How stupid an idea is the minimum wage? Let's look at California's fast food industry

 Will Swaim at National Review has an I-told-you-so piece today about the palpable effects of government interference in the microcosmic reaching of agreements beween buyers and sellers of labor:

Following Governor Gavin Newsom's decision - after some complicated political wrangling between Newsom and a furious fast-food lobby — to impose a $20 hourly minimum wage on the fast-food industry, Chipotle and McDonald’s announced on Q3 earnings calls yesterday that they’ll be raising menu prices in the state.

How big a hit will customers take – if they’re willing to take it at all?

“We’ve been studying that . . . it’s going to be a pretty significant increase to our labor,” Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung said on the company’s call. “We haven’t made a decision on exactly what level of pricing we’re going to take, but to take care of the dollar cost of that and/or the margin part of that, we haven’t decided yet where we will land. It’s going to be a mid- to high single-digit price increase, but we are definitely going to pass this on. We just haven’t made a final decision as to what level yet.”

“There is going to be a wage impact for our California franchisees. I don’t think, at this point, we can say exactly how much of that is going to work its way in through pricing,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on his company’s earnings call. “Certainly, there’s going to be some element of that, that does need to be worked through with higher pricing. There’s also going to be things that I know the franchisees and our teams there are going to be looking at around productivity.”

It didn’t take an economist to predict this outcome. I called it in a National Review article about Assembly Bill 257, what was called the Fast Act. “In an industry that operates on razor-thin margins,” I wrote, the Fast Act “will have two immediate predictable outcomes”:

On the worker side, higher wages, richer benefits, and more cumbersome labor laws will lead to job cuts as franchise operators seek to curb their skyrocketing labor costs. In some places, restaurant owners will rapidly automate; ATM-like ordering kiosks will replace actual people — primarily immigrants and other minority people who, by way of the fast-food business model, are just beginning their ascent on the American economic ladder. Other business owners may simply sell off to larger enterprises whose high volumes will allow them to cope with slimmer margins. That will make it harder for workers to rise into positions of management and ownership.

On the customer side, as some franchisees simply close permanently, we’ll see the expansion of what progressives have called “food deserts” in poor communities already underserved by grocery chains. Customer service in the remaining stores will decline and prices will rise.

So, in a kind of grim partnership, poor customers and rising workers, immigrants and the native-born, will suffer together.

In that January article, I called this “the iron law of California progressivism: Claim that new laws will help the poor. When the actual effect turns out to be catastrophic for the poor, blame capitalism/markets/billionaires/racism, and expand government control of the business. Rinse, repeat, and promote as a national — even global — model for equity. And if Californians have anything to say about it, AB 257 will be coming to you, no matter where you live in the United States.”

My dad, who majored in economics in college, insisted that I take at least one Econ course at the school I attended. It had an outstanding faculty in that department, and my dad pointed out that he was paying for my enrollment. Alas, I never came through on my end. To my lasting regret. Economics is an excellent field of inquiry for understanding certain things about human nature. 

Having studied economics informally on my own over the years, I have formulated a first law that I think is undeniably true no matter from what angle one approaches the subject. 

Here it is:

A good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period. If any other entity - think government - inserts itself in the process of arriving at an agreement, there is no way to know what the actual value of the good or service is.

Behold menu prices at California McDonald's and Chpotle franchises.

The case of labor negotiations is a little different from government imposition of value-setting. Actually, the case can be made that a negotiation between a union and management is a clear-cut example of this free-market reaching of agreement at work - so long as neither side enlists government in its cause.

But it does make plain what I've formulated as a second law of economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

Which is why, in the wake of the UAW agreement ending the recent strike, car costs may well go up - or the wide selection of models to choose from may dwindle:

Ford withdrew its full-year forecast last week citing "uncertainty" over its tentative deal with the UAW, and CFO John Lawler told investors during the company's third-quarter earnings call that the new agreement will add another $850 to $900 in labor costs to each vehicle made.

Those increases will either be reflected in new vehicle price tags, absorbed by the company, result in automakers reducing costs in other ways, or some combination of the three.

"The concessions the automakers have made are already being positioned as significant by the automakers themselves, which is setting the stage for those costs to be passed through to consumers," Alain Nana-Sinkam, co-founder of industry tracking firm Remarkit Automotive, told CR. "However, given that consumers are already pretty well tapped out in terms of vehicle affordability, I’m not sure how much of that is going to end up sticking."

 

Cox Automotive chief economist Jonathan Smoke said in a statement earlier this week that the new UAW contract will have both positive and negative impacts on the economy. 

Smoke continues:

He added, "Consumers will bear some of the cost burden over time but given that affordability is already a challenge for the market, the automakers will not have an easy time passing along all of the costs to buyers and will have to seek efficiencies in other ways, or further limit production to more expensive vehicles that can absorb higher labor costs."

Here's the thing about the free market. It's like grass growing through the cracks in an urban sidewalk. It will assert itself even in an atmosphere of value distortion. That's because it is the natural, ideology-free way human beings interact. 

