MESSAGE, SENT?

A Newsweek headline from two weeks ago:  "Satellite Photos Show US Reclaiming World War II Airfield for China War."

An overgrown airfield on a small island in the Pacific, once instrumental in America's role in ending World War II, is being reclaimed by the U.S. Air Force as it prepares for a possible future fight with China.

The remote island of Tinian, which is less than 40 square miles, is one of three principal islands in the Northern Mariana Islands, a string of sparsely populated islets in the Western Pacific Ocean that make up the U.S.'s westernmost frontier, along with the major military hub of Guam some 100 miles to the south.

Tinian was known for its strategic value during the war. Due to its proximity to Tokyo—less than 1,500 miles—it later became a staging base to launch bomber attacks on mainland Japan. The island is a similar distance to China and other flashpoints in Asia, with a U.S. Defense Department plan costed at nearly half a billion dollars now preparing it to help the United States deter, or defeat, the Chinese military.

If you know, you know.

PUTTING HIS MONEY WHERE HIS MOUTH IS?

No matter how many times I point out that independent left wing talk radio is at least as soporific as the same stuff on public radio, they never get the message.  Case in point: Thom Hartmann, who has a radio show, the tone of which ranges between irritated and scolding.  "The GOP hold on most of American radio seems pretty unshakable, but Democrats must get into the talk-radio game before ever more damage is done."

COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM MEANS COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION SIMPLIFICATION.

Read and understand a lengthy Cato policy analysis, "Why Legal Immigration is Nearly Impossible."

That has been the case for going on a century.

America traditionally had few immigration restrictions, but since the 1920s, the law has banned most aspiring immigrants. Today, fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. Immigrants cannot simply get an exception to immigrate any more than restaurateurs in the 1920s could simply get an exception to sell alcohol. Instead, just as Prohibition granted only a few exemptions for religious, industrial, or medical uses of alcohol, people seeking an exception to immigration prohibition must also fit into preexisting carve-outs for a select few.

I've carried on about this in a variety of ways, including referring to ancestors arriving with a letter of introduction to an employer or a mom and her kids landing with $5 to their name and on their way to join their dad; and grousing about the way the existing rules work for people seeking legal residence, which is to say, not even seeking citizenship.

JOE GOW, GONE?

Mr Gow was the chancellor (Wisconsin-speak for campus president) of Oktoberfest destination college Wisconsin-LaCrosse until his unusual side hustle came to light.

Joe Gow, who should have stuck to summer stock, was removed as chancellor of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, otherwise known as a notorious party school, and now the faculty hearing panel has recommended to the current chancellor that he be dismissed for cause.  "The former University of Wisconsin at La Crosse chancellor was fired last year for making pornography with his wife. Now a panel has recommended he lose his faculty job and tenure."  The current chancellor and the system's regents must each review the recommendation, and their concurrence is necessary before the Gows will have all sorts of leisure time to make videos.  "It's not pretty.  There's always the tension between professionalism and transgressivity in the university.  So it is playing out in LaCrosse."

The hearing panel's recommendations have made their way through the chain of command, with the system board of regents concurring with the recommendation.  He was removed as chancellor for conduct unbecoming.  The reason for stripping him of tenure looks more like misappropriation of state property.

Regents fired him from his faculty role due to allegations of engaging in “unethical and potentially illegal conduct” related to his pornographic activities, refusing to cooperate with a December investigation after lewd videos surfaced online and violating information technology policies by receiving vendor emails for sex toys and other items, among other reasons.

Gow—who made pornography and vegan cooking videos with his wife and occasionally adult film stars—has rejected UW’s accusations of impropriety and pointed to calls from state lawmakers who demanded his termination, alleging that the system is bowing to political pressure. Gow has also argued in media interviews and two separate hearings that his actions are protected by the First Amendment and that his online activities would not interfere with his teaching duties.

Something in that passage reminds me of warnings Illinois university faculty and staff received during ethics training about misusing university electronic mail, whether it was to buy stuff or to mass-quote political material.  That ethics training was a gift to us from Rod Blagojevich, who has sort of rehabilitated himself in Trump-adjacent media, and the people administering it became more fretful about the time people were putting in on the modules.  "As anyone who has ever sat the annual ethics training required of Illinois university employees (no rushing through it, peasant, or you get a do-over!) there is a gift ban, and the offer of a baseball team of tickets at face value to a public official qualifies as a covered gift."  Who knew, maybe some of the people who left the training window open so as not to be dinged for rushing through the material might have been looking at racy cooking videos in another window!)

THEIR PEAK SEASON IS FALL.

Most preservation railways wind down their operations after Labor Day, perhaps rolling out a few haunted trains or pajama parties with Santa.  For years, though, the electric railroad running out of East Troy has been busiest in the fall, with leaf peepers out for hayrides and children of all ages picking out pumpkins or buying apples.

Now Chicago's WGN-TV have called attention to the railway.

Just a two-hour trip from Chicago can take you across the Wisconsin border, and, in another sense, back in time to see a piece of century old transportation history from Chicago still riding the rails.

You may know East Troy, Wisconsin as the home of Alpine Valley, but the village of 4,687 people is also home to the East Troy Railroad Museum.

“We get a lot of Chicago people coming in from there,” said John Lauber, the owner of an East Troy ice cream shop. “It’s almost like stepping back in time.”

I've embedded the clip from WGN's You Tube channel as that link is likely to stay active longer.

John Lauber has been with the museum in its various incarnations since the first trolleys started running in 1972.  That's likely his vintage Studebaker in front of his store, and two of the modernized South Shore arks further modernized as a diner train behind.  Inside, the soda fountain and the ice cream freezer work, while most of the inventory is of vintage merchandise.

Unattributed WGN photograph.

Do the math, none of us are getting any younger, and this might be the final season for J. Lauber's, unless one of the employees continues the tradition.

Find yourself a preservation railway and go to it.  Have a Green Cow and buy a pumpkin while you're there.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Exactly.  "What Is the Democratic Party If Not the Party of Sophomoric Teens, Intrepid Cosplayers, and Would-Be Heroes?"

We want better choices.  "It’s easy to imagine the person who thinks neither Trump nor Harris would be a good President."  That post also notes, "If it’s all about turnout, then the point is to excite or inflame your base rather than appeal to the moderate middle. Which naturally turns off the moderate middle."  Maybe the political bundles are too big.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

BETTER TO BET ON EMERGENCE.

A recent Reason investigation of "certificate of need" restrictions on the expansion of medical facilities correctly argues "We can't have nice things."

Joshua Windham, the Institute for Justice attorney who is litigating [cataract surgeon Jay] Singleton's case, says the problem lies with North Carolina's Certificate of Need (CON) law, which gives government regulators—rather than patients or consumers—the power to decide what services are needed.

"The government can't possibly know these things in advance, in part because people's perceptions of their own needs will change, but also because the facts of reality will change."

Well, no.

[A]t least on a chalkboard we can achieve Platonic perfection in the issuance of permits, which is to say, trade tested betterments would do no better.  Reality generally falls short of Platonic perfection, let alone of Pareto optimality.  There are certificate of need regulations in place in Illinois, and those might have had the cosmetic effect of bending the cost curve down by limiting the construction of intensive care units, particularly downstate, but with the consequence of severe capacity constraints during the coronavirus outbreaks.

