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.

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.

CODIFY THE LIABILITY, CONSERVE THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Sometimes I'll speak in riddles, and with all the algorithms combing through Cold Spring Shops these days, maybe now is a good time to serve an oldie up.  Twenty years ago, frustrated by Student Affairs types continually putting more special education responsibilities on faculty, I proposed to codify the liability the common schools were saddling higher education with.

Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district." My sometimes sparring partner at Anonymous Community would no doubt be a bit unhappy to receive additional remedial students at the same time that his state is griping about having to pay for the same courses twice. Fine. As part of the reform, bill the school districts for those remedial courses and reimburse the community colleges. Principals now have a choice: offer token academic courses and suffer a budget cut, or spend money to improve their academic content.

Impractical?  Perhaps.  Get pushback?  I did.  "That changes may appear 'pretty screwy' is not necessarily reason to stop thinking along those lines, particularly when the status quo is not working."

DID EVERYONE LOSE?

Reason's Liz Wolfe asks the obvious question about the so-far-unseen "memorandum of understanding" continuing the ceasefire in Asia Minor.  "A digital preliminary memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran has been signed, leading to an opening of the Strait of Hormuz and a 60-day pause in fighting while final details get hashed out."  That's consistent with something we noted about two weeks ago.  "From that perspective, letting Iran's government export oil is splitting a gain from trade harvested by consumers of Gulf Arab oil and fertilizers. But U.S. forces must remain on station, which brings a different set of risks with it."  And so it might seem, or not.  Our President is carrying on about ships sailing freely and the Iranians are making noises about tolling, even if they call it "providing security" or something.

It's messy emergence, Ms Wolfe suggests, not continued evolution of that rules-based international order.

We still don't know what types of restrictions Iran will agree to with regard to its nuclear program, nor do we know what Israel will do with regard to Hezbollah and the fighting in southern Lebanon. We don't know how U.S.-Israeli relations will be impacted in the long run. (Tensions between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been rather high during these last few weeks.) We don't know whether Iran will, in fact, keep the Strait of Hormuz open, or whether we'll see it mess around with the strait to gain leverage over the U.S. once again.

"Months of fighting revealed that multiple countries can impose costs," wrote Foreign Policy's Will Todman, "but none can impose order."

"The tactical and operational successes that the U.S. and Israeli militaries achieved masked a deeper strategic defeat, with neither securing the political objectives cited to justify the war in the first place," argued Todman. "The Iranian regime survived and emerged more hard-line, and it discovered a new, powerful negotiating chip in closing the Strait of Hormuz." But even bigger picture: "The war did not produce a clear victor or a more stable regional order. Instead, it accelerated fragmentation, deepened insecurity, and imposed costs on every key regional and global power involved, including Iran, the Arab Gulf states, Russia, and China. The war demonstrated that no state will be able to navigate the new era of global disorder unscathed."

Also in Reason, Matthew Petti contends, "The U.S. and Iran have moved to the next stage of the peace process. Hawks on all sides are terrified that it will succeed."

VOTE LIBERAL, LIVE CONSERVATIVE.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme, mostly in the defense of bourgeois norms that the self-styled sophisticates engage in all sorts of circumlocutions to deconstruct, whilst living as if they're June and Ward Cleaver.  In a tribute to Theodore Dalrymple, who has been writing along similar lines for years, City Journal's Robert Henderson summarizes the argument as "The luxury belief class walks the Fifties and talks the Sixties."

The attributes that predict professional success—such as impulse control, academic aptitude, and personal accountability—also predict long-term romantic stability and marital commitment. Those who lack these characteristics require strong social norms and regular reinforcement.

Until relatively recently, those norms provided a framework that encouraged people across all social classes to adopt behaviors conducive to long-term success and community cohesion, which minimized the behavioral gap between those at the bottom and those at the top. People at the bottom used to be far more likely to get and stay married, obey the law, prioritize family stability, and adhere to the broader social norms set by their society’s elites.

But as those elites have become more insular and focused on self-perpetuation, the behavioral gap between them and lower-income groups has widened.