 

 

 

 

Gavin Newsom hates human advancement

 Oh, does the title seem a bit hyperbolic?

I'm not sure what else you'd call this:

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries, seeking compensation for damages caused by climate change.

The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, accuses the companies of knowing about the link between fossil fuels and catastrophic climate change for decades but suppressing and spreading disinformation on the topic to delay climate action. The New York Times first reported the case Friday.

The suit also claims that Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — as well as the American Petroleum Institute industry trade group — have continued their deception to today, promoting themselves as “green” with small investments in alternative fuels, while primarily investing in fossil fuel products.

It seeks to create a fund that oil companies would pay into to help the state recover from extreme weather events and prepare for further effects of climate change. It argues that California has already spent tens of billions of dollars on responding to climate change, with costs expected to rise significantly.

Talk about inflamed language:

“The companies that have polluted our air, choked our skies with smoke, wreaked havoc on our water cycle, and contaminated our lands must be made to mitigate the harms they have brought upon the State,” the suit says.

Villainizing those in the business of bestowing comfort, convenience and safety on American society, extracting the energy form that has raised living standards and life expectancies exponentially all over the world for over a century. 

Real smart.  

 

 

A California restaurant-industry dilemma at the confluence of economics and culture

 It may be soon be hard to find bacon on California restaurant menus:

Thanks to a reworked menu and long hours, Jeannie Kim managed to keep her San Francisco restaurant alive during the coronavirus pandemic.

That makes it all the more frustrating that she fears her breakfast-focused diner could be ruined within months by new rules that could make one of her top menu items — bacon — hard to get in California.

“Our number one seller is bacon, eggs and hash browns,” said Kim, who for 15 years has run SAMS American Eatery on the city’s busy Market Street. “It could be devastating for us.”

In a move reminiscent of the Golden State's auto-emission rules that were different from those of the rest of the country, it has thrown a wrench in the flow of consumer products into its retail outlets:

At the beginning of next year, California will begin enforcing an animal welfare proposition approved overwhelmingly by voters in 2018 that requires more space for breeding pigs, egg-laying chickens and veal calves. National veal and egg producers are optimistic they can meet the new standards, but only 4% of hog operations now comply with the new rules. Unless the courts intervene or the state temporarily allows non-compliant meat to be sold in the state, California will lose almost all of its pork supply, much of which comes from Iowa, and pork producers will face higher costs to regain a key market.

Animal welfare organizations for years have been pushing for more humane treatment of farm animals but the California rules could be a rare case of consumers clearly paying a price for their beliefs.

With little time left to build new facilities, inseminate sows and process the offspring by January, it’s hard to see how the pork industry can adequately supply California, which consumes roughly 15% of all pork produced in the country.

“We are very concerned about the potential supply impacts and therefore cost increases,” said Matt Sutton, the public policy director for the California Restaurant Association.

California’s restaurants and groceries use about 255 million pounds of pork a month, but its farms produce only 45 million pounds, according to Rabobank, a global food and agriculture financial services company.

The response of the industry's trade association - to ask the federal government to take up the slack with taxpayer-and-debt dollars - is disheartening, of the objective is to steer things around to a free-market basis:

The National Pork Producers Council has asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for federal aid to help pay for retrofitting hog facilities around the nation to fill the gap. Hog farmers said they haven’t complied because of the cost and because California hasn’t yet issued formal regulations on how the new standards will be administered and enforced.

Then again, havoc's going to ensue if the consequences of California's move are allowed to play out:

If half the pork supply was suddenly lost in California, bacon prices would jump 60%, meaning a $6 package would rise to about $9.60, according to a study by the Hatamiya Group, a consulting firm hired by opponents of the state proposition.

If one views an individual pig in the same manner as we do, say, dogs and cats, it does indeed seem that the argument can be made current industry practices are heartless:

At one typical hog farm in Iowa, sows are kept in open-air crates measuring 14-square-feet when they join a herd and then for a week as part of the insemination process before moving to larger, roughly 20-square foot group pens with other hogs. Both are less than the 24 square feet required by the California law to give breeding pigs enough room to turn around and to extend their limbs. Other operations keep sows in the crates nearly all of the time so also wouldn’t be in compliance.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture said that although the detailed regulations aren’t finished, the key rules about space have been known for years.

“It is important to note that the law itself cannot be changed by regulations and the law has been in place since the Farm Animal Confinement Proposition (Prop 12) passed by a wide margin in 2018,” the agency said in response to questions from the AP.

The pork industry has filed lawsuits but so far courts have supported the California law. The National Pork Producers Council and a coalition of California restaurants and business groups have asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to delay the new requirements. The council also is holding out hope that meat already in the supply chain could be sold, potentially delaying shortages.

Josh Balk, who leads farm animal protection efforts at the Humane Society of the United States, said the pork industry should accept the overwhelming view of Californians who want animals treated more humanely.

“Why are pork producers constantly trying to overturn laws relating to cruelty to animals?” Balk asked. “It says something about the pork industry when it seems its business operandi is to lose at the ballot when they try to defend the practices and then when animal cruelty laws are passed, to try to overturn them.”

