We Must Free Americans to Work

Established as a federal holiday in the late 1800s, Labor Day marks how American workers have contributed to the country’s successes. It is a holiday to celebrate the dignity of workers—but respecting the dignity of workers demands that we respect the choices they make regarding their careers. But too often, government stands in the way of those choices, tying workers up in unnecessary red tape that prevents them from doing the work they want to do.

That’s why we must free Americans to work. The Goldwater Institute’s Breaking Down Barriers to Work law cuts that red tape and makes it easier for Americans to work in the career of their choice.

At present, around one in four Americans is required to obtain a license in order to be able to do their job—a government permission slip to work in a certain career. These government-imposed barriers exist for a wide range of professions: barbers, plumbers, real estate agents, sign language interpreters, florists, landscapers, coaches, interior designers, and many others. No matter how qualified someone is, Americans must re-apply for permission to work when they move to a new state.

But under Breaking Down Barriers to Work, a new resident of a state is eligible to receive a license to practice their profession, so long as the applicant has held a license in good standing for at least one year and was required to complete testing or training requirements in the initiating state. It’s all about streamlining the licensing process for everyone: State licensing boards don’t have to devote unnecessary time to comparing education or training requirements across all 50 states, and applicants are no longer required to jump through hoops just to continue a career they were already doing safely and productively elsewhere.

Breaking Down Barriers to Work is particularly beneficial for low-income workers—those least able to afford the time and money needed to get re-licensed each time an opportunity across state lines comes up. Having to meet a state’s licensing requirements upon moving there hampers low-income Americans’ ability to take advantage of a job opportunity that arises in another state—in some cases, it may simply be a bridge too far. But Breaking Down Barriers can make it more possible for such a worker to seize an opportunity that comes their way.

Breaking Down Barriers to Work has been garnering bipartisan support in states across the country, because it’s a reform that’s simply common sense. Since Arizona passed Goldwater’s law back in 2019, several states have followed suit: To date, 16 additional states have passed our reform, and you can look for additional states to take up this law in their next legislative session.

And in the states where Breaking Down Barriers is on the books, it’s having real results. So far, nearly 4,000 workers have already benefited from the law in Arizona alone.

This Labor Day, we should keep the dignity of American workers in mind—and in particular, how we can ensure that Americans are free to make a living in the careers they want and need. Breaking Down Barriers is a needed reform to free Americans to work.

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This article was published on September 6, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the Goldwater Institute.

Too Little, Too Late: Millions of Biden Voters Regret Their Vote

Millions of people who cast their vote for Joe Biden in the presidential election last year “regret” voting for him, according to a new poll.

According to the latest Zogby Poll, one-fifth of likely voters say they regret their vote for Biden. Zogby says that “on the surface it doesn’t seem like much, especially if you look at the three quarters of likely voters who did not regret their vote,” but it actually matters a lot. And I agree.

“Why does this matter?” Zogby asks. “If you take into consideration the size of the electorate, and how the last two Presidential elections [2016 and 2020] were decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, this could really hurt President Biden’s chances in 2024.”

The poll looks worse for Biden when you consider the demographics of the voters surveyed. “Some very important groups, who normally lean left and Democrat, were even more regretful about voting for the president in 2020,” noted Zogby.

“For example, younger voters aged 18-29 [27% yes/67% no/6% not sure] and middle aged voters aged 30-49 [30% yes/67% no/4% not sure] were much more likely to regret voting for Biden than older voters aged 50-64 [10% yes/87% no/3% not sure] and 65+ [6% yes/91% no/3% not sure].”

The poll also found that 29 percent of Republicans who voted for Biden regret their vote (which seems low to me) and 21 percent of Democrats regret their vote.

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Continue reading this article, published September 3, 2021 at PJ Media.

Biden’s Ammunition Ban Is Part Of The Left’s Plot To Disarm Americans

The gun prohibition lobbies have discovered that even if they can’t ban guns, choking off ammunition is an effective way to prevent people from using them.

The Biden administration recently prohibited the import of ammunition from Russia. That’s bad news for American firearms owners, but there may be much worse to come.