Perhaps there's a more general lesson, suggested by George Will.

For [advocates of environmental-social corporate governance] progress consists of returning to the Middle Ages.

Then, life for most people was (as Thomas Hobbes depicted life in the state of nature) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hitherto in human history, there was stagnation — negligible economic growth — because workers, and the very few who had a surplus beyond subsistence to save, were surrounded by grasping “stakeholders”: kings, nobles, communities, tribes, guilds, churches and others who enforced nonconsensual communal sharing, leeching away much of what little that workers received for their dawn-to-dusk toils.

Mass flourishing has been enabled by economic growth. It began with the Enlightenment principle that individuals own what their labor and investments produce.

ESG is the stealthy socialization of wealth, the surreptitious semi-confiscation of others’ wealth. But progressives’ ESG aspiration is worse than a strange nostalgia for the 1300s. It also is a repellent yearning for the 1930s.

Show any skill in producing nice things, somebody with no ability to do so will find a way to batten off it.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Shaniqua McClendon wants her good name back.

By the time I reached college, there was no longer any ambiguity about how people felt about my name. I was often told I seemed more like an “Ashley,” or “nothing like a Shaniqua.” During my run for president of the Black Student Movement, students left disparaging comments about me. The one that cut deepest was, “And of course her name is Shaniqua.”

It's an instructive column, with an amusing conclusion.  "Prejudice does not end where it’s convenient for you, and one day a name as common as Susan could be subject to this same bigotry."

Karen would like a word.

DISPATCHES FROM KAMALA'S KOLKHOZ.

The ditzy valley girl is still rabbiting on about cracking down on (nonexistent) price gouging.

This proposal will not increase milk yields by a single drop. https://t.co/JMXbcHY1n0

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) September 26, 2024

Like any other purveyor of a lie, big or otherwise, Team Harris is betting on repetition adding veracity.

On Monday, Kamala campaign surrogate Kelly Hyman, an attorney and media commentator, appeared on Fox News with Sandra Smith. The interview turned into a complete disaster as Hyman fumbled, stumbled, and outright dodged a simple question: What is Kamala Harris’s plan to lower prices?

“What is Harris's plan?” Smith asked. After some awkward silence, Smith followed up by saying “We're waiting.”

And just like the candidate she was advocating for, Hyman offered a word salad of vague phrases and unconvincing stammering.

“Yeah. Okay. Excuse if there’s — there's a lot of aspects to it in, in regards to looking at it online.”

Looking at it online? Did she have Kamala’s platform on her computer screen as a cheat sheet?

“So let's talk about lowering the grocery cost because that's something that's brought, brought up. You the viewers can look at this online. She talks about certain things in regards to advancing the first federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries, to set clear rules to the road to make clear that big corporations can't unfairly exploit consumers as well.”

“Is that happening?” Smith asked. “Is that currently happening?

“It's not at this moment. No. This is her plan that's laid out for the first 100 days when she becomes president of the United States of America.”

It sounds like she didn’t understand the intent of the question, so Smith clarified: “Price gouging, is that currently happening?”

This should have been an easy yes-or-no question, but Hyman’s response? A waffling, awkward train wreck. “In regards to the — I don't know exactly if that's currently happening or not because I'm not privity [sic] to that type of information.”

Like the Oakland that the subordinate ditz's ditzy boss claims to hail from, there's no there there.

SURRENDERING WITH A SHRUG.

An Inside Higher Ed column asks, "How Much Do Students Really Read?"  As one might expect of a site that is fine with lowering standards, the answer is, "Not Much, Not That There's Anything Wrong With That."  No, seriously.

Ava Wherley likes to read—especially thrillers. She rarely reads nonfiction, but when she does, she prefers suspenseful tales of true crime.

Reading for school is another matter. Wherley, a sophomore biology major at the University of Florida, is assigned about 100 pages of reading a week for three classes—most of which she skips in favor of gleaning the information from YouTube videos.

“I’m someone that learns really well from videos and things being visually explained to me, which is something the textbook isn’t usually really good at,” she said, adding that academic texts tend to use overly complex language, which makes them harder to read.

It's possible that nobody taught her the art of close reading, or of having pencil and paper nearby to make marginal notes and jot down questions to bring up in class.  That requires the middle- and high-school teachers to be the demanding Mrs Stonebreaker rather than the friendly Miss Othmar.

Nowadays, many students rarely read full-length novels, reports AP's Sharon Lurye. Teachers assign excerpts, "a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world."

In a 2022 statement, the National Council of Teachers of English declared: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Instead, teachers are urged to focus on "media literacy" and short texts that students feel are "relevant."

Deep reading builds "critical thinking skills, background knowledge and, most of all, empathy," said UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf told Lurye. “We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are, not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others,” Wolf said.

"Only 14% of young teens say they read for fun daily, compared with 27% in 2012," according to federal data, Lurye reports. So, if students aren't asked to read books for school, most will not read at all.

Future social scientists might be able to trace some of the increasing gap between high earners and low earners precisely to that "decentering" of reading and writing in favor of the fun stuff.  Look, I was as guilty as anyone of being less than impressed with some of the stuff assigned in junior high and high school.  Some of it I went back to later and enjoyed it more; some of it was no less soporific than I found it at the time.

THROW IN A STOP-OVER OR TWO.

Amtrak's Floridian returns, sort of.  "Chicago-area residents looking for some fun in the sun later this fall will have the chance to take an Amtrak train directly to Florida, but only for a limited time."  The first through train will run Sunday, November 10.

THE POSITIVE CASE FOR TRUMP.

Alex Hinton, who is a senior anthropologist at the Newark campus of Rutgers, offers it.

I have been examining toxic polarization – and ways to stop it. Many efforts to reduce people’s polarized views begin with an injunction: Listen and understand.

To this end, I have attended Trump rallies, populist and nonpartisan events and meetings where Democrats and Republicans connect and talk. Along the way, I have spoken with Trump supporters ranging from the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, faithful to moderate “hold the nose and vote for him” conservatives.

And indeed, many on the left fail to understand who Trump voters are and how they vary. Trump’s base cannot simply be dismissed as racist “deplorables”, as Hillary Clinton famously said in 2016, or as country bumpkins in red MAGA hats. Trump voters trend older, white, rural, religious and less educated. But they include others outside those demographic groups.

Many people have thoughtful reasons for voting for Trump.

He's engaging in the same sort of ethnography Brad Todd and Salena Zito offered in The Great Revolt.  That book disaggregates voters more finely.  Professor Hinton suggests five essential elements contribute to a Trump vote, with his list being an enumeration rather than a ranking.

1.  Media distortion.
2.  Bread on the table, money in the bank.
3.  A border invasion.
4.  A proven record.
5.  The MAGA bull in a china shop.

That is, the Professional-Managerial Class has failed, and voters might be willing to forgive Mr Trump for the troubles during the corona shutdowns, as he trusted the very Professional Managerial types who were treated with even more respect at the beginning of the presidency that followed.

We'll see in about six weeks how it turns out.  Pay attention to your state legislatures and school boards.

THE BEST THING FOR GOVERNMENT TO DO IS TO GO AWAY.

