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Shen means divine or divinity. Yun means feeling or rhythm. Shen Yun means “The beauty of heavenly beings dancing.” Shen Yun, based in New York, comprises 7 dance companies that perform all over the globe. We just saw it in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It is simply spectacular; a show that should not be missed. If you go to one ballet this year, Shen Yun should be it. 

The show uses Chinese mythology to tell stories that transcend particularism. The themes are essentially universalist. In some ways they are Shakespearian, in some ways Christian. The themes address the ideas of right and wrong, sin and redemption, truth, compassion and tolerance. These are qualities that recognize the dignity of the individual human person. They are also ideas that are an anathema to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

Shen Yun intends to recapture the traditional culture and values of China; a civilization has been with us for 5,000 years. Since Shen Yun is an offshoot of the Falun Gong movement, the CCP has forbidden the performance of Shen Yun in China. The traditional values it espouses are a mortal threat to the CCP. So the Party has been trying to stamp out religious belief and traditional Chinese culture ever since Mao and the Communist Party came to power in 1949. 

They, like all totalitarians, mean to make a New Man, one who is infinitely elastic and perfectible; one who fits the the proper image of the ideologues. That alone is worth thinking about, particularly when considering the joyless idealogues who have captured so many universities in America. After all they are attempting to do precisely the same thing. First they come for the statues; then they come for the people. What is cancel culture all about, if not to de-platform and silence people guilty of wrong think? And what happens to the robust debate that is part of our heritage if stifling conformity becomes the norm?

As conservatives never tire of pointing out out, politics is downstream from culture. It should be painfully obvious that the goal of the new authoritarians is the destruction of  Western culture that lies at the heart of our civilization. The better to re-create the ever malleable New Man who will do what he is told. Perhaps progressive camp followers in the media are simply too naive to realize it.  

Shen Yun provides an effective retort to the attempt to the new cultural vandals. By telling stories based on Chinese mythology, it champions the dignity and worth of the individual human person. It is a rebuke to the social planners who seek to create a New Man in their own image. (Take a look at the Video below). 

It is also worth noting that the horrors of the 20^th century were not brought about by the Scottish enlightenment, now in so much disfavor, and derided as justification for colonialist white supremacy. Rather it was Adam Smith, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and others of the Scottish Enlightenment who provided the intellectual framework for developing modern institutions of liberty. 

Classical liberals are not the problem. It was instead Western utopians who provided what became justification for the world’s most prolific killers. Stalin, Mao, Castro and Pol-Pot among others originated in the writings of  Marx, Engles, Sartre, Proudhon, Robespierre and Lenin; and not to put too fine a point on it, cheerleaders in the press like Walter Duranty. 

It was widely reported, perhaps incorrectly, that when queried about all the death and destruction wrought by Stalin, Walter Duranty is said to have replied, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”. To which George Orwell replied, “Where’s the omelet?”

We are still waiting for that omelet–the one that will never appear. 

JFB

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In the matter of Ukraine, policy makers in Washington appear to be obsessed with finding an answer to a question they think will unlock the formula for maintaining the peace in Europe.  That question is: What does Putin want?

It is an interesting question. It is also the wrong question. It implies that the solution to the developing crisis in Europe is transactional. Once we discover what Putin wants, the next step is to find a face saving way to give it to him. Otherwise we impose economic sanctions. Just like we did in Iran. And how is that working out anyway?

What is notable about this episode is the extent to which Western thinkers have mischaracterized the problem. David Brooks, an opinion writer for the New York Times, summed up the conventional wisdom the other day on PBS.  He argued that the seriousness of the Russia – Ukraine dispute was centered on the willingness of a large power (Russia) to use force to impose its will on smaller nations—like Ukraine.  In so doing, he argued, Russia was endangering the rules based liberal order put in place as a result of the catastrophic destruction wrought by the two World Wars of the first half of the 20^th century.  

That is indeed the conventional wisdom. It also misses the point. There is a reason why the rules based system worked as well as it did for as long as it did. The reason does not lie in the work of the post war institutions we built like the United Nations, the Word Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Those organizations are simply instruments of Great Power geopolitics. 

