THE CONTINUED CASE FOR STRATEGIC PATIENCE.

After thirteen days of air strikes on and from Iran, both major combatants have paused, again, perhaps to talk.  "Airstrikes have paused and talks are pressing forward. But can the US and Iran take the off-ramp?"

PATERNALISM IS AS PATERNALISM DOES.

If you approve of the policy goals, it's Good Paternalism.  "Guess Who’s Big Mad They Can’t Buy Junk Food With Your Tax Money Anymore."  Pajamas Media contributor Tim O'Brien continues, probably approvingly.

Food stamp users in Florida are waking up to some big changes that took place in their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that took effect April 20. The entitlement program’s beneficiaries can no longer use their EBT cards to purchase soda, energy drinks, candy, and “ultra-processed prepared desserts” such as Twinkies, cookies, cupcakes, and other packaged sweets.

They can continue to use their taxpayer-funded, free-food cards for fruit, vegetables, grains, meat, dairy and other staples. They can also use their EBT cards for coffee, tea, bottled water, and sport drinks. On the snack side, they can use their EBT cards for granola bars, freshly prepared baked goods, and packaged “breakfast” foods such as toaster strudels and breakfast biscuits.

The federal government did not implement the restrictions, even though the state of Florida’s SNAP program receives subsidies from the government. Rather, this a state policy which is being implemented under a waiver program from the Trump administration.

It's For Your Own Good (Moocher edition).  It's always For Your Own Good, for arbitrary values of good.  People go into public service to traffic for the good of others boss other people around.  "Wise Experts know better than you, dear reader, what 'disinformation' on social media is, what additives to cigarettes are dangerous, how much beer you should drink, and whether your business ought remain open during flu season or not."  And whether your public assistance can go for potato chips and Pop Tarts.

SELF-INFLICTED JOYLESSNESS.

"The easiest way to be miserable" and "absolutely unnecessary," notes Derek Hunter.

RIP THE BANDAR OFF.

You'd expect to find Iran hawks such as Kevin McCullough writing for Town Hall.

The easiest decision any president can make is the one he never has to make.

Hold another meeting. Send another envoy. Extend another deadline. Issue another carefully worded statement expressing “grave concern.” Washington has turned delay into a governing philosophy, and nowhere has that habit been more dangerous than with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Forty-seven years after the ayatollahs seized power, we’re still hearing the same promise: Just give diplomacy a little more time.

President Donald Trump appears to have answered that question. Reports indicate he has approved plans to strike Iran’s deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility should Tehran continue refusing to abandon its march toward a nuclear weapon.

Process, nuance, failure.  Now that the World Cup has wrapped up and the teams and spectators are heading home, perhaps it is time to open up a can on the mullahs.

THE ILLOGIC OF MERCANTILISM.

Yesterday, Our President floated the idea of collecting payment for escort services.  I'm referring to the Arabian Gulf, get your mind out of the gutter.  National Review's Andrew McCarthy promptly and correctly flagged that proposal as illegal.

The strait was open when Trump decided to start the war. This was to the great advantage of the United States, a trading colossus with the world’s most formidable economy. If Trump were to impose tolls, fees, taxes, or whatever he deigns to call them — i.e., if he were to do exactly what Iran has been trying to do — that would induce other nations to extort payments for transit through international waters and straits of importance to international trade where they are in a position to intimidate shippers. Free trade would break down, which would be a catastrophe for nations heavily engaged in international trade, such as our own.

Congress should authorize the use of military force to keep the strait open. Still, regardless of whether one thinks the president has authority to use force to remedy a problem he created (because, however we got to this point, it is in America’s vital interest to keep the strait open), he has no authority to toll the strait, as he proposes to do.

It is entirely possible that Congress should enact legislation and/or that a binding international treaty should be forged that would reimburse the U.S. for security costs. I doubt that; I’d estimate that the benefits that the U.S. receives from free transit across the world far outweigh the costs of discouraging Iran from tolling the Hormuz Strait. But wherever you come out on that equation, a president has no authority to dictate transit taxes, and trying to do so is a provocation both constitutionally and in international relations.

I'll leave it to people who pay more attention to international affairs to evaluate whether that strait was open out of parties mutually looking the other way, the mullahs at infidels buying their oil, and the customers at the mullahs developing nuclear weapons.

