Category Archives: ethics

Circular Pseudo-Logic

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William Galston had this bit of circularity in his Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal:

Economists studying past tariffs have found that their effects endured even after the tariffs were removed. … Further, the Federal Reserve Board is concerned about Americans’ increased inflation expectations, which could trigger a damaging price spiral.
The American people smell a rat. In a recent poll by the Economist/YouGov, 68% said that higher tariffs mean higher prices and that consumers will bear a large share of the burden.
They’re right. Tariffs are import taxes paid in the importing nation.

It couldn’t possibly be that we Americans poll that way because that’s what we’re told by a steady stream of news writers, including a plethora of them who cite “economists” or who cite named economists without also citing those economists’ data.

Instead, these news writers just make their bald, unsubstantiated claims, providing no data at all.

It may well be true that tariffs, by their nature, are inflationary. That certainly seems plausible. However, plausibility isn’t fact, and it would be good to see the evidence—including evidence indicating how inflationary tariffs are, if they are, and under what circumstances.

Professorial Disingenuosity

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Columbia University professors who support pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian protests, mostly humanities and liberal arts professors, claim that those “protests” are actually innocent students exercising their free speech rights. Other professors at the school, mostly medical and STEM types, claim they’ve been too busy “doing their jobs” teaching and researching to worry about such mundane things as campus disruptions.

Those former either know better, and they’re being disingenuous in their wide-eyed innocence claims, or they’re breathtakingly ignorant of what free speech actually means. It’s not free speech when the “protestors” block others’ right to their own free speech by shutting off their ability to speak at all, or by shutting down the campus altogether, or by preventing others from exercising their free speech right to not listen to the “protestors.” The “protestors” are engaging in the abhorrence of censorship.

Neither are the “protestors” exercising free speech when they seize and occupy campus buildings and prevent the ordinary course of business in those buildings. Those “protestors” are executing illegal takings of others’ property and denying them and the users’ their accesses.

Neither are those “protestors” exercising free speech when they damage or destroy equipment in those illegally seized building or paint graffiti on and in the buildings. Those “protestors” are engaging in criminal destruction and in vandalism.

The medical and STEM professors also know better. As Pericles said a while ago, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” And Plato: “Those who think they’re too smart to engage in politics are destined to be ruled by those who are dumber.” These professors are just being cowards, hiding away from their responsibilities.

They’re all worthless; they all need replacement.

A Good Start

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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has pulled the security clearances and accesses to a number of Biden and other former government officials.

I have revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for…Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, James, Bragg, and Andrew Weissman, along with the 51 signers of the Hunter Biden “disinformation” letter. The President’s Daily Brief is no longer being provided to former President Biden.

But it’s only a start. I have said before, and I’ll say again: when anyone leaves Federal government employ, for any reason, for any duration other than an authorized leave of absence, that now ex-employee should have his security clearance pulled the day he walks out the door. Even those on a leave of absence should have their access to classified material suspended until he returns to duty at the end of his leave.

Research Grants and Overhead Caps

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Two letter writers to The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section disputed Harvard Professor’s Maya Sen’s “defense” of Harvard’s 69% “overhead” cut of any Federal research grant sent Harvard’s way. One noted that Sen had chosen to elide any actual facts regarding

the [overhead] costs that the reimbursement was intended to cover to support her claim that the 15% rate is insufficient.

He noted Sen’s disingenuousness in her expectation that we taxpayers should just trust the school’s managers to do the right thing. His view was that, in light of this attitude, research grants should be discontinued altogether.

The other letter writer cited Yale’s condition as a typical case:

Yale has a $6 billion annual budget with 8% coming from tuition and room and board, and 20% from grants and contract income. It has a $41 billion endowment and pays little in tax.

As he put it, this is Yale crying wolf.

No to Sen, almost entirely yes to the letter writers.

There’s no reason to believe the amount of money for research in a grant would fall as a result of lowered caps for grant overhead. The only thing that would be limited is that overhead; the money in the research part of the grant isn’t affected in the slightest—except by university managers who confiscate that research money for their overhead chimera.

I don’t entirely disagree with the first letter writer’s position regarding ceasing grants altogether, but I think it would be sufficient, instead of capping the overhead cut at 15%, to cap it at 0.00%, and the schools can accept that or get no grant at all. They can take their claimed overhead costs out of their endowments or jack their tuition further. Instead of us taxpayers paying for these confiscations, let the schools’ investors/donors or their students (parents) pay for them.

For those schools that have such puny endowments or that have properly low tuitions that they truly can’t hack the overhead costs on their own—rather than viewing the whole grant as income the way Sen confessed Harvard does—the relevant State government can make up the shortfall. The State’s taxpayers should be the only ones paying the costs of the schools in their State. That would magnify the voice of those taxpayers and perhaps lead to tightening up on school managers’ fraud, waste, and abuse.

Ignorance of Opinionators

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In the excerpt of her opinion piece in the New Yorker that is quoted in The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable and Quotable section last Sunday, Susan Glasser decried the relative quiescence in DC compared to other nation’s capitals regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) foreign policy moves.

There were no major protests in the quiescent capital…. These acts were a far cry from the popular uprisings that presumably would have convulsed Paris or any other European city if the President of the republic suddenly and unilaterally reoriented the nation’s geopolitical strategy, turned on its major trading partners, and allowed the world’s richest man to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers and billions of dollars in government services.

Unilaterally reoriented? Never mind the petty cultural differences between the United States and European nations. Those nations’ governments do not have their legislatures and Executives as separate, coequal branches of government. Instead, those nations blur the lines between the two, with many explicitly subordinating the Executive function to the legislative.

The United States is the only nation that separates the Legislative, Executive—and the Judicial (see Great Britain for a subordinated judicial function)—into their separate and equal authority branches. In our Executive in particular, those functions with foreign policy input—State, Defense, Commerce, and some others—are explicitly subordinate to, not equal functions with, the Chief Executive of that Branch, the President of the United States.

And yet she bleated, how dare the chief of foreign policy in our system of governance be the one making foreign policy decisions instead of surrendering that responsibility to a subordinate or to a committee of subordinates?

Glasser’s ignorance of the hierarchical nature and structure of the American Executive Branch is astounding.