Daily Archives: 15 July 2015

Nuclear Weapons Deal Agreed

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President Barack Obama and his lesser foreign policy wonk, John Kerry, have agreed that Iran can have nuclear weapons and the missile delivery systems to carry them.

This is from Omri Ceren, via Power Line:

The Iranian nuclear program will be placed under international sponsorship for R&D

Sort of: “a major power” will work with Iran to develop next-generation centrifuge technology, ostensibly merely for production of useful isotopes of various elements. Never mind that “isotope production” other than bombarding atoms with neutrons is exactly what is done to enriching uranium.

The sanctions regime will be shredded

Completely. The sanctions to be lifted are limited to sanctions against the Iranian nuclear weapons program. However, this better policy wonk than his policy wonks has agreed that all sanctions currently in place against Iran are to be defined as part of the “anti-nuclear weapons program” sanctions régime. Thus, sanctions on Iran for terrorism, human rights abuses, “conventional” weapons, and ballistic missiles will be lifted. This one is especially well done by Obama.

The US collapsed on anytime-anywhere inspections

Completely. The IAEA gets to ask, “Pretty please,” the Iranians get to say, “No,” and the whole thing goes to arbitration. With Iran as an arbitration panel member. With no deadline, no maximum time frame within which the question must be arbitrated.

Under this deal in our time, Iran gets to traffic in conventional arms, legally, in five years, and it gets to build/acquire ballistic missiles, legally, in eight years.

Iran’s legal path to nuclear weapons is wide open. Actually, that path is a multiplicity of multi-lane highways.

Obama, with a straight face, proclaims his pride in this failure. What a legacy he’s built.

A Misunderstanding

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Or a non sequitur. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial was headlined thusly: Should There Be a Tax on Soda and Other Sugary Drinks? The subhead had this: Supporters say it is an effective way to cut obesity. Critics say the health benefits are far less than claimed.

The piece then proceeded to a debate between Kelly Brownell, Dean and Robert L Flowers Professor of Public Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and William Shughart II, J Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice at Utah State University’s Jon M Huntsman School of Business, among other titles.

Both entirely missed fundamental point. The answer to the headline question can only be a resounding “No.” The debate was a waste of bandwidth and of newsprint and ink because it doesn’t matter whether taxing sodas is an effective way of curbing obesity.

As James Madison once said in the Third Congress about a related subject,

Mr Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity. He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

Charity of one sort, or charity of another sort, or simply the Federal government presuming to pressure us toward government’s definition of society, it’s all the same. And so it is with taxing as well as spending. Our tax code, in no way shape or form, should be used to conduct social engineering. Full stop.