Monthly Archives: August 2025

Land Swapping

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President Donald Trump (R) is upset with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the latter’s pointing out that he cannot, under the Ukrainian constitution, agree to any land swap with Russia, as a condition to a ceasefire or for any other reason.

On this matter, though, Trump is badly mistaken on two grounds. The first is that Zelenskyy must follow his nation’s most basic law (as well as all of its legislatively generated laws), and that forbids him from agreeing any land swap.

The other ground is at least as big an obstacle. Russia is not offering any land to swap for Ukrainian land. The barbarian is only offering—and only may be offering here—to swap some barbarian occupied land in return for being allowed to retain other barbarian occupied land. This is akin to the burglar offering to return some of the jewelry and other valuables he stole if, in return, he’s allowed to keep the rest of the jewelry and valuables he stole.

Trump should know better than this.

He’s anxious to force this deal, though, because he’s chary of all the killing that’s going on in the barbarian’s war, and he wants it to stop. Trump needs, however, to recognize that he’s dealing with a barbarian chieftain, not a civilized leader of a civilized polity. The killing won’t stop in the wake of this sort of sham deal.

The fastest way—if only because it’s the only way—for the killing to stop is for Ukraine to win this war outright and decisively, the only way that can happen is for Ukraine to succeed in driving the barbarian wholly and completely back out of Ukraine, and the only way that can happen—and it’s virtually guaranteed to happen if this criterion is met—is for the US, which is to say Trump, to stop slow-walking and instead to transfer arms and logistics of the kind the Ukrainian military say they need, in the amounts and at the pace they need them and without limits on targeting, to Ukraine. Additionally, Europe (with or without pressure from Trump to do so) needs to execute the same arms and logistics support.

The faster Ukraine wins this war, the faster the killing about which Trump is so worried will end.

Juicing 401(k)s

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President Donald Trump (R) is loosening the restrictions on what 401(k)s are allowed to contain in their investment options. His EO has directed the Labor Department, which oversees the rules governing business’ 401(k) offerings, to consider additional, non-traditional investment vehicles, things like private equity, real estate, and digital assets such as bitcoin.

Hal Scott and John Gulliver, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation President and Executive Director, respectively, argue in favor of this move on the grounds that

investment opportunities in public markets are shrinking. In 1996 there were roughly 8,000 public companies, but that number has since declined by half. Why? Because public companies are subject to increasingly burdensome disclosure obligations, compliance costs, and litigation risk, while private companies aren’t.

They’re right in the sense that overregulation by an ever more intrusive government keeps tying increasing numbers of hobbles onto our investment opportunities, and they need to be rolled back. They’re right, also, in that Trump’s EO moves to sidestep some of those regulations; although workarounds always are suboptimal. Better to eliminate the hobbles.

I say they’re right, though, on an additional ground: more opportunities for and flexibilities in investment are intrinsically good and should occupy a central place in a free market economy.

However.

These added opportunities bring with them added, and harder to measure or even to estimate, risks inherent in those opportunities, especially for retail investors. These things also are not as liquid as the more traditional 401(k) investment vehicles, and that carries its own added risk. Then, too, some of those vehicles carry added tax complexities. See Master Limited Partnerships and Real Estate Investment Trusts, for instance.

None of that is an argument for not getting into these investment vehicles, nor is any of it an argument for a nanny state to “look out for us little guys” by telling us we can’t use them. It is an argument for added caution and more careful vetting—especially by us unwashed retailers—of those opportunities before jumping onto them with both feet and our elbows, too.

Is The Left Nothing but a Bunch of Karens?

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Recall the hue and cry being raised over a good looking woman making an ad for blue jeans. It’s an emphatically one-sided hue and cry, though.

A clear majority of US voters who said they had seen the ad…according to a Napolitan News Survey. 70% said it was a typical ad, while 23% said it promoted white supremacy, and 7% were unsure.

Nobody in the middle or to the right of the middle thought anything of the ad other than it was an ad for jeans. That leaves the Left.

I’m Down with That

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George Will wants a clear and present example of the wonders of socialism, so he’s pushing for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s most prominent socialist (yes, even more so than Bernie Sanders (D, VT) to become mayor of New York City.

I want him to win. I think every 20 years or so, we need a conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism so we can crack it up again.

That works out to about once a generation, which I think overstates the need. Every three generations—every 60-ish years—I think would be about right; the grandfathers would still be around to help the grandchildren with the empirical outcomes of their own dabbling in socialism.

I agree with Will’s basic premise, though: let New Yorkers get the socialism they want. Let the outcome of that serve as an object lesson of the destructive and life-shortening nature of that ideology. New York City is large enough and nearby enough that the results will not be able to be ignored.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase HL Mencken, give New Yorkers what they want, good and hard.

Universal Basic Income

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The Leftist dream of socialism won’t die, and neither will the Leftist dream of free money, which they masquerade as universal basic income, the steady handout of taxpayer money to everyone because—well, just because. The Left doesn’t care that handing out free money—one of the more extreme aspects of socialism—doesn’t work.

The Left simply doesn’t care about making lives better for Americans, only making their own lives better. Free money, this universal basic income, is just modern day bread and circuses offered in payment for votes so the Left can keep their Progressive-Democrat politicians in power, favoring them. They hope.

The editorial at the second link lays out a number of the ways that UBS fails us all.

Here’s another path to that failure. A UBS increases overall demand for goods and services beyond what producers can supply. This is textbook inflation. Eventually, production succeeds in getting supply increased to match that increased demand, and inflation abates. However, the higher price levels resulting from that bout of inflation remain in place, which means the handed-out money doesn’t have the buying power that it was represented as having: recipients can’t buy significantly more goods and services than they could before the handouts started due to that eroded dollar.

It gets worse. One of the areas of failure that the editorial pointed out was that recipients of free money took advantage of that largesse to work less. Since there is less work being done—this is a universal basic income handout, recall; all of us get it—it would take producers commensurately longer for production to catch up to demand. This would let that inflation run longer, elevating overall price levels even higher. That, in turn, would reduce the buying power of the handed-out money even further, leaving us recipients even less well off than before the handouts began, likely worse off in absolute terms.

Leftists and their politicians, of course, know this full well. They’re hoping us average Americans are too grindingly stupid to figure out that these folks are merely buying, and playing, us for their own power gains.