Author Archives: eehines

Dictating the Terms of Business

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is at it again, trying to dictate how private businesses in our, so far, substantially free market economy will be permitted to operate. Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden intends to dictate to landlords:

Today, I’m sending a clear message to corporate landlords: if you raise rents more than 5%, you should lose valuable tax breaks.

This isn’t just the big landlords, either, bad as that would be by itself. Biden’s proposed cap would apply to half the rental market in the country.

We’ve known this for a while. Here’s then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeting:

Joe Biden @JoeBiden · 14h
We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.

He’s talked about fundamentally transforming our economy in his State of the Union addresses, also.

Why Should She Go?

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The knee jerk “boss must go” cry whenever someone in the organization that boss leads screws up is…silly. See for instance, the hue and cry that Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle must resign or be fired over the security failure that allowed an assassin wannabe to take his shots at former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, narrowly missing killing him.

It’s not even known how the lapse occurred, but let’s go ahead and get rid of the lady in charge.

Sometimes, such failures are the boss’ fault. Sometimes the failure can be laid off to the organizational culture the boss fostered, or the lackadaisical attitude toward training or equipage, or to an emphasis on DEI claptrap at the expense of effective performance.

Often, though—more often, I claim—it’s a matter of one or more of the following:

  • bad luck (luck gets a vote right alongside the opposition)
  • sound procedure poorly, or mistakenly, executed
  • sound training, but an individual(s) executed his training poorly
  • sound Standardization/Evaluation procedures, but an individual(s) fell through the cracks
  • poor training procedures and/or poor Stan/Eval procedures, in which case the supervisors of those sections and those supervisors’ immediate supervisors need to be looked at
  • poor operational oversight of individuals in the course of their performance—look at those supervisors and their immediate superiors
  • poor communication with external agencies involved in the action—what caused that (who caused that should come second in that part of the post mortem)

It’s an even more extensive list than that.

So: do the investigation, here of the Trump assassination attempt, of the protection procedures, and of the execution associated, thoroughly. Then decide what corrective action to take, and take it.

Blame, fire, investigate is a suboptimal order of events.

There’s a Separate Problem

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The People’s Republic of China’s debt-fueled economic growth is threatening to hinder continued growth, even to cause serious contraction for the PRC’s economy. Much of that debt is local government off-the-books lending and, especially,

The deterioration of China’s real-estate market in the past three years meant local governments could no longer rely on land sales to real-estate developers, a significant source of revenue.

There’s another problem with that last, though, that makes off-the-books debt issuance even dicier for those local jurisdictions. The local governments own, or owned, only a finite amount of land, and so there is an upper bound to the amount they can sell to those developers. It’s very much akin to feudal Europe, where parents, over a very few generations would subdivide their land to give some to their eldest sons to use and profit from—and then ran out of land to subdivide. It was worse for the kings, who gave away royal lands to eldest sons and to nobles as rewards or loyalty purchases. The kings ran out of land, also.

Kings and local PRC governments could repossess those lands on one or another pretext, but such moves were, and are for the PRC governments, fraught with political danger. In the PRC’s case, the land limits, as much as any market for real estate, meant that borrowing against that collateral becomes even more risky, as the land collateral becomes smaller, along with the constructed buildings becoming expensive to hold on inventory pending sales that aren’t happening.

All the more Reason

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The People’s Republic of China is continuing to manipulate the price of rare earths and of rare earth production and ore refinement. The nation is exploiting its current overwhelming monopoly of rare earths to hold those prices below the cost of their mining, production, and refinement elsewhere in the world, possibly below their own suite of costs.

That’s a security threat carefully aimed at the US and at Europe, since those rare earths are so critical to military equipment, computing equipment, and a host of other equipment throughout the general economy.

The US, Canada, regions in Europe, and the floor of the South China Sea each have ample supplies of the ores that, when exploited, would eliminate the PRC’s stranglehold on rare earths.

It’s time for the US and Europe, at the least, to suck up and go through the expense of developing our own rare earth resources and wrest that control away from our common enemy nation. It’s long past time to move to take back from the PRC the South China Sea, returning ownership of the islands to the nations with legitimate (if disputed among them) ownership and to return the waters to freely international status with their long-established economic zones which are held by non-PRC nations rimming the Sea. Regaining access to the Sea’s resources on and under the floor is one more critical reason for doing so.

Yes, He Was

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors messed this one up, badly, in two ways.

One is their blithe insistence that, as their headline put it, [t]he conspiracists on the right and left deserve to be ostracized. How do these august ones propose to identify conspiracists and their conspiracies in real time? The conspiracies painting the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian fakery were taken as gospel in real time. The conspiracies concerning a variety of Wuhan Virus vaccine side effects turned out to have considerable substance. The conspiracies concerning 2020 election cheating are turning out to have considerable substance.

And there’s this:

Congressman Mike Collins, Republican from Georgia’s 10th district, who sent a tweet on Saturday that “Joe Biden sent the orders.”
It’s hard to imagine a more incendiary message in the wake of an assassination attempt. Mr Collins was retweeting and amplifying a tweet that quoted President Biden’s remark last week that “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Mr Biden was employing a metaphor, however inapt given our current political distemper.

Collins’ amplification certainly was untoward. However, Biden was not at all speaking metaphorically with his put a bullseye on Trump instruction to his minions. He was every bit as literal and direct as the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ claim that then-President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech to his supporters in which he told them to go to the capital and fight for their election rights was an incitement to riot and insurrection. What those wonders have ignored all along is that Trump explicitly enjoined his supporters to fight peacefully. Biden, on the other hand, issued no instruction to his supporters that they should be peaceful with their bullseye.

The editors very carefully ignored all of that.

A bonus editorial “error:”

Mr Collins is among those who think Mr Biden lacks the mental acuity to be President, but he then accuses him of masterminding a conspiracy.

There’s nothing at all inconsistent in that. Leading such a plot, were Biden actually doing so, would be pretty dispositive evidence of his incapacity.