Strong Towns contributor Andrew Burleson offers a harsh but accurate description of the Technocratic Era of urban and regional planning.

Over the course of the 20th century, we've gradually stripped away the concept of property rights. In 1900, if you owned land, you could generally build whatever you wanted on it. Today the government determines the size, shape and design of buildings, as well as what activities are allowed inside them. This level of regulation is so widespread that the few exceptions — most famously Houston's lack of land-use zoning — are noteworthy and much discussed.

We've had a hundred years to get used to this, so we're not shocked by it anymore, but we should be. Most American cities today employ near-Soviet levels of central planning to micromanage the use of property. Unsurprisingly, we have crippling shortages of shelter and high rents.

All that expertise, and we turned out the worse for it.  Technocrats, however, report to elected officials, who still serve at the consent of the governed.  I'm obligated to remind you, dear reader, that paying attention to who is the mayor, who serves on the school board and common council, and as the dog-catcher matters at least as much as the presidency.  And the residents of the heavily zoned neighborhoods are saying, Enough!

First, the New Urbanists helped us all realize that our beloved historic districts in American cities and small towns were not obsolete but rather illegal. They explained that the shape of our buildings and neighborhoods is no longer the product of a designer's creativity, but largely the mandatory output of a regulatory formula set by city legislation.

By law, we could no longer have nice things, including mixed use neighborhoods with churches along the car lines. Nor did the pattern of shopping centers and drive-up eateries along a strip suitable for cruising age well.  And people who had an idea what was wrong started working with people who sensed something was wrong but couldn't diagnose it.

Second, Strong Towns and other media organizations built on the knowledge of the New Urbanists and raised the salience of dysfunctional local government to a much wider audience of concerned citizens. Twenty years ago, these topics were the niche interest of architects and planners; today, there's a much wider pool of nonprofessional interest and activism.

Thus, slowly, the work of clearing away the bad laws goes on.

Finally, the YIMBY movement emerged with an effective strategy to organize concerned citizens and effectively pass legislative reform.

The crucial insight of the YIMBY movement is that policy change hinges on a fundamental asymmetry: The negatives of new development fall overwhelmingly on the immediate neighbors, while the benefits are diffused across the entire region. Similarly, if only one jurisdiction in a region liberalizes, the entire region's pent-up demand will concentrate on that single outlet. Broad reform is therefore difficult at the local level.

However, the YIMBY movement has shown us that this collective action problem can be addressed at the state level, where the diffuse benefits clearly outweigh the costs. So a key YIMBY strategy has been to use state preemption to remove barriers to housing across an entire state all at once. This has led to broad, substantial reform, and the movement is gaining momentum as it accumulates wins.

It's straightforward.  Relax zoning.  Deregulate parking.  Treat street parking as a productive asset.  Reason's J. D. Tuccille notes that under the current morass of process, in heavily zoned and otherwise regulated neighborhoods, long waits to see the bureaucrat who can clarify which process govern are not unknown.  "Clearing away barriers to housing shouldn't be a big ask. We'll see if Americans are up to the challenge."

I suspect the people are.  The public officials who graft off the existing morass are another matter.

FIFTEENTH CENTURY AGRICULTURE WAS SUSTAINABLE.

Today's ration of silliness from Common Dreams. comrades!  "White Paper on Ending Destructive Food Systems to Be Released at Climate Week NYC."  Maybe we can eat sentiments.  "A global movement of organizations dedicated to ensuring a just transition away from industrial animal agriculture will release a white-paper roadmap to a U.S. audience on Tuesday containing guidance on shifting to equitable, humane, and sustainable food systems."  We won't be able to eat anything shipped from a distance, but that has long been part of those so-called just transitions.

“There’s a growing movement uniting against industrial animal agriculture’s exploitation of workers, animals and the environment,” said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The roadmap provides direction on stopping the global food system from driving us toward climate catastrophe.”

The roadmap was coproduced by more than 50 contributors. It represents a shared vision for transformation away from industrial animal agriculture and calls on global leaders to take action on three key levers of change for a just transition: strengthening food system governance, promoting agroecological practices, and shifting toward diets with planetary and social boundaries.

The pathways can be tailored to local and regional contexts, taking into account local legislation, cultural sensitivities, community-based solutions, meat consumption and reduction narratives, the role of plant-based diet shifts, and how entrenched industrial animal agriculture is in a given region. Efforts are already underway in Nigeria, Kenya, Togo, Southeast Asia, and the United States to create localized roadmaps.

“Industrial animal agriculture is exacting a heavy toll on animals, ecosystems, our health, and our communities. It is a system that profits from the exploitation of billions of animals, millions of workers, and our limited natural resources,” said Cameron Harsh, US director of programs at World Animal Protection. “Its only beneficiaries are the immensely powerful meat, seafood, and dairy companies who wield incredible influence over political processes. We must put ourselves on a clear pathway away from factory farming before it’s too late.”

That simply puts a different set of beneficiaries in the saddle.

Werner Schuch, Two Riders of the Thirty Years' War and Farmers, 1881, oil on canvas.
Painting from the collection of the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Let's see that "growing movement" demonstrate their transition skills on a small scale, before they put their boots and spurs on and yoke all of humanity to the plow.

CROSS CROSSINGS CAUTIOUSLY.

When it's a tie at the railroad crossing, you lose.  Railroad Safety Week began Monday.  Treat each week like it is Railroad Safety Week.  See Tracks?  Think Train!  Each day of the week features material intended for a different audience.  Hump Day is for motorists.  Friday is a variation on Get the Red Out.  Sunday, when the ferroequinologists are trackside, is for photographers.

CHICAGO'S TRIBAL CONFLICTS.

Second City Cop asks, "Gang War on Tap?"  That's been an undercurrent in those mostly peaceful weekends.  "There is a tribal element to the city's ongoing gang warfare. It's unusual, though, for anyone to call attention in the way Englewood, South Shore, and Woodlawn residents are." Add Galewood to the mix.  "Let's turn to John Kass for that pessimistic perspective.  'Thanks to Biden’s Open Borders, in Dem Cities it’s Black vs. Brown.'"

IS THE SPEAKER'S COMMITMENT CREDIBLE?

All I want for Christmas is the regular order appropriations.  We're likely to have more shutdown theater.  "Speaker Johnson says House will not approve ‘Christmas omnibus’"  Unfortunately, there are a few Advent candles yet to be lit.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is promising that the House will not approve a single, massive bill to fund the entire government in December — a scenario feared by conservatives — despite a stopgap that’s expected to clear the House this week expiring on Dec. 20.

“There won’t be a Christmas omnibus,” Johnson said in a press conference Tuesday, reiterating a message he relayed privately to members in a House GOP conference meeting that morning.

It is a bold promise from the Speaker, who has struggled to corral the slim House GOP majority behind an effective strategy to pressure the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House on spending.

And it would also defy historical precedent. Congress has regularly passed omnibus spending bills after a funding deadline butts up against end-of-year holidays, when members are eager to quickly finish legislative business and return to their families.

Conservatives have aimed to avoid that scenario, fearing Democrats and a lame-duck President Biden would load the bill with their own priorities. They had pushed for a stopgap spending bill that extended funding through March 2025, but it failed on the House floor.