These days, though, you can live like Ward and June but you don't have to shop at Red Owl or mingle at the Big Boy or (gasp) bowl at Red Carpet Lanes or take the kiddos to a local amusement park.

Elites’ unwillingness to publicly model and enforce these norms has contributed to a growing divide in family structure, marriage stability, and social behavior. Elite families thrive thanks to education, stability, and delayed gratification, while those below them struggle to replicate these patterns, leading to deeper social and economic inequality.

There are now bubbles for the well-off to fort up in.

For the elite ideas-festival crowd, every basic human good is to be picked apart or deconstructed with smug condescension. With equal fervor, they rehabilitate vice by asking, “What if this bad thing is actually good?”

Though today’s elites speak the language of 1960s countercultural left politics, their private lives reflect the square 1950s morality their predecessors rejected. Look closely at a liberal Park Slope nuclear family in the U.S. and you’ll see little difference from a mid-century suburban Republican one. Both are deeply committed to stability and achievement, which helps propel their kids toward academic and career success. And both embrace a convenient moral justification for that success: in the 1950s, belief in God and country; today, a commitment to social justice and ethical consumption.

For "ethical consumption," though, read "leaving the big box retailers and the industrial scale eateries to the lumpenproletariat."  And never do the spawn of the upscale self-styled progressives ever work there.

ABOUT TIME, TOO.

Joanne Jacobs offers a plea from California's (checks notes) college professors.  "Don't make us reteach middle-school math, say STEM profs at 'test-free' UC."

Apparently the college boards, let alone mathematics placement tests, were exclusionary, or something.

Dropping standardized test scores for admissions was supposed to expand equity, writes Gabrielle Temaat on College Fix. The University of California system stopped requiring standardized test scores for admission in 2020, and many other universities did the same.

However, highly selective universities such as Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn have reinstated the SAT requirement, "after studies found standardized test scores to be the best predictor of students’ future academic performance." Princeton will reinstate the requirement starting with the 2027–28 admissions cycle, she writes.

That might help with faculty morale, although the government schools are perpetuating a different sort of fraud on the admissions offices.  “A lot of students have taken precalculus or calculus in high school, and they've basically been lied to by their school systems. They don't actually know these subjects at all."  That could be from that open letter signed by multiple California system professors calling attention to the Distressed Material matriculating despite not being able to do middle school arithmetic, or perhaps from an internal Berkeley report noting the same things.

California might not yet be where Wisconsin is, with legislation requiring the state's universities to identify the sources of Distressed Material.  First you have to recognize you have a problem, then you have to work the problem.  Thus far, nobody has implemented the next step, which is to send the school districts that didn't do it right the first time the bill for staffing those remedial, er, developmental, classes.

LET THE ANACONDA'S COILS TIGHTEN.

In The American Thinker, Heyrsh Abdulrahman, who has foreign policy experience germane to the conflict, notes, "The era of believing the Iranian regime can simply be managed indefinitely appears to be ending, and Washington should not waste the opportunity created by that realization."  It's a lengthy essay, considering several dimensions of the conflict, and it reinforces the Cold Spring Shops position that the current Iranian government ought not have nuclear capabilities, ought not be financing gangbangers masquerading as religious zealots in Asia Minor or beyond, ought respect the status of the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway, and ought compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages resulting from their unstructured response to the Israeli and United States military campaign.

GIVE EMERGENCE A CHANCE.

The latest issue of Journal of Economic Perspectives, which the American Economic Association post on the public viewing part of their web pages, features a "Competition in Health Care" Symposium in the latest issue.  It is that Journal's practice to group several papers into a themed symposium, and the papers address a multiplicity of ways in which trade-tested betterments might emerge, or not.

WILL GOING THROUGH BE THE ONLY WAY OUT?

Over the years, Kurt Schlichter has maintained that leftists, and their willing accomplices in the liberal establishment, want those annoying Normals dead.  In the wake of a Democrat loyalist attempting to go kinetic at the weekend's nerd prom, he's repeating that message.

We are getting uncomfortably close to how the Spanish Civil War was started. That war was started because the communists started losing their power. We need to realize what time it is and the threats that we face. The only reason why the Left calls Trump "Hitler" and Republicans fascists is to give others permission to take him and us out. The fight against evil will continue, and I'm not sure it will end well.