But we as a society, gong back to the days when feral boars were hunted for roasting at that age-honored America custom, the barbecue,  have regarded hogs differently from the above-mentioned species we welcome as family members, and there's real cost involved in moving in a different direction:

In Iowa, which raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, farmer Dwight Mogler estimates the changes would cost him $3 million and allow room for 250 pigs in a space that now holds 300.

To afford the expense, Mogler said, he’d need to earn an extra $20 per pig and so far, processors are offering far less.

“The question to us is, if we do these changes, what is the next change going to be in the rules two years, three years, five years ahead?” Mogler asked.

And, as in the case of the above-mentioned auto-emissions rules, things get complicated in a global economy:

The California rules also create a challenge for slaughterhouses, which now may send different cuts of a single hog to locations around the nation and to other countries. Processors will need to design new systems to track California-compliant hogs and separate those premium cuts from standard pork that can serve the rest of the country.

While Ms. Kim's establishment's concern arises because the fare she offers is good ol' all-American fare, she is cognizant that many others with her demographic classification, as well as Latin Americans, will see a dent in their ability to offer traditional fare from the Pacific rim and the southern portion of the Western hemisphere:

Kim, who is Korean-American, said she’s especially worried for small restaurants whose customers can’t afford big price increases and that specialize in Asian and Hispanic dishes that typically include pork.

“You know, I work and live with a lot of Asian and Hispanic populations in the city and their diet consists of pork. Pork is huge,” Kim said. “It’s almost like bread and butter.”

A rejoinder comes to mind that, while somewhat boneheaded, still has all too much validity in the case of the Asian cuisines in question: "Well, hell, in some of the countries you're referring to they keep dogs out behind the restaurant, and when somebody orders a dish featuring dog, they go out there, take a brick, go upside the dog's head, and bring it in and dress and butcher it."

I happen to believe, and I'm willing take the slings and arrows of a charge of chauvinism, that the special place we in the West have given to dogs and cats is one small marker of what makes our civilization  unique blessing to humankind. You just don't do that to Fido if you have any interest in attending to your humanity.

Now, no sooner do I say that than I must admit to being a sucker for cute-pig videos. When I. share them on social media, I generally do so by saying, "File under: If I ever give up a meat, it will be pork."

But I, like millions of North Americans, Latin Americans and Asians, love my bacon, sausage, chops, ribs, shoulder, ham and belly. 

I've long said that I classify the animals lower than humans three ways: those we make pets and therefore family members, those we eat, and those we view from afar with awe. In this, I take my cue from Genesis 1:26 as well as the fact that every dog or cat I've ever had has savored table scraps of steak, chicken or ribs as much as I've relished the preponderance of the offering on my plate. 

This is the well-entrenched set of assumptions that California is trying to buck. To see them do so without taking regard for the full range of consequences seems to me to be just another example of that once-great state's collective decision to decline. If only its decision didn't risk dragging down the world with it.

 

 

 

Barney & Clyde - Season 2, Episode 16

 It's here!

Pour yourself something bracing, pull up a stool and join us at the virtual libation station for an hour of examination of 

NOT QUITE A BUSINESS, NOT QUITE A GOVERNMENT AGENCY - The US Postal Service: the upcoming hearings on its current predicament, Trump’s bluster about its role in the upcoming elections, a bit about the service’s history (with a particular focus on Nixon making it quasi-autonomous in 1970), the role of the union, and its unfunded liabilities. 

I’LL DECIDE THAT FOR MYSELF, THANK YOU - Uber’s announcement that it will suspend operations if it’s forced to regard its drivers as employees.

TURNING DOWN THE TEMPERATURE IN A PERENNIAL HOTBED - Could the Israel-UAE deal be a harbinger of a new era in the Middle East?

I DON’T NEED THIS KIND OF GRIEF - Law-enforcement morale in mid-2020 America.

The only way to move from landfills to recycling is to curb human freedom and go in the red

Yesterday, I covered the monthly meeting of the board of our county's solid waste management district for the local media company I freelance report for. One item of business concerned the sole bid that the board received for the upcoming three-year contract to operate the district's two landfills and its recycling activities. The board's attorney pointed out that the bottom-line figure that the bidder quoted would exceed the district's budget, but that if one takes out recycling, it leaves a nice cushion. In other words, the landfill makes money for the district, but recycling eats that money up.

This comes up at most of the meetings. Some board members even floated the purely theoretical possibility of doing away with recycling, but then quickly said that it was not a possibility; the public would find it too politically incorrect.

So when I came across this Politico piece about San Francisco's "quest to make landfills obsolete," it grabbed my attention.

The first paragraph has to do with the impressive technology that city has employed in the task of sorting refuse, but it doesn't take long after that for the article to acknowledge that "other cities over the past several years have scaled back or even abandoned their recycling programs because they couldn't find a market for the materials." Still, San Fran presses on!