The House is expected to vote Wednesday on a continuing resolution (CR) to extend government funding until Dec. 20 in order to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1. While many conservatives opposed to any kind of stopgap are expected to vote against the bill, it is likely to pass due to support from Democrats.

Democrats like to print money and buy off preferred constituencies, and yet, the track record in this century suggests Official Washington prefer these shutdown dramas to regular order.

If there are twelve appropriations for the Constitutionally-specified federal functions, there are opportunities for a fiscally-minded Member of Congress or a president bound by the Constitution to object to those irrelevant sprinkles, irrespective of the Urgency with which some of the kids clamor for them.  A bundle, on the other hand, in which all those federal functions are at risk unless the omnibus passes, is an omnibus with lots of kids carrying ice cream treats on board.

The House appears to be struggling to temper two principles: that the federal functions be funded, and that the government not borrow too much printed money, by making it harder to bundle the functions, sprinkles, and crap sandwiches.

I'll credit the Speaker with success in shutting down the ice cream truck.

Johnson pointed to a move last year that extended government funding to two separate dates past December as evidence that he could avoid an omnibus this year. The House eventually approved government funding in two separate large packages, but only after multiple stopgaps to buy lawmakers time.

“We have broken the Christmas omni, and I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition,” Johnson said.

Johnson is also ruling out other large packages of funding legislation, such as “minibuses” — bills that combine funding for some, but not all, areas of government. Government funding is theoretically divided up among 12 appropriations bills.

“We don’t want any buses. We’re not going to do any buses, OK?” Johnson said.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) pushed a similar message, and painted this week’s stopgap bill as a win because it did not include other funding that Senate Democrats wanted.

And one salutary effect of assorted Tea Party spending hawks and Trumpians within the Republican caucus is laying bare the nexus of Official Washington and big-spending Democrats.  "Might the eternal shutdown-continuing resolution-debt ceiling cycle be the way by which Official Washington continues its preferred policies?"

For the moment, the reluctant spenders are reining in the free spenders.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) pushed a similar message, and painted this week’s stopgap bill as a win because it did not include other funding that Senate Democrats wanted.

“This is always a tough negotiation. The Senate wanted to try to spend more money, and our Speaker stood up to the Senate and said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that,’” Scalise said. “They wanted to play this Christmas Eve Omni game that they used to play, having an omnibus drop on Christmas Eve, and nobody’s read the bill, and it just gets voted on, everybody leaves town. We said no to that last year, and Mike Johnson, as Speaker, is saying no to that again this year.”

Johnson noted that the House has passed five of the 12 regular funding bills — which were packed with GOP priorities and considered dead on arrival in the Senate — while the Senate has passed none, pointing the finger at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“I’m going to hope, I’m going to plead, I’m going to urge the Senate to do their job. As the Leader Scalise noted, they have not done that. This is Chuck Schumer’s fault,” Johnson said.

Perhaps Mr Whipple is pinning his hopes on a change in control of the House and a larger majority in the Senate after the election.  Whether that comes to pass or not, another continuing resolution standoff during Advent will not be edifying.  Perhaps the bond traders will provide clarity first.

THERE SHE GOES AGAIN.

It wasn't enough for Zephyr Teachout to write a silly defense of price-gouging laws for The Atlantic, she had to write a similar essay making the same mistakes for The Washington Monthly.

While price gouging bans are not novel nor particularly problematic, they represent a deep and wise recognition that educated Americans in the libertarian era that began with Ronald Reagan don’t recognize: that the “invisible hand” of the market doesn’t always exist in reality as it does in platonic form and that the magical “price discovery” promised by keeping government out of the way doesn’t always work. All markets have rules and need them, and they need rules not just about quality and safety but also about power and exploitation. As president, Joe Biden surprised many by breaking with market fundamentalist thinking and becoming the greatest trustbuster our country has seen in 50 years. Harris’ price gouging announcement suggested she would not turn away from the path he forged but instead embrace it and make a powerful legacy of a new—and old—vision of economics, one which puts power problems at the core.

Half a century ago, Charles Peters's Monthly articles were cheerleading for Jimmy Carter, and they're fine with the Jarrett regency, whether it's Dementia Joe or the ditzy valley girl as figurehead, serving up more malaise.  In like manner, Mx Teachout serves up the same sloppy thinking to Monthly readers that The Atlantic ran.

Price gouging laws in America are based on the insight that there are situations where the asymmetry of power and information is too great to allow the price that “emerges” from those dynamics to go unregulated. During emergencies, companies can effectively set whatever price they want, using disaster as leverage to reap windfall profits. When a hurricane shuts down all the electricity in a community, for instance, the grocery stores with generators could hike their prices manyfold, knowing that families with refrigerated food will have to pay the new prices or their children will go hungry. Such predatory behavior happens, but it is far less prevalent than it would be because grocers and other retail sellers know they can be investigated and charged with price gouging.

Free market thinkers object to anti-price-gouging statutes as damaging interference with laws of supply and demand. Severe price hikes, they argue, are valuable market signals that alert investors and companies that there is money to be made in expanding capacity to produce more of the needed goods. The problem, as I recently noted in The Atlantic, is that when a spike in demand is clearly the result of a temporary emergency that will recede once the situation returns to normal, producers have little incentive to expand capacity. Rather, it’s in their interests to merely jack up prices and enjoy the higher profits while they last. Anti-price-gouging laws are specifically tailored for precisely these scenarios.

It's not about "expanding capacity," it's about using transportation. To move goods from where their marginal valuation is relatively low to where their marginal valuation is higher. And somebody has to be willing to pay that higher price.  Somewhere Zephyr's train of thought derailed.  Would she rather have those transactions be relatively transparent, or must the buyers with higher marginal valuations make side payments or hire private transportation or otherwise exercise creativity?  Oh, you could expand the laws to deal with such situations, you know, confiscate inventories of hoarders, send speculators to Gulag, maybe make example of rich Jew or two, you get the idea.

From there, he goes on to serve up more malaise, in the form of competition policies based on the old structure-conduct-performance paradigm, with some predatory pricing thrown in just for fun.  Egad.  Let us draw the curtain of charity over that continuation.

I'll let Michael "Kids Prefer Cheese" Munger caution policy wonks against running with price scissors.

The most fundamental problem, though, is the naïve equating of price changes with cost changes. The logic seems to be that the only legitimate change in prices must come from and be proportional to, changes in cost.

There is no economic basis for such a rule. Cost and price may move together over longer periods of time, but in any period of a few months the price is mostly determined by consumers. This conclusion is not ideological, it’s not controversial, and it dates to one of the giants of economic theory:  Alfred Marshall.

Yes, and in a very short period of time it is the subjective valuation of consumers that governs the price that would ration the available supply and make importation from more distant sources of the good worthwhile.  "Marshall’s insight is timeless: in the short run, consumers are generally buying from other consumers, not from producers."  Choose wisely: will consumers buy from other consumers in a transparent way, or in a roundabout way, or not at all?

THE NOSE TACKLE NOBODY OUTRUNS.

Brett Favre reveals Parkinson's diagnosis during congressional hearing.

Favre, who played 20 NFL seasons, including 321 consecutive regular-season and playoff games, estimated during a 2022 interview on the "The Bubba Army" radio show that he suffered “thousands” of concussions during his football career.

