A CASE FOR EMERGENCE.

At first blush, Sarah Taber's "America Loves the Idea of Family Farms.  That's Unfortunate," which Laura "11-D" McKenna recommended, seems to endorse collective farms, or perhaps some updating of primitive communism.

Farming has almost always existed on a larger social scale—very extended families up to whole villages. We tend to think of medieval peasants as forebears of today’s family farms, but they’re not. Medieval villages worked much more like a single unit with little truly private infrastructure—draft animals, plows, and even land were operated at the community level.

Family farming as we know it— nuclear families that own their land, pass it on to heirs, raise some or all of their food, and produce some cash crops—is vanishingly rare in human history.

It’s easy to see how Anglo-Americans could mistake it for normal. Our cultural heritage is one of the few places where this fluke of a farming practice has made multiple appearances. Family farming was a key part of the political economy in ancient Rome, late medieval England, and colonial America. But we keep forgetting something very important about those golden ages of family farming. They all happened after, and only after, horrific depopulation events.

Rome emptied newly conquered lands by selling the original inhabitants into slavery. In England, the Black Death killed so many nobles and serfs that surviving peasants seized their own land and became yeomen — free small farmers who neither answered to a master nor commanded their own servants. Colonial Americans, seeking to recreate English yeoman farming, began a campaign of genocide against indigenous people that has lasted for centuries, and created one of the greatest transfers of land and wealth in history.

Put another way, plagues or conquest or perhaps the application of knowledge that served as a military force multiplier (phalanxes or firearms) combined to provide an opportunity for the family farm to emerge as a trade-tested betterment.  Or perhaps not: Ms Taber notes that family farmers can rent-seek (or serve as the mascots for Big Agriculture doing the rent-seeking) with the best of them.

In areas where family farming has persisted for more than a couple generations it’s largely thanks to extensive, modern technocratic government interventions like grants, guaranteed loans, subsidized crop insurance, free training, tax breaks, suppression of farmworker wages, and more. Family farms’ dependence on the state is well understood within the industry, but it’s heresy to talk about it openly lest taxpayers catch on. I think it’s time to open up, because I don’t think a practice that needs that much life support can truly be considered “sustainable.” After seeing what I’ve seen from 20 years in the industry, continuing to present it as such feels to me like a type of con game — because there is a better way.

That might be reason for government to go away, although Ms Taber doesn't want to roll that way.

America’s history is filled with examples of collaborative farming. It’s just less publicized than single-family homesteading. African-American farmers have a long and determined history of collaborative farming, a brace against the viciousness of slavery and Jim Crow. Native peoples that farmed usually did so as a whole community rather than on a single-family basis. In the early days of the reservation system, some reservations grew their food on one large farm run by the entire nation or tribe. These were so successful that colonial governments panicked, broke them up, and forced indigenous farmers to farm as individual single-family homesteads. This was done with the express goal of impoverishing them — which says a lot about the realities of family farming, security, and financial independence. It also says a lot about how long those grim realities have been understood. Indigenous groups today run modern, innovative, community-level land operations, including over half the farms in Arizona Tanka’s work restoring prairies, bison, and traditional foodways in the Dakotas as the settler-built wheat economy dries up.

One collaborative tradition that’s been very public about how their community-size farms function is the Hutterites, a religious group of about 460 communities in the U.S. and Canada numbering 75-150 people apiece. Despite the harsh prairies where they live, and farming about half as many acres per capita as neighboring family farmers, Hutterites are thriving and expanding when neighboring family farms are throwing in the towel.

Their approach — essentially farming as a large employee-owned company with diverse crops and livestock — has valuable lessons.

Outsiders often chalk up the success of the Hutterites, who forgo most private property, to “free labor” or “not having to pay taxes.” Neither of these are accurate. Hutterite farms thrive due to farming as a larger community rather than as individual families. Family farms can achieve economies of scale by specializing in one thing, like expanding a dairy herd or crop acreage. But with only one or two family members running a farm, there simply isn’t enough bandwidth to run more than one or two operations, no matter how much labor-saving technology is involved. The community at a Hutterite farm allows them to actually pull off what sustainability advocates talk about, but family farms consistently struggle with: diversifying.

Put another way, there is no one model of agriculture for a Farm Czar or the Great White Father or some other Wise Expert to dictate. Perhaps the best thing for the government to do is to go away.  (Not to mention that one way to do right by Native Americans might be for the government agencies managing tribal affairs to encourage those farms, again, rather than focusing on casinos and associated hotels.)

America’s farmland is filled with opportunities to sustainably grow more food from the same acres and earn extra cash, thwarted by the limited attention solo operations can give. We treat this plight as natural and inevitable. We treat it as something to solve by collective action on a national level — government policies that help family farms. We don’t talk about how readily these things can be solved by collective action at the local level.

Collaboration doesn’t just make better use of the land — it can also do a lot for farmers’ quality of life. Hutterites, thanks to farming on a community scale, get four weeks of vacation per year; new mothers get a few months’ maternity leave and a full-time helper of their choosing — something few American women in any vocation can do.

We don’t have to commit to the Hutterite lifestyle to benefit from the advantages of collaborative farming. Big, diverse, employee-owned farms work, and they can turn farming into a job that anyone can train for and get — you don’t have to be born into it.

Yes, she uses a lot of buzz-words (collective, collaborative, decolonize) that smack of vanguardism. Her examples, however, are various and emergent.

Finally, and perhaps most important, collaborative farming can be a powerful tool for decolonization. Hutterite communities are powerhouses, raising most of the eggs, hogs, or turkeys in some states — and they’re also largely self-sufficient. This has allowed them to build their own culture to suit their own values. They have enough scale to build their own crop processing, so they can work directly with retailers and customers on their own terms instead of going through middlemen. They build their own knowledge instead of relying on “free” agribusiness advice as many family farms do. In other words, they’re powerful. Imagine what groups like this, with determined inclusivity from top leadership down through rank-and-file, could do to right the balance of power in the United States.

It's probably nitpicking to point out that Hutterite marketing managers are doing the work of the middlemen by negotiating those contracts with retailers or customers.  The organizational approach might look like voluntary combination into a collective farm, or an egg cooperative that doesn't break down in squabbles between Catholics and Lutherans.  The important phrase there is voluntary combination, which is to say, betting on emergence.  And there's a model for righting balances of power in the United States already: it's called limiting the power of the national government and allowing the states to function as their voters see fit.

Likewise, her concluding remark generalizes to other areas where One Best Way appears to hold sway.

Our culture puts so much emphasis on one “right” way of farming — solo family operations — that we ignore valuable lessons from people who’ve done it differently for hundreds or thousands of years. It’s time for us to open up and look at other ways of doing things.

Is it "our culture" or is it "our political class" (for a variety of reasons) that is wedded to One Best Way?

WHEN TECHNOCRATS GO WRONG.

Veronique de Rugy starts polemical, taking on the latest incarnation of industrial policy, which is currently seasoned with a lot of China envy in the manner of High Thomas Friedman.

Why should we want America to become more like China? Here's yet another politician thinking that somehow, the same government that started a war in Iraq on faulty intelligence, botched the launch of HealthCare.gov, gave us the Solyndra scandal, and can't keep either Amtrak or the Postal Service solvent, can effectively coordinate a strategic vision for American manufacturing.