For decades, recycling and composting programs have enjoyed broad political support from San Francisco mayors, legislators and voters. “They’ve always been willing to do things other cities haven’t tried yet,” says Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “They’ve pioneered a lot of programs that either are commonplace everywhere or are going to be soon.”

As it turns out, this "willingness to do things other cities haven't tried" entails a fair degree of tyranny - excuse me, bans and regulation:

Curbside composting bins joined recycling bins in 2001, and composting and recycling became mandatory in 2009. Now, city residents and business actually compost more material than they recycle. The city has also regulated construction and demolition debris, diverting much of it from landfills through recycling and reuse. Wood goes to steam-driven power plants in North Carolina to be burned as fuel; metal goes to scrap yards, then to foundries; sheetrock is composted; crushed concrete and asphalt go into new roads and pathways. 

The city has also banned single-use plastic bags and other hard-to-recycle items. It recycles items other cities don’t: film plastic, clamshell food containers, and lower-grade plastics such as yogurt cups. San Francisco found new markets for some items after China shut the door to them last year. Its cutting-edge sorting technology produces cleaner, purer bales of recyclables, which are easier to sell. 

Residents and business owners have no choice but to take time out of their lives to fool with sorting refuse into an array of bins, and you can be sure that the nanny state is auditing your degree of compliance:

All around the city, residents and businesses don’t have just two waste bins, they have three: black for trash, blue for recycling and green for compost. From curbs outside San Francisco’s famed Victorian houses and on sidewalks outside Chinatown restaurants, Recology picks up food scraps from green compost bins the same day it picks up recycling and trash. 

Sanitation workers don’t just fling stuff into the back of their trucks. They’re auditing customers’ trash. If they see too much waste in someone’s black bin that ought to have gone into the green or blue bins, they’ll leave notes reminding the person what to recycle and compost. The notes include pictures of common items for the workers to circle — a universal means of communication in the multilingual city. It’s "very targeted communication,” Haley says, “not in a mean, police-state way, but to [say], ‘Help us clean up the recycling. Help us clean up the composting.’”

"Not in a mean, police-state way, mind you." At least not yet. Oh, and under a new law, it's up to you to pay for a sorter if you fail your audit.

B.F. Skinner would dig some of the measures the city is employing:

The city has also used behavior-modification strategies to get people to throw away less trash. It recently shrank the capacity of the black bins by half, to 16 gallons, but the monthly charge of $6.97 for each black bin is the same as for a 32-gallon recycling or composting bin. “If your recycling or your composting are so contaminated that they are trash, we can double your charge on those temporarily,” Haley says. About 500 large customers have received contamination charges, and about 100 have lost discounts for recycling and composting, he says. 

Only in the fourth and third to last paragraphs does the article glancingly deal with that pesky little matter of what all this costs:

 Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who co-sponsored the waste audit and straw ordinances, says political support for anti-waste laws is high, though businesses will always raise financial concerns. 

“That’s one of the biggest challenges we face when we’re talking about these very aspirational and wonderfully environmental policy goals,” Safai acknowledges. “How do you put it into practice without making San Francisco unaffordable for everybody?” So Safai highlights ways the laws save money: fewer supply orders for restaurants, lower garbage rates for businesses that sort.

So how to close the financial gap? More tyranny!

The next frontier may be producer responsibility laws, already adopted in Europe and parts of Canada. They fund the disposal of certain packaging and printed paper by collecting fees from companies that produce them. This month, Recology CEO Michael Sangiacomo joined with two members of the California Coastal Commission to launch a petition drive for a statewide ballot initiative. Their proposed law would tax plastic manufacturers up to 1 cent per package, ban Styrofoam food containers and require that all packaging be recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2030.

 And if all this regulation, behavior modification, taxation and auditing doesn't do the trick, maybe the icy gaze of Saint Greta will get you to obey:

More civilizational rot out of San Francisco

This:

On Saturday, San Francisco voters elected the son of two former Weather Underground murderers to serve as their District Attorney. The voters deserve all the hell that is about to break loose. 

Progressive candidate Chesa Boudin wants to free criminals but prosecute police and ICE agents for doing their jobs. It's no surprise Boudin hates cops so much. His parents did, too. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert were terrorists in the Weather Underground who murdered two police officers and a security guard during a 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored security car outside New York City. 

There should be a law that children of terrorists who share their parents' worldview are barred from holding public office, especially the role of the chief law enforcement officer. Boudin's dad is still in prison so he can't kill any more cops, but his mother is out. Naturally, she is an assistant professor at Columbia University. 

After his parents killed the cops, Boudin was sent to live with two other terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn declared war on the United States and was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Ayers bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol building, and the New York City Police Department before he and Dohrn became fugitives and went into hiding. The pair eventually came out of hiding and settled in as university professors. 

As district attorney, Boudin plans to decriminalize crime and close down jails. He believes the criminal justice system is racist, and he plans to cut back on the time criminals serve under parole supervision, which he thinks is also racist. Boudin also wants to stop prosecuting gang members to the full extent of the law because he thinks that's racist, too. He thinks everything is racist.

