DAVID HENDERSON UNDERSTANDS THE FOLLIES OF MODERN MONETARY THEORY.

Last week, we called attention to Jarrett regency economic advisor Jared Bernstein, demonstrating how little he understood about modern monetary theory.

David Henderson watched the interview, and he caught something instructive.

I’ll ignore interviewer Stephanie Kelton’s statement (at the 0:06 point) that something “begs the question.” Kelton, by the way, is one of the leading proponents of Modern Monetary Theory.

Jared says, “The government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money which is why the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by selling bonds.”

You can tell by watching him that Jared is playing for time while he consults the hard drive in his head. It’s as if he’s saying to himself, “I know the answer; I can get this.”

Unfortunately, he doesn’t.

Curmudgeons understand that "begging the question" is framing it in such a way as to force the answer you want.  It's a common trick among the Woke, referring to a policy as "-phobic" or otherwise deploying a pejorative, the better to elicit agreement.  It's also possible to do that with monetary theory, referring to a policy as "inflationary" when it might not be.  A lot of people have shifted to the "begs the question" locution where "provokes the question" or "prompts the question" or "Can you explain?" are serviceable.

YES, THAT'S GOING TO WIN OVER THOSE NIKKI HALEY VOTERS.

In the continuing Republican primaries, it appears as though she has become the protest candidate of choice.  I'll let psephologists come up with explanations (crossover Democrats? security moms? fed up?) for those votes.

Donald Trump seems content to campaign, and win, without any special appeal to Haley voters, whilst Joe Biden gives lip service to having their votes.  Then he issues a ukase imposing prohibitive tariffs on electric cars from China.  Reason's Eric Boehm sums it up.  "Bad for consumers, bad for American industry, bad for his administration's own environmental goals, and bad for an increasingly irrational executive branch."

THE ETIQUETTE OF BLACK FRIDAY AT THE BIG BOX STORE.

Only it was graduation day at Howard University's College of Nursing and Allied Health.  "A graduation ceremony for nursing students at Howard University in Washington D.C. was canceled right in the middle of the keynote address Thursday as furious parents who were locked out due to capacity issues pounded on the doors and even smashed a window."

It's like a good sea story, "no s***, this really happened."

1 hurt in chaos after Howard University nursing graduation ceremony reaches maximum capacity 📹: @Dream_Girl_MG https://t.co/BEL54p8OVJ pic.twitter.com/v82nASe5b9

— Allison Papson (@AllisonPapson) May 10, 2024

The university and the fire department subsequently got into a spat over whether the ceremony was first cancelled, then rescheduled for another day, because of fire code violations. (No. Somebody in Student Affairs dropped the ball on issuing tickets the way graduations in public buildings have taken place probably since Plato's Academy.)

RAILROADS CONNECT PEOPLE.

A few years ago, Union Pacific sent Big Boy 4014 on a tour of its metals, and ferroequinologist and casual observer alike came to trackside.  To call attention to a unification that no political power could dream of, Canadian Pacific is sending a passenger Hudson, 2816, on what it calls the Final Spike Tour, with the train and assorted exhibits making calls in British, French, and Spanish North America, er, Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

The train called at Davenport, Iowa, Friday last week.

The Final Spike Tour is on its way to Kansas City, where on Friday the combined railroad's new livery will be revealed.  Other calls will be May 28 at Laredo, June 7 at Mexico City, and June 30 at Winnipeg.  No protracted stops have been announced for that June jump back to Winnipeg.

PRACTICE COUNTING YOUR LOSERS.

There's a training version of bridge called "Minibridge" in which the bidding comes after the declaring partnership has been determined.  Seriously.  Here's how it works:

The players count their points (A=4, K=3, Q=2, J=1) and announce in turn their point count.

The partnership that together holds the most points will play the hand (in the case where both pairs hold 20 points, the cards should be re-dealt). The partner with the most points of the two will become the declarer.

The declarer's partner becomes the dummy and displays the dummy's cards at once.

Now declarer, with his side's resources known, decides on a suit and a contract. The rules recommend looking for an eight card fit to determine a trump suit, and the art of counting losers to state the contract remains useful.  As in the traditional game with bidding, Three No Trump is game, Four of a major is game, Five of a minor is game, and small and grand slams are as always.  Scoring is different.

There's an opportunity to work on your loser-counting skills at this Minibridge site.  The usual warnings apply, there's that off-side opponent void in the suit that you're trying to cash the ace and king, and sometimes an opponent is long in a suit and capable of running it, thereby yielding even more losers.

Have fun with it.

SHOWCASING THE TALENT.