His colleague Ward Clark is thinking along similar lines, although he might be thinking about a general strike of some sort, repeating "They need us. We don't need them."  That's interesting, as May Day is coming up, and the communists are organizing their own version of a general strike for that day, although it will probably be mostly kids in the schools that produce the next generation of welfare recipients reinterpreting truancy as some sort of political action participating.  He also echoes John Galt in suggesting that perhaps scorning the productive give their detractors what they want, by going away.  But rather than holing up in Galt's Gulch, he might have something more kinetic in mind.  "If the left wants to normalize political violence, and if they succeed, they aren't going to like how that works out. In any conflict sparked by such a move, the left will lose, suddenly and catastrophically, within a matter of days — maybe hours. Why? Because when it comes to a scrap, as with almost anything else, we are just simply better at it than they are."

A former Bernie Sanders booster called Batya Ungar-Sargon, suggests that the chap who disrupted nerd prom was simply acting on what his Intellectual Betters were saying.

Democrats have blamed gun violence for the rise in political violence, which is of course ridiculous, given that conservatives are much more likely to own guns, yet much less likely to engage in and justify political violence.

It’s time for the Left to take responsibility for the violence it is fomenting, justifying, and carrying out. Cole Allen’s manifesto justifying his attempted murder of the President doesn’t read like the ravings of a lunatic. It sounds like the kind of rhetoric you hear every single day from Democrats and their media. They are radicalizing their side every single day, and refusing to take down the temperature.

There are similar assertions circulating elsewhere in the right-populist internet environment these days.  She concludes, "You can’t unite around a lie."  The lie, though, might be that the usual forms of government are working as they should.  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, who knows a few things about conflict, develops that argument.

We have increasingly cast our politics as existential. Every presidential election in my lifetime has been “the most important presidential election in our lifetimes.” And, as the parties have polarized and sorted, the stakes have certainly increased: every election is a referendum on the future of race relations, gay rights, trans rights, abortion rights, gun rights, etc.

At the same time, the safety valve that deligitimates violence in a democracy—elections—have become increasingly meaningless. Gerrymandered House seats mean few of the 435 districts are truly in play; the winner of the dominant party’s primary is all but assured of election. This is true for the Senate and Electoral College in all but a handful of states. So, for all practical purposes, most Americans have no real say come Election Day.

And that’s to say nothing of the counter-democratic, if not outright undemocratic, features that have been bolted onto the system. Voter suppression efforts by state legislatures to further skew outcomes. The routine use of the filibuster has made it almost impossible to pass legislation. A Supreme Court with an extreme partisan skew that tends to strike down policies enacted by Democrats at a much higher rate than those enacted by Republicans.

Violence is a tool of the powerless. And more and more people feel powerless.

Pay attention, though, to where the power is accreting.  Presidential elections.  Federal policies.  National legislation.  Perhaps, in place of widespread defiance of Our Political Masters, or gunplay replacing wordplay, a restoration of those enumerated, separated, and limited powers matters.  Perhaps, instead of asking "who is John Galt?," dear reader, ask "who is running for school board or mayor" and "what is she proposing?"

APRIL MEANS TAXING TIMES.

In Reason, George Mason economist Veronique de Rugy offers five tax myths.

1.  The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share.
2.  We'll Fix the Budget Deficit by Taxing the Rich.
3.  If You Can't Tax the Rich, Tax Corporations.
4.  Capital Gains Should Be Taxed Like Ordinary Income.
5.  Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves. 

It's worth reading through her elaborations in full, and, yes, the political economy of taxation does not favor either Democrats or Republicans.  I'd note further that while she compares flows with flows in evaluating only income taxation in her first point, governments tax consumption and wealth as well as income: consider sales taxes, particularly those that vary by type of good, e.g. no tax on food at the grocery store and high taxes on food at restaurants (I'm looking at you, DeKalb, Illinois) and property taxes, which is to say, the way in which localities fund their schools, and which can be assessed on other personal property, consider registering your automobile or your boat.

