Author Archives: eehines

An Alternative

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Or two. The Trump administration is kicking around the idea of taking a stake in companies that receive Federal funds pursuant to the 2022 Chips Act (formally the Chips and Science Act), 10% in Intel being one of the ideas in play. I have an alternative, although it likely would require a legislative modification to the Chips Act: structure the funding as a loan, the [10%] stake as collateral, and dissolve the stake when the loan is repaid.

Another alternative, also likely necessitating modification to the Chips Act, would be to structure the funding as a grant, with the stake dissolved after a [five] year period on satisfactory performance under the grant—suitably boosted domestic research and manufacturing.

Either of these alternatives would mitigate the risk of government-run “capitalism” by getting government back out of these enterprises once performance has been confirmed durably established. They’re similar, too, to the government bailout program of the Panic of 2008, with the critical addendum of a hard withdrawal of government on clearly measurable achievement of tightly defined milestone.

False Comparison

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In their letter to the Tuesday Wall Street Journal Letters section, Professors Amy Finkelstein, of MIT, and Matthew Notowidigdo, of the University of Chicago, argued for the necessity of Obamacare.

…because millions of Americans “don’t use” their subsidized insurance, they therefore “don’t need” it. Yet as we teach our students every year, this misunderstands the purpose of insurance. Not filing a claim doesn’t mean you didn’t need insurance. We’ve never had to use our oxygen masks during decades of flying, but that hardly means they’re not essential.

The professors, as educated as they seem to be, should know better than to make such a false comparison. Folks die if they don’t have access to those oxygen masks in the realization of the once-in-a-lifetime likelihood of needing one. Folks without insurance always can get at least life saving care, and usually more than that for a variety of non-life threatening ills, in any hospital ER.

The professors also cynically conflate “need” with “useful.” Having insurance against this or that outcome usually is a useful backstop to have, IFF the accumulated premiums paid are worth the Expected [sic] cost of a realized outcome. Underlying the distinction between “need” and “useful” is the individual’s own assessment of those risks and that value. With Obamacare, though, folks are required to buy the insurance, however bad it is, and to do so wholly independently of any cost/benefit tradeoff that actually exists and equally independent of the individual’s assessment of his risk, or of his need. Risk assessment has been taken out of the individual’s hands altogether.

Mail-in Ballots

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The Just the News headline lays out the error.

Trump’s push for ending mail-in ballots and voting machines means process likely to fall on states

This is what Art I, Sect 4, of our Constitution says about elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

Whether Congress chooses to tailor a ban on mail-in ballots (other than, I say, for military personnel stationed outside their voting precincts and businessmen on extended business-related travel outside their precincts) and electronic voting machines to each of the 50 States or enact a nationwide ban, such a move would be entirely constitutional.

I Have a Suggestion

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Alexander Ward, Alex Leary, and Matthew Luxmoore are rightly skeptical about any agreements Russian President Vladimir Putin might make vis-à-vis Ukraine that would be short of his outright conquering Ukraine or include NATO troops on Ukrainian soil as guarantor of an agreement, even were those troops nationally provided rather than as a NATO contingent.

One of the lesser questions requiring an answer is the location of any meeting among Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin, the principals, and President Donald Trump (R), currently the primary broker of any deal. On this, I have a suggestion, stipulating that the negotiations would proceed in two phases.

The first phase negotiations should be held in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (not the village Bucha, which is a bit south of the city.) The second phase should take place in the Ukrainian city of Makariv, about 20 miles west of Bucha.

These locations, even three years after the fact, would let both Putin and Trump see the results of the desolation and butchery Putin’s barbarian hordes inflicted on Ukrainian civilians in those early days of the barbarian invasion.

Wrong Question

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And it leads into a false premise. These errors are William Galston’s, writing for The Wall Street Journal last Tuesday. His subheadline lays out the false premise:

Kyiv will have to make concessions to Russia, but it will also need security guarantees.

No. Kyiv can make almost no concessions to the barbarian without rewarding him for his invasion and giving tacit encouragement (reminiscent of ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) permission to Putin that a small incursion into Ukraine would be OK) for a renewed, expanded, and better prepared invasion a year or two later. “Almost no:” perhaps—a weak maybe—an agreement might consist of a non-exclusive lease to the barbarian of the narrow confines of the port at Sebastopol. Note: that’s the port, not a naval base, and that’s the port, not the surrounding city.

The wrong question Galston posed in his lede:

Where does Europe end and Russia begin? This centuries-old question underlies the meeting between President Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and European leaders in Washington on Monday. The resolution of Russia’s war against Ukraine will settle this question, at least for now.

Again, no. The “centuries-old question” was answered centuries ago: the Ural mountain range is the demarcation (however blurry) between Europe and Asia. Russia west of that range is in Europe, and Russia east of it is in Asia. It really is that simple.

The real question is where does Russia end and the individual nations of the rest of Europe begin. The barbarian chieftain in the Kremlin insists that the boundary of his immediate interest lies between Russia on the one side and Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia on the other side. The barbarian already is making early, mostly political interference, moves against Moldova, and he’s already engaging in cyberwars against those three Baltic States.

Any “settlement” between Ukraine and Russia that involves land concessions to the barbarian only puts those other nations in nearby, if not immediate, peril: the barbarian has said many times, and unequivocally, that he intends to reconstitute the Russian empire, and that means absorbing into the Rodina those other nations (as oblasts, they’d be permitted to keep their current names), and results in the Russian border being pushed even farther west. It’s imperative for the safety of those other European nations and that of our own, that we all support Ukraine materially as well as politically, and enforce the eastern border between Ukraine and Russia along with the northern border between Ukraine and the barbarian principality of Belarus.

Beyond this, the barbarian’s behavior is putting a premium on expanding NATO to include Ukraine, or alternatively, the standing up of a new mutual defense arrangement that includes the Three Seas Initiative nations, Sweden, Finland, the UK, and the United States.

There are broader implications to this struggle. The fate of the Republic of China hangs in the balance, along with the subsequent fates of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and all of the nations rimming the South China Sea. As does our own fate.