The reason why the liberal world order flourished as it did is that the United States enforced the rules. Great Power politics did not vanish with the creation of a liberal international order. The United States emerged from the ashes of World War II with so much concentrated power that it was in a position to dominate the construction of the political and financial architecture of the emerging era. 

But those institutions, largely instruments of American power, were never going to be permanent. As the relative positions of other Great Powers began to improve vis-a-vis the United States, what had become became known as the Washington Consensus strained to adapt. While the United States largely held the Western Alliance together through NATO, other existing powers began to revert to old habits, particularly, Russia. 

Leave aside for the time being Russia’s general suppression of Eastern European countries through the Warsaw Pact. Russia also invaded Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) to put down local attempts at liberalization. They put nuclear missiles in Castro’s Cuba in 1961, constructed the Berlin Wall in 1961 and invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. And all along the way they supported various national wars of liberation around the globe. 

The only thing standing in the way of more aggressive (what was then) Soviet behavior was the United States. When the wall finally did come down in 1991 it took with it the Soviet system. It wasn’t just the military power of the United States that Russia faced. The U.S. combined military power with soft power. Who can forget Reagan’s speech in front of the Berlin Wall when he said  “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall”. 

But the fall of the Berlin Wall  did not take down the dreams of socialism, autocracy and ultimately totalitarianism, although by rights it should have. Vladimir Putin, who went from being a junior KGB operative in Eastern Europe to a cab driver in Moscow, described the collapse of the Soviet Empire as “…the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20^th century.”

That hints at the answer to the question: What does Putin want? First and foremost he wants to protect and expand his power. That means destroying NATO, hence his demand that the West pledge to never admit Ukraine to the alliance.  

To a large degree Putin has already succeeded in knocking NATO back on its heels. He merely has to deliver the coup de grace. Remember the original goals of NATO: Keep Germany down; Russia out and America in.  Now consider, the response of NATO and the United States to Russian aggression in the matter of Ukraine. 

Germany is continuing with its plan to approve Russia’s Nord 2 gas pipeline which runs from western Russia to north-east Germany, bypassing Ukraine. This will make Europe, and particularly Germany, dependent on Russia for its energy supplies. And not to make too fine a point of it, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder went to work for Gazprom and sits on the Board of Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer.

In the meantime the Biden Administration has threatened “swift and severe sanctions” should Russia invade Ukraine. But it is hard to imagine that Vladimir Putin will be shaking in his boots over anything that the Biden Administration says it is prepared to do. Already the Administration has looked for an off-ramp by trying to make a distinction between a “minor incursion” and an invasion, albeit with some belated after-action clean-up. 

Then there is the matter of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and the subsequent lies about it. (See today’s Washington Post for one example among many). Honorable mention goes to the Biden Administration’s obsession with getting  a “deal” with Iran despite the fact that Iran continues to ramp up its nuclear weapons program and has recently tested a ballistic missile capable of reaching Israel.  

All things considered the question that matters is not what does Vladimir Putin want. The real question that matters is: What does the United States want? Another way to put it is: What is in the best interests of the United States, and derivatively, the West? Which is not the same as what is in the best interests of Joe Biden’s political standing, which seems to be the driving force of his policy making. 

Faced with the correct question to ask, we are immediately confronted by a problem. It ought to be obvious that the default position of mankind is not peace and prosperity, all the nonsense about the Noble Savage notwithstanding. Achieving those goals requires constructing both institutions and leaders capable of delivering and sustaining them.

The existential problem we face—and it truly is an existential problem—is that America’s scholars, public intellectuals, universities, thought leaders and cultural arbiters no longer believe in the intellectual infrastructure that made the modern Liberal state possible. The classical Liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment developed by Adam Smith, David Hume, John Locke and Edmund Burke are based on the idea of natural law; that there are universals that spring from that idea; that among them are the right to life and liberty; that those rights in turn depend on property rights and the right of contract; that the rule of law applies equally to all and that it is the job of Government not to create, but to secure those rights. Those beliefs are what made America, America. And the institutions built on those beliefs are what allowed those 13 colonies to become the richest most powerful country in the world.