Parkinson's disease is a condition that causes deterioration in the brain and affects motor skills. According to the Parkinson's Foundation, over one million people in the United States live with the disease and nearly 90,000 are diagnosed each year.

Mr Favre had the right attitude toward continuing to play football. "When any job loses all elements of fun, it's time to quit."  And when it was time to walk away, "the toughest guy on the field wasn't afraid to cry."

PEGGY NOONAN BURIES THE LEDE.

She's long understood the situation. "The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully."  That was before she went Never Trump.  At the time, she was advocating for Nikki Haley; I don't know if she's now endorsing the ditzy alternative.  She has doubts.  "Kamala Harris Is an Artless Dodger."

Well, yeah, Democrats are good at concealing their candidates' true selves.  They hid Dementia Joe's dementia while suggesting he would make the lives of the unprotected less parlous than they were during the 2020 corona tyranny and urban riots.  How has that turned out?

FOOD IS TOO EXPENSIVE TO WASTE.

That's why Tupperware caught on during the American High.

Tupperware has historically sold to consumers only through so-called direct sales, most commonly at “Tupperware parties,” similar to cosmetic company Avon’s business model, and only began selling in Target in 2022. The 78-year-old brand empowered women to enter the sales business.

“The party is over for Tupperware,” Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at UK investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, said in a note. “There is still a chance a buyer for the business can be found but, with plastic seen as far from fantastic among eco-aware consumers, revitalizing the brand will be an uphill struggle.”

Even though the brand was once a household name, it became less popular with younger consumers, in contrast with some of its competitors.

I'm not sure who those competitors are, nor am I sure about the logic of rejecting plastic food storage containers.  Food waste in the landfill produces environmental effects as it decomposes, plus the concept of food waste bugs me.  Tuna casserole?  Hash?  Trimmings from Sunday's pot roast?  "In addition, the cooks of that era were either Depression babies or the children of Depression babies."  And one of the effects of Bidenomics has been those struggling families hanging on to the leftovers to cobble another meal together.  Other Depression era behaviors resurface.

According to parents, although more than one in five (17%) said their child’s lunch is much more gourmet than they had as a kid, parents estimate that 21% of their child’s lunch comes home uneaten at the end of the day, on average.

And when they’re not eating the leftovers themselves (29%), parents said they’ll offer leftover lunch as an afterschool snack (25%) or put it back in the fridge or pantry (22%). Although 41% admit throwing leftovers away.

The article doesn't specify whether those are lunches Mom put up that morning, or the free or reduced price lunches the school serves, and that the kids bring home to help out.

WHY AREN'T WE TWENTY POINTS AHEAD?

Two weeks ago, Touchdown Jesus blessed Victor E. Huskie's latest dog bone.

Over the weekend, Northern Illinois hosted Buffalo at Huskie Stadium.  At halftime, the home team enjoyed a 14-3 lead.  It's a sixty minute game, and what happened next gave Red State's Brad Slager another moment of mayhem.  "Two weeks ago, Northern Illinois shocked the nation by beating Notre Dame on the road, sealing the win with a blocked field goal. This week, they hosted underdog Buffalo which tied the game on a desperation toss and then locked the win in overtime – by blocking a field goal attempt."  Oh, and somehow the Rose Bowl mooshed up into September with Michigan beating USC.  Thus did Northern Illinois go from ranked twenty-third in the Associated Press poll to receiving no votes, whilst the football coaches weren't that impressed with the win two weeks ago, sparing them the ignominy of "others receiving votes" there.

IT'S OKTOBERFEST SEASON.

Last Saturday, despite the college football disaster in Madison, the Oktoberfest at Bavarian Bierhaus in Glendale was well-attended, with the traffic controllers directing automobiles to the overflow parking.  Yes, I've been there before.  I've also cracked wise about Polonia and Bavaria not re-litigating the Polish Corridor on the soccer pitch.  And so it went.  Nebraska football jerseys are unusual, welcome all the same.

There are even challenges for youngsters, of whom there are many, sometimes on the dance floor, sometimes playing Jenga.

I wonder if any of those culture-studies types from Marquette were in attendance.

There are two or three more weekends in Oktoberfest season.  Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Who cares about the plebs?  "Washington technocrats are imposing their will on working-class people. If it took cat memes to do it, then thank God for cat memes."  There are a lot more at the link, and even more introducing "If they ignore it, it thrives and they look scared, but if they try to refute it, they just add fuel to the fire and keep the conversation on a topic on which they cannot win."

Our Intellectual Betters assure us that all is well.  "Our government and our media are mostly seeing the country from the vantage point of the gated communities while ignoring the plight of ordinary Americans struggling to make ends meet."

That story was displaced by news of a Trump hunter in his deer stand.  "Just because they compare him to Hitler and Mussolini doesn’t mean they actually want him dead."  No, not at all.  "They do not want an America that is more free. They want an America that is safer, and by that, they mean to silence dissent, to shut people up, to censor information."  It puts a price on Trump's head.

This being election season in 2024, a new set of memes had to drop.  "In Hezbollah’s macho culture, the psychological blow of their warriors and officials getting their genitalia blown up is acute, and so is the signal sent to Iran, that no communications devices are safe."  Nor can some of the martyrs enjoy their virgins.

Life, in its maddening and edifying forms alike, went on.  The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

GOVERNMENT IS THE CAUSE OF OUR DISCONTENTS.

Yesterday's post on gridlock ran long.  We continue in a similar vein today with my Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster revising and extending "Life in the Fully Politicized Society."  His column from years ago was pessimistic. Things have not gotten any better.

I’m afraid we have quite a few people in America today who like having “the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions.”  But for most people, especially for creative and emotionally-healthy people, the politicization of everything leads to a dreary and airless existence.

In her novel We the Living, based partly on her personal experiences in the early Soviet Union (which is probably why it is, IMO, the best of her books from a literary standpoint), Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of what day-to-day life in the politicized society is like.  Her heroine, Kira Argounova, is a strong anti-Communist, but absent other options has found a job (which she got through intervention of a Communist friend) in something called “The House of the Peasant,” which is dedicated to “a closer understanding between workers and peasants,”  under the slogan “The Clamping of City and Village,” celebrated with posters bearing slogans like “Comrades, strengthen the Clamping!”

Kira’s boss at the House of the Peasant is an older woman “thin, gray-haired, military and in strict sympathy with the Soviet Government; her chief aim in life was to give constant evidence of how strict that sympathy was, even though she had graduated from a women’s college…” But the boss lives in fear of “a tall girl with a long nose and a leather jacket, who was a Party member and could make Comrade Bitiuk shudder at her slightest whim, and knew it…”

Such women are still among us.  These days they're the Keffiyeh Karens.

In her ready and confident fury, her rudeness, her iron-fisted appetite for confrontation over infractions of what she deems political and moral gospel, the Keffiyeh Karen is related to a broader epidemic of the Gen Z Mean Girl. These Mean Girls have graduated from running the schoolyard to terrorizing the workplace. If there is one type to be afraid of in modern offices, it isn’t the lech or the shouty, hungover male middle manager. It’s the twenty-three-year-old gluten-free vegan graduate, wet behind the ears. We know what these misanthropic misses are capable of — we’ve seen the Phoebes and Annas of Just Stop Oil chuck soup on Van Gogh.