Her argument is straightforward and should be familiar to regular readers. That is, the expertise of Wise Experts is limited to their expertise.

U.S. industrial policies launched in response to the rise of Japan in the 1980s and the USSR before that failed, not because American policy mavens weren't smart enough to do things right. The real problem with industrial policy, economic development strategy, central planning or whatever you want to call these interventions is that government officials are inescapably plagued by ignorance of localized knowledge. Government officials cannot outperform the wisdom of the market at picking winners. In fact, government intervention in any sector creates distortions, misdirects investments toward politically favored companies, and hinders the ability of unsubsidized competitors to offer better alternatives. Central planning in all forms is poisonous to innovation.

Exactly. Plus industrial policy is a way of generating rents and creating a swamp that has to be drained. I thought we had enough of Government Czars forty years ago, but Donald Boudreaux notes no bad idea ever goes away.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., proposes to establish a new federal agency for designing and directing national industrial policy. Named the National Institute of Manufacturing, this agency would be led by what The Washington Post calls a “manufacturing czar, who could report directly to the president. This person would be called the chief manufacturing officer of the United States.”

Peters declares that “It’s important to put someone in charge.”

No. No. No. A billion times No!

Indeed not. In fact, it's not clear why anyone from Michigan would want an industrial policy czar in the first place.  A Special Commissioner for preservation, perhaps.  But a Wise Expert In Charge of Picking Winners might rule that all of Michigan's heavy industry ought be closed down, with the productive resources devoted to server farms in California, and the state turned into a nature preserve.

And what's with all this China envy anyway?

America’s extraordinary growth and prosperity are emphatically not the results of any “manufacturing czar” or of a government agency dedicated to overseeing and planning industrial development. Quite the opposite.

Our growth and prosperity are fruits of a policy and culture in which each of us with gumption is free, as the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey puts it, to “have a go” at opening businesses and innovating. We never needed the permission of officials to innovate. And we certainly never looked for entrepreneurial ideas from the likes of politicians and salaried government mandarins.

And so why does Peters think that we Americans now — with per-capita incomes more than 3½ times higher than those in China — should abandon the system of what my colleague Adam Thierer calls “permissionless innovation” in order to adopt Beijing-style bureaucratic fetters?

Well, Mr Peters is a senator, and the governing class has to give the impression of Doing Something, even when there's nothing productive that the governing class can do.

EXECUTING RICHARD NIXON'S PRIME DIRECTIVE?

There's a school of thought in ferroequinology that Amtrak was set up to fail: it would be sold to the masses as a quasi-public, for profit corporation that would devote the best of the existing rolling stock to continuing service on some of the existing passenger train routes, and it might have quietly expired a few years later had the 1973 oil embargo not gotten passengers interested in trains.  That's despite the early efforts to experiment, for example with trains running through Chicago, and with lounge or first class service on many trains.

It is hard to perceive the current behavior of the carrier, cancelling trains whenever the deer hibernate and offering a joke of a meal service, as anything other than reverting to that liquidation.

In doing so, might they be taking the Commuter Rail authorities down with them?  "Amtrak is tightening the screws on three commuter operators using its infrastructure—Virginia Railway Express (VRE), Chicago’s Metra and now the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA)." It would be funny if it weren't so silly, a ward of the state that has no interest in doing its own work making it difficult for other passenger train agencies to do theirs.

The problem is that in the three affected cities, there are still parts of the commuter rail service that function as rolling gated communities.  There's even a subscription parlor car still serving Chicago, on the old Chicago and North Western into a terminus not run by Amtrak.  There might be some influential citizens who get ticked off.

Unlike squabbles over substituting jelly sandwiches for hot meals, and adjusting routes and schedules to reflect budgetary realities and changing demographics, Amtrak, in dealings with commuter railroads, is engaging in incomprehensible pretensions to avoid its public interest obligations, shield itself from regulatory oversight and threaten, unchecked, commuter operators with service disruptions and even eviction unless they pony-up more cash.

Thuggish behavior intended to weaken other financially strapped public transportation entities so as to make Amtrak stronger is a reprehensible affront to public trust. Amtrak should be better than that. But with no sign of Amtrak remorse or abatement, Amtrak’s actions are overripe for congressional oversight and correction.

Amtrak's spokesman denies any ill intent, claiming it's all about clarifying fully allocated costs.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE.

First Big Time Hockey purges Kate Smith.

Now Little Time Hockey purges Lillian Gish.  Big Hollywood lodges a protest. "For a university to dishonor her by singling out just one film, however offensive it is, is unfortunate and unjust. Doing so makes her a scapegoat in a broader political debate. A university should be a bastion of free speech. This is a supreme 'teachable moment' if it can be handled with a more nuanced sense of history."

It's Bowling Green State University, and Ms Gish had a role in Birth of a Nation.  Thus, she can be retroactively made an unperson. "Upon reviewing the totality of Lillian Gish’s acting career, no evidence was found that she denounced or distanced herself from director D. W. Griffith or her link from the film The Birth of a Nation."

Apparently, judging people's behavior in a past era on the basis of contemporary standards provides an all-purpose free pass for making the person, rather than the behavior, a thought criminal.

Bowling Green issued a statement this week in response to the letter from the actors in which it noted that campus leaders from various groups studied the issue -- and came to the view that the honor for Gish, given her connection to the film, sent a hostile message to some students.

"Bowling Green State University has a primary responsibility to serve its students, faculty and staff, and an obligation to create an inclusive learning environment. That obligation outweighs the university’s small part in honoring the Gish sisters’ legacy," the statement said.

A Student Affairs type at Oberlin couldn't have put it any better.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, WILL THEY TRY THE RIGHT THING?

Zoning codes impose constraints on land markets, which leads to higher prices.

In California, that's got Google setting up latter-day company towns.

Google's attempt to ease the housing crunch will play out over 10 years, in two main phases. First, [Google CEO Sundar] Pichai said, the company will "repurpose at least $750 million of Google's land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing."

That move should result in 15,000 new homes at all income levels, including for low- and middle-income prospective homebuyers, the Google CEO said.

In the second part of the plan, Google will create a $250 million investment fund that will be used to give developers incentives to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units.

Pichai said the company has already worked with its home city of Mountain View, Calif., to change the zoning on some of its land. Similar conversations, he added, are taking place with officials in nearby Sunnyvale and San Jose.

It's changing the zoning codes that might do the most good.

California, and the Bay Area specifically, are infamous for an absolute jungle of process you must overcome if you want to build anything—creating lots of opportunities for development opponents to stonewall projects for years. This drives up the price of development (and ultimately housing costs), not insubstantially. More importantly, it shuts a lot of would-be developers out of the market, and causes a lot of worthwhile projects to simply never even be proposed.

I could crack wise and suggest that California becoming a one-party socialist state precludes doing the right thing because that would fly in the face of Received Technocratic Wisdom. Or, put less polemically,

What the Bay Area needs to do is reform regulatory processes, abandon an untenable paradigm of restricting almost all residential land for single-family homes, and allow incremental development in a broad swath of neighborhoods. It needs to make approval of such development rapid enough and predictable enough that small-scale developers can get in the game. And for this to happen, there needs to be a huge cultural and institutional shift, because right now, every one of Silicon Valley's small, fragmented cities has every incentive to build a wall of exclusionary zoning codes around itself and saddle its neighbors with the burden of housing its workforce.