But today’s progressives do not believe that, campaign rhetoric aside. Today’s progressives are determinists and racial essentialists. For them, race, class and gender are determinative. The hierarchy of oppression is the scorecard. The hysterical opposition to school choice, the insistence on forcing 5-year olds to wear utterly useless masks in schools (when they are open) and acquiescence to the 1619 project and “anti-racism” in public schools give the game away. Which is: Command-and-Control. 

That ideology, for the moment, dominates public discourse. And it is why policy makers are incapable of formulating the right questions to ask, much less coming up with the right answers. And why they shy away from global leadership. They cower in fear of being called Neo-colonialists.

Shortly after John Kennedy was inaugurated as President  he went over to Foggy Bottom and asked various employees whom they represented. The answers came back quickly—France, England, India, Japan, Egypt etc. Whereupon Kennedy reportedly asked “Where is the American desk?” 

That is a question we should be pondering today. Another is: what would the world look like if America were to abdicate its role as global leader and enforcer of liberal norms. Answer: It wouldn’t be pretty.

JFB

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Poor Joe Biden. You almost have to feel sorry for him, surrounded as he is by a multitude of disasters. But since they are largely the result of President Biden’s policy choices, we should feel sorry for the citizenry that is paying the price for his incompetence. It’s actually worse than that because while Candidate Biden promised to govern as a moderate, he is being led around by Bernie Sanders (VT-Rolling Stone)

Let’s face it, Mr. Biden’s  staff puts a speech filled with happy talk in the teleprompter. He proceeds to read it and by the end of his remarks it is clear to sentient beings everywhere that Mr Biden doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about.  

Consider the inflation situation. Back in June of 2021 when the inflation rate was racing ahead at 5.4% here is what President Biden had to say. 

“The vast majority of the experts, including Wall Street, are suggesting that it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to be long-term inflation that’s going to get out of hand,” Biden said. “There will be near-term inflation, because everything is now trying to be picked back up.”

Leave aside the horrific grammar that seems to be endemic among ex-Senators. Also leave aside the minor fact that there is zero evidence that the “vast majority of experts”, by which he presumably means economists (other than the cheerleaders at the Fed) have actually signed on to this particular piece of economic incoherence. The fact is that the inflation rate, which was 5.4% in June is now 7.5%. And the word transitory, as least as it pertains to inflation,  has been shoved into the memory hole. 

In the wake of todays report of the highest inflation rate in 40 years President Biden gamely soldiered on. He announced that “While today’s report is elevated, forecasters continue to project inflation easing substantially by the end of 2022.” 

A better way to put is that those forecasters continue to be flat out wrong, and for the same reason they have been wrong all along. They are relying on a 70 year old model based on the Phillips Curve that is a relic of a different era. That model posits the idea that there is a predictable trade-off between the unemployment and inflation rates. As inflation goes up, unemployment goes down and vice-versa. Policy makers merely have to pick the optimal trade-off point as they set interest rates.  

That idea was wrong when it first surfaced in the late 1950s and it is still wrong today. But bad ideas never die; they just lie in wait for the next opportunity. So progressive policymakers who should have but didn’t learn from the experience of the 1970s  when President Jimmy Carter (and Presidents Nixon and Ford) made the same mistakes, have seized the opportunity to mess things up royally. 

And so here we are with 7.5% inflation and shortages on grocery store shelves. The shame of it is that this was an avoidable disaster. And it shows no signs of getting better anytime soon, pace Mr. Biden. 

The reason why prices are soaring is because of the policies championed and implemented by Mr. Biden and his Progressive buddies. They have been spending money like drunken sailors (with apologies extended to drunken sailors) and show no sign of remorse. Instead they continue to tout themselves as modern Messiahs who will right all wrongs in the pursuit of justice. 

Back on planet earth it is (or ought to be) crystal clear that soaring prices are the result of constrained supply brought about by lock-downs, transfer payments from savers to spenders, and the re-imposition of a regulatory regime focused on social justice goals rather than economic efficiency. At the same time the Progs have thrown scads of money hot off the Fed’s printing press at every conceivable social justice cause thus pumping up aggregate demand. 