WILL THE THING FINALLY BE PRESSED?

The useful idiots at Common Dreams are doing what useful idiots do.  "Iran Condemns Fresh US Bombing Campaign as ‘Serious Threat to International Peace’."  Pure projection, but isn't it the way of the abuser to accuse everybody else of being abusive?

The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Sunday condemned the United States’ latest round of airstrikes as a “flagrant violation” of international law that threatens to permanently derail efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to the war, which US President Donald Trump launched earlier this year in coordination with the Israeli government.

This past weekend, said Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the US carried out “brutal attacks” and “acts of aggression” that pose “a serious threat to international peace and security, rendering futile all efforts made over the past several months to reduce tensions and restore stability in the West Asia region.”

For 47 years the mullahs and their revolutionary guard storm troopers have been fomenting instability and raising tensions.

THERE'S NO CORRUPTION LIKE OLD CORRUPTION.

Volokh conspirator Ilya Somin sees the bright side of previous rents generated and dissipated.

I have long been critical of the Olympics and the World Cup for a variety of abuses, such as massive stadium subsidies that victimize taxpayers, forcible displacement of people in order to build stadiums, and providing a propaganda showcase for repressive authoritarian regimes, such as Russia and Qatar (hosts of the last two World Cups). Fortunately, this year's World Cup - co-hosted by Canada, the US, and Mexico - has mostly avoided these problems, at least when it comes to the United States. Though not quite entirely, as we shall see.  The key factors are that the US host cities used existing stadiums, and that strong protections for freedom of speech largely foreclosed the censorship and repression common in authoritarian host states.

Those existing stadiums, which do not include either Chicago's Soldier Field, or the new stadium yet to be built either in Arlington Heights or Hammond or Kenosha, are a return on previous manifestations of corporate welfare that traffic under the rubric of stadium subsidies.

[H]ost cities have used existing stadiums, obviating the need to build new ones. This eliminates by far the biggest cause of the World Cup's exploitation of taxpayers. There have still been some public expenditures on things like traffic management and security. But protecting people against crime and terrorism, and managing public infrastructure are basic functions of government that the state provides for events of all kinds. There is no good reason to exclude major sporting events. Anarchists (including libertarian ones) can consistently condemn such spending. But that goes to philosophical issues that go far beyond sports events.

How fortunate that you can fit a footie pitch inside the dimensions of a professional football field, and that led to a missed opportunity when Argentina eliminated Switzerland, as the player who scored a breakaway goal late could have done a Lambeau Leap, had he known of such things.

FIGHTING GENTRIFICATION?

Who knew?  "When the rent gradient comes for your neighborhood, maybe you have a platform to engage in grievance-mongering."  Now comes recovering Bernie girl Batya Ungar-Sargon calling that platform out.  "We're not seeing a multi-racial working-class uprising. We're seeing privileged white gentrifiers organizing a politics of resentment driven by a hatred of America."

CONTROLLING THE POLITICAL PIPELINE.

It's Friday, and a reinforcement of a frequent Cold Spring Shops theme, "Perhaps, instead of asking 'who is John Galt?,' dear reader, ask 'who is running for school board or mayor' and 'what is she proposing?'" is in order.

Town Hall's Ashley Evdokimo suggests that the Donk establishment enabled the Democratic Socialists (who might not really be socialists, but I digress) to position a lot of candidates through their Ahab-like obsession with the Golden Golem of Greatness rather than, to use the Sunday show locution, paying attention to the issues the American people care about.

While Republicans and Democrats have poured enormous amounts of energy into presidential politics, media cycles, and national messaging, the DSA has invested in something much less glamorous—but arguably much more important.

The political pipeline.

School boards become city councils. City councils become state legislatures. State legislators become members of Congress. Members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders. Politics has always been a farm system, and the DSA understands that.

Ironically, while much of the Democratic establishment spent years defining itself in opposition to Donald Trump, the DSA spent those same years defining the future of the Democratic Party. And unless Democrats outright say they’re against it, we can’t “trust” their alliances.