Boudin plans to hand out U-Visas to immigrants like candy. U-Visas were originally meant for immigrants who could aid in the prosecution of crimes, but now they are rampantly misused and Boudin vows to misuse them even more. Boudin thinks every illegal alien is the victim of a crime committed by ICE and President Trump, so every immigrant will get a Visa. Boudin also wants to advocate on behalf of anyone in the United States facing deportation, including aliens who murdered cops like his parents did. 

A perfect example of the fruits of the long march through the institutions that 1960s radicals undertook when that decade came to a close.

Wednesday roundup

I haven't seen the documentary The Rise of Jordan Peterson, but my sense, from reading about it, is that it is balanced, nuanced and in-depth.  That's not stopping the jackboots from using threats to try to prevent anyone from seeing it.

A similar exercise in jackbootery is underway at Sarah Lawrence College, as the American Enterprise Institute's Samuel J. Abrams reports:

I am currently teaching a First-Year Study at Sarah Lawrence College called American Dreams. The class is a deep dive into our nation’s difficult history and addresses the question of what it means to be an American today and how that has changed over time.

In creating the class, I was deeply concerned with promoting intellectual and ideological balance, along with creating a space where students could freely question and discuss questions ranging from identity politics to social policy. As such, the reading list is as a mix of social science works, historical pieces, and memoirs, which range from Charles Murray’s Coming Apart to Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me and is intended to offer a wide range of perspectives on the American Dream and truly promote viewpoint diversity.

I even included specific provisions in the syllabus to promote balance, such as reminding students of the 1967 Chicago Kalven Committee Report about the import of higher education as an “institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.”

Moreover, the class operates  under Chatham House rules along with the College’s Principles of Mutual Respect which not only asserts that those in the school’s community seek to “embrace our diversity in all its dimensions” but also that we work to “foster honest inquiry, free speech, and open discourse.”

This course was recently featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education because the class explicitly attempts to help students understand other points of view beyond the fairly narrow, progressive monoculture that afflicts so many campuses.

I share this background because my course’s content and ideological balance are hardly objectionable. However, many of my students are being bullied outside of the classroom – in their dorms, in the student center, in the dining halls – by other students for simply taking the course with me. The course content cannot possibly be the source of the bullying. Rather, the intimidation is presumably a result of a 2018 op-ed that I wrote in the New York Times which questioned the partisan and ideological nature of the programming coming out of some administrative offices on campus and resulting storm of protests and demands, which included the usual host of meritless slanderous and defamatory claims.

It now appears that by remaining in my course or by not explicitly and publicly condemning me in some capacity, the students risk reputational damage and the stress of being viewed as  pariahs or being labeled a complicit supporter of me or my “objectionable views.” I truly do not envy my students here and completely empathize with the position my students find themselves in.

I am grateful that my students come to class ready to engage, question, and debate topics and questions across the ideological spectrum, but it is completely unacceptable that they must censor themselves or feel the slightest bit of discomfort over attending my class.

Whenever I tangle with Trumpists, I always arrive at a juncture at which I have to concede the very significant good policy moves that have occurred on the VSG's watch - judicial appointments, deregulation, pulling out of the Paris Accord and there JCPOA, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. They don't outweigh that which is disastrous about the VSG, but they must be acknowledged. One such move was appointing William Barr as Attorney General. Barr's recent speech to the Notre Dame law school is the kind of thunderous analysis of post-America's spiritual sickness that could only come from a highly refined conservative mind:

Last week, US Attorney General William Barr gave an extraordinary speech about religious liberty at Notre Dame Law School. I have not been able to locate a transcript, and only found time to watch it this morning. Here’s a video of the entire thing. The speech itself begins at about the four-minute mark.

The AG begins by talking about the capacity for self-government, meaning not the form of administration of a liberal democracy, but the ability of individuals to master their own passions, and subject them to reason. Can we handle freedom? That, says Barr, is a question that preoccupied the Founders.

No society can exist without the capacity to restrain vice, he goes on to say. If you depend only on the government to do this, you get tyranny. (This, by the way, is what’s happening in China; many Chinese actually support the tyrannical Social Credit System, because communism destroyed civil society and social trust.) But, says Barr, licentiousness is another form of tyranny. People enslaved by their own appetites make community life impossible. (This, I would say, is what we are more endangered by in America today … and it will ultimately call forth tyranny, Chinese-style.)

Barr offers this quotation from Edmund Burke:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”

Why is religion a public good? Because, says Barr, it “trains people to want what is good.” It helps to frame a society’s moral culture, and instills moral discipline. No secular creed has emerged that can do what religion does, he says. And by casting religion out, we are dismantling the foundation of our public morality.

“What we call ‘values’ today are nothing more than mere sentimentality, drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity,” says the AG.

Barr took the gloves off, saying that religion is not jumping to its death; it’s being pushed.

“This is not decay,” he said. “This is organized destruction.” He named secularists in academia, media, and elsewhere as figures who are not neutral at all, but have rather inculcated a kind of religiosity in their own project of destroying religion. They conduct their own inquisitions and excommunications for heresy.