Her third and fourth points get into the weeds of tax incidence, which makes reckoning exactly how much of a corporate profit tax is borne by its owners rather than its suppliers or workers: and that spills over into determining how much appreciation of capital has already been taxed in other ways.

On his Substack, David Henderson offers four technical thoughts about taxation.

1.  High marginal tax rates cause economic harm.
2.  High tax rates also cause tax avoidance.
3.  Making tax rates the same would likely reduce the demand for government spending.
4.  Most people, not just high-income people, think a proportional tax on income is more fair than a graduated tax with higher rates for higher-income people.

The first and second points are related, with the economic harm presenting as excess burden and the tax avoidance presenting as people changing their behavior in addition to looking for ways to shelter income, which Milton Friedman once quipped was "losing money in order to pay less tax" or words to that effect, and both of those distinct from, oh, in Steve Martin fashion, making a million dollars and not paying any taxes on it.  I'd like to see stronger support for the third and fourth points.  The third, in particular, suggests that politicians promise pie in the sky that some fellow behind the tree will pay for.

WAS BULL RUN AN ESCALATION TRAP?

A lengthy post by Bret Devereaux, who appears to be a historian of some sort, provokes the title of my post.  As he develops his thesis, he offers the following origin story for the war.

The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.

The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing.

I note before we continue that National Command Authority anticipated an air campaign in excess of a month, that the United States and Israel have goals that align but are not congruent, that no battle plan survives its first encounter with the enemy, and that had the United States and Israel clobbered the mullahs on the basis of actionable intelligence that they would be meeting somewhere in Teheran without any coherent follow-on operations, somebody would probably already have leaked that to one of the legacy newspapers.

It is to that "solid blow" that I wish to turn.  Recall, in the summer of 1861, how the Georgetown cocktail party set packed picnic baskets and headed into Virginia to watch Gen^l McDowell and his forces smash up the secesh, march On to Richmond, and settle that hash once and for all.  We know that McDowell's plans came a cropper and that the cocktail party set got caught up in the ensuing skedaddle.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Federal forces had prevailed and been able to occupy Richmond.  Mr Devereaux's essay works as an explainer for how occupying Richmond, with no forces in Memphis or New Orleans or Atlanta or Charleston would have failed.  The original capital city of the seceded states was in Montgomery, and it would be straightforward enough to return the political class there: and until something like Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan closed the ports and reopened the Mississippi for the Union and wrecked the secesh's industrial base the war would go on.  If you think cartoonists of the era slagged on Abraham Lincoln for pursuing the war the way he, with Grant, Sheridan, Sherman; and Farragut and Porter did it, imagine those cartoonists with Richmond occupied and yet the war continuing.  Consider, also, that even with first Lee and then Johnston surrendering in April 1865 and with New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond occupied, unreconstructed elements (in the manner of Iran's revolutionary guards with free rein to act locally) could continue the fight for years.  That's how the "Southern" "Poverty" "Law" Center made its civil rights bones, back in the day, litigating against such elements.

WILL THE THING BE PRESSED?

Our President is negotiating, or not, perhaps through an intermediary, with Iranian officials who are, or not, making decisions of state.  As we prepare for a weekend of recovery from the big O Scale show and determining the finalists in the basketball tournaments, Our President is hailing the passage of eight, or perhaps ten, oil tankers that he described as "a gift" and he has pledged not to make good on his threat to unleash the Air Force on Iran's power plants until April 6.  Iran's passage guarantees apparently didn't apply to at least two Chinese container ships.  His Secretary of State is still dickering with European diplomats who maintain a touching faith in the sort of diplomatic process that has worked so well for the past half century.  While the reality show president engages in the sort of showmanship that gets the Excessively Earnest People fretting, Israel's military continues to press its case.  "Defense Minister Israel Katz warned on Friday that Israel would ramp up its strikes on Iran in the coming days, citing continued Iranian ballistic missile fire at civilian targets in Israel, despite US President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to bring the hostilities to a halt."

A CASE FOR EMERGENCE.

