Worth a Shot

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President Donald Trump (R) is looking to sign an Executive Order lifting in large part sanctions currently extant on Syria. The sanctions were levied when Bashar al-Assad still reigned; he has since been tossed by an ex-Daesh terrorist middle manager and his cohort that had been operating in Syria after that middle manager had estranged himself from Daesh.

It may be that that ex-middle manager and now Syrian strong-man Ahmed al-Sharaa has, in fact, renounced his terrorist ways of his past and truly wants a more stable political and economic environment for the Syrian peoples [sic]. That remains to be seen.

This move may blow up in our face, just as welcoming the People’s Republic of China into the WTO and granting it US Most Favored Nation status ultimately blew up in our face. Or it might be a sound move, easing friction throughout the Middle East, supporting opportunities for prosperity for the several peoples resident in Syria, and reducing Israel’s security risks.

It’s worth a shot, although its value would be increased were it far more easily reversed should the move fail than has been reversing our coddling of the enemy nation, the PRC. Nominally, the Executive Order may well be more easily reversed than those moves regarding the PRC.

A Noble Man

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The University of Virginia’s President James Ryan has resigned his position in response to the DoJ continually pushing him and the university he sits atop to get rid of their racist and sexist DEI infrastructure. The constant push was necessitated by his and his university’s continual refusal to do so. Ryan’s rationalization of his decision:

I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.

How noble. How humble braggingly self-important.

Never mind that had he decided otherwise, the only ones who would have lost their jobs would have been the incumbents of those DEI facilities. On the other hand, researchers would have lost no funding, and “hundreds of students” would have lost no financial aid, nor would many have had their visas in peril. But Ryan considers that bigotry more important than those other matters.

That’s nobility in the current form of academia.

An Easier Solution

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The Progressive-Democrat Governor of Delaware, Matt Meyer, and his State Health Care Commissioner, Neil Hockstein, objected, in their Wednesday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, to the Senate’s intention to cut Medicaid funding for illegal aliens. Their objection centered on the relative cost of the State funding, through Medicaid, medical care for illegal aliens compared with illegal alien care in hospital emergency rooms, with the hospital footing the entire bill.

Consider that outpatient dialysis costs about $90,000 a year, while emergency inpatient dialysis can exceed $300,000 annually. That extra cost falls on hospitals, state budgets and, ultimately, the taxpayer.

The answer to that is not to foist the medical costs of illegal aliens, who have no business being here in the first place, off onto the good citizens of the State, or by Federal transfers onto the good citizens of our nation at large. The better solution is to go ahead and treat the illegal alien the one time in the hospital’s Emergency Room, and then shortly after stabilization, discharge, and departure from the hospital, round up the functionally self-identified illegal alien and deport him so he no longer is a drain on our medical services or costs.

Hard hearted? It might seem so, but it pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of an American citizen being denied an Emergency Room hospital bed because those beds are occupied by illegal aliens. It pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of spending the tax dollars us average Americans send to the Federal government on services for illegal aliens when those dollars are better spent on making health care—especially including expensive treatments like dialysis and especially especially including preventive health care programs for Americans on the bottom rungs of our economy—more broadly available and cost effective for us citizens.

Judicial Inconvenience

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A prison inmate went without his heart medication for a week, had a heart attack, and died. The 6th Circuit ruled no Qualified Immunity for the nurse who didn’t, per the Institute for Justice‘s 27 June newsletter, call his pharmacy to verify his prescriptions or take 10 minutes to get the necessary release form filled out for getting his prescription filled out.

The dissenting judge in the panel beefed (IJ paraphrase),

Now everyone in CA6 who dies in jail because they were briefly without their medication has a constitutional claim.

Sorry, Judge, the convenience of you or your court is no excuse for denying even a prisoner his due, and it’s no excuse for not holding materially accountable those prison officials who deny a prisoner his due.

The Circuit opinion and dissent can be read here.

Yeah, And?

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The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are moving to reduce the supplementary leverage ratio that big banks, and only those big banks, must maintain. The ratio is the amount of money those specifically-selected-by-government banks must maintain over and above their regular capital requirements against times of “market turmoil.” The reduction would make available much more money for those banks to lend into our economy.

Fed governor Michael Barr, once the Fed’s top bank regulator is opposed to the move. He’s cited by The Wall Street Journal as saying that the proposal would “significantly increase” the risk of a big bank failure.

To which I say, so what?

The failure of a “big” bank would be disruptive in the short term and potentially damaging to the particular bank’s creditors—depositors and others lending money to the bank—but in the intermediate- and long-term, such a failure would be net beneficial to our economy.

A big bank failure—without government bailout—would go a long way toward mitigating, even eliminating, the market distortions of an enterprise in our private economy—which is the economy outside of the government—being held as too big to fail and so guaranteed our taxpayers’ dollars being used to keep it alive, despite that lousy management having, over an extended period, brought the enterprise to that strait.

Reducing the supplementary leverage ratio also is a way of injecting more money into our economy without it being government tax money being injected. Our economy’s money supply would be increased, or not, based on sound business decision-making rather than on flawed political decision-making.

Fewer market distortions, less tolerance of bad performance in our market place, and reduced special treatments of particular businesses, would only make our market economy freer and more efficient and more prosperous for us all.