Category Archives: politics

NATO and Mutual Defense Alliances

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Europe at the end of the week, and among other things, he pushed for NATO member states to honor their decades-old commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on defense.

Germany, among other members, insisted that honoring their commitment was “unrealistic.”

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said demands for 2% of GDP spending were “totally unrealistic.” He said that to meet the US target, Germany would have to increase spending by some €35 billion ($37 billion).

After all, Gabriel has argued,

…a strong defense isn’t enough to ensure security.

That’s a cynically offered straw man, though; no one is arguing that a strong defense is sufficient, only that it’s necessary.  Gabriel will have to play with his dolly without me.

There are others who agree that the nations need to boost their own spending—Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, for instance, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.  But it isn’t sufficient.

We need to be developing a mutual defense alliance that includes eastern European nations, anyway.  Maybe the result of that development should be a separate alliance, not an expansion of NATO.  Perhaps even the result should replace NATO, or at least our role in the new alliance should replace our role in NATO, since so many of the nations of NATO have so little interest in their own treaty responsibilities.

“Our Federal Dollars”

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It doesn’t get any clearer than this.  Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has illustrated the addictive nature of Federal funds transfers to the States and lower government jurisdictions with that phrase.

In defending his city’s lawsuit against the Federal government over DoJ’s decision to withhold Federal monies from cities that violate Federal law by protecting illegal aliens from enforcement of immigration law, Murray said this:

The federal government cannot compel our police department to enforce federal immigration law and cannot use our federal dollars to coerce Seattle into turning our backs on our immigrant and refugee communities.

Our federal dollars.  The dollars aren’t theirs.  Those dollars are Texas citizens’ money.  Those dollars are New York citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Illinois citizens’ money.  Those dollars are Oregon citizens’ money.  Those dollars are the money of the citizens of every State and territory in the nation, including Washington.  Those dollars are money transferred from all those other citizens around the nation.

This is what such transfers lead to: the powerful addiction of a sense of entitlement to other people’s money and the loss of any sense of responsibility for a jurisdiction’s own money.

Port Automation

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It’s coming to west coast ports, and the unions don’t like it.

The push over the last decade by international maritime ports to fully automate operations has sparked the ire of many US longshoremen whose high-paying jobs and way of life are at stake. The trend also sets up a battle between their unions and companies and governments who see automation as a cleaner, more efficient and more cost-friendly alternative to the current system.

Never mind that west coast ports—three in particular, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland—do 40% of the nation’s (not just the west coast’s) container traffic and so costs there have sharp impact on the nation’s economy.

Never mind that the west coast ports often are subject to expensive longshoremen union work slowdowns.

The Washington Council on International Trade this week released a report that attempted to quantify how severely the [2015] slowdown directly impacted Washington state businesses. That final price tag: $770 million.

Never mind that west coast ports often are subject to even more expensive longshoremen union strikes, including illegal strikes.

Never mind that longshoremen union strikes against west coast ports often turn violent.

The automation will reduce costs—good for the shippers and ultimately for us consumers—and increase profits—which means jobs, albeit different ones and with lags for the different jobs to develop.

And robots don’t do work slowdowns, robots don’t strike, robots don’t get violent when they don’t get their way.

Irrational NLMSM

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Now it’s getting out of hand as the NLMSM has gone full-on hysterical.  Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, has said that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are akin to Uday and Qusay Hussein.

Uday and Qusay working for Saddam Hussein: you couldn’t go into a restaurant and have eye contact with those guys without getting killed.

Imagine getting into a fight in the office with Jared or Ivanka—they have enormous power and they’re always going to be there[.]

Hmm….

A Test

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In South Dakota v Dole, the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal government could not withhold already committed funds from States in amounts that could coerce the States into obeying Federal diktats, such withholdings were legal but only in amounts that would be persuasive rather than coercive (as an aside, the Court did not get around to identifying a threshold or a threshold region that would separate the coercive from the merely persuasive).

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday that he was reaffirming a[n]…Obama-era policy that threatened to pull grants from jurisdictions that bar officials from communicating with federal agencies about immigration, and implied that more sweeping rules were coming. He also said the Justice Department would try to take back previously granted funding from places that don’t comply with the communications law.

Sessions’ rationale seems entirely reasonable, on one plane.

When cities and states refuse to help enforce immigration laws, our nation is less safe.  I strongly urge our nation’s states and cities and counties to consider carefully the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to enforce our immigration laws and to rethink these policies.

There are, though, a couple of problems with this, one legal and one political (and political philosophical).  The legal problem stems from that Supreme Court ruling.  While the inability to coerce was applied in a matter involving coercion of States, the extension of the principle to jurisdictions below States is straightforward.  If the Federal government cannot coerce States, it cannot bypass the State governments to coerce lesser jurisdictions within (and generally bound by) a State government.

The political problem is this—and it’s the larger problem in my view, since Court rulings can be overruled by later Courts.  Just how much do we want, in our federated form of governance—the 10th Amendment—and the sovereignty of We the People—our Constitution’s Preamble and the 9th Amendment—the Federal government to be able to coerce the States and lesser jurisdictions?

It seems entirely legitimate to prevent coercively a State or lower jurisdiction from flouting federal law, from disobeying it.  Forcing it to actively enforce federal law seems a different matter.  Where is the threshold?

If this level of coercion is appropriate or legitimate, how about that level of coercion?  If coercing States, et al., regarding immigration questions is OK, what about coercing States, et al., regarding gun (control) rights?  Speech?  Drinking ages (that South Dakota thing again)?  And on and on?

Where would it stop?  What is Sessions’ limiting principle?  What is the Federal government’s?