Strong Towns contributor Norman Petersman asks, "What happens when the teacup cracks?"  It's a metaphor to get people thinking about excessively planned urban, suburban, or exurban development.  Excessive planning fails, but regular readers of Cold Spring Shops know we quibble with Strong Towns on the meaning of "finished state."  "It might be more subtle than that: the tract houses, supermarkets, and shopping centers might have had some evolutionary advantage, but when the Powers that Be decided to pick winners, bad stuff happened."  It's hard for Powers that Be to square two simple maxims.  "No neighborhood should be subject to radical change.  No neighborhood should be exempt from change."

WHAT ARE THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?

Did a man die in Minneapolis on Saturday because a federal official didn't handle the pistol that man dropped properly?  Does that even matter?  Before Saturday, Cato's Walter Olson was already claiming "In Minnesota, ICE Is Assaulting the Constitutional Rights of Citizens."

It is crucial to grasp, though, that ICE and Border Patrol also routinely violate the rights of US citizens, both the naturalized kind and those born right here. With the Minnesota campaign of recent weeks, these assaults on citizens’ rights appear to be multiplying rapidly.

Until lately, the citizens most visibly targeted for abuse have often been reporters and protesters. Members of those groups have been repeatedly attacked while taking pictures of ICE actions in a nonobstructive way or protesting nonviolently, in what looks very much like a practice that is being tolerated by policy.

He concludes, "Many advocates of constitutional liberty have begun pushing back against ICE and Border Patrol’s incursions on the Bill of Rights. More should join them."

Despite incoming foul weather and Conference Weekend in professional football, another protest put down with force in Minneapolis has brought people out.  Paul Krugman asks, "Was This a Murder Too Far?"  He suggests it is, because of the wide range of people crying foul.

Centrist Democrats, who have spent weeks trying to ignore Minneapolis so they could talk about the price of eggs, are finally taking a stand and appear ready to vote against another round of DHS funding. And several Republicans are now speaking out.

The NRA and other gun groups are now calling for a full investigation of Pretti’s murder, angry that the DHS justifies the execution of Pretti because he was, entirely legally, in possession of a gun. Even Fox News’ s Maria Bartiromo, a tireless Trump cheerleader, sounded patently skeptical when questioning Kash Patel about DHS’s outlandish claims.

The first post-Pretti execution poll, from YouGov, shows that ICE’s brownshirt tactics are evoking a wave of anger, shame and revulsion across America. People who have seen videos of the shooting overwhelmingly say that it was unjustified. Calls to abolish ICE have gone from the fringe to the center, with a plurality of Americans supporting them.

Does this mark a tipping point? Or will the revulsion simply fade away, as it did after Good was killed? I think that this time is different, for several reasons.

Well, politics is the only "respectable" art in which compromising your integrity for the sake of a talking point is normal behavior.  It gives Paul Krugman free rein to sneer at people he disagrees with, or finds disagreeable.

I believe that a significant number of people brushed aside the murder of Renee Good because she was a woman — at a time when right-wingers are still dismissing opponents of fascism as “gangs of wine moms” — in a same-sex relationship.

Second, while the video evidence on Good’s killing was clear if examined closely, it did need close examination to reveal that she was simply murdered. The videos of Pretti’s killing don’t need close examination. That sound you heard Saturday was millions of Americans, myself included, crying out in horror as we watched agents repeatedly shoot a man who was already restrained.

His closing sentence expresses the sentiments that prompted the questions introducing my post.  Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor answers my "Does it even matter?" with a better question.

Even if you are a reader who thinks that protesters should keep their distance from ICE, or maybe you think that they shouldn’t be protesting at all, please stop and consider that none of this is justified, and that we should expect any law enforcement entity to behave professionally and to de-escalate, not as both of these incidents indicate, lash out in anger at US citizens exercizing their constitutional rights.

Ask yourself, upon watching any of these videos: Is there any defensible reason that ICE couldn’t have just walked away?

His continuation is correct in part, incorrect in part. "Annoying law enforcement is actually a First Amendment right. The notion that instead of being protected speech, it carries the death penalty without trial is the stuff of authoritarian nightmares."  The "annoying law enforcement part" might not be correct.  Rich Schapiro of NBC News breaks that down in "One called it murder. Some need more information."  By all means, read it in full.