Google, for very good reason, doesn't want to get in the mud here. It probably shouldn't. Google is already widely perceived as one of the villains in the whole region's housing crisis. It's a linchpin of the industry that's driving explosive job growth which hasn't been accompanied by a corresponding number of homes—not even remotely close.

It's possible, also, that Google are an inframarginal employer in the Bay Area. They might be able to establish a company town, but eventually people who do business with Google will find ways to engage in locational arbitrage.

Google's investment is welcome. It makes business sense for them — they still need to locate employees in the Bay Area, and driving down the cost of rent will help them attract and retain people without raising salaries even higher.

But bigger, more troubling, issues remain. The biggest is that the Bay Area is a regional economy out of balance, and a symptom of a national economy out of balance. A handful of superstar cities are responsible for an ever-more-disproportionate share of America's economic dynamism, and as a result, there are huge "left behind" parts of the country that could easily accommodate housing and jobs, but where the brightest and most ambitious college grads wouldn't dream of moving.

The Bay Area is also the logical conclusion of what the Suburban Experiment has wrought when it comes to land-use planning. It's the ultimate bad party: existing homeowners have every reason to protect their investment and very little reason to want anyone new to show up. It's exacerbated by California-specific factors like Proposition 13 and a process-happy political culture that results in the kind of obstacles to even small-scale (perhaps especially small-scale) development that seem insane from the vantage point of most parts of the country.

That passage is describing a disequilibrium, in which there are several margins along which businesses might compete to attract, if not necessarily the "brightest and most ambitious" (and given the credentialing idiocies these days, who knows if that's even who Big Tech are getting?) , sufficiently competent people with a different package of pay, benefits, and locational amenities than come with the Google company town.

THE CASE FOR BOURGEOIS NORMS.

A Harvard professor suggests that diversity efforts among the institutions that have solved the U. S. News problem often amount to Them That Has Gets, or perhaps it is about people who have learned to code-shift.  "[The Privileged Poor] is [A. A. Jack's] attempt to get people to question what they take for granted, especially about class and culture in higher education. The privileged poor are lower-income students who were lucky enough to attend boarding schools or preparatory high schools before coming to college."  Yes, where they can learn that "the Vineyard" refers to something different than "the Cape," but it's still permissible to confuse Minneapolis and Milwaukee.

In a way, there is nothing new here: it has long been a point of contention in education policy whether enrolling a diverse class comprising the spawn of professionals of all manner of ancestries and creeds really expands access, or whether the privileged poor enter the work force with an affirmative action asterisk all the same.

Read on in the article, though, and note where the troubles of the striving bright student who didn't go to prep school start.  "Culture shock from day one. Most of the students I interviewed for this book describe feeling isolated, different, uncomfortable talking about their families around their peers. Many of them have never been around so much wealth, and they’ve never been to school with the kind of people they encounter on campus."

Perhaps the hundred or so institutions that claim to inhabit the top twenty spots in the U.S. News rankings can help a few matriculants from poor backgrounds, prep school or not.  There is, however, a lesson for the land-grants, the mid-majors, the regional comprehensives, the community colleges, stated succinctly by Ohio's Richard Vedder:  "Engaged professors plus engaged students equal prosperity and fulfillment."

Amid the fallout from the Oberlin bakery defamation case is a nugget that is also relevant.

“The Grape,” a student-written monthly school magazine, explored the student shoplifting dilemma in Oberlin called ““The Culture of Theft” in the December 2017 issue. They found that shoplifting was down significantly in the summer months at businesses in Oberlin because the students were mostly gone. The magazine has not been listed as evidence, and is merely included here because of it seems to have hit the mark pretty well.

One student, anonymously quoted in the story,  described stealing pasta noodles from Gibson’s twice. “It wasn’t expensive and I felt like it … I just preferred not paying for it but I could have.”

Krista Long, owner of a Ben Franklin’s store (books and other student needs) on the town square near Gibson’s, told the writer of the story that she was losing about $10,000 a year in shoplifting theft each year.

“While it may be tempting to think that the owners of local stores are pocketing tons of wealth, this simply isn’t true. Every day presents challenges … Theft is demoralizing to us, making us feel that we should suspect the very customers we want to serve.”

Is anybody surprised that when you deconstruct bourgeois norms, bad things happen?

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Summer is usually for road trips, for catching up on reading and swimming, for tending to the garden.

The protracted winter and extended spring, with lots of rain delaying the spring planting, have meant more time to work on the railroad.

Here's the subroadbed going into place for the Saugus Branch and the Lynn Common house track.

That's as of 27 May.  Will tracks be in and power applied by harvest time?

LOSING ANY SENSE OF HISTORY.

You'd think Michael Tomasky would know better.  "It's never been more important for the Democratic Party to win an election. In the history of the country. Never."  Seriously?  I suspect the Peace Democrats of 1864 would differ.

He's too in love with his cult of the presidency to think straight.  Read his article, and ponder the internal schisms of the Democrats.

Show me the apocalypse, Mr Tomasky.

LOSING THAT INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY?

The Federalist's Tom Raabe suggests that hymn-singing ought to be out of the hymnal, rather than off the jumbotron.  I want to focus on an observation he makes about the traditional hymns.

As hymnals fade, theology also suffers. The rich repository of religious wisdom contained in hymns will be lost. The old-fashioned language of hymns may strike some as unusual, but their text teaches the Christian faith far better than most of the praise choruses that dominate contemporary services. Old hymns were carefully crafted with theology at the forefront. Traditional hymns present doctrine clearly and beautifully convey the gospel story of saving grace.

That might have nothing to do with technology. It might be a reflection on the aliteracy of the writer of a praise chorus.  It might also reflect the stuff that doesn't get taught, whether in Sunday school or the common schools.  I'm more troubled by the loss of, for instance, classical and Shakespearean allusions as the curriculum becomes more quote-unquote inclusive:  wait until those first year law students hit the landmark Supreme Court rulings of the nineteenth century.

Or perhaps, some references lose relevance.  I was struck, for instance, by a line in Tony Bennett's "Paper Moon," which Tuesday's singer offered at the city's band concert.

It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

I understand Mr Bennett has sold out a summer concert at Ravinia Park.  But let's take stock of what's been changing.  The "oldies" radio stations used to feature love ballads, such as "Paper Moon," with singers backed by strings, or perhaps a swing band, rather than guitar and drum, and you could actually understand the words.  (Point your search engine at "Blinded by the Light" which now rates as an oldie.)  The band itself, which has been performing since 1854, still offers Sousa marches and medleys from Broadway's musicals, as well as the big band works longtime director Dee Palmer established his chops on.  But in the thirty-odd years that I have been attending, the G.I. generation seniors who were common at the concert have given way to the current crop of seniors (hi!) and we're fewer in number.  Yes, there are some little kids running around, but does the music mean anything to them?

Then there's that "Barnum and Bailey" reference in the song.  Yes, there has always been a sense that the itinerant circus is a humbug, and once upon a time Barnum and Bailey were The Greatest Show on Earth, but no more.  There are still little kids checking out the circus models at our shows, but does the circus train mean anything to them?