Several good friends of mine who work in corporate settings have told me tales to chill the blood — women in their early twenties conducting bullying campaigns, being proudly insubordinate to their bosses. They never face consequences.

Your business is rejoicing, and if you're not reacting properly, expect to be shamed by the Keffiyeh Karens, and perhaps kicked out of the fantasy football pool.

SOCIOLOGY IS NOT SCIENTOLOGY.

"It’s Time for a Liberty-Loving Sociology," writes Fabio Rojas for the Martin Center, which probably guarantees the poobahs of the American Sociological Association will pay no attention.  That's unfortunate.

Sociology’s criticism of modern society doesn’t limit itself to an anti-market stance. Sociologists are often opposed to many of the institutions that define modern liberal societies. Wendy Leo Moore and Joyce Bell criticized free-speech norms on the ground that they enable racist attacks and a general atmosphere of neoliberalism. And David Hargreaves wrote that modern schools are afflicted with a “cult of individualism” that can be dispelled with sociological analysis.

Thus, one might conclude that sociology is a field of inquiry defined by a commitment to collectivism and a rejection of liberal institutions such as markets, limited government, ethical individualism, and free speech.

I am here to tell you that this is wrong.

It is absolutely true that most sociologists lean to the left, and Marx is more popular than Mises within the discipline. At the same time, there is nothing to prevent scholars from developing a social science that takes liberty seriously.

It is an open secret in higher education that the Sage publications are a rigged glass bead game for the woke, and a more careful perusal of sociology curricula might turn up some respect for inquiry rather than indoctrination.  And yet, deconstructing free speech because it's repressive tolerance is hackneyed, and was when it fled the Weimar Republic. and haven't I been calling attention recently to the deconstruction of norms without regard to what replaces them?

THE POLITICS OF GENUINE JOY.

Donald Trump appeared on Gutfeld! last night.

Red State's Nick Arama compiled the highlights.  I'll close with one noting Mr Trump's experience with pro wrestling.

PRESIDENT TRUMP GETS A CHAMPIONSHIP BELT! 🔥 pic.twitter.com/7GEUFbsSg5

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 19, 2024

There are more at the link. Enjoy.

GRIDLOCK IS GOOD. SIMPLER GOVERNMENT IS BETTER.

Christian Schneider, who is part of the Wisconsin Never Trump brigade, argues, "The vice president and her policies are terrible. But I want her to win, so that a post-Trump conservative party can be reborn."  I've seen variations on this argument in a number of places, and will address a few.  Mr Schneider is not joining the Cheneys and others who would vote for the Democrat.  He does, however, stake the claim that there's a hard upper bound to Trump support, and that will not turn out well for the party or the country.

I care less about whom you’re voting for than you should care about for whom I’m casting my ballot.

Of course Harris can’t keep the price of food and clothing down by setting up a ridiculous “price gouging” law (and if she could, why hasn’t the Biden/Harris administration done so yet?). Obviously giving $25,000 to first-time homebuyers would increase demand and drive up housing prices. And taxing unrealized gains would be economically catastrophic, bureaucratically unworkable and almost certainly unconstitutional.

That is, the Democrats are running on standard tax-spend-buy off favored constituencies, and although Mr Trump asked the "why hasn't" question during that alleged debate, there aren't enough principled Republicans willing to stand with their nominee.

That’s why, with less than two months until the election, there should be an honest discussion of whether a Trump loss would be best in the long term for “conservatism” as traditionally understood. In a sense, a Harris presidency could serve as a type of political chemotherapy: a poisonous injection meant to eradicate a tumor in order to keep a major political party alive.

What happens to traditional free-market, low-tax conservatism if Trump were to win in November? One could argue the classical liberalism horse has already jumped the fence, never to return. But if America gives up and returns Trump to the presidency, “conservatism” as many of us understood it for the past half-century would simply become a museum piece, gathering dust on library shelves.

That might be, but with the Paul Ryan - Donald Trump tax cuts slated to expire sometime next year (that expiration being a way to get the Congressional Budget Office to conclude it would not be a deficit-buster for all time) there is no way a gridlocked government with a Republican majority in Congress is going to get an extension through.  You know who will joyfully veto it, laughing all the way.

RECLAIMING THE CULTURE.

I warned you.  "It seems so cathartic to deconstruct those bourgeois conventions, until decorum breaks down at the school board or city council, followed by governance itself."  Which is about where we find ourselves in national affairs, with Team Trump claiming the ongoing "threats to democracy" rhetoric is inspiring people to take shots at their candidate, and Team Harris claiming the ongoing "our cats are being eaten" rhetoric is inspiring people to threaten local schools.  Call attention to any of that, though, and it's free speech, but not for thee.

Tim Walz, Minnesota governor and Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, has received a lot of criticism for fudging details of his military service.

That’s definitely worthy of scrutiny, but something else that Walz said in an interview in late 2022 deserves attention, too.

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” he told MSNBC.

Walz is wrong. We do have a broad guarantee of free speech under the U.S. Constitution, and that includes misinformation and hate speech. Walz probably missed the irony, but his misinformation on free expression is protected speech.

While Walz has a right to spread misleading comments, it’s concerning that a governor and now vice presidential nominee seems confused about what protections we have under our First Amendment.

Unfortunately, Walz is not alone in his views. Many on the left – and some on the right – are turning to the government to regulate (or force, in the case of Florida and Texas laws) speech that some may find offensive.

That is antithetical to one of this country’s most important values.

That is, when public officials crack down on satire under the rubric of "disinformation," they miss the idea that laughter can be the best medicine.  So much for refuting the notion that Excessively Earnest political types are humorless scolds.  Campaign need not be limited to the contrived "joy" of Nikita Sergeyevich's campaign.  Columnist Ingrid Jacques asks the right question.  "Does satire have the ability to offend or make people uncomfortable? Sure. That’s the point. And to open it up to government oversight is a huge problem."

Exactly.  Perhaps if we had a proper understanding of civility, we'd be in a better place when somebody let loose with something satirical.

There is further room for improvement.  Consider rediscovering bourgeois norms.  "Old-fashioned morality is not popular these days, and few old virtues are more reviled than 'civility.'" Elective office, supposedly, is a High Calling.  So why do the seekers after elective office so revile each other?  Perhaps referring to the other fellow's voters pejoratively isn't such a good idea.  "A culture that sees humans as a curse is a culture where civility, including self-respect, is out of fashion."

Alternatively, perhaps the political discourse is so nasty because at the margin the stakes are so small.

HIGHER EDUCATION HAS BROKEN FAITH WITH ITS CLIENTELE.

That's long been the Cold Spring Shops position.  I continue to be pleased to see people with bigger platforms than mine calling attention.  Reason's Steven Collis recently offered what could be a meta-short take.  "As long as academic institutions place social justice goals ahead of truth seeking and knowledge creation, they will lose the respect of the public and will not live up to their potential."  Well, yes, we had churches enforcing orthodoxies before we had academies.  In principle, academies can engage in the sort of sifting and winnowing that gets closer to the truth, and the rules of inference ought foster the sort of modesty implicit in "no final say" and in so doing build comity.