Then Barr said something, almost in passing, that in truth deserves a lot more attention by religious and philosophical observers: that we have created a popular culture in which we the people are “too distracted” to take these questions seriously. Just last night, readers, I received an e-mail from one of you who said that “the really striking thing of our age is the complete anesthesia of religious questions.” That’s true. This, I think, is where I would push back against AG Barr somewhat. It’s not only that the secularists want to suppress religion; it’s also that many of us aren’t interested in religion in the first place. To be clear, religious questions — that is, questions of transcendence and ultimate truth — can’t be suppressed forever. But we seem to be doing a great job of avoiding them.

Anyway, back to the Barr speech. He says that we are in a time like the days of the early Church, when the Roman authorities weren’t content to leave Christians alone to pray in peace, but actually tried to force them to violate their beliefs.

Barr says in his talk that one of the most important aspects of religious liberty is the freedom to pass the faith on to your children. This is where the battle is joined — and, because the Trump administration supports “religious accommodation,” the real battles are happening at the state level. Ground Zero for the warfare is at the schools. Barr identifies three specific areas of conflict:

1. Content of public school curriculum. Meaning the implementation of an anti-traditional values curriculum without any opt-out for families. E.g., New Jersey, Illinois, and California law mandating LGBT curriculum. He cites a diktat by the Orange County (Calif.) board of education saying that parents cannot opt their kids out of LGBT training.
2. State policies designed to starve religious schools of generally available funds, to force religious people to put their kids into public schools.
3. Use of state laws to force religious schools to accept secular morality.

The Attorney General concluded by telling his Catholic audience that only by conversion of ourselves can we hope to transform society. He adds that Christians must have more emphasis on moral content in education. “Education is not vocational training,” he said. If we don’t pass on our faith and moral conviction to our children “in full vigor,” all is lost.

Another AEI scholar, Danielle Pletka  says that, with regard to what the VSG's withdrawal of a US presence from Northern Syria is doing to the power dynamic on the world stage, the root cause doesn't lend itself to a tidy left-right analytical model. The involvement-in-hot-spots-is-icky-let's-just-come-home mentality can be found on both sides of the spectrum:

we must recognize that this is a failure of leadership. Yes… the leadership of people like me and those like me who believe that the world is a better place when America leads; who believe that “never again” once meant something; who think that we must build the foundations of democratic transformation and human freedom. We must persuade our leadership, our policymakers, and the public that it is always cheaper to try to solve problems overseas before they become wars, but we haven’t done so. Second, we must set aside the left-right anger that is only deepening between us. The true adversary on the American political scene is the isolationist, the do–nothing, the one who believes “nation building here at home” is somehow mutually exclusive from leadership abroad. The problem to confront is the one that suggests that anyone who wants a foreign policy and a strategy to confront dangers is a warmonger determined to sacrifice blood and treasure.

California is going to let illegal aliens serve on government boards.

Last night's debate made more plain than ever that Joe Biden's star is fading.

Kim Jong-un has been photographed riding a white horse across the snowfields on Mt. Paektu, which, according to North Korean media, means something grand is afoot.

A Rutgers University gender-studies professor says that Donald Trump is to blame for any obesity among black women.

California comes up with another economically idiotic idea

From the state that brought you the $15 minimum wage, the mandate that all corporate boards have at least one woman, and the still-thankfully-unbuilt light rail comes this humdinger:

Changes could be coming to your favorite restaurant thanks to a statewide initiative just being announced Wednesday, called Restore California Renewable Restaurants.

Restaurant owners have the option of charging customers an additional 1% on their bills that would go to help stop climate change. Payments will be gathered by the California Air Resources Board and spent on implementing carbon plans on farms and ranches across California, boosting healthy soil, according to the Perrenial Farming Initiative.

“There’s always going to be the people who say, why is this on the bill? I don’t want to pay it. I don’t care what it’s for. I don’t want to pay it,” Christopher Barnum-Dann, the owner of Localis, said.
Talking to people in Sacramento Tuesay, they are split on the idea.
“I wouldn’t be interested in doing that. Leave the climate alone,” one resident said.

“We’re not asking our fixed-income people to pay that on their property tax. We’re asking that of someone who had made a choice to go out and spend money,” another resident, John Peters, said.
If the restaurant you’re eating at is a part of the program, you don’t have to pay the 1% if you don’t want to. You can just ask your server to take it off your bill.
“Well I live in California and I don’t know if you know this or not it’s pretty freaking expensive here. One percent to somebody who doesn’t make that much money ain’t a lot but it’s a lot more than they have,” resident Mike Mattingly said.

It's going to be interesting to see how the size of each of the four groups of restaurant patrons shapes up as this gets going (organizers hope to have 200 eateries signed up by the end of the year):

• The eager virtue-signalers who are quite proud to part with the extra money, because they really swallow the hooey about the climate being in a state of crisis
• Those who will reluctantly cough it up rather than endure the shaming facial expression of their woke server 
• Those who will say, "No, please take that off my bill."
• Those who quit eating out. 