That might be the real problem confronting the churches, does the language of "Come, Come, Ye Saints" or "We Gather Together" or even "We Three Kings" mean anything to modern worshippers?

Or, as I once put it, "And yet the day may come when nobody knows how to set the valves on a steam locomotive, or how to catch the triple somersault."

ILLINOIS IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO.

Sometimes, what Democrats do defies parody.  Dan Mitchell nominates current Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker for a George Orwell award.  "The governor of Illinois actually asserted that higher income taxes are needed to stop people from leaving the state."

It sounds plausible at first blush: as the net effect of Illinois property and sales taxes, which are onerous and fall more heavily on lower income people, is regressive, the proportional income tax suggests a stronger incentive for lower income people to avoid all of Illinois's taxes by leaving.

The reality, though, is that Illinois is chasing the higher income people out.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS.

The good news: railroads working on more expeditious interchange of containers and trailers.  (That's something participants in the old Alphabet Route might understand.)  "Union Pacific, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Florida East Coast have launched interline domestic intermodal service connecting California, Dallas, and Chicago with central Florida."

The bad news: the Florida container terminal is in Orlando. "The goal of [Union Pacific reducing the number of interchanges and intermodal terminals] has been to simplify the network and concentrate on steel wheel interchange in Chicago and Memphis."

That's been something the major railroads have been doing for some time.  With Florida East Coast running all the way to Miami, and collaborating with Virgin on extending fast passenger service beyond Orlando to Tampa, aren't the railroads leaving some money on the table?

As I'm typing this post, word is coming in of yet another semi-trailer crash on Interstate 94 between Milwaukee and the Cheddar Curtain.  The Wisconsin highway department is widening the road in the (vain) hope of heading off congestion arising from the future opening of Foxconn's video screen works.

Where is the public official with vision in a state department of transportation who might see in spending money on freight railroads (something Wisconsin already does) a way to alleviate congestion on the expressways, as well as reducing the safety risk inherent in mixing heavy trucks with zip-cars?

GOVERNMENT BECOMES AN ENGINE OF UNEARNED INEQUALITY.

George Will suggests that a Cloward-Piven collapse might come without anyone willing it.

The more that individualism can be portrayed as a chimera, the more that any individual’s achievements can be considered as derivative from society, the less the achievements warrant respect. And the more society is entitled to conscript — that is, to socialize — whatever portion of the individual’s wealth that it considers its fair share. Society may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual to keep the remainder of what society thinks is misleadingly called the individual’s possession. Note that “society” necessarily means society’s collective expression: the government. Note also that government will not be a disinterested judge of what is its proper share of others’ wealth. This collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness.

Strictly speaking, roads and schools are not public goods, although delegating their provision to government agencies might be defensible, although I (along with Mr Will) have my doubts.

REDUCE SPEED TO NINETY.

Regular readers know there were a few spots along The Milwaukee Road that the Hiawatha could not safely exceed that speed.

Regular readers will therefore not be surprised that I was delighted to discover this.  Orlando's Sun-Sentinel is alerting readers to infrastructure construction that doesn't involve tax dollars.

Next month, motorists on S.R. 528 may notice earth work for rail corridor that will cross south Orange County through an area of state conservation lands and Deseret Ranches pasture.

Michael Cegelis, Virgin’s senior vice president for rail infrastructure, said the ride from Miami to Orlando will span three speed limits.

From Miami to West Palm, Virgin Trains will be limited to 79 mph.

From West Palm Beach to Cocoa, top speed will be 110 mph.

From Cocoa to Orlando International Airport, speed will vary slightly.

Cegelis said at Interstate 95, Virgin tracks will pass under S.R. 528 from its north side to its south side, a jog that will hold trains to 90 mph.

From I-95 to State Road 417, Virgin Trains will hug S.R. 528 – the Beachline – at 125 mph. Even motorists breaking the 70 mph speed limit on the adjoining expressway will be quickly overtaken by Virgin’s trains, company officials noted.

"Virgin" are the partners with Brightline. The trains will use existing Florida East Coast tracks as far as Cocoa Beach, and the area south of West Palm is thickly settled with lots of level crossings.  Thus "Free Rein to 110" is pretty good.  There's no reason to apologize for not running at Acela speeds.

Amtrak’s Acela Express between Washington D.C. and Boston advertises itself as capable of 150 mph, making it the nation’s fastest rail service. But Acela is hampered by an aging track corridor and doesn’t often reach that speed.

Virgin and Florida East Coast are demonstrating the value of diesel trains on existing track structures, as well as a less expensive line west to Orlando.

TO REMEMBER.

The faculty founder of the Northern Illinois University steel band, Professor G. Allan O'Connor, has crossed the final summit.  It has been a difficult year for the band and its friends, as musician and pan-pounder extraordinaire Cliff Alexis left us earlier this spring.  The band dedicated its spring concert to Mr Alexis.  The university's honors to Mr O'Connor will take place in August.  "A memorial visitation will be held Friday, August 2, at First Lutheran Church in DeKalb from 4-6 p.m., and a musical celebration of his life will be held Saturday, August 3, at 3 p.m. in Boutell Memorial Concert Hall in the Music Building on the NIU main campus."  RIP.

BRITAIN'S CLUELESS ESTABLISHMENT?

Stumbling and Mumbling reflects on the popularity of Boris Johnson, who appears to be emulating some of Our President's style. In some ways, things are different.

Most top journalists went to private schools. They therefore regard Johnson as “one of us”. For the same reason, they regard a public school-educated commodities broker with suspected links to Russian oligarchs and who doesn’t listen to music or watch TV as a “man of the people.”

It’s not just personal homophily that makes the Tories the familiar option, though. Being privately educated inculcates people into shared presumptions such as about what counts as “educated” (classical references do but numeracy doesn't); what matters (economics doesn’t) and who is or is not part of “the country”.

Much of the media and the Tory party have other things in common, though. One is a shared conception of what politics is – an Oxford Union-style game of jockeying for position. The BBC, like much of the media, is obviously happier covering the Tory leadership race than it is covering substantial policy which ends up, in Humphrys’ words. “all getting a wee bit technical and I’m sure people are fed up to the back teeth of all this talk of stuff most of us don’t clearly understand.” It thus sees Johnson as a player of a game it understands, whilst it ruthlessly othered technocrats such as Ed Balls or Ed Miliband*. In the same way, the failure to see that politics can be a project of building mass movements has lent the BBC a bias against Corbynites and other activists.

The British terms "public" and "private" don't mean "government" or "non-profit" as they denote in the States. "Private," however, means relatively elite, perhaps contrasting Choate or Sidwell Friends with St. Mary works.  Punditocracies, however, work the same whether they're in London or New York.  Thus, the latest polls are more interesting than the policy details, even when the policy details are offered as an obligation, rather than as something substantive.

Also, the media prefers human interest stories to theories of emergence, in which social outcomes for good or bad are the product of human behaviour but not design**. This too lends a bias towards seeing politics as a clash of characters rather than as a more complex process.

Oh, sure, go on a Sunday show, or whatever the British equivalent is, and say, "all this talk about polling data or comprehensive reform or what have you is nonsense," and see how many call-backs you get.  Apparently, though, there's the same sort of insular establishment in Britain as there is in the States.

