Monthly Archives: May 2026

Memorial Day Celebrations

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I first posted this in 2012.  It bears repeating.

Enjoy this holiday.  Take the time to kick back, relax from the hard work you’ve been doing, and just goof off for a bit.

While you’re doing that, though, do something else, also.  Invite that veteran in your neighborhood, who came back from his service wounded or maimed, and his or her family, to your celebration.  Invite the family in your neighborhood whose veteran was killed in his or her service to your celebration.  They need the break and the relaxation and the support, also.  And they’ve earned your respect and remembrance.

To which I add this, excerpted from Alex Horton’s remarks on the significance of the day to him and his:

I hope civilians find more solace in Memorial Day than I do.  Many seem to forget why it exists in the first place, and spend the time looking for good sales or drinking beers on the back porch.  It’s a long weekend, not a period of personal reflection.  At the same time, many incorrectly thank Vets or active duty folks for their service.  While appreciated, it’s misdirected.  That’s what Veterans Day is for.  Instead, they should take some time and remember the spirit of the country and the dedication of those men and women who chose to pick up arms.  They never came home to be thanked, and only their memory remains.

h/t Spirit of America

What Error did she Acknowledge?

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In James Freeman’s Best of the Web Wednesday piece, he wrote of Seattle’s newly elected socialist mayor Katie Wilson’s supposed acknowledgment of her problem vis-à-vis her disdain for big business in a competitive market. In her series of victory laps shortly after her election, she crowed while at a barista union rally,

I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either.

With the ensuing backlash, which includes an exodus of big businesses like Starbucks from Seattle, she then said,

Those comments were not productive in the sense that they caused more harm than good….

Freeman then quoted, without questioning, Danny Westneat, writing for the Seattle Times:

Admitting errors in public is hard…. Conventional political wisdom says it means you’re weak. In this case, I’d argue it’s a positive sign for the future of both the mayor and Seattle.
It means the mayor is at least more grounded in the real world than some of her blinkered progressive fans….
Maybe this is a chance to reset relations with businesses—at least ones other than Starbucks, where it may be too late.

But what “error” is Westneat claiming Wilson has admitted? In fact, it’s quite clear from Wilson’s own words, and Westneat has chosen to ignore it. Wilson admitted the error of her words, not the error of their intent, which is and always has been, her disdain for and assaults on free markets and the larger businesses that operate in them.

Competition

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In her Free Expression piece concerning the Harvard faculty’s vote to limit the number A grades (but not A- and lower grades) awarded to the school’s pupils, Mary Julia Koch had this:

It’s a fair point that a scarcity of A’s could crank up the competitiveness among an already ambitious group of college kids.

It’s a fair point? What, exactly, is wrong with competition among the pupils for the better grades, and so for the benefits ensuing, beginning with a less stressful and sooner successful job hunt? What’s wrong with increasing the level of that competition?

Harvard’s pupils, even after this grade inflation move (as small as it is), have no idea of the level of competition in our relatively free market economy. Those pupils have no idea of the benefits of competition, from improving their own skills to producing better products and services at the companies that employ them to the follow-on of more and better jobs and better pay.

One professor who doesn’t like the quota said that

she didn’t become a college professor to “rank my students against one another for the convenience of potential employers.”

But that’s precisely the purpose and the benefit of such rankings, and her attitude insults those students who take her classes. College graduates are not simple members of a commodity pool from which a company can select at random. Companies want to hire only the best because that’s what produces the best goods and services, which in turn maximizes the companies’ ability to thrive and grow and do R&D, which in the end maximizes job growth and so employment opportunities. One of the most important tools a company has in discriminating among a pool of brand new college graduates is an honestly done GPA.

The answers to my prior questions is that there’s nothing wrong with competition or with increasing competition. That’s what makes all of our lives better, including those of Harvard’s pupils, who now will be required to level up their game.

Gold-Backed Dollars

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Murray Sabrin, a proud PhD holder and equally proud Associated Scholar at the Mises Institute, wants us to go back to a gold-backed dollar.

A sustainable path forward requires a gold-backed dollar….

This is risible on its face. Gold-backed dollars, or silver-backed, or whathaveyou-backed dollars are every bit as fiat currency as are floating dollars.

Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated this when he confiscated everybody’s privately held gold and then revalued the gold in dollar terms.

A metal-backed dollar is worth what a government says it is. A floating dollar is worth what the market says it is. The latter is sound(er) currency.

ARPA 2.0

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The Federal government has taken equity stakes in some rare earth development and production companies as supply chain control moves. Now the government is taking equity stakes in a few companies nascent and still doing basic research that’s becoming increasingly engineering-to-production in a critical industry—quantum computing.

The Trump administration is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing companies in deals that include US government equity stakes, the Commerce Department said.

In the middle of the last century, the Federal government started the Advanced Research Projects Agency in response to the USSR’s successful launch of a Sputnik satellite, soundly beating us into space. ARPA’s mission, ultimately, was centered on high risk, high gain R&D projects that were too expensive for private enterprise to start, but which private enterprise could develop into thriving businesses once that initial hurdle was overcome.

Quantum computing is a Critical Item industry which neither Russia nor the People’s Republic of China has beaten us at, but their progress threatens to gain critical leads in. The output of those ARPA projects, however, did not encompass the government taking equity stakes in the companies that ultimately went into production with those outputs. The government’s current moves are shades of that earlier ARPA approach, with government stakes thrown in.

And this:

[A] senior Commerce official said the agency did so many different deals to spread out its bets, acknowledging that it could take years for them to pan out.

This is a government version of a long-standing investment tactic, gorilla investing. The idea as implemented by private investors is to shotgun investments into a collection of companies in a new(er) industry, and then as they develop, or not, begin selling off the nots, while keeping those still promising or beginning to achieve success, repeating the process until the investor is left with the one or two that are actually taking off and the gains from which vastly outpace those prior losses. The technique often works.

Quantum computing, other nascent technologies, even the established areas like rare earths, though, may well benefit even more without the government ownership but with increased reduction in the regulatory environment within which those areas are being developed.