 

 

Saturday roundup

Wonderful tribute to geostrategy scholar Robert Kaplan by Thomas MacKubin Owens at the Claremont Review of Books. 

Kaplan describes himself as a realist, arguing that realism is a “sensibility” rooted in a “mature sense of the tragic.” The realist recognizes that he must work with the elemental causes of war identified by Thucydides—honor, fear, and interest—rather than against them. His books are part travel narrative, part geopolitical treatise, combining remarkable observational talents with strategic insights. His method for understanding the world is captured by a diplomat’s comment that Kaplan noted in The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (1993): “Read, travel, read, travel, that’s the way to go.” Kaplan not only travels through the world’s regions but also “travels” through scholars’ ideas, testing his own concepts against theirs. One sees this in his essays on such exemplary realists as Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer.

Kaplan is the contemporary heir to Herodotus, the great observer of human affairs. While Herodotus is described as the first historian, the correct translation of the title of his work, The Histories, is Inquiries. Herodotus the Greek was inquiring into the ways of the other peoples with whom the Greeks were in contact, especially the Persians, Scythians, and Egyptians. One result of his inquiries was the conviction that each of these peoples was shaped to some degree by its territorial setting. Kaplan, following Herodotus, understands that cultures and civilizations continually interact in time and space and are therefore shaped by geographic realities. He explicitly acknowledges Herodotus in The Revenge of Geography (2012), which includes a tour d’horizon of the works of earlier geopolitical thinkers, especially Marshall G.S. Hodgson and William H. McNeill, who challenged Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler’s belief that separate civilizations pursued their destinies more or less independently of one another.

Kaplan is definitely of the school asserting America's indispensability:

Although Kaplan does not use the term, he advocates in effect “hegemonic stability,” the international relations theory which holds that free and open international trade—globalization—requires more than simply a global invisible hand. Instead, it needs a hegemonic power willing and able to provide the world with economic stability and international security. During the 19th century, Great Britain functioned as the hegemon; since World War II, the United States has fulfilled this role. Despite the attendant burdens, hegemony is a win-win, beneficial to the hegemon and the world at large. Conversely, a decline in relative American power could create a more disorderly, less peaceful world. As the late Samuel Huntington wrote in his essay “Why International Primacy Matters”:

A world without U.S. primacy will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth than a world where the United States continues to have more influence than any other country in shaping global affairs. The sustained international primacy of the United States is central to the welfare and security of Americans and to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.

Kaplan’s realism is not indifferent to such liberal principles as human rights and free trade. On the contrary, his style of realism makes defense of those principles possible in the first place. The realist knows, declares Kaplan, “that order comes before freedom, and interests come before values. After all, without order there is no freedom for anybody, and without interests a state has no incentive to project its values.” 

Which is why it's scary to have a guy like the Very Stable Genius at the helm:

President Donald Trump appeared to overrule his own Treasury Department on Friday and withdrew new sanctions aimed at North Korea because, the White House said, the president "likes" the reclusive country's leader, Kim Jong Un.
Treasury officials announced Thursday they were sanctioning two shipping companies based in China that have helped North Korea evade international sanctions. The U.S. has been increasingly pressuring Chinese firms doing businesses with Kim's regime.
Less than 24 hours after those sanctions were announced, Trump abruptly announced on Twitter that he had ordered the withdrawal of "additional sanctions."
"It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea," Trump posted on Twitter. "I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!"

Can't announce something like that without the exclamation marks! There's sure to be some head-scratching. In fact, the face-palming has already begun:

. . . the decision to abandon the sanctions so quickly after they had been proposed drew surprise from experts. 
Harry Kazianis, director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest, has been generally supportive of Trump’s engagement with Kim. But he expressed disbelief on Friday with Trump’s decision to rescind the Treasury sanctions.
“What are we doing on #North Korea?" he tweeted on Friday. "Help.”
Kazianis said in an email that Trump's move may be an appeal to Kim not to abandon the denuclearization negotiations.
"No matter what happens now, you can bet the North Koreans will only want to deal with Trump from now on considering this action,” he said, a reference to the harder line that Trump's advisers have taken in the negotiations.

Speaking of leaders abruptly reversing course on established policy, here's Tammy Bruce on Gavin Newsom's U-turn on the death penalty in California:

During the past eight years, California voters have twice reiterated their support for the death penalty by defeating propositions seeking to overturn it.

If anyone was confused about Californians’ understanding of the death penalty representing an important part of justice, in 2016 they even passed a proposition calling for the speeding up of executions by shortening the decades-long appeals process.

In other words, Californians want the death penalty, and they want to it happen faster and more often.

Last week, despite this undeniable demand by the voters, California’s new Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a “moratorium” on the death penalty in the state, effectively granting a reprieve to the 737 condemned killers on California’s death row.