We have constrained supply and increased demand. And we did it on purpose. It was integral to a disastrously failed anti-Covid strategy. Of course prices soared. What in the world did they think was going to happen? And they will continue to do so until the policy regime is reversed. But that would amount to a repudiation of the policy regime brought to us, or I should say, imposed on us by Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and the whole crowd of collectivists who currently own the Democratic Party. 

And since they are not about to admit the obvious, namely that they are simply flat out wrong, they will have to be asked to give up the reins come November. And then we will have a brand new bunch of economic illiterates to deal with. 

JFB

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According to the Washington Post,  

“…the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, has dismissed claims that the Fed’s money-printing is fueling today’s price spiral, emphasizing instead the disruptions associated with reopening the economy. Like his most recent predecessors, dating to Alan Greenspan, Powell says that financial innovations mean there no longer is a link between the amount of money circulating in the economy and rising prices.”

Really? The Fed now maintains there is no longer a link between the amount of money in circulation and rising prices. Then why are they poised to raise the target rate for federal funds and reduce the size of the Fed’s balance sheet in March? Both of those policy shifts will reduce the amount of money in circulation, thereby lowering effective demand ceteris paribus. That, after all, is the point. 

The Fed is up to its old tricks, trying to change the subject so as not to be held accountable for the explosion in inflation that it sponsored. The Fed insists that it has the tools to deal with inflation should it become a problem. Well inflation has become a problem. The question is not whether the Fed has the tools to address the problem. The question is whether the Fed has the will to use the tools at its disposal. 

Consider the history. For years, a decade actually, the Fed’s stated policy goal was to increase the inflation rate to 2%. This it failed to do. Between the years 2010 and 2020 the inflation rate averaged 1.73%, staying between a low of 0.7% and a high of 3%. 

Then, during the first quarter of 2020,  in response to the Covid-19 pandemic the Fed drove short term rates to zero, created credit facilities for entire swaths of the economy and expanded the assets on its balance sheet from about $4 trillion in January of 2020 to  $8.8 trillion by the end of 2021. The broadly defined money supply rose 35% from March 2020 through December 2021. Unsurprisingly the inflation rate, which had been humming along at 1.4% in 2020, soared to 7% in 2021. 

It is important to understand the implications of the Fed increasing its balance sheet. The Fed began buying Treasury and Mortgage Securities, thereby increasing the assets it holds. On the liability side the Fed increased its “liabilities” by creating the dollars it needed to buy the assets it added to its balance sheet. In effect it just printed the money, thereby increasing aggregate demand. 

Another thing happened on the way to this explosion of money creation. The Fed took Congress at least partially off the hook. The Fed enabled the Congress to spend trillions of extra dollars without worrying about financing. By purchasing gargantuan quantities of Treasury securities, the Fed provided the necessary financing.  In so doing it blurred the distinction between fiscal policy (taxes and spending) and monetary policy (interest rates and the money supply). 

It is also notable that inflation rates are soaring around the major industrialized economies of the West, largely because they have adopted the same foolish policies. The ECB drove interest rates into negative territory, and UK rates were tamped down by the Bank of England. The inflation rate in the UK recently clocked in at 5.4% in December, the highest reading since March 1992. This Thursday’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) is expected to be somewhere between 7% and 7.3%. 

The political backlash is building as a result. Real (inflation-adjusted) wages are falling in the U.S and the U.K. because although nominal wages are rising, they not keeping up with inflation. Energy bills are set to rise in the UK by 50%. They are also set to rise substantially on the continent. Gas prices in the U.S. have risen 40% since December 2020. Chalk rising energy costs up to a combination of bad monetary policy and green energy initiatives. 

We should be absolutely clear why the inflation rate is soaring across the Western economies. Policy makers have systematically driven interest rates down to zero and expanded Central Bank balance sheets, thus increasing effective demand. At the same time they constrained supply with lock-downs, green energy policies, more income transfers, and expanded regulation. Constraining supply and pumping up demand produces higher prices. There isn’t any mystery about it.

