Monthly Archives: January 2017

Linkages

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They didn’t work when Nixon and Kissinger tried it, even though the Soviet Union generally complied, because the revolutions that the USSR was fomenting continued to occur apace after the Soviets stopped fomenting in return for nuclear and economic concessions.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned ignoring recent steps by Beijing to liberalize its economy would endanger Chinese cooperation on other major geopolitical issues, particularly containing North Korea’s nuclear program.

They’re not working now with the People’s Republic of China, but for a different reason.

And

The departing Treasury secretary further warned against steps that would prompt China to withdraw its support for tougher sanctions against North Korea.

The PRC still isn’t taking steps to “liberalize its economy,” not when it’s actively interfering with its cross-border yuan flows, manipulating domestic interest rates with a view to control who gets to lend or borrow rather than an effort to maintain a stable monetary policy, manipulating its domestic stock markets as it did in 2015 and today with manipulating the legal environment, and on and on.

Nor has the PRC ever cooperated in any meaningful way with respect to sanctions connected to northern Korea’s nuclear weapons program.  The PRC routinely slow walks its agreement to sanctions (which is why their occasional prompt agreement is such news), and it ignores sanction violations as those occur across its border with northern Korea.

And—ignored by Lew—the PRC is accelerating its aggression in the East and South China Seas and increasing its pressures on the nations rimming the South China Sea to deal with them exclusively and one at a time on trade questions.

Before today’s linkages can have effect, the parties at both ends of the lever must be willing to be responsive.

Polemics vs Reasoned Argument

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As the Congress considers import taxes as part of its general tax reform agenda, toy sellers are expressing their concern: they import most of what they sell; their products are manufactured overseas.  Import taxes are surely a thing worth discussing and debating thoroughly, whether they’re essentially cost of goods sold neutral, as Doug Holtz-Eakin argues (the dollar will rise from the tax change and economic growth, and so the dollar cost of imports will fall; the cost of goods sold will simply emphasize taxes more and import costs less), or they’re dangerously like protectionist tariffs, as others argue.

Arguments that are carefully emotion-laden while devoid of facts, though, are inappropriate.  Here’s an example from Steve Pasierb, President of the Toy Industry Association:

We are fully prepared to work productively or be a royal, boisterous, media-friendly pain in the backsides of people who would take away children’s happy birthdays, steal Christmas, and destroy quality US-based jobs.  And no one wants to have to explain to their children why Santa was put out of work.

Such Leftist “feel my pain” three-hankie argument has little credibility and less validity in the sort of reasoned discourse necessary in an economic debate.

It Takes One to Know One?

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Several municipalities in New Jersey have taken to painting a blue line down the middle of their Main Streets as a show of support for their police and police departments.  The image below is an example of that.

President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama’s (D) Department of Transportation has decided to take a dim view of this move.

There are many appropriate and fitting ways to recognize service to the public that do not involve the modification of a traffic control device, which can put the road user at risk due to misinterpretation of its meaning[.]

The Democrats are projecting again.  Only they would think Americans are so dumb that we’d misunderstand a blue line, when road markings for traffic control are yellow or white.

One can hope that DoT Secretary nominee Elaine Chao will be able to correct this departmental culture.

Growing Irrelevance of the World Economic Forum

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The rising income gap and growing rifts in Western societies that led to the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote are the main global risks, according to a report by the World Economic Forum ahead of its annual forum in Davos next week.

Climate change and technological disruption were also listed as important risks in a survey of 750 law makers, business leaders and academics carried out by the WEF….

No, the rising income gap isn’t why President-Elect Donald Trump was elected, nor was it why Great Britain voted to go out from the European Union.  Quite the contrary: it was because those on the bottom and in the middle were being held down by the policies of the Know Betters and by the latter’s desperation for votes—votes bought and paid for by handouts that trap folks in the Know Betters’ welfare cages.  That that contributed to a rising income gap is only a side effect.  The bottom and middle class folks simply wanted their opportunity to get rich, too.

Climate change isn’t a risk at all; it’s a certainty.  The Earth is illuminated and warmed by the sun, the sun has been heating up for its entire four billion year existence, and it’ll continue to heat up for the next several billion years.  Global warming—which is what climatistas mean when they changed the name to and talk about “climate change”—is a pseudo-science whose sole industrial function is to transfer government funds to the “industry.”

Technological disruption is a good; it’s how progress and prosperity happen in a free market—and without a free market there is neither progress and prosperity nor any technological change at all.  It’s a risk, too, but it’s one that’s well understood by everyone who’s had a high school economics class.

And there’s this nonsense from Cecilia Reyes, Chief Risk Officer at Zurich Insurance Group, speaking at the gathering:

The momentous political changes in 2016 raised worries about the health of liberal democracy that has underpinned global prosperity[.]

No, the health of liberal democracy took a dramatic turn for the better, exemplified by the repudiation of the policies of eight years of the Obama administration and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s control over the Congress as a whole and then of the Senate.  That repudiation was broader than just a rejection of those policies, though: the real turn for the better was the repudiation of the increasingly authoritarian behavior of the Progressive-Democratic Party and of the Left in general.

No, the WEF is just getting a bit too far out of touch with the world.

Failure of Hate Laws

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The failure stems from an inability to define hate, but mostly it fails from the irrelevance of hate as anything other than a motivator for committing a crime.  Motive, though, belongs solely in the jury box during the punishment phase given a conviction of a crime; it should not be foreordained by a Government’s attempt to define the hate or by Government’s more evident attempts to discriminate among groups of Americans and single some out for favorable treatment at the expense of other groups of Americans.

That’s demonstrated by Illinois and Ohio law, which comes up from case of the four blacks who attacked a white disabled man and live streamed it on Facebook, as discussed by Eugene Volokh in his Washington Post article.  For instance,

The focus, then, isn’t on “hate.” For instance, if a thief selects a physically disabled victim simply because he thinks it’s less likely that the victim will fight back, that too is covered as a hate crime under Illinois law.

And

Similarly, the Amish beard-cutting case was prosecuted as a hate crime on the theory that the targets were chosen by fellow Amish perpetrators because of the targets’ dissenting religious beliefs within the Amish community.  …  Choosing someone for attack based on his religion would be a hate crime whether the motivation is hatred, theological disagreement, or whatever else.

You see the irrelevance of hate in such crimes, yet Government, in these instances Illinois’ and Ohio’s, arbitrarily tacks it on, just because.

As Volokh put it,

But the Illinois statute and the federal statute [another of his example laws], like most other hate-crime statutes that I’ve seen, focus on discriminatory selection, not the underlying emotion behind the selection.

Indeed.  I pick you for my crime victim because I think I’m more likely to get away with it than if I’d selected someone else or because I’ve decided (legitimately or not) that you’d done me wrong, and I was determined to get you back, and I do the crime.  But if you happen to belong to a government-favored group of Americans, my crime—completely unchanged in its nature or motivation—becomes much more serious solely because of Government’s own discrimination: it has chosen to favor your group over other American groups and so to discriminate against those other American groups.

Which also is an argument for doing away with Governments favoring, for any purpose, this or that group of Americans over other groups of Americans, which Government has decided should be disadvantaged by that favoring.  That’s hate crime by Government.