The Bakersfield Californian issued an editorial blasting the governor’s move:

“… If opponents want to abolish the death penalty, they must convince voters. They must clear up judicial concerns over these executions. They must find ways to deliver assurances that people who commit some of the worst crimes will legally and humanely receive the worst punishment. Although Newsom long has publicly opposed the death penalty, he pledged during his 2018 gubernatorial campaign to ‘respect the will of the voters.’ He lied. Just three months into office, he has signed an executive order reprieving -- or halting -- the death sentences of all 737 inmates on death row. …” 

In typical Democratic fashion, when Newsom was running for governor back in 2016, he indeed misled everyone about his anti-death penalty intentions. After all, the ends justify the means. In the aftermath of the governor’s action, the San Francisco Chronicle reminded readers, “But when The Chronicle asked candidates last year for their views on capital punishment, spokesman Dan Newman said Newsom ‘recognizes that California voters have spoken on the issue and, if elected governor, he’d respect the will of the electorate by following and implementing the law.’ “

Yeah, well, not so much.

Matthew Walther asks, at The Week, why are 2020 Democrats so weird?

Why are Democrats so weird? Only a few days after his long-shot candidacy had begun to attract some interest from the mainstream press, Andrew Yang came out strongly against circumcision, surely one of the most pressing political and social issues of our time. He even doubled down on this by agreeing on Thursday to debate right-wing WunderkindBen Shapiro on the subject. Last month Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) told a painfully obvious lie about listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac while smoking weed in college (she graduated many years before either of them released their debut albums). Even her own father told her to cut it out. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (Mass.) insistence on releasing the results of a DNA test in the hope of vindicating her past claims of Native American heritage was one of the most bizarre events in recent political history.

Meanwhile, there is Beto. I don't particularly care that in 1988 the young Robert Francis O'Rourke posted some erotic verses about cows ("Oh, Milky wonder, sing for us once more, / Live your life, everlusting [sic] joy" is one of the only bits I can quote on this family website) online. I didn't even know until yesterday that there was such a thing as "online" in 1988. Nor am I going to get all worked up about his weird murder spree fantasy story, which is the kind of thing stupid teenagers write every day. But what I do want to know is whether he actually took a handful of green feces, put it in a bowl, and served it to his wife once, telling her that it was avocado. Asked by a journalist recently to confirm the anecdote, which had been reported by a supposed friend of the candidate, he responded that while he didn't remember this happening it "sounds like the kind of thing I would do." Come again? If you fed excrement to the mother of your children, I feel like you would recall. I almost certainly think she would. If there was ever something to lie about as a politician, this is it.

Jonah Goldberg's G-File at NRO this week takes up the broad and grim subject that informs everything here at LITD. He's basically imploring us, "Please, fellow Americans (post-Americans?), it's very late in the day and the rot is very advanced. Let's get a grip and reverse it."

Sumantra Maitra at The Federalist on the Freedom-Hater position on the Electoral College in the context of the overall FHer agenda:

This is not a single, specific issue taken up only after Queen Clinton didn’t get the throne. The trend lines are far deeper.

The current Democratic front runners, including Robert Francis O’Rourke, have argued for not just open borders, but tearing down the existing border fences. Others have argued for abolishing the Senate, calling it undemocratic, and lowering the voting age to 16.

All these trends cannot be just coincidence. The fundamental aim is to replace and control the demos, in the name of democracy—add more people who are traditionally Democratic voters, and who are young, naïve, and impressionable, more easily swayed by charismatic charlatans and soaring rhetoric. There’s a reason the rush is always to nominate one who’s charismatic but vacuous. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama followed the pattern, which Hillary Clinton, naturally awkward, couldn’t manage.

The final obstacle is the Electoral College. Even here, with the shockingly low standards of civics education in America, and deliberate partisan misinformation from both print and television media, means much of the American population lives not knowing why the Electoral College was made part of the nation’s system in the first place, and how it is the last bastion against majoritarian tyranny.

Barbara Streisand on the revelations about just how much of a perv Michael Jackson was:

The legendary singer and actress said that Wade Robson and James Safechuck — whose allegations against the late King of Pop resurfaced in the recent documentary “Leaving Neverland" — “were thrilled to be there” and that what allegedly happened to them “didn’t kill them."

And, at the risk of letting this brief take on the overall subject of Michael Jackson turn into an essay worthy of a full-length post (it's after 11, and I have to get to the bank before noon), let me say that I had absolutely no use for any of his post-Jackson 5 output. I suspect that Quincy Jones, one of the most accomplished producers and arrangers the music business has ever known, approached his work on stupid albums like Thriller opportunistically. I mean, who's not going to take a call from the King of Pop? I could be wrong; maybe he saw something in the thin material, most of it funk- and disco- based and heavy on minor pentatonic structure - that is to say, not all that distinguishable from a lot of early-80s R&B output - that I am missing. But then there are the videos, particularly the one for the title cut, which struck me as having a Saturday-morning-cartoon vibe that should have been our cue that Michael had a real reluctance to grow up.

Okay, that is all. I really have to get going before the urge to really pontificate in the matter gets the better of me.