Policy makers are already trying to pin the blame elsewhere. Such economic luminaries as Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are already complaining about “corporate greed” as if human nature abruptly changed when progressives came to power. Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, foolishly asked Britains not to ask for wage increases to offset inflation. As if workers, not policy makers, were the problem here. Meanwhile over in Brussels, at its last meeting the ECB declined to raise its policy rate despite exploding inflation on the continent. And of course, progressives in the U.S., always searching for bad ideas to implement are hinting wage and price controls. 

The fact is that policy makers in the leading Western economies created the financial mess we are in by spending too freely,  suppressing interest rates, and piling on more and more regulations. We have seen this movie before, and it doesn’t end well. To put the economy on track for long term sustainable growth it is going to take significantly higher interest rates, reduced government spending and scaling back the regulatory burden of the nanny state. Which is to say, a complete and utter rejection of the progressive politics of Command-and-Control.  

JFB

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Bari Weiss, is the former New York Times journalist who resigned in in July of 2020 in protest over the stifling conformity and illiberalism of the paper of record. Now she runs a phenomenally successful substack newsletter named Common Sense. It is always a good read. 

Today’s edition has a column by Suzy Weiss titled “Revenge of the Covid Moms”. In it she writes about the anger and disgust of those she calls “Covid Moms” who are angry and disgusted with the mask mandates that have been imposed on school kids. 

For the most part these are highly educated liberal women who make their homes in deep blue urban enclaves. Most importantly, they have school age kids and have been able to observe first hand the effects of masking requirements on their own.  The scales are falling from their eyes. 

Maud Maron who lives in Soho with her husband and kids got so disgusted with the situation that she decided to challenge Carolyn Maloney, a mask aficionado and 30 year veteran Congresswoman, in the upcoming Democratic primary. Weiss quotes her as saying “When you shut down my kids’ schools and impose devastating mental health effects on them—I don’t forgive anyone who did that.” Likewise she quotes Natalya Murakhver, who voiced her disgust with political establishment. “I was a very liberal Democrat… Now, my vote is up for grabs to whoever puts kids first.” 

At first blush for those who would like to see the schools reformed, this would seem to be a positive development. But it’s way too soon to start popping the champaign corks.  For one thing, we have to see if any of these insurgent candidates are actually elected. And that assumes they will have the power to do what they claim to want to do.  More importantly, while these candidates are fighting against a particular policy regime, namely masking mandates, the structural underpinning that has allowed the schools to be captured by the teachers unions and other interest groups remains in place.  Third, public schools in large urban areas have been an unmitigated disaster for decades. It is only now that disastrous school policies have started to have a deleterious impact on the kids of affluent parents in the best neighborhoods that they have sat up and begun to take notice.

In her article Weiss maintains that these women really don’t care about political theory; they just care about what works. And therein lies the problem. Their focus is on what they consider to be a series of policy errors and how to correct them without asking why the errors happened to begin with. Those errors were baked in the cake a half century ago when the public schools, under the influence of John Dewey, began to democratize learning. 

No longer was the point of education to teach upcoming generations by instructing them in the Western Canon; what Harold Bloom called the School of Resentment began its long ascent in educational institutions across the country. Eventually, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, ethnic and gender studies and racial essentialism began to dominate curricular development, as it does today. And so today we have the absurdity of specifying pronouns. 

Today’s educational institutions are busy attacking the institutions of liberal society; not sustaining them. But that has been underway for along time. It is only now that affluent parents have begun to take notice, for two reasons. First they can see on their kids’ iPads what they are being taught in Zoom classes. Second, they can see first hand the damage being done to their youngsters by being forced to mask up. 

But the harms visited upon kids in public schools  in poor neighborhoods are an order of magnitude greater. They have been a fiefdom run for the benefit of teachers, not kids, for decades. Look at the results. NAEP statistics show that for 8th graders in America, only 33% are at or above proficiency in mathematics. In reading it is only 35%. The black / white gap in mathematics is stunning. Some 43% of white 8th graders are at or above proficiency, but only 13% of black students are. The only group that scores well is that of Asian and Pacific Islanders. In math and reading, they score at or above proficiency at 59% and 52% respectively.