The emergence of Michael Harrington's disciples is also giving Never Trump conservatives heartburn, as they are personae non grata among Republicans and the irritated rump flexing among the Donks will have no truck with them.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

The local preservation railways attempt to use car-cards no newer than those in use when the owning railroad abandoned service or retired the cars, trackless trolleys, or buses.

That ticket only won in a notorious headline prematurely published by the then-very-anticommunist Chicago Tribune; Joseph McCarthy did win a Senate seat in Wisconsin, something that did not require advertising buys on Illinois Terminal cars running out of St. Louis, and a subsequent Republican president appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, touching off a number of unintended consequences.

A TRIFECTA IN 1776.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Jefferson, et. alia, The unanimous declaration of the united States of America, and Boulton and Watt's steam pump.

The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago this week, was a bright torch of the Enlightenment. So was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, also published 250 years ago this year. But for me the most momentous happening in 1776 was the inauguration of James Watt’s first practical steam engine.

We have the industrial revolution backwards. We tend to think that clever people in powdered wigs came up with ideas – democracy, free enterprise, stock markets, science, intellectual property – that enabled men with dirty fingernails to set about changing the world. But I think it was more that the fingernail fellows made the wig wearers possible. Smith’s division of labour and Jefferson’s democracy were all very well. But Thomas Newcomen and Watt mattered more. Thermodynamics – the science of heat and work – was invented to explain steam engines, not vice versa.

Arguably, political economy (which later fractured into various social sciences) might have emerged to explain human action, not (despite the best efforts of the Men of System) to be an instruction manual.

For the miracles of emergence to work, though, don't the institutions governing the relationship of citizen with state have to be biased toward freedom?

The great flywheel of positive feedback began delivering higher living standards not just for the rich but for the poor too. Previous civilisations in ancient India, China, Greece, Rome, Arabia, Italy, the Netherlands, had made the rich richer but had done little to help the poorest. This one was different - thanks almost entirely to coal, then oil and gas. As John Constable, the energy analyst, puts it, the economy is a thermodynamic machine: it takes random arrangements of atoms and turns them into improbable, useful forms.

It's when the Men of System cloak themselves in Protecting Mother Nature, though, that the "great flywheel of positive feedback" gets jammed.  "Britain’s pursuit of high energy costs is a reckless catastrophe."

TEMPERING TRUMPY TRIUMPHALISM?

During Freedom Weekend, Our President delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore that had the cheering section on a Trump-friendly network, as well as Pajamas Media's Robert Spencer. cheerful.

Surely, we can compare and contrast Our President's triumphalism with  the sort of speech National Review's Jeffrey Blehar feared.

I remember when a friend of mine, back in the fall of 2024, ran down the list of reasons he was going to vote for Donald Trump. Aside from all of the political ones — which need no rehearsal here — he ended with a throw-in point that actually moved me somewhat: “I don’t want America’s 250th anniversary to be run by Kamala Harris and the Democrats.”

And that was an argument I immediately understood. Imagine the public disgraces that Kamala’s Semiquincentennial would have officially sanctioned in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It would have been a yearlong lecture with July 4 a day of solemn reflection and recrimination. After Trump won in November, I heard similar sentiments from some of my friends, even those unpersuaded by Trump themselves: At least he wouldn’t be collaborating with the New York Times 1619 Project to turn America’s 250th into some ghastly yearlong anti-American display.

We could, at least, have had a pool on whether President Harris would be sober or sozzled during such a speech.  But to be spared a no-longer-lucid President Biden or a perpetually scolding President Obama, or a screechy, whether sober or sozzled, President Hillary Clinton is a blessing.

HOW QUICKLY CAN PUBLIC OPINION CHANGE POLICY?

Consider, dear reader, that the Eighteenth (liquor prohibition) amendment took effect on 16 January 1919, and was repealed effective 5 December 1933.  The Interstate Commerce Commission, an early manifestation of the independent regulatory commissions, or the administrative state, if you will, was established by An Act to Regulate Commerce dated 7 April 1887 and finally, mercifully, allowed to expire in 1995, long after it had outlived its usefulness.

All that by way of preamble to the recently issued Trump v. Slaughter, which restores some presidential powers to swap out appointed or hired employees of the regulatory agencies, broadly understood.  That ruling has people such as Outside the Beltway's James Joyner troubled.  "American society is considerably more complex now than it was in 1935. It makes even more sense now than then that some regulatory functions should be carried out by subject matter experts not subject to the changing whims of the electorate."