Academic institutions that revert to their religious roots, in the worst possible way, lose friends and alienate people.

In theory, at least, modern universities should be places that can help [build comity]. Sadly, too often, they are not playing that role. Many Americans do not trust these institutions or the people in them. And at least part of the problem, in my view, is a lack of understanding by faculty and administrators of the heavy cost that comes from moving universities away from seeking for and disseminating truth.

In a recent event at the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center, Jonathan Rauch, Jonathan Haidt, and I engaged in a discussion with our audience about whether the missions of universities should be to pursue truth or to seek social justice. We also questioned whether that framing created a false dichotomy. As you might expect, the audience had mixed reactions. Different groups adopted each of the available views. Haidt, Rauch, and I then discussed the topic more in depth.

I return to it now to make a simple point. Universities must recognize the price that comes with deviating from a truth-seeking mission towards a social justice mission. That price is respect and credibility. And they will pay it whether they like it or not.

Yes, they have been paying that price, for a long time, and yet there are enough people whose salary depends on continuing with business as usual that business as usual, as bad for business as it is, will continue.

The problem arises when institutions—universities, departments within them, or academic organizations—adopt some ideology or solution that most of its faculty or administrators believe is just, then shut down all debate, discussion, or scholarship that contradicts what they have adopted. This can happen in formal ways, such as when a college declares that it will pursue only a certain type of approach in its research. Or it can happen informally, often through faculty refusals to consider or be generous to views contrary to their preferred orthodoxy.

When a researcher makes a discovery that seems to undermine an institution's claimed social justice mission, and those in the field discourage its publication, others who learn of such acts cannot help but be skeptical of any research that institution later produces. When faculty always produce "research" that comes down on just one side of whatever culture war issue is most important to them, they cannot expect others to respect them as much as scholars. They can find esteem as advocates. They can earn recognition as activists. But people will struggle to see them as serious seekers of truth. This is both expected and unavoidable. Universities cannot enjoy the respect given to institutions dedicated solely to exploring and propagating truth while being something other than that. Too often, however, too many people at them are hoping to achieve just that.

Undermining comes from several sources, some more defensible than others.  First, "no final say" comes into tension with "preponderance of evidence," with senior scholars understandably (I'm as guilty of that as anyone) being more skeptical of evidence contesting a strongly held position than that supporting it.  About the best one can do is avoid invoking "consensus."  Second, the enterprise of sponsored research and publication in highly regarded journals can deteriorate into self-referential reciprocity, if not outright censorship through skeptical research neither being funded nor published.  Third, the academy probably self-selects for the sort of non-conformist who would never be mistaken for a middle-schooler seated at the cool kids table.  Thus, being contrarian becomes the conformity.

Those who run our universities—faculty and administrators alike—cannot have it both ways. Americans' trust in higher education remains low. I am sure that, as with anything, there are multiple causes. But academics must come to understand that while truth and social justice are often not mutually exclusive, respect as a truth seeker and a relentless pursuit for social justice at the cost of truth are. If academics would like society generally to trust and respect them as creators of knowledge and seekers of truth, they would do well to ensure there is diversity in their ranks. If institutions would like more credibility in what they produce, they should avoid taking positions on the issues of the day or doing anything that would suppress certain types of research.

No kidding.  "Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors."  Let the presidents at Columbia and Harvard and Penn be sent back to faculty status to encourage the others.  "It took years, but elite colleges are learning the value of institutional neutrality."

LEAVE MY GAS STOVE ALONE.

It's simple enough for me, or for Kamala Harris, to use.  "I'm a fan of the gas stove, in part because the opportunity to preheat a wok on an open flame, and to control the heat delivered by the flame, matters a lot.  Conventional electric stoves aren't much good at heating up woks, and temperature control with a thumping big element runs afoul of the laws of physics."

THE IDIOCY OF FEMINIST PEDAGOGY.

Your fall coffee, Scoutcraft, and now space exploration.

Current approaches to outer space are “heavily Western, state-centric, militarized, masculinized, and colonial,” and encourage practices that are “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive.”

That’s according to an intersectional feminist report on outer space bankrolled by the Department of National Defence to the tune of $32,250 in taxpayer cash.

“We have lots of problems down here on Earth and maybe we should focus on getting those fixed before we spend tens of thousands of dollars talking about how to talk about space,” said Kris Sims, Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “I think a lot of Canadians can think of a lot of causes that need $32,250 more.”

I stopped excerpting it because it got loopier from there. Tom "Tilting at Windmills" Knighton asks, "Why does anyone take these people seriously?"

I’m going to tell these twerps something they’re not going to like: Colonization isn’t an inherently bad thing.

You can talk about all the sins of colocalization here on Earth, but any and all of those are the result of people walking into a country where other people were and deciding to take over. I’d even argue that ultimately, that led to positive outcomes for millions of people, but I can at least get the argument that such a thing is troubling.

Space, however, doesn’t seem to have a lot of that.

Take Mars or the Moon, for example. Right now, we know there’s no intelligent life on either. We can set up shop and not displace literally anyone or anything. There’s no indigenous population to oppress or exploit.

And yet, that’s still colonization.

Of course, these are people who see words like “explore” as problematic. I can get “conquer” being a little different because that’s an arguably aggressive term in some cases, though I still think it’s applicable and some people need to get bent, but explore?

I wonder if the Ark sailed with only Noah's family aboard because everybody else was splitting intersectional hairs about whether the rain was evidence of climate change or not.

We need to reach for the stars. Why? Because it’s what’s next. We’ve explored pretty much all of the Earth’s surface and are working on the oceans, but space is next. Going there is where we’ll need to go so the next giant rock that smashes into us doesn’t turn us into just another layer in the fossil record.

And these people trying once again to police language aren’t helping. They’re doing everything they can to make sure we’re wiped out, all because we didn’t use the correct language so as to not offend their delicate sensibilities.

Well, I’ve got some harsh language for you vacuous waste of human tissue, you living examples of why abortion might not be as evil as some believe. I’m more than happy to wreck this planet then leave you on it as we head off to the stars.

We’ll set the course of the future while you bitch and gripe about how none of the actual pronouns in the English language adequately describe you.

That "wreck this planet" is risky, for now it provides launch pads to establish that inner Lagrange launch pad, or whatever the interplanetary explorers would think of.  Perhaps the existence of feminist pedagogy is the cleanest evidence that we are way richer than our ancestors.

IT CAME TO THIS LONG AGO.

Common Dreams contributor James Zogby, who, as far as I know does not carry a pager, sees the compassion fascism of the all-administrative university.  "Administrators, driven by fear, political pressure, and donors, have engineered a power grab bypassing the established structures of governance to securitize campuses and restrict free speech."

I wrote about that phenomenon some twenty years ago.  "Administrators are capable of engaging in expense-preference behaviors that are compatible with the worldviews of sufficiently many campus politicians that those campus politicians acquiesce in administrative power grabs sufficiently frequently that come a truly obnoxious power grab, those same campus politicians have no consistent basis for stopping it."

SOMEBODY BARBECUE THIS DEANLET'S CAT.

Bourgeois norms are there for a purpose. No matter how many times I call attention, there is always somebody who doesn't get it.  "Yeah, when you deny coherent beliefs of any kind, you get incoherence."

