Tag Archives: freedom

Tradeoffs

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Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson wants the present Republican-majority Senate to do away with the filibuster altogether on the argument that the Democrats (read: Progressive-Democrats) are going to do that anyway when they return to power. On the latter part, Johnson is correct, and when the Progressive-Democrats do that, it’ll be the death of our republican democracy and the birth of the tyranny of popular democracy.

Johnson made this argument, though, and on this he is wrong.

I’ll admit that the 60-vote cloture threshold has prevented many bad bills from becoming law, and that without it bad bills would become law more easily. But it also prevents good bills from getting passed.

That’s an excellent tradeoff, Johnson’s worries notwithstanding. Passing bad bills is far more destructive to our nation’s economy and to our national security than is not passing good bills. The latter can be tried again in politically short order; the former will take years just to undo the damage.

A legislature that gets nothing at all done is a far more successful legislature than one that passes even one bad statute. As a man said earlier in our national history, that government is best which governs least.

Contra Johnson, the Senate should eschew abusing us with bad laws because Senators think they have to pass something—anything—in order to earn their pay votes. Keep the filibuster.

Transgenders are Better than other Americans?

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Kansas passed a law with effect last Thursday that requires driver licenses to reflect the biological gender of the license holder and not the holder’s currently self-claimed gender. The law invalidates, with immediate force, existing driver licenses that reflect a gender different from the holder’s birth gender. That lack of notice strikes me as unfair, but that’s a separate issue. The law also

invalidates birth certificates of residents [sic] who changed their gender and says citizens can sue transgender Kansans who use public bathrooms that don’t correspond with their assigned birth sex.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit claim that

the law violate[s] transgender Kansans rights to privacy, equality, and free expression guaranteed by the state constitution.

Leave aside the plain fact that the plaintiffs’ suit utterly denies biological fact. What’s interesting here is the self-important arrogance of the plaintiffs, along with the cynically offered irrelevance of one of their beefs.

Last thing first: the law does not deny the plaintiffs’ their right to free expression. No one is telling them they cannot self-claim a different gender than that of their biology. No one is telling them they cannot live their lives as though they were that…alternate…gender, with the few exceptions that all citizens have when exercise of their rights interferes with the ability of their fellow citizens to exercise their own rights.

Which brings me to the first things. Plaintiffs, with their suit, insist that others’ rights to privacy and equality must take a back seat to plaintiffs’. To hell with women’s rights to their own privacy, the equality of their own rights. They must accept that their rights are less important than, are inferior to, the claimed rights of men who claim to be women.

This is a suit that should be tossed on its face, with prejudice, and in short order.

A Proper Response

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People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jinping is looking to bully President Donald Trump (R) into stopping arms sales to the Republic of China in order to ease Xi’s coming invasion of the RoC. Xi has ordered the PLA to be ready for the invasion by 2027, and the arms sales to the RoC are critical in forestalling that invasion or defeating it should it come.

As the Wall Street Journal‘s editors note,

giving in to Mr Xi’s threats on Taiwan would send a dangerous signal about America’s reliability as an ally. The Taiwan Relations Act obligates the US to supply defensive weapons to the island. If Mr Trump abdicates on that obligation, China will immediately use it to tell the Taiwanese people that America can’t be trusted to defend them. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines will also get the message that Mr Trump’s priority in the Pacific is China, not their mutual defense.

It also would tell Xi that the US is a paper tiger, easily cowed, and his pressure on us would only increase.

The proper responses to Xi’s bullying attempt are two. One is to increase the sales of weapons—including offensive weapons, now—and to greatly accelerate their delivery. The other is to increase our own combat suites in and around the South China Sea and the island of Taiwan, with particular attention here to the Taiwan Strait. Every time Xi waxes angry and threatening, we should up the ante further, each time much more than the prior increase.

Mistaken Emphasis

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A letter-writer from the Hudson Institute in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section tried to make a case for Europe’s ability to defend itself against a Russian invasion based on Ukraine’s capability.

Despite Russian air superiority and numerical advantages, Ukrainian forces and local volunteers slowed, halted, and ultimately rolled back Russia’s assault on the capital. They did so because they were fighting for national survival, and, in many cases, defending their homes and families as the Russians advanced.

They did so, also, because Ukrainians, individually and as a population, didn’t hesitate to enter a stout defense–The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride. As the letter-writer misconstrued the wargame exercise, Germany did hesitate in the wargame, with fatal effects on the attempted defense against the Russian invasion.

Furthermore, that part about fighting for national survival as well as defending individuals’ homes and families does not obtain in Germany or France. Far too many of those nations’ citizens—including their younger generations and members (of all ages) of their major political parties—would rather not fight even to defend their nation.

Next, much of the reason Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine failed, despite apparent superiority in numbers and equipment, was its mistaken assumption that the invasion would be a walkover. Russia has learned the lesson of that failure, and it won’t underestimate the level of resistance capability of its next target, whether Germany’s and France’s reluctant citizens or the Baltics’ and Poland’s willing but small populations.

And this: the runup to WWI in the aftermath of an Archduke’s assassination was one of a race to mobilize and to achieve a mobilization level conducive to successful attack vs a level conducive to deterrence or to defeat of an attack. In that race, both sides proceeded from substantially equal baselines of military capability and mobilization ability. In the realization, the race ended in a substantial tie, and the German invasion of France, after initial gains of the sort that nearly always accrue to the first aggressor, was brought to a standstill.

That substantial mobilization capability equality does not obtain in today’s Europe.

Russia already has combat-hardened (even if of uncertain quality) troops, a war materiel production capacity already in place and growing, and force buildups occurring, low-key, in Belorussia and in Kaliningrad. The Baltic States and Poland, stipulate arguendo, have similar per capita capacities, but they’re already maxed out due to their small populations and limited, even operating at maximum output, industrial capacity. Behind those front line nations, though, Germany has no serious troop establishment and it cannot even field a combat-ready brigade of armor. Its industrial capacity is not capable of producing materiel in war deterring, much less fighting, much less at mobilizing rates before 2030. Italy and France are little better off.

In a mobilization race today, Russia wins. And that, coupled with the incapacity for defense that even the most dedicated nations have, means Russia wins the war, too.

What He Said

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Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR), wrote of the need for modernizing and expanding our nuclear weapons capability across three dimensions: numbers of warheads and systems to deliver them, the quality of those warheads and systems, and the range of threat—tactical, theater, and strategic—against which those warheads and systems are optimized.

He closed his piece, though, with the most important Statement of Need of his piece:

[T]o those who fear an arms race: The race has already begun. Russia and China have been running it for more than a decade while we sat on the sidelines. The question isn’t whether there will be competition in nuclear forces, but whether America will show up to compete.

To which I add: if we don’t compete, we cannot compete successfully. If we cannot compete successfully, we will find ourselves very quickly faced with nuclear blackmail or a nuclear war that we will certainly lose. In either of those cases, we will see ourselves completely subjugated to our enemies.