Tag Archives: political parties

Cost Is Too High?

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Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s terms for negotiating with Russia an end to the barbarian’s invasion of is nation begins with the barbarian being driven completely out of Ukraine. Which raises a question that shouldn’t even be a question.

[P]ushing Russian forces out of the entrenched positions they hold in more than 15% of Ukraine’s territory will require an even greater flow of military support—possibly more than the West is willing and able to bear.

This timidity is especially rampant in President Joe Biden’s (D) administration.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The Wall Street Journal last Monday [4 December] that the US would support Kyiv in recovering territory Russia has grabbed since launching its large-scale invasion on Feb. 24, suggesting that Washington might not back Ukraine militarily in retaking areas that Russia seized in 2014, including the Crimean Peninsula.
Other Ukraine allies are adamant that Kyiv must win back all its lands.

Those others are correct, and it’s especially embarrassing that our own administration doesn’t understand that. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Tobias Billström put the matter succinctly:

Anything less than a Russian defeat in Ukraine will embolden Moscow and other authoritarian powers[.]

Those other authoritarian powers include the People’s Republic of China and Iran. Encouraging the PRC puts the Republic of China at direct risk as PRC President Xi Jinping has said openly and often that he intends to absorb the RoC into the body of the PRC, and at gun point if necessary. The mullahs of Iran will be encouraged to push their domination over Iraq, and they’ll be encouraged press their Yemen war even more zealously to weaken Saudi Arabia and then to dominate that nation.  Which puts Israel at deadly risk.

Those aren’t the only costs, either. Russian President Vladimir Putin has often said that Ukraine isn’t really a nation; it’s part of Metropolitan Russia, and he intends to erase that nation and absorb it. He’s also said he intends to recreate the Russian empire, which puts the Baltic States, Poland, and the nations on the western shore of the Black Sea at risk. Even what used to be the German Democratic Republic will be at risk. All that’s required is the barbarian’s victory in Ukraine. Even his merely holding the 14 February already occupied oblasts would only encourage him.

Go back to the PRC. Xi’s successful conquering of the RoC would cement his control over the South China Sea and all of its fisheries, undersea oil and natural gas fields, and all the rare earths on the sea floor. It also would give him control over the sea lines of commerce on which the Republic of Korea and Japan utterly depend—and through which at least 40% of the economic value shipped to the US sails.

Biden and his affiliates need to find some backbone vis-à-vis Ukraine. The problem here is, in the end, not a matter of cost—the cost of failure is far greater, and it includes the non-economic cost of the erasure of at least two independent nations from the Earth.

The problem here is the degree of political will.

Economic Failure

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An example is in the housing market, provided by this bit in a Wall Street Journal article centered on housing costs as a major component of our current economic inflation. The article suggests, among other things, that housing cost inflation may be abating.

If shelter inflation does drag overall inflation closer to 2%, that doesn’t mean the inflation problem is over. Economists assume increases in rents and home prices will remain subdued, given the slowing economy and high mortgage rates.

Say that the shelter inflation is easing and that it does, indeed, drag overall inflation down. Inflation is a measure of the rate of price increases, it is not a measure of prices themselves. If shelter prices stop rising so fast, the cost of shelter—rent, house purchase (and associated interest rates on those mortgage), rent/housing utilities—and of fuel, food, and on and on all will remain at their current levels; they most assuredly will not fall back.

But those prices must be paid out of a household’s income, and that income—wages and salaries—has increased only at half to three-quarters the rate of inflation. That means that in real, practical, terms, a household has less money with which to pay those costs: a larger per centage of monthly household income will be absorbed by those monthly rent/mortgage payments and those monthly household utility, fuel, food, etc bills than was the case before this inflation explosion.

That’s the failure of the Biden administration’s and Congress’ fiscal policy of throwing trillions of dollars at our economy with no means for it to absorb that money though increased production and productivity. That failure is exacerbated by the Powell Federal Reserve’s monetary policy failure in artificially suppressing interest rates for so long, and in printing dollars like the presses would run out of ink tomorrow through its bottomless purchases of Treasury debt instruments.

