Ex-Democrat Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has offered his analysis of Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) and of Businessman Donald Trump and their relative values as Presidents of the US. See his two-minute YouTube video here.
Stipulate everything Reich said about Cruz is accurate (after looking past the hype): Cruz turns out to be pretty good. Cruz should thank Reich for the endorsement, and wear the description proudly.
Mark Lilla’s essay in the New York Review of Books regarding France’s response to the series of Islamic terrorist attacks against the Republic carried out on Metropolitan French soil has sparked a thought in me regarding the nature of “citizen” for a nation. The passage in question is this [via Power Line; the full essay is behind the NYRB‘s paywall]:
The Hollande government responded in kind [to public Islamist threats]…. Most controversially he called for binationals convicted of terrorist crimes to be stripped of French nationality, a proposal that runs up against current constitutional and European jurisprudence but has been Hollande’s most popular move since being elected.
Withdraw the terrorist’s citizenship and throw him out of the country. What’s wrong with that? International law makes it illegal to create a stateless person, hence the Hollande administration’s decision to limit withdrawal of French citizenship to those already possessing another nation’s citizenship status also—a binational.
American citizenship under existing domestic statutes and case law also cannot be withdrawn; see, for instance, Afroyim v Rusk, a 1967 Supreme Court ruling which denied the ability of the government to rescind the citizenship of an established citizen. There is a constitutional question attached.
However. The underlying philosophy of our political nation, our concept of social compact, is very much a Lockean philosophy, and our Constitution is steeped in that view: a consensual government, yes, but also very much a matter of discriminating between those within our social compact and abiding by our compact’s rules—those who are members of the compact and those only resident here with the compact’s permission (and by whose residence have agreed to abide by our compact’s rules)—and those outside out social compact, whether physically or otherwise.
Herein lies my thought. An earlier definition of “outlaw” is in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government: a man who is within a social compact but who by his criminal actions has placed himself outside the compact. In Locke’s view, any criminal act, whether directed particularly against an individual member of the compact or against the compact as an entity, was an attack on the compact as a whole; hence the criminal’s outlaw status. That outlaw status had an important outcome apart from his simple eligibility for suitable punishment for his actions: outlaw status also placed the criminal outside the protections of the social compact; the outlaw had no recourse to the compact’s laws or courts or anything else.
We Americans, though, have parsed criminal acts into two key categories, attacks against individuals and attacks against government or society. Only criminality directed at our society or government are attacks against our compact as a whole. Clearly, though, terrorist attacks against Americans—individually or in groups—are attacks against our society, are attacks against our social compact. American citizens who are terrorists, by their actions, place themselves outside our social compact and thereby lose the protections of our compact.
We should acknowledge that wholly voluntary self-placement: withdraw citizenship from such an erstwhile American in addition to the existing sanctions against his terrorism. After the terrorist has served out that sanction, he should be ejected from our nation.
Obviously, there are some mechanics that would need to be grunted through to enact this sort of thing, not least of which is that constitutionality question. But that doesn’t refute the principle; it’s only a barrier on the path to be corrected and overcome. One expression of the barrier, from Afroyim v Rusk, was expressed by Justice Hugo Black, writing for the Court, said in part
In our country the people are sovereign and the Government cannot sever its relationship to the people by taking away their citizenship.
Certainly. But We the People can instruct our employee government to enact a law that severs our relationship with an outlaw by taking away his citizenship, his right to be among us and to enjoy the protections of our compact. If it’s cleaner for us to make our instruction via the Constitution’s Article V, then so be it. Again, though, the means is a speed bump, not an impenetrable barrier.
International law? That enjoins against creating a stateless person. It does not, though, obligate us in any way to find this outlaw a place to be somewhere else before we acknowledge his decision to stop being a member of our compact. In addition to enjoining us, it obligates other nations to find a place within them for him to be. That’s a moral obligation, to be sure, and not a legal one. Thus, international law needs to be corrected and updated to deal with terrorists as outlaws. Or we need to withdraw from this law.
