s wrong. He’s right that we don’t want war; no sane nation does. He’s right that Ukraine can’t win their current war by themselves.

But he’s terribly wrong where it counts. Of course, we can win a war against Russia. Indeed, he implies that Ukraine can win such a war, if only they’re not alone. No, the only way we could not win would be for us to give it up before it starts—”we can’t win” is just a dangerously defeatist mindset.

It’s that mindset, too, that is contributing so heavily to Ukraine’s current strait. Russian President Vladimir Putin has the measure of President Barack Obama and of Obama’s key cabinet players, and Putin is confident he can act as he pleases and the US will make no meaningful response. Putin is confident that we’ll do something “for moral reasons to show that we’re doing something” but that something will be confined to more wrist-slap sanctions. Putin most carefully has observed the American administration’s penchant for “leading from behind,” which many people more accurately identify as leading the retreat.

Rojansky also is wrong that the endgame negotiation must be something of which the Russians are part. Certainly, it would be nice if the Russians were part, but they really have very little useful to say in the matter until they stand down from Ukraine’s eastern border; until they stop shooting at the Ukrainian army from within Russia; until they stop supplying the…separatists…with arms, artillery, SAMs, ammunition, and so on; until they withdraw from their occupation of Crimea.

No, the right answer is to ratchet up the economic pressure on Russia with real sanctions and openly and effectively helping Ukraine (and Europe) find non-Russian sources of oil, gas, and other goods, and to ratchet up the pressure on Russia by supplying Ukraine with arms and ammunition.

And to openly and publicly recognize that the Russian nuclear threat has only the credence we choose to give it. If we’re not threatened by it, it is no threat. It is no threat because Russia does not want a war with us, either, and especially, Russia will not go nuclear over eastern Ukraine.

Update: Corrected the second paragraph, beginning “If we keep going with sanctions…,” to indicate it was part of Rojansky’s remarks, and not part of my writing.  I apologize for the error.

Freely Traveling and Peaceable Assembly

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The US government offers no adequate method for people to challenge their placement on its no-fly list, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a case involving 13 Muslims who believe they’re on the list.

US District Court Judge Anna Brown found people lack a meaningful way to challenge their placement on the list, which bars them from flying to or within the United States. She also said the 13 people who sued the government have been unconstitutionally deprived of their right to fly.

The Federal government’s no-fly list is treated as secret, and it’s through this list that the Federal government determines who is barred from flying from or to US airports.

Brown earlier had ruled people had a constitutional right to travel and via this list, the Federal government had violated that right.

How do I get from this to peaceable assembly? These 13 innocents, by their placement—against their will—in company with terrorists who are on the no-fly list is one path. The government’s denial of their right, through denying them a pathway, to protest against that association and be removed from it is another. Preventing these 13 from traveling via a transportation of their choice—and so of associating themselves with travelers of their choice (strangers they may be, but still fellow air travelers)—is a third path.

Entitlements and Taxes

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Dr Ben Carson had a couple thoughts a while ago; they’re still valid.

On taxes:

What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe.

We don’t necessarily have to do 10% but it’s the principle. He didn’t say if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithe, or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you’ve got to get rid of the loopholes.

On health care:

Here’s my solution: when a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed—pretax—from the time you’re born ’til the time you die. If you die, you can pass it on to your family members, and there’s nobody talking about death panels. We can make contributions for people who are indigent. Instead of sending all this money to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care. And very quickly they’re going to learn how to be responsible.

The only place I disagree with him is on the degree of heritability of the HSA. Given the slowness of growth of the relevant supply (of health-related services) compared with the rapidity of growth of its demand, accumulating wealth in an HSA would over just a couple of generations create too much money earmarked for health services; this money would rapidly increase health services prices. And that would price those just starting out—newborns, new immigrants, and so on—out of the health services market, just as the present system and its immediate precursor have done. Instead, let the dearly departed’s remaining HSA be passed into his estate as an ordinary asset of the estate, and let each new entrant—those newborns, new immigrants, and so on—start their own HSAs anew.

Nonetheless, The Wall Street Journal titled their article about these thoughts “Ben Carson for President.” We could do worse.

Obama Is Legally Allowed to Enforce—or Not Enforce—the Law

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Amazingly, a professor at the University of Chicago’s law school wrote this in the New Republic, and he’s serious. Yet he cites not a single clause from the Constitution, not a single phrase, to support his…thesis.

Eric Posner wrote, among other things,

Would President Barack Obama, by refusing to enforce the immigration laws against millions of undocumented immigrants, be engaging in “domestic Caesarism,” as Ross Douthat charges [in a New York Times op-ed]?

…if he chooses not to enforce immigration laws against “up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants,” as Douthat claims, the president wouldn’t be doing anything different from what his predecessors have done (or rather, not done).

There’s that Progressive morality, again. The rightness or wrongness of a behavior isn’t at all inherent in the behavior. No, the behavior’s morality is determined solely by whether someone else did it first or is doing it also.

And

The president cannot suspend or change the law: when he leaves office, the law will remain the same as it was, and the next president will be free to enforce it or not.

No, no president, nor Obama nor any “next president,” is free to not enforce the law (nor has any past president been, although past ones have been guilty of this, also; Posner is right on this much). Here’s what Article II, Section 3, has to say on the matter:

he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed

Full stop. There’s nothing in there about taking Care if he feels like it or taking Care not to faithfully execute.

And

The executive branch spends a lot of time not enforcing laws. Congress has illegalized an enormous amount of activity without giving the president the resources to enforce the laws, so the executive has no choice but to make a list of priorities and devote its attention to law violations that, in its opinion, are the most serious.

with

Nearly all of this non-enforcement takes place with implicit congressional acquiescence….

This merely means Congress may be failing its tasks, too (“may be:” Congress has no obligation to allocate money to be spent in amounts a president might demand. A case can be made, in fact, that Congress allocates too much as it is); it in no way legitimizes Presidential lawlessness. Certainly, a lack of resources does increase the difficulty for a President. However, the difficulty in no way legitimizes choosing not to enforce.

This is, also, a straw man. This President also chooses not to enforce laws for which he has the resources: the Business Mandate and the Individual Mandate of the ACA; border security; delivery of subpoenaed documents to the Congress that subpoenaed them, including Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS; refusing to comply with Congressional oversight; the list runs on.

Then there’s this:

People like Douthat wrongly think that separation of powers means that the president must do what Congress decides. That’s not the principle of separation of powers….

This is another straw man. The Constitution gave the President executive power for the purpose, among others, to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, not to choose among them to enforce only those convenient to him. In this guise, the President must, indeed, do what Congress decides: he must enforce the laws that they pass—and that become actual law when he signs the bill and thereby enacts it, or when they pass it again, over his veto. To do otherwise is the principle of Executive supremacy, embodied in monarchies like an earlier Britain’s, against which we rebelled some years ago.

And this:

If Congress cannot pass any laws because of gridlock, then it has violated its obligations under the Constitution, and accordingly the president has the right to use his enforcement powers to implement policies that serve the public interest.

Of course, a President has no such right. There’s that pesky Art II, Sect 3 clause, after all, which also contains no syllable of authorization for a President to create “law” on which he might then presume to act. Further, in the entirety of that second Article of our Constitution, there’s no such “right,” or power, or authority identified.

Above all that, the President has no authority to decide what “policies…serve the public interest.” That’s the province of We the People, who are the public, and we make those determinations through our elected representatives in the Congress.

Posner’s piece goes on, but you get the idea.