That position has, from the beginning, been the logic of the administrative state.  It's as simple as a city council setting up a commission to adjudicate streetcar fares or cable connection rates rather than having to conduct a vote every time business conditions changes, and as fraught as, in protecting those "subject matter experts" from those "changing whims of the electorate" you get, if not necessarily "swarms of officers, harassing our people and eating out their substance," unelected bureaucrats.  In three-plus decades of teaching regulatory economics, I never lacked for material suggesting that things didn't always turn out in practice the way we could draw them up on the blackboard.

THINK OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AS A LEGAL ARGUMENT.

Robert Parkinson argues that the "we hold these truths" passage is the predicate of the case, and the bill of particulars that follows is its substance.  "For a lot of Americans—probably not the majority of your listeners, but a lot of Americans across the country—the opening paragraphs of the Declaration are all there is to it. The bit about self-evident rights and pursuit of happiness and unalienable rights, that’s about it. They don’t know that there is a list of 27 grievances in the Declaration."  The professor uses the expression "mission statement" rather than the legalistic "predicate;" the logic of what follows is the same.

The separation was a long time in coming.  "The first 12 grievances are specifically grouped as episodes of executive overreach—things that the king is doing outside of his prerogative in tyrannical ways."  Note, that includes the famous "Swarms of Officers" passage that remains germane today.

REMEMBERING GORDON WOOD.

Steven Hayward mourns his passing.  "Now we shall mark the occasion next month without his cheerful demeanor and fund of hard-earned wisdom and knowledge, which finds no intellectual equal in this nation of equal citizens. It will not be the same without his presence."  By all means, read his eulogy in full, and pay close attention to his arguments noting that "radicalism" does not have to mean "leftward ho."

It is hard to avoid wondering whether the shocking news of the ghastly accidental death of historian Gordon S. Wood, struck down by a motorist in a shopping center parking lot, is a bad omen, coming within a month of our observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wood has been enjoying a much-deserved spotlight in the runup to the sesquicentennial, but now his voice will be absent on July 4.

Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding in our time, Wood was virtually without peer within academic American history today. There is, however, an arc to his career and thought as a historian that offers encouragement that, in this time of doubt and division about the character and future of American democracy, it is possible to capture and celebrate America’s complex and enduring foundations.

Wood burst onto the scene in 1969 with the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, a capacious 653-page exploration of the ideas that crystallized into the American Revolution and the Constitution eleven years after the Declaration. Wood had been a student of Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading historians of American political thought in the mid-twentieth century, and Wood built upon Bailyn’s well-regarded Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but can be said to have advanced and refined a bold new interpretive strand of American historiography—the “civic republican school.”

The civic republican school argued that modern democracy owed less to Lockean liberalism than to a more classically inspired tradition centering on “civic virtue.” It was an explicit alternative to the liberal tradition of natural rights and rugged individualism. Although Wood was restrained in staking out a clear position, his book offered considerable backup for the civic republicans, many of whom were openly seeking an alternative for understanding America and to displace the “liberal tradition” as defended by Louis Hartz and other mid-century historians.

Mr Hayward's colleague at Power Line Scott Johnson offers Hillsdale's Wilfred McClay an opportunity to extend.

[Professor Wood] may have spent his life working mainly in the Ivy League, but he was no blueblood. He was an affable, hardworking guy from a working-class family in Concord, [Massachusetts], and you could hear his origins in his unmistakable Yankee accent. A great historian could also be a regular guy.

Although he studied at Harvard under the august Bernard Bailyn, and excelled in all he did, he acquired none of the mandarin manners of the higher professoriate, but remained himself. His sympathy for the lives and ways of ordinary people informed his most important work, and was part of his visceral love of democratic America.

His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution was in large measure a tribute to the Revolution’s astonishing achievement in ushering in a genuinely new world, one in which feudalism and monarchy were a dead letter, the elite values of pre-Revolutionary classical republicanism had lost their appeal, and there was a general awareness that, in Jefferson’s famous words, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Instead, Wood wrote, America would find its greatness in a new way: “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness—common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.”