ENABLING THE OVERSCHEDULED CHILDHOOD?

Strong Towns contributor Noah Toumert asks, "Why Do Cities Build Sports Complexes Instead of Neighborhood Fields?"  Maybe because the helicopter parents think of the local playgrounds as dangerous places, and the authorities crack down on unsupervised play as tantamount to neglect.

Perhaps, as Mr Toumert contends, the sports complexes are a way of showcasing the city as a destination, rather than as, oh, a place to live.

Large sports complexes are attractive to city governments because they are easy to explain. They arrive with economic impact studies attached: hotel nights, restaurant spending, regional visitors. They come with clear capital budgets, naming rights, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. They can be photographed from the air and branded as evidence of investment. A $30 million complex feels like progress because it is visible.

Neighborhood fields, by contrast, don’t always photograph well. A lit mini-pitch on a residential block looks like maintenance instead of transformation. Ten small investments scattered across a city do not produce a single moment of political credit in the way one large facility does.

In the end, cities are not only responding to community need; they are responding to the logic of governance. Centralized projects are legible to councils, donors, and the press. Distributed infrastructure is quieter and harder to narrate. The result is predictable: cities optimize for visibility rather than proximity.

Beyond politics, sports complexes solve a series of administrative challenges. They centralize scheduling, liability, maintenance, and security. They allow recreation departments to manage sport as a contained activity rather than a diffuse one. Insurance is simpler, permitting clearer, and staff can be concentrated in one place.

All of those things might be true, subject, however, to the caveat that such projects, like any other local improvement built with Other Peoples' Money, turn into liabilities when time comes to do the maintenance and security.

THOSE URBAN-RURAL POLITICAL DIVIDES.

Downstate Illinois would just as soon have nothing to do with Chicago.  Inland and mountain Oregon and Washington resent the political aesthetic of Portland and Seattle.  There might be Minnesotans asking Paul Bunyan to chop the Cities off.

Now consider remarks one Representative Daniel Sickles made in Congress.  “Secession, although it may begin at the South, will not end at the South. There is no sympathy now between the city and the State of New York ... nor has there been for years.”  Yes, that's the same Daniel Sickles, political general, whose impetuous behavior on 2 July at Gettysburg almost lost the battle, but for the First Minnesota plugging the gap.

THE PILLARS OF TRUMP.

Our President has been musing about buying or annexing or occupying Greenland.  A polar map makes the island's strategic importance to North America clear.

Object Zero map retrieved from CDR Salamander.

During the Battle of the Atlantic and the Cold War, the ability of the Atlantic Alliance to keep track of naval activity in the Greenland - Iceland - United Kingdom gap was useful.  To the extent that being able to use the Northwest Passage for commercial shipping matters, keeping track of what's on those waters is easier with observers in Alaska, far northwestern Canada, and Greenland.  Note, further, that great circle trajectories of intercontinental missiles out of Persia or European Russia cross Denmark, making it a logical place to base anti-missile technologies that activate during the boost phase.

SEVENTEEN RESOLUTIONS TEAM TRUMP WILL LIKELY BREAK.

Reason's Ryan Bourne offers "Seventeen Ways Politicians Can Make Things Cheaper, Starting With Food, Health Care, and Appliances."  I'll simply list them and suggest you read the article for the elaborations thereon.

1.  End Sugar Quotas.
2.  End Tariffs on Food.
3.  Expand Agricultural Immigration Visas.
4.  Expand the Scope of Independent Health Care Practices.
5.  Allow More Over-the-Counter Medicines.
6.  Recognize Foreign Drug Approvals.
7.  Scrap the Tariffs.  (The extension beyond appliances is straightforward.)
8.  Relax Licensing Requirements for Repairmen.
9.  Release Land for Building.
10.  Upzone.
11.  More By-Right Permits.
12.  Approve More Pipelines, More Quickly.
13.  End Tariffs on Goods Needed for Electrical Grids.
14.  Repeal the Jones Act.
15.  End the 'Chicken Tax'.
16.  Allow Direct Sales of Motor Vehicles.
17. End or Ease Buy American Rules.