And that was before the pandemic, with its associated years of learning loss due to closed schools and mask mandates. But there is an alternative: Charter Schools. 

A look at standardized tests tells the story. Recently in New York City 47% of public school students passed standardized reading tests; 43% passed the math tests. But at Success Academy, the Charter Schools run by Eva Moskowitz, the numbers were 91% and 98%. The students at Success Academy are virtually all low income (median income $32,000), selected at random, and 95% are members of minority groups. The political establishment still continues to fight expanding the number of charter schools, even though they produce manifestly better results. 

The upshot of all this is that even if the “Covid Moms” get elected and can effect some policy changes, overall, urban schools are not going to improve. They may improve in some affluent neighborhoods where the parents are well organized. But poor neighborhoods are still going to be left to the tender mercies of the teachers unions. They will not change unless and until public funding for the schools is channeled through parents and not politicians beholden to public sector labor unions. Those are the politicians who owe their elections to the machine politics that are the backbone of the modern Democratic Party.

JFB

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The Republican National Committee has provided the perfect example of why I am no longer a Republican, and haven’t been since summer of 2016. And why it is hard to imagine I ever again will be. 

The New York Times reports that the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the Congressional investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Even worse, the RNC went further and characterized the assault as legitimate political discourse. 

Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman said this. “They [Cheney and Kinzinger] crossed a line…They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.” 

The resolutions passed by voice vote (typical of cowards) without any noticeable dissent. 

Perhaps Ronna McDaniel and the RNC are insane. Or maybe they really are as dumb as they sound; it is hard to tell, and really not worth the effort. Most likely they are simply lying cowards, cut from the same cloth as their hero, Donald J Trump.  

Ms. Cheney who is running for re-election responded by saying “I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what.”

Good for her. 

Precious few elected Republicans beside the usual suspects like Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and Ben Sasse have been willing to stand up and tell the truth. The election wasn’t stolen; Trump inflamed the crowd on January 6 in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power. 

It was a failure. Just like him. 

JFB

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The Washington Football Team, previously known as the Washington Redskins, is changing its name to the Washington Commanders. This earth shaking event follows years of agonizing over what to rename the team so as not to give offense to the delicate sensibilities of professional football fans. 

In keeping with the spirit of finding appropriate names for things, I would like to propose renaming Washington, DC. Instead of being named after our first President, General George Washington, the capital could be renamed Absurdistan, USA  since that moniker would better describe the daily activities that go on here. 

Consider for instance, Georgetown Law School (oops, there’s that George thing again). Some students (I use the word loosely) of the Law school, armed with Twitter, have gone into full social justice warrior mode. They have taken to demanding that the Dean fire Ilya Shapiro, the newly appointed Executive Director and senior lecturer at the Law School’s Center for the Constitution. Shapiro had previously served as vice president and director of the CATO Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. 

Shapiro’s nominal offense was to fire off an admittedly inartfully composed Tweet to the effect that President Biden should not restrict his search for a new Supreme Court nominee only to black women. But Shapiro’s real offense is that he is a libertarian legal scholar who believes (gasp) that the Constitution means what it says. 

Our progressive friends simply cannot permit that, and so have launched a cancellation effort in order to get Shapiro fired. But we should have pity on the poor little put upon revolutionaries of Georgetown Law. They have been traumatized. So in addition to the summary firing of Shapiro some have demanded a safe space where they can go and have a good cry; another demand is for a personal reparations package for black students to compensate them for missing class so they might go to the protest. 

The Dean, who reportedly agreed to set aside space for the more lachrymose students, ought to consider handing out crayons, chocolate chip cookies and milk cartons to the social justice warriors who have had such a rough couple of days on the battlefront. 

In the meantime in different section of Absurdistan, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer continues specializing in political malpractice. Knowing full well that he was going to lose, he called a vote on (1) Biden’s badly named Build Back Better Bill and another to (2) effectively end the filibuster. In so doing he forced Senate Democrats in competitive seats to take difficult votes while giving Republicans a freebie. 