It isn’t often that we get to run a controlled experiment in economics, but one seems to be beginning in Oregon on the matter of minimum wages.
Oregon lawmakers have approved landmark legislation that propels the state’s minimum wage for all workers to the highest rank in the US, and does so through an unparalleled tiered system based on geography.
The legislation will raise the state’s minimum wage to
$14.75 in metro Portland, $13.50 in smaller cities such as Salem and Eugene, and $12.50 in rural communities.
This will be complete in just six years, by 2022.
And that’s the experiment. Over the course of these next six years, watch employment rates adjust across the three geographies, and watch small business startup and development across those three geographies.
Hmm….
Professor Cal Newport, a Georgetown University Computer Science professor, has some interesting ideas regarding how Americans should work and how we should communicate with each other. He laid out these views in a recent Harvard Business Review piece.
This unstructured workflow arose from the core properties of email technology—namely, the standard practice of associating addresses with individuals (and not, say, teams, or request type, or project)….
This is bad, of course, because the individuals doing the work didn’t actually do that. Someboedy else did—those nebulous “teams,” or this thing called a “request type.”
But the big demonstration of an Academic’s self-importance is in this:
But just because this unstructured approach is standard and easy doesn’t mean it’s smart. It’s important to remember that no blue ribbon committee or brilliant executive ever sat down and decided that this workflow would make businesses more productive or employees more satisfied.
Yeah. No Betters told these plebes what to do. They just stumbled around in the dark, using this complex new tool—email!—without guidance, without an Expert’s or a Blue Ribbon Committee’s instruction. Never mind that they got the work done, and better, using this new tool (among others) their way instead of in the Approved Way.
A consequence of this workflow is that an organization’s tasks become entangled in a complicated network of dependencies with inbox-enslaved individuals sited at each node. The only way to keep productive energy flowing through this network is for everyone to continually check, send, and reply to the multitude of messages flowing past—all in an attempt to drive tasks, in an ad hoc manner, toward completion.
Now he’s projecting and assuming everyone shares his shortcomings. Of course in serious work, this isn’t the case. It certainly wasn’t the way we worked—with email and instant messaging—at a major defense contractor that was my latest employer.
Newport’s piece goes on in this vein, but you get the idea.
Leo Shane described one aspect of this in his piece in the Military Times. Shane centered his article on Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) role in making it nearly impossible to fire non-performing Veterans Administration executives.
Sanders—the independent Vermont senator who at the time was chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee—insisted on preserving the protection board’s appeals role, and held up reform legislation in his chamber until it was included.
That protection board is the Merit Systems Protection Board, an allegedly independent facility with a degree of judicial authority that supposedly ensures that nobody gets fired without due process. In the realization this Board, which Sanders was so desperate to protect, is a union facility that ensures that nobody gets fired.
The larger problem, though, is less Sanders’ union’s interference with the VA leadership’s inability to get rid of the trash and other non-performers in the VA leadership, than it is that inability to throw out the trash.
In recent weeks, the VA has seen a host of job actions against senior employees overturned by the Merit Systems Protection Board [see, for example, here]…. They include the demotion of two VA executives accused of gaming the department’s hiring system for personal benefit, and the dismissal of a New York VA director over patient safety concerns.
And
The appeals fight has grown into an escalating intra-administration showdown between VA leaders, who call the decisions off-base, and protection board officials, who blame bad legislative changes for the unsatisfactory rulings.
These union hacks even are trying to turn the problem back onto Congress:
They also accused lawmakers of overhyping problems within the department, saying lawmakers are conflating malice and malfeasance with mistakes made by under-trained supervisors.
Under-trained? The union hacks agree, then, that these supervisors are unfit for their positions, yet they insist these unfits must be retained, anyway. No trash out, not under-performers out, nobody out.
After all, our veterans are used to the idea of becoming casualties on a war’s battlefield. They and everyone else should just shut up, and our veterans should accept being casualties on an artificial VA battlefield, too.
Veteranos administratio delende est.