I’m complaining about a tendency for everybody to inhabit bubbles in which they are unaware of the partiality of their own perspective. I suspect this is an increasing problem, caused by decline of two otherwise different characters: the aristocratic Tory who crouched in foxholes with working class men; and the upwardly mobile working class man who enters posher circles. For me personally, the most attractive of the Tory candidates is the (yes, Etonian) Rory Stewart whose career suggests a willingness to step out of a comfort zone of his own background and presumptions.

Such a failure to see that one is in a bubble is perhaps forgivable for those on both the left and right. Whether it is quite so forgivable for the BBC, which pretends to be impartial, is another question.

Public broadcasters gotta public broadcast.

The broader point, though, might be that the Traditional Rulers ought have a better claim to legitimacy than "We've always done it this way."  You'd think events such as the exit from the European Union and the yellow vests and the Trump presidency might have concentrated some well-educated minds.  Particularly if they get classical references.  These might be the best times to be out-of-touch elites as there are no war-crime trials, guillotines, or gibbets in common use.

CAN THE CHI-COMMS DESTROY THEIR ECONOMY FOREVER?

No. "If a government manages to undervalue its currency in terms of foreign currencies, it subsidizes the consumption of foreigners who purchase its country’s exports. And while gains are reaped by those of its citizens who work to supply goods for export, currency undervaluation makes most of that country’s citizens poorer."  Next question?

A QUESTION FOR FUTURE RESEARCH.

Perhaps not by me, but there might be somebody with the empirical chops to address the dual anomalies of gentrification and greater income stratification.  In Chicago, for example, who is bidding up the housing prices?

Chicago’s middle class, once the backbone of the city, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone, and a set of maps from a local university lays that reality bare.

The dynamic stands to affect nearly everything about Chicago going forward, from politics to schools to who will live here.

“It raises a lot of questions as to what kind of city it will be,” said Janet Smith, co-director of the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which compiled the maps that document Chicago’s shrinking middle class — and an increasingly polarized city — over the past five decades.

It might be too facile to suggest that Illinois being a tax hell run by and for Chicago Democrats is the proximate cause, although that probably matters at the margin.  There ought to be limits to how steep the urban land-rent gradient is, no matter how spiky the world is or how impossible the traffic might be.  Those urban agglomeration economies seem to be at work, though, as upscale neighborhoods emerge.  "Just 8 percent of Chicago's census tracts were considered high or very high income in 1970. Today, more than one-fifth of the city’s census tracts are higher income."  We've been aware of that for some time, that's the fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the third world.  But the high-income residents want their amenities, and the entry-level service jobs.

In U.S. cities over the past several decades, “the jobs that were added tended to be at the very high end or at the very low end, “ said Rick Mattoon, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Chicago has a high share of college educated workers, “higher than the share that's in the suburbs at this point, which is a historic flip,” said Mattoon.

But highly educated, highly paid workers — attracted in recent years to urban centers — tend to demand a lot of services. Think retail, restaurants, hotels, and entertainment. “And so that creates a big demand for entry level workers.”

Left out of this dynamic are the middle-class manufacturing jobs that used to be heavily concentrated in places like Chicago, Mattoon said.

What happens, though, when the housing demand plus the expansion of offices outbids the restaurants and taverns and health clubs and poodle groomers for the available space?

The article offers a partial explanation for the income polarization, it involves many of the formerly middle-income jobs becoming more valuable, whilst others have been automated away.

A CASE FOR MORE TRADE-TESTED BETTERMENTS?

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed doesn't like imposing accountability on institutions of higher education by making the colleges co-signers on student loans.

It’s the sort of idea that sounds good if you assume that every college is affluent, every student graduates, recessions don’t exist, nobody ever transfers, everybody can afford to attend full-time and has no other economic obligations, everybody is fluent in English, and we have unit-record data for every student in the country.  Also, you’d have to forget everything you know about racial disparities in wealth and income, the open-access mission of community colleges, and basic fairness. Other than that, it’s not half bad.

He's correct, life sometimes gets in the way, and students might have to take on family responsibilities or transfer or get hit by a recession.

It's true, we could rethink that open access mission, although that's not in the intellectual makeup of community college administrators.

Institutionally, it would be hard to come up with a more potent weapon for destroying any sort of open-access institution.  [Columnist Carlo] Salerno briefly acknowledges that, pointing out that “public community colleges would surely resist,” before assuring us that the loss of access is merely a “trade-off.”  A trade-off for what, exactly, is left unspecified. He suggests that legislatures could protect open-access institutions by giving them more money. Well, yes, they could.  They could do that now, and avoid student loans entirely. There’s an entire movement dedicated to exactly that.

Yes, and once upon a time it was possible for a student to make expenses at a state university with a factory job in the summer and a half-time campus job during the school year.  That's not the case any more.  Perhaps, though, "access" ought not be a polite way of saying "admit unprepared students;" and those student loan defaults for lack of effort might have originated in the common schools, thus before you put the colleges on the hook for loan defaults, put the high schools on the hook for remedial courses.  It might all be futile, anyway, as long as the default setting for common culture is "trashy and splintery."

But keep reading the dean's column.  It's not just another set-piece battle between competing visions of higher education.

To see just how awful Salerno’s proposal would be in implementation, look at health care.  There’s an entire industry devoted to cost-shifting. HMO’s make money by not paying bills.  Doctors and hospitals fight back by hiring more administrative staff -- usually the enemy of cost-cutters, but never mind that -- to dot every i and cross every t.  HMO’s respond by raising the bar, muddying the waters, and generally being as evasive as possible. I personally had an HMO decline at first to pay for my daughter’s birth, on the grounds that her name and social security number weren’t on the original enrollment form.  They weren’t, because she hadn’t been born yet when I enrolled. The multiple hours that a staffer from HR spent on the phone, explaining that a new person is a predictable consequence of birth, represented a deadweight cost to the college. This is not a productive use of resources.

No, but it's what you'd expect in an activity beset by cost-evasion, which is what third party payments lead to.  Student aid, health "insurance" (it really isn't, but that would be a digression), nobody knows what the relevant price is.  Be grateful there isn't a Tourist Protection and Affordable Cruising Act.

Any college faced with this rule, and trying to survive, would quickly turn its back on the people who need it most.  It wouldn’t even have to do it explicitly. Just target recruitment in some areas and not others, offer documentation only in one language, only have classes during the day, and you could easily shut out the riskiest populations.  It’s been done before. We know the drill.

Yes. That's an unintended consequence of Medicaid reimbursement rates, too.

Risk management, however, is part of curating an entering class.

Oddly for someone from a conservative perspective, Salerno’s proposal discounts individual responsibility entirely.  Every professor has had the student who simply can’t be made to care. Every professor has had the student who’s just passing through.  Why let students entirely off the hook? If a student spends a few months doing the thousand-yard stare before dropping out, never having cracked a book, why punish the college for it?

Perhaps Mr Salerno doesn't want to punish the college for admitting disengaged students. He wants to discourage colleges from admitting disengaged or unprepared students in the first place.

THE PRETTY PIG PROBLEM.