With graduation season come the guest speakers, and at more than a few universities, the protests.

DeKalb was host to both Northern Illinois University's graduation, and the Mid-American Conference's outdoor track championships for men and women.  Northern Illinois field only a women's team, such are the realities of complying with Title IX on a tight budget, and most of the points they earned were in jumping and throwing events.

Despite all the traffic heading for the west side of campus, and the street closures provided for the competitors to get to their between-events support tents, everybody kept their calm.

The doors have not yet opened at the convocation center.  There was a brisk north wind blowing.  All the friends and relatives congregating there were seated in time for the steel pans to play.  (Can you name any other university where there's a pan arrangement of Land of Hope and Glory?

DOWN BY THE STATION.

Railroads connect people, and there's nothing like a steam locomotive to encourage those connections.

Canadian Pacific's Empress isn't as fast as the F6 and F7 speedsters that used to hustle past Columbus with Hiawathas and the Fast Mail.  And yet, listen to the squeals of delight from children of all ages as the engineer whistles off.

HE DOESN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HIS OWN POSITION.

Modern Monetary Theory is one of those ideas so crazy only an intellectual would believe it.

The point of collecting taxes is to absorb the excess demand that's being dropped from helicopters, which might be why the Jarrett regency is as bent on imposing net worth taxes as assiduously as it is.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

This is only the start of the pushback.  "America’s normal young men are fed up."  They're done.  "Frat Boy Summer is this year’s backlash against an epidemic of arrogant, entitled women who have been coddled all their lives and think they’re smarter and more important than they really are."  For Miranda Devine's "backlash" substitute "restoring a state of good repair."

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

PAID LACKEYS WITHOUT CHARACTER OR KNOWLEDGE.

What began at Columbia as tragedy in 1968 returns today as farce.

As a Columbia alum (College ’69), participant in that university’s 1968 student rebellion, advocate for academic freedom and free expression rights, and as a Jew, I have followed developments at Columbia over the past few days with great interest.  On Wednesday came the appearance by the co-chairs of the university’s Board of Trustees alongside Columbia’s president at the House Education and Labor Committee’s latest sham “hearing” on allegations of antisemitism on campus, a “set up from the get-go” where, as AAUP President Irene Mulvey puts it in her excellent statement issued today, both academic freedom and the faculty were thrown “under the bus.”  Then yesterday, in a chilling echo of 1968, Columbia called in the NYPD to arrest more than a hundred protesting students at a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

I am appalled!

So it always is with Excessively Earnest People, in this instance retired Cal State historian Hank Reichman: go through the litany of "azzas" and express your outrage.  Read between the lines, dear reader, as he digs into his thesis, and recognize that in the craven behavior of those Ivy presidents is the reality that universities are heavily dependent on the public dime, and satisfying Congress trumps any notions of academic freedom or institutional probity.

GOOD MORNING, CAMPUS JIHADIS.

Stand up to the radical ruffians!  Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg, who has some experience with music and radio, asks, and answers, a good question.  "What music should be on the 'Loop' that people blast at these cretins all night long?"  Yes, there are various settings of the National Anthem on the play-list as well as a few other suggestions.

EVOLUTIONARY STABILITY IS REAL.

From time to time, Cold Spring Shops calls attention to the effects of the sexual revolution and hook-up culture on human unhappiness.  Two observations from a 2011 post structure that argument.  First, "contemporary mating practices and admissions policies might not be evolutionarily stable."  Second, "younger people have different time horizons, and different rates of time preferences."  Those observations tended to rely on opinion columns.  The mini-dissertation below the jump will engage recent Serious Scholarship on those themes.

SOCIALISM SUCKS. LET'S HAVE MORE OF IT.

Salon contributor Kirk Swearingen is hoping to be an English-language correspondent for Brezhnev's Pravda.  "Don't like this economy? OK, just wait for Trump and the GOP to ruin it."

No, seriously, everything is fine.

Last November, I wrote what I thought was a modest commentary about how the Biden economy was doing remarkably well, at least by most standard macroeconomic measures, and much of the corporate media wasn’t reporting about it. Job numbers were historically high, unemployment low and the U.S. had done the best of all G-7 economies in bringing down inflation resulting from the worst pandemic years.

The recent money printing has made a lot of work for government employees and consultants.  Those European countries not named Sweden had Illinois-style lockdowns. The free states reopened sooner and thus had less adjusting to something resembling normal lives likely contributed a lot to those aggregate outcomes.  Then comes a "to be sure" paragraph followed by an exhortation of the toilers to increase milk yields.