That vote could come back to haunt Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Among vulnerable Senate Democrats likely harmed by this bit of theatre are Rev. Ralph Warnock (GA), Maggie Hassan (NH), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), Mark Kelly (AZ), and Michael Bennet (CO). But it might prevent a New York Democratic Senate primary challenge to Schumer by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Which is the likely reason why Schumer chose the path he did. 

Meanwhile at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden, Grand Chief of Absurdistan reminded us that he is busy trying to lower inflation by spending lots more money that the Fed will obligingly print up. In addition he has taken other steps to get prices to fall. For instance oil prices fell to $78 a barrel in late November when the President announced his plan to release 50 million barrels of oil from the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve. 

As of this writing the price of oil is $92 a barrel, about 18% higher than it was when Biden began working on lowering the price. 

For sheer stupidity though, it’s hard to surpass Karen Attiah, the Global Opinions Editor for the Washington Post. Here is a sample Tweet from her:

So white people, you guys need to figure this out how to erase the emotional rewards of sadistic pleasure white people have long enjoyed in dominating and destroying black bodies.

— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) June 17, 2020

But wait—there’s more. In today’s Washington Post, Attiah writes the following on the Whoopi Goldberg affair:

“ABC could have provided a space to educate Goldberg and the rest of its audience about the centuries-old history of global white supremacy, and to push back on current efforts to marginalize the voices of the oppressed.

Instead, it chose one of America’s favorite pastimes — silencing Black women.”

Not even worth commenting on. 

JFB

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Now as we begin the third year of the COVID pandemic we can begin to evaluate public policy responses to it.  Which is the polite way of saying that it is well past time to sift through the public policy wreckage and ask what went wrong and why. 

Let us consider masking and vaccine mandates. For three years, compliments of the CDC, the public has been given changing and conflicting guidance on the efficacy and advisability of wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in its various iterations. For instance, at the beginning of the outbreak, the CDC argued against wearing masks saying that they were ineffective. In an e-mail obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequently published by Buzzfeed, CDC Director Anthony Fauci wrote the following:

“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.”

By April of 2020, Fauci had changed his tune. Now the CDC recommended that people wear face coverings “in public settings when around people outside their household, especially when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”

By August of 2021, the new CDC Director Rochelle Walensky reiterated the call for universal indoor masking, including vaccinated Americans. 

At a White House VOVID-19 briefing Dr. Walensky said (correctly) that  “Our vaccines did exactly what they were supposed to do: prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death.” She also said that “… masks will protect you and your family.” Later, on another occasion she said “We do encourage all Americans to wear a well-fitting mask to protect themselves and prevent the spread of COVID 19”.

Note what is going on here. First, there is the CDC claim that we are dealing with “a pandemic of the unvaccinated”. That is clearly not the case. With the introduction of the Omicron variant the number of breakthrough cases is so large that the claim has been obliterated. (To be fair, the Omicron variant had yet to be discovered when the CDC characterized the pandemic as being restricted to the unvaccinated). Second, the CDC has been moving the goal posts. They begin by claiming that vaccination in all but a few cases prevents infection. When that turns out not to be true they shift to arguing (correctly) that the vaccines are extraordinarily effective at preventing severe disease and death. 

But then we have the next assertion, a favorite of President Biden’s, which is that since vaccinated people do not get infected (false) they can not transmit the virus to others (also false).  Which leads to some interesting policy questions. (1) If vaccinated people can’t transmit the virus why are they required to mask? (2) What is the evidence that masking is really effective anyway?

The rationale for a masking requirement is that it helps prevent the transmission of the virus to innocent third parties—a negative externality in the parlance of public policy. So the initial questions are these: (1) what is the evidence that masking effectively prevents COVID-19 transmission; (2) what, if any, are the benefits of masking and do they outweigh the costs; and (3) why the necessity of coercion?  

Whether masking provides any benefits at all is a highly contested proposition. There are for instance, studies that provide some evidence of lower levels of infection among groups people who wore face masks versus those who did not. The problem is that the claims asserting effectiveness in reducing virus transmission generally refer to infecting other people, not the mask wearer. If wearing a mask protects the wearer, there should be no need for coercion. 

