Category Archives: politics

A Good Start

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President Donald Trump (R) has signed an Executive Order that sets up a mechanism for the US to mine and harvest minerals and metals from the ocean floor under international waters. It’s for more than just international waters, but this is the part of importance to me.

Environmentalists and legalists don’t like it, the former because they don’t want the pristine sea floors disturbed at all. It seems unimportant to them that the metals and minerals are critical to our nation’s economy and our defense establishment and that without them, we’d be unable to provide any sort of environment within which environmentalists could environmental.

The latter don’t like it because there’s no international law that regulates or even permits such mining. It’s apparently lost on these that the lack of regulation or permission means that the mining and harvesting is entirely legitimate to do.

At least one mining enterprise, The Metals Co, a Canadian firm that’s still interested in doing business with the US, has said that given the EO and a 40-ish year old American law, the Deep Sea Hard Mineral Resources Act, it can start mining in a year or so.

Given that, the first mines should be set up in the Gulf of America, and done so promptly. The second mines should be set up in the South China Sea, and done so just as promptly.

Merit-Based to Depoliticize

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The Trump administration is moving to consolidate Federal employment/termination decisions in the OMB and out of the several separate Departments and agencies.

[DOGE personnel embedded in OMB began issuing] orders that have weakened other agencies’ control over their own workforce, in many cases bringing hiring, firing, and performance evaluation—which for some employees, will soon be based primarily on execution of the president’s agenda—under the purview of OPM.

Previously,

Most of the government is made up of mid- and low-level civil servants whose jobs have historically been sheltered from political hiring decisions.

That’s the problem that badly wants fixing.

Government hiring and firing, at any level of government, needs to be politicized to an extent in order to maximize the likelihood that government employees work to carry out the policies of the incumbent President, Department Secretaries, and agency heads. This does not require a return to full-up patronage, but it does require that what constitutes an assessment of merit include how hard and how effectively that employee works to execute those policies and how well a prospective employee can be expected to do so.

My Irony Meter…

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…is pegged. In their letter published in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday Letters section, David Wippman and Glenn Altschuler of Hamilton College and Cornell University, respectively, object to comparisons of Harvard to Hillsdale College, even as they misleadingly mischaracterize the latter’s relationship with Federal dollars (writing that Hillsdale has for decades refused federal funding, when the fact is Hillsdale has never taken Federal dollars at any time in its 180 years of existence).

The letter writers acknowledge that Harvard’s taking Federal dollars makes it “vulnerable” to Federal pressure, citing supposed risks to Harvard’s research capacity. In truth, Harvard still could conduct effective research, were it to get serious about the bigots and terrorist supporters entrenched in its student and faculty and staff populations.

That brings me to the irony of their letter.

[I]t is absurd to compare this Christian college with 1,700 students and 170 faculty with Harvard, one of the leading research universities in the world with almost 25,000 students and more than 20,000 faculty and staff.

Actually, two: Wippman and Altschuler call out Hillsdale as an explicitly Christian college as though that were somehow important to their discussion, while ignoring Harvard’s more religiously and areligiously ecumenical bent—as though that does not matter at all.

The real irony though is that 1:10 faculty to student ratio at Hillsdale compared to that 8:10 ratio of faculty and staff to students at Harvard. Clearly one school is focused on actual teaching, while the other is focused on…nothing in particular, apparently, other than faculty and staff activism, antisemitic bigotry, terrorist support, and condoning when not actively encouraging the same in the student population. That only creates an environment where that vaunted research is merely an afterthought and a source of Federal largesse rather than a serious focal point for the institution.

A Thought Experiment

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Our so-called “elite” universities are banding together to form a collective to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold grants and contracts from those institutions that aren’t doing enough to combat antisemitic bigotry and support for terrorists, reporting what foreign money they’re receiving and in what amounts, and adequately limiting the numbers of foreign students and faculty to suit the administration.

The collective is centering its resistance on the premise that Government doesn’t get to dictate to them what their practices might be, never minding that all donors get to specify how their donations are used.

What this collective is missing is that colleges and universities have no particular right to government funds, and that government has no particular obligation to send money to colleges and universities.

Hence my thought experiment.

Consider that a large collection of private citizens get together and say to a college or university, “You can’t have any more of our money unless and until you stop doing these things and start doing these other things.”

What legal recourse would that college or university, or any collection of colleges and universities similarly addressed, have against that collection of private citizens? How is their private collective action any different from their collective action through their government? It is, after all, the same money, whether their private money given or withheld directly or their private money washed through government as tax remittances.

A Useful Self-Identification

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The People’s Republic of China has decided not to apply its across-the-board 125% tariffs on certain goods that it imports from the US.

China’s government has exempted some US imports that the country would struggle to immediately source from elsewhere from its retaliatory tariffs, people familiar with the matter said.
Chinese authorities have told some importers of American goods that they would waive the most recent 125% increases in tariff rates for certain US imports. Those products include certain semiconductors and chipmaking equipment, medical products, and aviation parts, the people said.

These, then, are precisely the goods that we should cut off from exporting to the PRC.

On the other hand,

The Trump administration, similarly, announced exemptions on its “reciprocal tariffs” for China-made smartphones, laptops, and other electronics earlier this month, a recognition of the US’s reliance on China for such goods.

This is a mistake if the purpose is anything other than a negotiating tactic. There is a critical difference between the two sets of goods. The goods the PRC is exempting are critical components and component-making goods whose cutoff would severely impact that nation’s ability to make downstream products. The goods the Trump administration is exempting are finished products. Their supply chains can be adjusted to flow from non-PRC sources, including domestic, an adjustment that might be difficult, but an adjustment that both is eminently possible and is absolutely necessary: we should never have ourselves dependent on an enemy nation for such goods.