I was careful to note that my wife and I, and members of our daughters’ generation, were still feeling economic pain around the cost of food and housing, and that many younger people felt they could not get their lives started due to student debt and high housing prices.

I got considerable grief from readers for that one, but I stand by what I wrote about the Biden administration’s active economic moves and a renewed focus on industrial policy to accomplish goals that simply cannot be left to “the marketplace.” Leaving infrastructure work to the marketplace is how America wound up with so many embarrassing airports, shaky bridges and poky, increasingly dangerous trains. There are things we must do together.

When all else fails, deploy a bromide.  Apparently, though, those things we do together do not include coordinating the traffic lights in a two-stoplight town.

The money printing ensures that mortgage rates will remain high, if not at Carter malaise levels, for some time; but this time around there's a lot of friction in the housing market as people who have paid off their houses and could use the capital gains from selling those houses to move elsewhere without borrowing have trouble finding ... new buyers who have to borrow at Bidenomics mortgage rates.  Meanwhile people like Mr Swearingen might be happy the current regime is making noises about taxing those unrealized capital gains.  Be careful what you wish for.

TAKING A VICTORY LAP.

Today is V-E Day, and there is a 48 star flag flying at Cold Spring Shops headquarters, one of several vintage flags raised on suitable days.  The Flag Code notes that older versions of Old Glory may be flown, subject to the provision that tattered and torn flags ought be given honorable retirement.

I found this painting of GIs quaffing a few beers at Hitler's mountain hideout.  Germans and Austrians make some pretty good beers, but the dictator wouldn't touch them.

The troops had particular cause to celebrate the Germans packing it in.  Although ECLIPSE plans envisioned the Western Allies not driving to Berlin, with much of Germany east of the Elbe set for Soviet occupation, the commanders could not shake the possibility of the Nazi leadership plus the most committed of true believers holing up in something called the "Alpine Redoubt," there to conduct a resistance in the best Balkan, or perhaps hillbilly, style.  Those fears were allayed once Germans who surrendered to the Western Allies along the Elbe (rather than take their chances with the Soviets) reported Hitler was still in Berlin.  That famous temper tantrum in Ausfall providing material for those parodies is based on documented events.

Well done, Citizen Soldiers.

THE LAW, IN ITS MAJESTY.

Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan attempts to inject Victim Studies into Anatole France's old observation.

It’s been a long time since a tent was simply a tent. Today, it almost certainly represents an issue, a problem, a population with which society would prefer not to contend.

The tents are unseemly. They need to be. They’re flimsy structures staked on uneven ground surrounded by the stately architecture of the academy, capitalism and power. Their flapping scrims of nylon and plastic clutter up the landscape and serve as a rebuke to the grandiosities of polite society. The tents shame countries, cities and individuals for their failures even when the voices of the activists fall silent, when the chanting stops and the sun sets. The tents are still there.

Most recently, tents have become fundamental to the pro-Palestinian encampments constructed in college yards and on plazas from New York to California. In the nation’s capital, an encampment has taken root on the campus of George Washington University, where a few dozen tents have been pitched on the street and in the courtyard. All of it encompasses a one-block span of downtown Washington over which police officers keep watch with modest interest rather than alarm.

It came to this years ago, when Our Progressive Betters condemned the flophouses in the name of Urban Renewal and emptied the insane asylums in the name of Humanity.  The column offers an amusing interpretation of those developments.

The tents are always telling us something that we don’t want to hear.

The tents of the homeless fill parks, clutter walkways and sprout in the shadow of freeway overpasses. So leaders of western states across the political divide have gone to the Supreme Court to have those tents declared illegal. Under current law, they can’t just summarily clear the tents if those who are living in them have nowhere else to go, if there are no beds at a shelter in their city. Officials in Grants Pass, Ore., don’t want homeless camps on their streets or in their parks. But asking the Supreme Court to allow them to remove the tents doesn’t remove the problem; it doesn’t make a weak social safety net any stronger.

That's what we mostly hear about Californian cities, if without the details of the open sewers and discarded needles, although Denver is trending that way as well.  It's to the tents pitched to Make a Statement that the column focuses upon.

The activists who settled into New York’s Zuccotti Park back in 2011 drew attention to income inequality, joblessness and the outsize political influence of financial firms. Occupy Wall Street spread from Manhattan across the country and around the world. The protesters marched and rallied but mostly what they were remembered for was rolling out their sleeping bags and setting up tented tarps and creating their own little squatters camp in the midst of capitalism’s Emerald City. They were belittled as jealous of the success of others, as anti-capitalist and as vaguely un-American.