Further, the question of protection is crucially dependent on the type of mask, how it fits and the consistency with which it is worn. As a practical matter we are talking about adults in their everyday lives, not lab rats. It is unlikely that they are going to suit up to the CDC’s satisfaction for any length of time. On wearing cloth masks, for instance, Leana Wen a medical analyst for CNN, who also happens to be a vigorous supporter of coercive measures says this.  “Don’t wear a cloth mask…Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. There’s no place for them in light of omicron.”

So sure, if you walk around town triple-masked, you may be less likely to be a virus spreader. And if you make a habit of wearing a hazmat suit, you are probably well-protected. But so what? As a practical matter that is not going to happen. Just like 5-year olds sitting in socially distanced grammar schools are not going to keep on wearing well-fitted N95 masks for hours on end. And the fact is that children are very unlikely to become infected and symptomatic anyway. For all we know, children may be getting infected by the score without getting sick, thereby building up natural immunity. 

Which brings us to the question of vaccine mandates. If vaccinated people are incapable of transmitting the virus, it makes no sense to require them to wear masks. But vaccinated people are in fact capable of transmitting the virus. That fact alone obliterates the case for vaccine mandates.  If you want to be protected against severe disease and death from COVID (and you should) then get vaccinated.

The unvaxxed may be taking foolish risks, but they themselves bear the consequences. Society as a whole is not threatened significantly more by the unvaxxed than the vaxxed. And not to put too fine a point in it, the CDC is essentially admitting that a zero COVID strategy is simply not possible. The disease is going to run its course and it will become endemic.

Nevertheless, the unvaccinated are being treated more and more like lepers with each passing day. Ezekiel Emmanuel President Biden’s bioethics advisor, advocates for denying unemployment benefits to workers who are fired for refusing to be vaccinated. So how widespread is this type of attitude? 

A recent poll found that 59% of Democratic voters would favor a policy that would confine people to their homes except for emergencies if they refuse to get vaccinated. 48% of of Democratic voters said they thought federal and state governments should be be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of vaccines. 45% of Democrats would favor governments to require the same to be temporarily housed in designated facilities or locations. 47% of Democrats polled favored digital tracking of those refusing vaccination to ensure they are either quarantined or socially distancing. Astonishingly, 29% of Democrats would support temporarily removing parental custody of children if the parents refuse vaccination. By far, Democrats favored harsh compliance measures over Independents and Republicans. Poll details are here. 

If the unvaccinated are mostly a danger only to themselves, or they don’t pose a risk to others materially greater than the vaxxed population, then why are they being treated like this? Fear mongering by progressives and their pals in the media account for most of the hysteria. But then, what is the point of all the fear mongering? 

The goal is social control and the transformation of American society away from individual freedom, property rights and liberal market capitalism. Instead progressives wish to substitute collectivist state control with governance by benign “experts” who always get it right. 

Except that even if all the experts were benign souls (and they are not) they face the problem of incomplete information. As Hayek demonstrated, they would never have enough information to make the right decisions. The eventual collapse of planned economies everywhere from the Soviet Union to Mozambique to Venezuela provides irrefutable evidence of this. 

Human nature being what it is, central planning leads to authoritarian state control if it is not forcefully resisted. Fortunately, the American political system with its checks and balances, has for the most part successfully resisted the progressive trap. Partly because of this, progressives have been very busy trying to dismantle those institutions that protect Americans’ freedom to choose.  

Progressivism should be vigorously resisted, in favor of the classical liberalism of the American Founding. Authoritarianism is not confined to the Right. As the Left has recently demonstrated, it is perfectly willing to trample on due process, norms and an independent judiciary to achieve its goals. They will almost certainly be booted out come this November. Replacing them with Donald Trump, should he choose to run, would just be more of the same. 

It will be a difficult task to resurrect classical liberalism to meet the myriad of challenges we face. But we have done it before, and we can do it again. 

JFB

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Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) took to the Senate floor to defend the filibuster, and in so doing he provided an important civics lesson. His speech, on the You Tube video below, is well worth watching.

JFB

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