In Which Rubio is Mistaken

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The Senate passed a bill mandating a labor agreement agreed by railroad companies, management teams of a dozen rail unions, and the rank-and-file of most of those unions be imposed on all of those unions and railroad companies. The bill also barred a rail union strike.

In a separate vote, the Senate failed to pass a bill imposing a number of paid sick leave days for union employees on the rail companies.

Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) is dismayed.

When workers are treated as little more than line items on a spreadsheet, they become indistinguishable from the freight cars they service….

And

…the measure only granted rail workers one day of paid sick leave all year—a stipulation that Rubio said “underwhelmed and alienated the men and women doing the hard work.”

And

Congress…told rail workers to suck it up and be grateful. We should have worked to meet the demands of the workers instead of appeasing labor leaders and companies.

Most, if not all, of that likely is true.

However.

It doesn’t matter how much any of that might seem like a good idea, or might even be a good idea, over the duration of a contract. It’s not government’s job to set the work compensation parameters for employers and their employees. Most especially, it is not government’s job to meet the demands of the workers. It’s government’s job to set the market conditions within which employers and employees can negotiate those parameters freely.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) wasn’t far off with his dig at Rubio: I always knew you were a socialist.

Government is a system of men and women, not an entity in itself. What those men and women might think is a good idea will vary over time for those men and women and certainly will vary as different men and women come into government from time to time. We need only see how government “good ideas” vary as Republicans or Progressive-Democrats are in ascendance from one Congress or administration to another.

At most—at most—where a national risk is in play (for instance, a steel worker industry-wide strike or lockout, or a nation-wide rail strike or lockout), government might require the two sides to settle through binding arbitration a disagreement they can’t settle through negotiation. With the arbiters chosen by the two disputants, not by government.

Get Rid of the EV Subsidy Altogether

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Allied and friendly governments object to the Biden administration’s battery-operated car tax subsidy requirements that these vehicles be assembled substantially in the US or they’re not eligible for the subsidy. That puts battery-operated cars assembled in Europe, Japan, and the Republic of Korea at a substantial disadvantage in the competition for sales in the US.

They’re right, but for a different reason than they think.

The Biden administration should get rid of the battery-operated car subsidies altogether. If battery-operated cars truly were ready for market, they’d need no subsidy: Americans would buy them on the merits of the cars. If we don’t want them, or don’t want them in large numbers, government intervention (via subsidies here) is no more appropriate than is government intervention in any other section of our free market marketplace.

Full stop.

Why Not?

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (D) doesn’t want the US to decouple our trade or our trade relationship with the People’s Republic of China. It’s sufficient, she claims in all seriousness to safeguard [our] technology to ensure [our] economic competitiveness.

It’s important that we get the bilateral economic relationship right, not just by protecting but also by actively promoting our economic interests in trade. We are not seeking the decoupling from China.

Why not? There’s a broader concern here, that Raimondo and the Biden administration at large, carefully ignore than merely protecting our technology and technology advantages. That larger concern is our independence of action on the world stage in “competition” with a nation with the avowed goal of overtaking and supplanting the US in the world—of conquering us, whether overtly or functionally.

That goal, that threat is given concrete, measurable effect by the PRC’s

  • flooding the US with fentanyl and flooding Mexico with the components of fentanyl so that nation can flood US with fentanyl
  • our dependence on PRC for Critical Items in our supply chain
    • rare earths, which the PRC already has used in an attempt to extort Japan
    • lithium
    • cobalt
    • intermediate components in assembly of computer chips, computers, cell phones
  • overt threats against friends and allies, , Republic of China, Japan and Republic of Korea (East China Sea), nations rimming South China Sea
  • 2017 National Intelligence Law that makes every PRC company a spy for the PRC government and for the CCP
  • support for the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine

Trade with the PRC funds their military development against that goal of replacing us.

The PRC is an enemy nation, and we should be doing nothing at all to support its economy, its economic adventurism around the world, its intelligence-gathering efforts, its own technological development, its military expansion and expansionism.

That requires decoupling altogether.