In the midst of a city where money is considered the great equalizer, the men and women who slept outside under bright blue tarps through rain, wind and even a nor’easter were an insistent reminder of a society turned ugly and heartless for a cash payout.

No, Robin, encampments have long been a manifestation of guerrilla theater.  Faux shantytowns were props the Concerned Students set up on the quad to call attention to apartheid conditions in South Africa.  The sanctions had their effect, the apartheid conditions ended, and now everyone in South Africa is miserable.  Sometimes, the cardboard box is a prop; it's much more effective on a chilly winter evening to call attention to "the homeless" whilst avoiding any serious conversation about the effects of urban renewal and closing the asylums.

BEYOND EVEN TOM WOLFE'S ABILITY TO PARODY?

During the previous Consciousness Revolution, it was Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers at some event for the High Society types.

These days, there's the Met Gala, and we're not talking about a baseball team.

The Dacquoise is iced. The warm rhubarb tortes are in the ovens. The guest list has been personally curated by the Vogue Editrix Anna Wintour herself. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the East Side of Central Park in the 80’s, is perfectly lit. The red carpet is rolled out. The theme, “Garden of Time”, is magical. And, oops, it’s “Day of Rage”. Here come the “Free Palestine” hippies. This could get good.

We are not jealous that we are never invited. I think all of the Victory Girls Goddesses would rather get our teeth cleaned than attend the Met Gala to benefit the Costume Institute. We do write about the Gala every year. There is always something that arrives at the corner of High Art and Idiocy. Remember the year that AOC wore that “Tax the Rich” dress? This year, the Costume Institute is debuting “Sleeping Beauty: Reawakening Fashion” so Garden of Time is an apt theme. Unfortunately, the Upper East Side was double-booked with the Day of Rage. Oops!

It doesn’t look like too many protestors got over to the Met Gala during Red Carpet time. On X (Twitter), actress Patricia Heaton said that there is more police protection for the celebs at the Gala than Jewish students trying to get to class. Ain’t that the truth. Then, Anna Wintour has more pull with the cops than the Jewish students.

No, apparently neither Leonard Bernstein nor Squeaky were available to comp the lot into the event. Victory Girl Toni Williams warns us not to laugh. "We really shouldn’t laugh at these historically ignorant little turds. They are truly dangerous."  She's right, though: radical chic is still with us.  "Every single person who walked that red carpet is responsible for these Day of Rage hippies. Every. Single. Solitary. One. Of. Them. Enjoy the warm rhubarb tarts fools."

SOMETHING TO GET STEAMED UP ABOUT.

Five years ago, Union Pacific sent Big Boy 4014 on a tour of their system to commemorate the sesquicentennial of their Golden Spike, and that steamer continues to visit Union Pacific cities.  There is a return to the Chicago area sometime this year.

Canadian Pacific, er, Canadien Pacifique de Mexico, are calling attention to their recent creation of the first North American railroad with mainline operations in three countries, with what they term the Final Spike Tour.  They put Royal Hudson 2816, Empress (a nod to the names of Canadian Pacific's passenger steamers) back into service and got her certified to run in all three countries.  "We hope that many people will have the opportunity to safely see the beautiful 2816 as the train makes its way from Calgary to Mexico City."

Once upon a time, The Milwaukee Road had the world's fastest Hudsons Baltics, the conventional Class F6 and the streamlined F7.  None of those, let alone the as-fast Class A Milwaukee types, made it into preservation.  That noted, having a Royal Hudson riding those rails through the curves east of the station and making her way to the racetrack is good to see.

Canadian Pacific 2816 “The Empress” chugs through downtown Milwaukee at noon today.

Trains!! pic.twitter.com/EAUEooevET

— Mark Fairbanks 🍅 (@MarkFairbanks) May 6, 2024

Your editorial note for today: I have no objection to someone using "chugging" when the locomotive in question is chugging along.

We'll see what the weather brings for 2816's jump to Iowa Thursday or its Davenport visit Friday.

PLAY THE MARSEILLAISE!

Last fall, Bookworm suggested that the Militant Normals take a cue from Casablanca.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, the next time the leftist shrieking started, it turned out that the conservative speaker came prepared? I imagine the speaker pulling out his or her smartphone, turning the volume on as loudly as possible, sticking it right up to the microphone (also on top volume), and blasting the room with a patriotic song. Even better, those who came to hear the speech would sing along.

He recommended God Bless America.  That works better if you're a Philadelphia Flyers fan of a certain age, or go to baseball games on Sundays.

KHRUSHCHEV'S LEGACY.