Michael Munger contemplates the advantages and disadvantages of various forms of social organization.  It's a variation on the old introductory economics taxonomy of resource allocation by custom and tradition, or by market exchange, or by electoral politics of some sort.  That's not always as easy as it looks, as anything in practice is going to come off poorly compared to an ideal alternative on a blackboard.  "We all want to compare the actual form, and pathologies, of systems we dislike with the ideal form, as we can imagine it, of systems we admire."  It's easy enough: the Creation Myth is the blackboard version of Optimal Custom and Tradition; General Equilibrium the blackboard version of Optimal Market Allocation, and Withering Away of the State a blackboard version of democratic allocation of resources.  I have to specify "a" rather than "the" as exactly what that democratic alternative is varies with who you talk to.

THAT STRANGE RED-HAIRED BEARDED ONE-EYED MAN WITH A LIMP

The reference is from antitrust law, wherein the authorities attempt to construct meaningful relevant markets in such a way that two combining companies obtain a market share that qualifies as a substantial lessening of competition.  For instance, a few years ago, your tax dollars went to challenge and modify a merger of two beer brewers not of Milwaukee fame.  Apparently if Bud Light and Corona are under the same ownership, economic welfare is at risk.

THE SCALES FALL FROM JONATHAN TURLEY'S EYES.

Oberlin College case shows how universities are losing their way. "Across the country, academics have caused lasting damage to their institutions by failing to stand up to, or actively supporting, extreme demands for speech codes, limits on academic freedom, and tenure changes."  If only someone had warned them.

A FISKING.

David Brooks wrote a defense of the international order that followed on from D-Day.  "The liberal order was built by foreign policy elites, from George Marshall to Madeleine Albright. The problem is that voters are now actively hostile to the project. Instead of widening the circle of concern, most Americans want the U.S. to simply look after itself."

Daniel Larison performs the Fisking.

The things that Brooks derides as “negative aspirations” are fairly normal national security concerns that most people in most nations would have. Most Americans have this crazy notion that the U.S. government’s primary responsibility is to the security and welfare of the United States, and Brooks wants you to know that he does not like it.

That might have been the selling point of a Trump presidency: no more "stupid" wars.

Read on, though, and discover that perhaps a lot of the lamentations of the political classes and their spear-carriers in the legacy press is really of crying with their mouths full.

The U.S. does not face anything like the threat it did during the Cold War, the rest of the world has recovered from the devastation of WWII, and more countries than ever before are democratic, prosperous, and independent. If this is not the time when the U.S. should spend more of our time and resources on looking after ourselves, when will that time ever come? To the extent that the U.S. deserves credit for helping to usher in a better postwar world, the U.S. should also be freed of some of the burdens that it took on in the immediate aftermath of WWII that it no longer needs to bear. The U.S. took on those burdens because the other industrialized nations of the world were in ruins or bankrupt after the war, but that is no longer the case. If “liberal international order” maintenance conflicts with reducing our burdens, why shouldn’t most Americans reject it?

For a corollary to that proposition, check out the victory dividend resource curse.  But that dividend has long been dissipated, and Mr Larison suggests that the principle of an international order is honored more frequently in the breach.

Fetishists of “liberal international order” or “liberal world order” are happy to talk about the importance of a global order based on rules, but they are typically among the first to advocate breaking them when they get in the way of exercising American power. Many of these same people back illegal invasions and bombing campaigns, endorse regime change, and justify interference in the internal affairs of other states all the time. They like to use “liberal world order” rhetoric as a bludgeon against their political opponents, just as Brooks is doing in his column, but they suddenly lose interest in that order when it conflicts with their desire to intervene against this or that regime.

The argument today is not between those who want to uphold this imagined “world order” and those that don’t care what happens to everyone else, but between those who still possess the hubris to think that the U.S. can and should “lead” the world as hegemon and those of us who believe the costs of this are too high and conclude that the task is beyond the competence of any government.

Alternatively, it might be that the conflict is between the people who would like to exercise that leadership inconclusively and the people who have seen all those limited wars since 1945 turn out badly.  That is the complaint of Angelo Codevilla (via Ed Driscoll at Insta Pundit):  "Since then, the U.S. government has won no wars. More important, it has not sought to win wars. Instead, our foreign policy establishment has spent some 100,000 American lives and trillions of dollars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in pursuit of world order, multilateralism, or collective security."  Mr Larison summarizes, loosely, as, the elites have governed poorly, and fail to grasp that.

American policymakers are so susceptible to hubris and overreach because they often fail to take account of human passions, vices, and destructive impulses. They assume that everyone wants to be like us. More than that, they think that everyone should want to be like us and that there is something wrong with them if they don’t. They overestimate U.S. capabilities and competence, and they underestimate the difficulties in dealing with other governments and other cultures. The first 20 years of U.S. foreign policy in this century have been marked by an insouciant stupidity about how other nations view the world, and part of the problem is that our policymakers are far too ambitious and optimistic in the worst way possible. It is that ambition and deranged optimism that have kept U.S. troops fighting pointlessly in Afghanistan for 18 years, and that is also what motivates elite pundits to look down on the majority of their countrymen simply because they think that U.S. foreign policy should have some discernible connection to America.

The alternative, though, might be for the elite to self-abdicate. Icicles will likely form in hell first.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENABLING DYSFUNCTION IN A TAX HELL.

Another year, another report of teacher shortages in Illinois.  You have to scroll twelve paragraphs into the article to get to the heart of the matter.

Nancy Latham, executive director of the Council on Teacher Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said it’s difficult to pinpoint all of the causes of the growing teacher shortage. One of the factors, she said, is that there are more teachers from the “baby boom” generation now retiring than there are young people graduating from schools of education. A big part of that, she said, is about money.

She noted that more than 90 percent of the vacancies reported in 2017 were in schools that received “below-adequate” funding and that had been reducing their staff in recent years.

Another factor, she said, is that the teaching profession no longer has the same kind of allure it once enjoyed.

You mean to tell me that there are opportunities for educated young people that might offer better pay and better working conditions? And here I thought the vanishing middle class was a Crisis of Mueller Investigation Proportions.

It's the same old story, year after year.  "The report said shortages were reported in almost every subject area, with foreign languages, special education fields and computer science leading the list of classroom subjects. There also were significant shortages of school psychologists and library and media specialists."

I can't wait for some culture-studies type to suggest that people staying away from school psychology or special education, or pursuing private-sector opportunities in languages or information technologies, to lament the code-shifting into a white supremacy culture at work.

THE PROPER RESPONSE TO ANY FAITH-BASED COMMUNITY.

I don't intend to get into the thickets of the cultural conservatives attempting to redefine conservatism, or perhaps to excommunicate heretics.  There's a lot of writing on that subject.  Feel free to peruse it at your leisure.

An observation by Baylor's Alan Jacobs, in Atlantic (of all places?!) will reward careful study, if for different reasons.  He begins, "Even if the secular left has no intention of playing fair in the culture wars, that doesn’t erase the Christian imperatives of civility and decency."  After a brief review of the theological disputes, he writes, "Today’s secular left has no intention of playing fair, and if Christians and conservatives—if people who follow 'David French–ism'—insist on playing by the discarded rules, they’re just setting themselves to be played for suckers."

He notes, though, that a similar argument, with a different protagonist, appeared nearly a quarter century ago, in First Things, perhaps not the first place you'd look for an essay by Stanley Fish!