LOOK FOR WHAT'S OUT OF PLACE.

Buddy Melges worked into his sailing lessons an experience he had partridge hunting, where his companion bagged a lot of birds.  How did he do it?  By looking for something that was out of place.

It helps to have knowledge of the place, to see something that looks out of place.  Consider the arrest of a man with a gun outside the fence at Trump National.  "Would-be Trump assassin exploited security hole that Secret Service has known about for years — and the pictures prove it."

TEN USEFUL ECONOMICS CONCEPTS.

With the fall semester under way, Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux offers Ten Lessons of the Economic Way of Thinking.  I'll cite the outline, go there for the details.

1.  Poverty has no causes; wealth has causes.
   
2.  Wealth is created, not “distributed”; therefore, in a market economy the “distribution” of income and of wealth has no policy relevance.
3.  The economy is impersonal – implying, importantly, that prices and wages are not arbitrary.
4.  It’s good that the economy is impersonal.
5.  Tradeoffs are inescapable.
6.  There’s no objectively ‘best’ pattern of tradeoffs.
7.  Exchange is mutually beneficial.
8.  The economic benefits and costs of economic exchange are unaffected by political borders.
9.  Jobs are costs, not benefits.
10.  The government is human, not divine.

He concludes, "Every student who, at each semester’s end, leaves an economic classroom having internalized at least some of the above propositions is a student who has learned an unfortunately rare, yet extremely valuable, lesson."

I'd suggest a different ordering of the points, starting with point 7 on exchange, and point 5 which introduces opportunity cost.  Point 6 can follow from the differing subjective evaluation of goods that's implicit in trading.  But then, I've put my markers down on the fundamentals of thinking like an economist many times before.  Grasp the fundamentals first.

Before one gets into political economy, one might contemplate what harvesting those gains from trade means.  "That's the central lesson of price theory, one unfortunately too often incompletely taught to the beginning student, that is, when it's not buried under formulas, diagrams, and jargon."  Political economy is harder, and it might be useful to save the elaborations on such things as taxation and the Welfare Economics Paradigm for later in the course, or for a second course.

NOW WORK OUT THE PROPER VALUE PROPOSITION.

A recent Washington Monthly article might be offering praise for the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors.  "New research shows that regional universities deliver the greatest return for our tax dollars."  Unfortunately, the concept of "greatest return" in the research is an ancient mercantilist myth.

Colleges and universities are under enormous pressure, from demographically driven admissions declines to accusations of “wokeness” to mounting public doubts about the value of a four-year degree. Public universities like [Grand Valley State] took big hits to their budgets after the Great Recession, and while overall per student funding has returned to pre-recession levels in most of the country, debates continue over whether higher education is a sound investment. Many Republican state lawmakers, especially those representing rural areas, argue that public universities contribute to “brain drain,” when students earn college degrees on the taxpayer’s dime and then move out of state to pursue their careers. Those dollars would be better spent, they say, by cutting taxes and subsidizing companies to relocate to their states.

Are they right? The Upjohn Institute, a nonpartisan research organization focused on policy-related issues of employment, set out to answer that question. Using innovative research methods, a group of scholars led by the Upjohn senior economist Brad J. Hershbein found that students at brand-name public flagships—places like the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Kansas, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to name a few—do tend to leave those states after graduation. But alumni of less-renowned regional public universities, like GVSU, generally stick around.

There's a lot going on in those two paragraphs, and in 22 years of Cold Spring Shops we've looked at a number of them.  It is a sobering thought that Illinois was once a destination state for ambitious graduates of Michigan's institutions.

Shiver me timbers, there are drawbacks in attempting to capture 25 years of creative destruction in two data-points. One state has a manufacturing economy dominated by motor vehicle assembly. The other has a diversified economy including much of the financial and logistical infrastructure for Michigan. Does it surprise that the incentives to finish high school and attend university are different?

The balance of trade in higher education obsesses policymakers in the upper Midwest, as my beggar-thy-neighbor series of posts points out. University administrators throughout Wisconsin fret about graduates accepting jobs out-of-state, particularly in Illinois (but did any of their campuses see fit to offer me a post as space-cadet-theorist-in-residence?) and Amtrak's Michigan corridor service exists to transport flatlanders to Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor.

The comparison of Michigan with Illinois misleads in another way. Consider Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State, and Michigan Tech. At one time Michigan attempted to maintain four research universities in-state. There are also three Mid-American members and a number of regional state universities and colleges. (It was clear that Wayne was going to lose out to the other three in the retrenchments that were in progress 20 years ago.) Public policy in Illinois has tended to favor Illinois at Urbana as the research university, with perhaps a few specialty programs in Chicago. But there's enough discontent among students good enough for Illinois who don't get in, and their parents, that Northern, Southern, and Illinois State can make the case to be additional research comprehensive universities. But that public policy has not maintained academic departments in Urbana at the same level that Ann Arbor has managed to maintain, let alone competitors that could be viewed in the same way as Michigan and Michigan State. Question: if not for Michigan, State, Tech, and Wayne, would the exodus from Michigan have been worse? Different question: How much Illinois human capital is being developed in Madison and Ann Arbor and East Lansing and Kalamazoo?

Michigan continues to attempt to maintain more university capacity than they can support, and the rent-seekers predictably are wetting their beaks.

Robert Genetski, a former schoolteacher and Michigan state representative, provided one explanation: political clout. Larger universities have more money to employ highly paid lobbyists to influence state appropriations. For example, in 2011—the year that the legislators considered the 2012 budget—the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Central Michigan University together outspent every other school combined on lobbying in Lansing. These lobbyists can have quite an impact. Genetski explained to me that while the original higher education budget for the following year, 2013, contained the largest increases in state support for high-performing regional universities like GVSU and Ferris State University, lobbyists for more influential universities successfully killed his budget. Instead, the legislature boosted overall higher education spending by a bit, but with the largest research universities receiving the overwhelming majority of the new money. Over the next few years, [former governor Rick] Snyder signed additional modest increases in higher education spending, but at levels below what they had been when he was first elected, and with the lion’s share going to the universities with the best political connections, not the highest performance.

That Upjohn study, though?  That Institute, which has hired some solid economists over the years, comes close to making a mercantilist argument.

On a basis of return on tax dollars, regional universities outperform flagships. For every $100,000 of state funding, the researchers found, regional universities retain nearly two college graduates in the state for every one flagships keep. “From the lens of a state policymaker,” they concluded, “we show that regional public institutions tend to produce the greatest number of graduates who stay and work in-state per dollar of state funding, suggesting investments in these institutions could have particularly high local returns.” (While the best community colleges have similarly high ROI, many others don’t because their students graduate at lower rates and earn less after college.)

I've never been a fan of keeping the human capital home.  "Michigan exports human capital to Washington. Washington exports jet planes and computer software to Michigan. If Washington's products improve life, including work life, of Michigan's residents, the proportion of adults with degrees in Michigan does not have to signal a decline in the economic health of Michigan."  I've also urged caution in evaluating the degree programs at those regional comprehensives, as well as caution in comparisons involving community colleges: "Note the distinction between a four year college and a community college or vocational school. The Five-Year Party also cautions readers not to conflate a subprime party school with a community college: open access does not equate to open kegs."