From time to time, I've referred to Anatole Shub's An Empire Loses Hope as a useful source anticipating the fractures in the Warsaw Pact and noting the emptiness of the Evil Empire, or as a way of drawing parallels to the incompetence of Our Gerontocracy.  It was all written down, some of it while Ronald Reagan was still hosting Death Valley Days.

Today, let me call your attention to a passage that starts on page 298.

Russian ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean went back to the tsars.  Stalin had asked Roosevelt and Churchill for "trusteeship" of Libya in 1945, and in 1948 had helped Zionists in Palestine overthrow the British mandate and establish the State of Israel.  But when Israel's first ambassador to Moscow, Golda Meir, was greeted enthusiastically by Russian Jews, Stalin turned violently against Israel, and in 1949 he launched the bloody anti-Semitic purge which culminated in 1952 with the grisly Slansky trial in Prague.  Stalin could not, however, develop much enthusiasm for the Arab leaders of the time, who were nearly all traditional Moslems as well as anti-Communist.

It was Khrushchev who discovered the "progressive" Arabs in the form of the Egyptian Colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the radical Ba'ath party in Syria, whom he hoped to utilize against the Middle Eastern states still under Western influence.  But after a number of crises between 1955 and 1958, the area had become relatively peaceful, with United Nations forces stationed on the Egyptian border with Israel.  Khrushchev's attention had turned to Cuba, China, and Berlin.

Brezhnev and his colleagues, however, saw a new chance for a breakthrough in the Middle East, in the form of the radical regime which had taken power in Syria in February 1966.  The Communist party was well represented in the new regime, which seemed dynamic as well as "progressive": that is, it was not only violently anti-Western, but also encouraged a Palestinian guerrilla group, Al Fatah, to launch raids and terrorist actions against Israel.

Three months after the new Syrian regime came to power, Kosygin visited Cairo and persuaded Nasser to sign a military alliance with the "progressives" in Damascus.  By October 1966, Soviet propaganda had begun to charge, at least once a month, that Israel was concentrating troops on the Syrian frontier and planning to overthrow the shaky "progressive" regime in Damascus.

Let's break this down, dear reader.  Stalin could brook no competition from rival socialists, whether their names were Trotsky or Zinoviev or Meir.  Recall that Zionism was originally a form of socialism with Jewish characteristics, and to this day the kibbutzes are collective farms that sort of work, better than their Soviet supposed counterparts or the occasional Millerite or Bishop Hill experiment somewhere in the Anglosphere.  At one time the full name for the Ba'ath party was the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party, although, in the same way that Chinese and Russian Communism broke down in sectarianism, so too did the Syrian and Iraqi parties.  There was also a time between 1958 and 1961 when Egypt and Syria called themselves the United Arab Republic.  There was, predictably, a falling out between Nasser in Egypt and the Ba'athists in Syria.  The Soviet accusations of troops concentrating were not true.  Russian disinformation led to discord, but the outcome of the 1967 "Six Day War" put a damper on Brezhnev's Jubilee celebration, that year being the fiftieth since the Great October Socialist Revolution.

THESE ARE THE RULES THEY MADE.

Remember when California's Maxine Waters told the party faithful it was High Public Service to get in the faces of public officials who held the wrong views?

“If you think we’re rallying now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” she warned.

“Already, you have members of your Cabinet that are being booed out of restaurants,” she continued as the crowd erupted, “who have protesters taking up at their house, who say, ‘No peace, no sleep. No peace, no sleep,’” she continued.

“And so, let’s stay the course. Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up and if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

It's not that the representative's base electors require a lot of prompting to be obnoxious.  "It is the way of the Perpetually Aggrieved to unleash verbal terrorism in order to disrupt any presentation or gathering that calls their tight priors into question."  Nor does it necessarily have to be a high Republican official or a member of the Trump family circle that gets no peace.  "A gaggle of Hamas supporters confronted Gov. Gretchen (GRETCH) Whitmer at her daughter's graduation dinner."

Governor Gretchen Whitmer gets confronted by crazy liberal HAMAS supporters at her daughters graduation dinner.
Your chickens are coming home to roost governor. pic.twitter.com/cxDs56gzZK

— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) May 5, 2024

Kurt Schlichter frequently cautions the Angry Left that Militant Normals can play by the new rules. "The pushback is going to be impolite. It’s going to be mean. It’s going to lack decorum. But hey, aren’t those are the new rules, you Hamas-kissing psychopaths? As I’ve said many times before, be careful about the new rules you enact."  That the rage mob came for the Schlachterfrau at her kid's graduation party only makes the story sweeter.

Deconstruct bourgeois norms at your peril.