Category Archives: political economy

Nice Facility Ya’s Got There

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The Pacific Maritime Association is planning to strike the two largest West Coast ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. Talks haven’t gone as favorably toward the union as it wishes, so….

The union laid bare its attitude toward port management and toward us average Americans generally.

A timely agreement matters not only to the parties at the table, but to the entire Southern California supply chain and to the local, state, and national economies that depend on it.

That’s just naked extortion, and it’s putting those not anywhere close to the negotiations under union threat, using them as hostages. Not only is this union threatening the ports’ ability to function and earn the income needed to pay up, it’s also threatening all of the hostages it’s taken, us average Americans who make up those local, state, and national economies.

Yet another union is demonstrating why it should be decertified.

Further, in any other milieu than union “negotiations,” contracts signed under duress would be held invalid. If unions aren’t going to be decertified, then at the least, contracts signed while a strike, or a lockout, is in progress or within some serious time period after the end of a strike or lockout should be held invalid, having been signed under duress.

No, It Isn’t

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New York City, as the WSJ pointed out, has a serious homeless problem, and it’s failing across to deal with it. The article centered on the city’s socialist Progressive-Democrat mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s current failure, but in truth, the problem is rampant across all of our nation’s cities.

Dave Giffen, Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director thinks he has the answer.

The simplest solution is to build more affordable housing.

No, it isn’t. It is, though, the only idea the economically bankrupt Left can conceive.

It’s always either throw more money into failed programs, or build ever more government housing projects, or both. In truth, though, Leftists and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians don’t care a penny about programs or policies that actually work; they just want the spending and building (the latter especially for their union benefactors’ jobs), and then to call it good. Sadly, as the rest of us understand, “more affordable housing” just perpetuates the homeless’ isolation from society by facilitating their dependency on government and trapping them in increasingly dilapidated government housing.

Contra Know Betters like Giffen and his ilk, the simplest solution isn’t as pie-in-the-sky simple as those virtue-signaling money wasters so favored of the Left, but it is eminently straightforward. This entails getting government regulations out of the way of private enterprise, so more jobs, including those for the unskilled, become much more available; encouraging private enterprises and charitable organizations wholly unaffiliated with government to run job training programs; and thereby providing the homeless with both the incentive and the means to get jobs and earn their own income and get into their own homes. (The general housing shortage is a separate problem.)

In parallel with that, encourage private enterprises and charitable organizations wholly unaffiliated with government to set up drug rehabilitation programs for those addict homeless who want off their drug dependency the treatment they need to achieve that. In parallel with this particular phase, it’s critical for government at all jurisdictional levels to get truly draconian and move the drug pushers off the streets and their suppliers out of their facilities and into jail. This is one of the very few aspects of homelessness in which government has a legitimate role.

There will remain a few homeless who are truly hopeless; these would be wards, first, of local church and charity, and only last of government, beginning first with local government.

No, There Doesn’t

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Supposedly, there’s confusion on what the Federal Reserve is going to do this month, regarding interest rate levels. The headline worries,

Why the Fed Is Expected to Hold Rates Steady Despite a Case for Raising Them

And the lede adds to the confusion:

The Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady this week for reasons that have as much to do with what Fed officials have said as with what the economy is doing.

Confusion. It’s mostly in the fervid imaginations of some who think they’re pundits. For instance, Robert Kaplan, Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman and ex-Dallas Fed president:

If they had wanted to hike in October, there needs to be more stage management than what they’ve done.

No, there doesn’t. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has already been clear that folks should listen to what the markets are saying and not to what Fed Governors or the Chairman say, or do not say. There needs be no stage management. There needs be only heeding this bit of Fed advice as diligently as pundits listened to Fed prior (spoon-fed) advice.

An Answer

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Although it would take quite a bit of time to bring to fruition. The problem is getting low cost natural gas to the good citizens of New England. President Donald Trump (R) has proposed the beginnings of a solution.

New Englanders pay some of the highest energy costs in the nation, and the Trump administration says the Constitution Pipeline—a project New York successfully blocked once before—is the answer. New York, however, appears to remain stubbornly committed to stopping it.

The Constitution Pipeline would transport natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York. A complication in the matter is that all five of the New England States are just as adamantly opposed to pipeline development as is New York. Trump is looking at designating the pipeline a national security matter and forcing is construction, but that’s of sometime utility.

An alternative, or perhaps parallel, solution is to use the Federal government’s authority to appropriate State lands and its 5th Amendment power to seize, with just compensation, private lands as necessary to assemble the rights of way the pipeline would require to pass through New York and into each of the New England States.

Then let the State government men and women justify refusing to let their respective constituents to have access to that cheap energy that now sits on those constituents’ figurative doorsteps, needing only their local utilities’ abilities to hook those pipelines into the distribution’s last miles.

None of the moves won’t solve this winter’s problem, but they would address future winters.

A Slick Idea in the Oil Trade

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Miad Maleki, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has one.

The US has imposed sanctions on some 160 shadow fleet oil tankers, 70% of which are relatively young as tankers go: less than 20 years old.

[T]he administration was reportedly considering easing sanctions on shadow-fleet vessels and allowing them to carry oil not subject to sanctions in an effort to bring down record high freight rates. Those discussions, a US official told Reuters, include the possibility of lifting sanctions on tankers “on an individual basis” so they can change hands.

Maleki’s idea is a tightening of this:

Washington should create incentives for US-aligned operators to buy ships out of Iran’s black market and put them to legitimate use in the Strait of Hormuz.

That legitimate use would be shuttling crude from within the Arabian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf of Oman, there to be transferred to waiting tankers for shipping forward to the oil’s final destinations.

Even just lifting the tanker sanctions on a case by case basis to facilitate each tanker’s sale to a legitimate buyer would be a very good move, but doing so to facilitate an American buyer’s purchase would make a good move much better, easing as it should, the shortage of American tankers.

And this, a bit of well-deserved schadenfreude:

Washington should open a gate and let the [Iranian] regime watch its fleet work for someone else.