If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism’s table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism’s table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers. That is, someone will now turn and ask, “Well, what does religion have to say about this question?” And when, as often will be the case, religion’s answer is doctrinaire (what else could it be?), the moderator (a title deeply revealing) will nod politely and turn to someone who is presumed to be more reasonable. To put the matter baldly, a person of religious conviction should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas but to shut it down, at least insofar as it presumes to determine matters that he believes have been determined by God and faith. The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch.

That reads enough like Critique of Pure Tolerance, but with the person of religious conviction taking the place of the Vanguardist on the Side of Liberation, that is, until the True Believers, whether they worship God or the Dialectic, turn on each other.

In the congregation, No Final Say is a valid epistemological principle.

This respect and love require a commitment to conversation, and “conversation requires civility”—even when people do not reciprocate that civility. After all, it is Jesus himself who tells us that when we are struck on one cheek, we should turn the other toward our attacker. Civility should not be our religion, but “there are religiously imperative reasons for being civil that do not entail turning civility into a religion.”

First Things editor, Rev. R. J. Neuhaus, wrote a response to Professor Fish that might set a record for exceeding the length of an essay by a literary type in a rebuttal.  There's a lot more for the careful reader to digest: the point I wish to emphasize circles back toward repressive tolerance.

Intellectuals who “rephrase” their language in order to enter the liberal conversation are accused of betraying their own “interests” as Christians. They should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas, it is said, but to shut it down. To which these intellectuals might respond that it is their interest and their duty to try to transform the marketplace, but before transforming it they must gain entry, and to gain entry they must demonstrate that they understand the existing liberal rules that need to be changed. This is a tricky game, and, unless one is exceedingly careful, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of being coopted by the very liberalism one set out to transform.

God forbid that a feel-good argument contrary to the faith position, whether it is the Church of Rome or the Church of Intersectionality, should gain purchase.  Read on: Father notes, "The pitting of freedom against truth is the original sin of the liberalism that we must oppose. The truth about freedom is that there is no freedom apart from truth. The truth claims I have proposed do not stop the conversation but provide the firmest foundation for sustaining it."

Perhaps so.  Reality is biased toward social conservatism.  Deconstruct that at your peril.

IS EVERY AMERICAN ENTITLED TO EAT?

John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane has a "Provided by whom?  Blank-out" moment. "Just who does what to whom?"  There's a lot of material in the post (and yes, in blog years, it's old.)  It's worth your time, if only for its dissection of the way in which the Establishment press, in this case public radio's Scott Simon, advance The Narrative.

Scott reveals deeply the deliberate confusion among "progressives," between your right to do something, to purchase a good or service from another, and an "entitlement" to have the Federal government pay for it by taxing others. No, you do not lose "access" to something just because you have to earn the money to pay for it. But by deliberately confusing the issue, and repeating the mantra over and over, they can ride the moral authority of the former to the illogical conclusion of the latter.

The interview being deconstructed is not about recession conditions in which substantial numbers of people face difficulties finding opportunities to earn money.  It's about a common sense agricultural policy, with fewer farm subsidies and stiffer requirements for food stamps.  That might be heresy around public radio, where making food more expensive by making it an entitlement is right up there with making health care more expensive by making it an entitlement.  "Single-payer food is apparently so taken for granted around the NPR studios, that this seems like a scoop."  Or "Republicans want to starve children," which serves to fire up low-information bases of all sorts.

Never mind that for at least as long as I have been following these things, the log-rolling of members of Congress in districts with a lot of food stamp recipients supporting farm subsidies in return for support for public assistance has been the quintessence of bipartisanship.  Perhaps the best thing Our Political Masters could do for hungry people is ... go away.

WHEN THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE LOSES ITS LEGITIMACY?

Angelo Codevilla perceives a tyrannical administrative state, and what comes next might not be pleasant.

[Hillary] Clinton’s characterization of Trump voters as “deplorables” and “irredeemables” and Barack Obama’s description of rural Republican voters as “clingers” to Bibles, guns, and racism, has long been ruling-class conventional wisdom. This attitude is what crossed the threshold of revolution.

Because the Resistance succeeded so well in limiting the impact of the 2016 election, it solidified the Left and the ruling class’s sense of common identity and entitlement. Henceforth, the bureaucracies, the educational establishment, the judges, the corporate establishment and the media will continue to impose themselves, regardless of conservative election victories or laws, never mind the Constitution. This attitude is not the result of a policy decision, but the expression of an evolving identity.

Mr Codevilla's view rules out a scenario in which the political class rediscovers the good in Constitutional provisions limiting the powers of the Executive, or the Presidency.

The ruling class, unwilling to loosen its grip on America, will appeal to “the rule of law,” use its control of the bureaucracy to cut funds, its control of the media to intimidate, and might even send some federal agents to give substance to that intimidation. They might point guns. But knowing what they are up against, they dare not shoot.

America has already come apart. The conservative resistance can conserve only one of those parts.

Here, I thought the Kurt Schlichter novels about a divided country in a new kind of civil war were fiction, but Bookworm is also thinking along lines that they're a manual.

It’s the real Americans — the ones who believe in the Constitution, including the Second Amendment, and who believe in individual rights and self-reliance — who still know how to fight. I devoutly hope that the true Second American Revolution, the one that is a push-back against the socialist Fabian revolution that slowly occurred right before our un-heeding eyes, never needs to go outside the voting booths and courtrooms. However, if the Social Justice Warriors decide to continue their revolution on the streets, I’m pretty sure they’re going to lose quickly and efficiently.

That sort of talk has Reason's Steven Greenhut worried.  "The Democrats are dealing with a socialist-friendly Left that despises economic freedom, but Republicans are facing a resurgent nationalist Right that shares many of the same hostilities. There's a clear and present danger on both horizons." I'm quoting him a little bit out of context, as his column focuses more on an intramural spat among social conservatives that I've mostly not paid attention to: and yet, the voices of angry division seem to be riling up the true believers of all stripes.  Here's the problem, notes J. D. Tuccille, also in Reason.  "The government in the United States has increasingly become a powerful weapon that two warring tribes repeatedly seize control of and then use against each other. For those of us who are averse to being smashed, it's long past time to consider the machinery of the state as nothing more than a bludgeon in the hands of dangerous maniacs."  If not dangerous maniacs, at least the congenitally incompetent.  He continues,

Most of us will prefer quieter acts of disobedience—ignoring regulations and perhaps assisting others who get caught doing the same, as [Charles] Murray recommends. We might also choose to respond to the excesses of government agents as we would those of any other thugs, without offering undeserved deference, as Brennan suggests. We could refuse private services to state employees, damage government property, dox officials, and even directly intervene in incidents of oppressive action.

There's no reason to show respect to a system that sees us as nothing more than enemies to be smashed.

Unfortunately, restoring Constitutional order under such circumstances doesn't appear to be easy.

SOME THINGS DON'T GO BETTER WITH VINEGAR.

The presidency doesn't necessarily go to the person who carries the thickest briefing books, according to Jim Geraghty.  "Elizabeth Warren is 69; Hillary Clinton turned 69 right before Election Day 2016. Both lawyers, both served in the Obama administration, both elected to the Senate in a big Northeastern state. Both women were trailblazers in high-powered legal circles; one attended an Ivy league law school, one taught in an Ivy league law school."  It gets better.

Both face the criticism that they’re not “likeable,” and both have allies insisting that criticism is sexist. Warren may face the accusation that her speeches have a lecturing tone, but for most of her adult life, she’s been employed in a job that involves giving lectures.