Such sentiments are what one might expect from Power Line, which argues from an institutional-conservative seasoned lightly with populism.

THE AMERICAN PROJECT.

Yuval Levin, "America’s 250th Isn’t Just a Birthday."

In celebrating America’s 250th, we are recommitting ourselves to a national cause that we did not choose but which we now see that we would and should choose.

We do this not because prior generations offer us a model of perfection—they certainly do not. We do it because they offer us a model of contending with imperfection and of striving toward the good and the true. This is what it means to celebrate our country this year: We affirm the rightness of the original choice made by prior generations by making that same choice again ourselves.

Our political tradition articulates the terms of that choice unusually clearly for us in the Declaration of Independence. We choose to live in light of the truth that we are all created equal, and of its implications. We haven’t always lived up to the standard of that truth, but it has always been there to hold us to account. We are a nation that, in moments of great national celebration, feels compelled to recur to that truth: to repeat it, to restate it, to recommit to it, and in that peculiar way to celebrate ourselves.

That’s the kind of celebration we should strive for this year. Call it a birthday, call it an anniversary, call it whatever you will. But treat it as an opportunity for mature, reverent reflection and judgment about the political tradition we are privileged to be part of and the nation we are privileged to belong to—an opportunity for gratitude, and therefore for hope.

Happy 250th.

Indeed.

A TRUMPY AMTRAK?

Pajamas Media contributor Ashley McCulley offers "Make Amtrak Great Again."  Her central thesis is sensible national politics.

If Amtrak is the national rail operator of the United States, then it should serve the United States. Not just the Northeast Corridor. Not just the West Coast. For too long, the national agency has been serving only a handful of our population: people who live and work in major coastal cities and rely on rail for daily commuting — you and I both know the dominating voting demographic there. Having lived in Southern California, I can tell you that Amtrak is the best way to get between San Diego and Los Angeles unless you enjoy wasting away in traffic. When we lived in Fredericksburg, Va., Amtrak was a fantastic option for stress-free trips to D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. All of that said, relegating Amtrak to mere commuting purposes is a disservice to the rail and the taxpayers who fund it.

The challenge is in the how best serve the United States.  There has never been a coherent business model for covering the national network.  The Northeast Corridor get their rolling gated community in the form of Acela trains with premium and business class seating, as well as Northeast Regional trains offering business and coach class seating, and no honoring of the commuter train tickets operated by regional authorities.  The regional operators in North Carolina, Chicagoland, and California have to come up with state money to offer train service that is reasonably comfortable and dependable.

BEYOND "YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT!"

The assertion is artless campaign rhetoric from the likes of former president Barack Obama and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth "Fauxahontas" Warren, who like to argue that any fortune relies in part on public spending on schools or highways  or perhaps the institutions that enforce contract and property rights.

FOOTIE HIGHLIGHTS THE NORMIES.

A week ago, we noted that Emergence, not European Technocracy, made possible the plenitude those World Cup tourists, who were probably not poor, marvelled over.  Now. in "Europeans in the US for the World Cup Are Celebrating American Culture—Specifically, Red America's Culture," Batya Ungar-Sargon tosses in a political economy lesson.  "I couldn't help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for."

It is amusing, what with footie being this way for fans of distances in kilometers and long waits for medical procedures to be sports fans (and even the Fox network, broadcasting the games, has lots of announcers from overseas and even those native to North America use British dialect) and yet cling to their cosmopolitan snobbery, for the fans to get off on ... big box retail and all the pop you can drink!

[W]hat’s truly amazing is that these European admirers are enjoying the fruits of Red America—the exact things that the Left has the most contempt for: Walmart. Guns. Ranch dressing. Country music. People getting fat off fast food. The very things that Leftist elites love to deride about America, often from the vantage point of what a sneering Frenchman might say, are the things our European visitors are most admiring of, because they are the things that are most recognizably American.

Moreover, it's the infrastructure of the Suburban Experiment being hailed.  A week ago I flagged the possible downsides of exurban living eventually coming to light.  Thus far, though, none of the usual suspects, such as Streetsblog or Strong Towns, have gotten in touch with their inner social critic to fret about footie fans developing car brain.

A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."