I find myself in the position of Omar Sharif's Dr. Zhivago, agreeing with most of that list, if for reasons that are subtle.  I am old enough to remember how European agencies approved a sedative called thalidomide rather quickly whilst staff in the Food and Drug Administration asked for more evidence of that drug causing birth defects when administered to pregnant women.  Apparently that formula has use as a cancer treatment.  I also fear that Mr Bourne is insufficiently familiar with soldering irons and wrenches.  "Easing burdensome licensing for routine HVAC tasks and relaxing it for basic plumbing, in favor of simple registration and insurance requirements, would increase competition, shorten wait times, and push down the cost of keeping the kit in your home running."  The stories I have heard over the years from skilled tradesmen about the do-it-yourself stuff they've sometimes had to fix!

That noted, Mr Bourne is correct in diagnosing many of our "affordability" crises as failed attempts to manage crisis that somehow spill over into continuing the crisis, and the intrusion of Our Political Masters.

A serious affordability agenda would take aim at child care, clothing, and dozens of other essentials. Even in the areas covered here, there's more that could be done. The guiding principle is clear: Trade liberalization and deregulation can unleash supply, expand consumer choice, and improve affordability—sometimes through lower prices, sometimes by making room for cheaper, lower-frills options. Even when prices don't drop much, greater efficiency boosts wages.

In the long run, what people care about is how far their money goes. This requires economic growth. But after an inflation shock has jacked up prices, consumers aren't in the mood to wait. Officials should respond by letting markets work, not by stumbling into price controls and costly subsidies.

And maybe next time, Washington could try not overstimulating the economy through reckless monetary and fiscal policy in the first place.

But, but, but, I can hear the advocates for Government that Does Something scolding all and sundry about how Something Had Gone Wrong and There Was A Problem and Those State Actions were Intended To Solve Problems.

Let's open the new year with another reminder that voters returned Donald Trump and a Republican majority to Washington, known faults and follies all, because the most recent attempts to have a Government Doing Something brought us fiscal incontinence and a debacle in Afghanistan and corona tyranny and dangerous cities and personnel policies where competence was second or third to identity or ideological conformity.

FIRE PREVENTION WEEK.

In the early days of Cold Spring Shops, we offered a trivia question borrowed from a newspaper Sunday supplement.  "Late in the 19th Century, a tragic fire occurred in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in which more than 1,500 lives were lost. Yet this event was journalistically overshadowed by a simultaneous tragedy in which only 300 lives were lost. Where did this latter tragedy occur, and why is this question on the website today?"

Because we post out of Illinois, we had correct answers in the Haloscan comments the same day.

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

The Allies are again commemorating the end of the War in Europe.  My meditation from ten years ago is sufficiently on point that I will simply quote the bulk of it.

Some four score years ago, the survival of constitutional republics and market economies, namely the institutions most friendly to emergence and evolutionary stable interactions, was very much in doubt, and the future looked very much to belong to the totalitarian state.

Saalfeld, Germany, June 1945.  John Karlson photograph.

There was no guarantee of victory going in, no guarantee that the ending would be one conducive to the emergence of expanded freedoms.  Thus, at the end of the war, the Perpetually Aggrieved inherited a starting position for their efforts much more favorable than it could have been.  Unearned privilege?  You decide.

Imagine a social order in which a Montgomery bus boycott, a Pettus Bridge, a march in Cicero would seem to non-Aryans as if a stroll in the park compared to life under a North American version of the Nuremberg Laws.

Imagine a social order in which expanded labor force participation for women might as well be a hallucination, given official encouragement of large families and official discouragement of the single life.

Imagine same-sex dating and mating criminalized so stringently that a Stonewall Bar would seem more like a car-port than a closet.

Imagine a Middle East free of conflict, because there would be no Israel, and whatever differences Shia and Sunni have with each other are secondary to Persians being Aryan and Bedouins being Semitic.

And thus, dear reader, whatever grievances you might have with the way things are, keep in mind that there's stuff in your privilege knapsack that you might not otherwise have.