Both think of themselves as technocrats — insightful policy wonks who are best-positioned to enact sweeping changes to the nation’s health-care system and economic policies because they’ve researched the topics deeply. While both have lived quite comfortably in adulthood, they both see themselves as defenders of the impoverished and downtrodden. Both discuss harder times in earlier chapters of their life and face accusations that they lost touch long ago and don’t really relate to problems of today’s poor.

I'm more worried about that Sensitive Technocracy than I would be about either person's speaking style, politics being show business for awkward people.  That's the real problem with the Democrats, they are so in love with their Social Engineering Vice, seasoned with smug.  Mr Geraghty continues,

Whether you think it’s sexist or not, Trump and his allies are likely to paint Warren as an insufferable know-it-all nag, an academic who thinks she knows how to best manage every detail of your life, condescending and badgering. For at least four years, that persona will be addressing you from the Oval Office, telling you how things are going to change and how it’s for your own good.

Hectoring and condescension are the Democrat Way. Deal with it.  Matt Taibbi is willing to look past the aesthetics to the substance.  "An oversimplified view might describe Warren’s campaign as an effort to correct and more aggressively regulate the flaws of American capitalism, while also preserving the market-based system in which she does seem to genuinely believe."  There might be an opportunity for a return to administrative service by Joseph Stiglitz, for instance.  But Mr Taibbi can't help but note that the Democrats, too, are having their schisms.  "Warren’s obvious appeal to the conga line of think-tankers and DC political consultants currently swooning over her campaign is her perceived utility in helping remove Sanders from the race. It’s why Bernie’s in almost every headline about her rise."

The Illinois primary comes relatively early and it allows day-of-election ballot requests.  I'm going to have lots of choices.  But there is a full pennant race and the start of another baseball season before we get to the nominating convention in Milwaukee.  I think I'll pass on that twenty-hopeful, two-night presidential forum later this month.

RUNNING THE TABLE.

For the third Saturday in a row, here is a not-to-be-regular Saturday bridge column.

I'm still not sure what the bots that provide the entertainment are doing.  Sometimes a bid of two of a suit is a cue to bid two of the next higher suit.  Sometimes a bot will jump to four of a suit, or something else, and there's nothing.  (Perhaps I will have another experience of having to play in five of something and going down seven!  That's something you wouldn't see in the newspapers!)

On occasion, though, everything works out for the best.

North deals.  I have three aces, 22 points in high cards, and a singleton.  Perhaps 1♠ is mauering, a more experienced player would start at two.  West goes to 4♣, yes those are eight cards, but there's only seven points plus the two singletons.  It's useful, though, to anticipate those horrendously unbalanced hands: if you're holding four as declarer and dummy has three, it's probably prudent to expect something other than the defense is split three each.

The scoring conventions of contract bridge, however, encourage prudence in bidding.  Contract for too many, suffer a penalty of fifty points a trick (this becomes worse if you've been doubled, or if your side is vulnerable.)  Contract for too few, pick up bonuses for the overtricks, which are invariant to vulnerability.  The solitaire game uses Chicago four-deal conventions, which means none of this above the line, below the line complications, and vulnerability rotates: nobody on the first deal, North-South on the second, East-West on the third, everybody on the fourth.

North doubles.  I could have just let that go, and play for penalties, although that suggested enough support in other suits to run Four Hearts, which is a game value contract.  And so it begins: no losers in Hearts, one possible loser in Spades, one possible loser in Diamonds, with a ruffing opportunity there, the Club Ace takes care of the Ten.

I recently discovered that the game lets me review all the plays, which I did to obtain the record, before playing another game.  No doubt the experienced players can recall all the cards they ran in all their games.

The opening lead is 10♦.  Expect a human player to see the dummy and react poorly: Queen, 2, 3.

North plays 2♥ to South's Queen: King (West shows out), Ace, Six to North's Jack (East shows out.)

The Ten of Hearts is an opportunity to discard the Diamond loser, now the Ace of Clubs pulls out the Two, Ten, and King!  (Would that be a signal to an East with some Clubs to not be afraid to lead them, that is, if East could ever secure the lead?) Now the remaining Diamond winners: North King followed by the Seven to South's Ace.  West is still pitching those high Clubs.

Contract made, and we still haven't played the Spades. South leads; it is my practice to lead the lowest controlling cards first, thus Queen, King, and when the Ace smokes out the Jack, the Ten picks up all the trash!  Note, though, that if the fourth Spade was with West, or if East had the Jack, that garbage time trick would have gone to the defense.  That's something the newspaper columns aren't always explicit enough about: for a finesse (meaning leading from a low card past a high card to win a trick with a lower card) to work relies on the cards falling just right.  In the hand I played, there was plenty of brute force to get the job done.

WE DON'T AWARD DAMAGES BECAUSE OBERLIN ENDORSED DEFAMATION OF A BAKERY.

We award damages in order that other tony colleges don't endorse defamation of their neighbors.  "[I]t is a proceeding intended to signal to the nation, especially to the college administrators of the country, the costs of reckless catering to politically correct radical students making false claims of racism."  As a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial notes, that sort of reckless catering didn't turn out so well a few counties away at Antioch.

David French concurs, the verdict should concentrate minds.  "To the extent that the verdict causes activist administrators to pause and consider the underlying veracity and merit of the public campaigns they’re asked to join, then this is one chilling effect that may well do some good." The problem, dear reader, is that activist administrators are administrators whose mouths are more active than their minds are.  Thus far, Margaret "University Diaries" Soltan suggests, administrators have been able to get away with it.  "[O]nce awake, mainstream liberals might ask themselves why Oberlin has as a vice president and dean of students an angry factionalist, a woman way, way out of the liberal mainstream."  Perhaps so, although the fancy colleges provide the court intellectuals for mainstream liberals (and for the angry factionalists) and they've all mastered the art of condescending and deplorable-shaming.  It's easier to hope that a few bons mots or a well-polished credential will make the rabble go away.  Sorry, no, that's not going to work.

Yes, John K. Wilson notes, in the house organ for the professors' guild (that is, where there still are professors in higher ed) that the verdict is probably easily appealed.  "[B]eing pissed off at the local college is not a valid legal doctrine for taking millions of dollars." Maybe not, and yet, he's hard pressed to put a favorable gloss on this.

Gibson’s Bakery won this case by depicting Oberlin College as an uncaring bully, but these arguments have no legal merit. Their lawyer used a repulsive and stupid email written by the inept Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo that said about a professor critical of Oberlin’s action, “I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.”

Perhaps it's a good day when a defender of business as usual in higher education turns on a functionary.  It's unlikely, though, that the townies or all the Internet pundits enjoying Oberlin's discomfiture are going to cut them any slack.

A FIFTEEN MINUTE TRAIN.

A Milwaukee-area inventor would like to make Milwaukee a streetcar suburb of Chicago.  Just build a Shinkansen style track above existing railroad tracks.  That's fine, if private money comes up with it.  (Call me skeptical.)

I stick to my view that providing a track structure suitable for 125 mph running with diesel trains and bringing Chicago within an hour of Milwaukee by rail is the more cost-effective way to go.  Unfortunately, the good people of Glenview aren't yet ready for that.