The gun prohibition lobbies, having mostly failed in their campaigns to convince legislatures to ban guns, have intensified their efforts to disarm Americans by other means. The Biden ammunition ban is one step in the process.

If you’ve tried to buy ammunition in the last year and a half, you know how bad the shortage already was, even before the new ban. In a sense, Joe Biden has been a contributor to the shortage since 2020.

Gun and Ammunition Sales Were Already Surging

When presidential nominees declare an aggressive anti-liberty agenda, many Americans prudently exercise their rights while they still can. If an anti-rights candidate wins and starts implementing a gun-control agenda, the urgency increases. Thus, arms and ammunition purchases surged in 1993-94 (early Bill Clinton), 2008-09 (early Barack Obama), 2012-13 (Obama making gun control a top second-term priority), 2016 (Hillary Clinton campaign), and 2020 (Biden campaign).

Biden was, however, not the only problem. Rising COVID-19 cases worried many Americans that police forces might be temporarily spread thin. Thus, March 2020 saw a huge (and still enduring) surge in ammunition buying, beginning to outstrip supply.

Then came the summer of violence, as Marxists, leftists, and other opportunistic malefactors robbed, burned, looted, and murdered with impunity. Many law enforcement agencies stood idle. While rioting has abated in most cities, it will resume whenever the organizers decide to turn it on again. Meanwhile, the police have been partially defunded in some cities, and vilified and demoralized everywhere.

Then came the summer of violence, as Marxists, leftists, and other opportunistic malefactors robbed, burned, looted, and murdered with impunity. Many law enforcement agencies stood idle. While rioting has abated in most cities, it will resume whenever the organizers decide to turn it on again. Meanwhile, the police have been partially defunded in some cities, and vilified and demoralized everywhere.

Given that so many governments have demonstrated that they cannot or will not protect citizens from individual criminals or from violent mobs, it is no wonder that so many Americans have decided to take responsibility for protecting themselves and their families. But they can’t do that if they can’t buy ammunition.

A Maxed-Out Market

In 2020 about 8.4 million guns were purchased by first-time gun buyers. Like Americans who already owned guns, these newcomers might, in ordinary times, buy a few boxes at a time, for target and safety practice. But in today’s extraordinary times, many new and old gun owners are seeking to buy more, since they do not know if they will be able to buy ammunition at all in the future. Politicians from coast to coast used the pandemic as a pretext to shut down gun stores. No one can predict when they will do so again.

America’s ammunition manufacturers have responded to the full limits of their capacity. Many factories are operating 24 hours a day. But because the continuing effects of COVID-19 have disrupted supply chains, there are many materials bottlenecks that limit manufacturing output.

Input prices have also soared. For example, a pound of copper cost $2.55 on Sept. 2, 2019, and $4.30 on Sept. 2, 2021. Ammunition prices in many calibers have at least doubled. The backorders at ammunition manufacturers now stretch out to a year or more. Hornady Manufacturing Company — known for very well-engineered self-defense and hunting ammunition — said in May 2021 that it already had orders for its next two and a half years of production.

The ongoing ammunition shortage is seriously impairing the exercise of Second Amendment rights. Many gun owners have cut back on practice because they cannot be sure they will be able to replace the ammunition they use. Some firing ranges are not even able to sell customers a box of ammunition. The shortage is particularly burdensome for the millions of Americans who purchased their first firearm in 2020 and are being deprived of practice opportunities.

Drying Up Import

On August 20, 2021, the Biden administration announced it would not issue new licenses for the import of ammunition from Russia. Existing licenses were not affected. Ostensibly, the import bans are sanctions against the Russian government for its attempted murder of dissident Aleksey Navalny (although the seriousness of the Biden administration’s sanctions policy is questionable).

In 2020, 765 million units of Russian ammunition were imported into the United States — more than from any other nation. The calibers most affected by the Biden import ban are 7.62×54, 7.62×39, 5.45×39, 5.56×45, and match-grade .22 rimfire. Those first four calibers are mainly for AK platform semi-automatic rifles. AK rifles are manufactured by U.S. companies and by overseas exporters. Functionally, these popular rifles (and sometimes large pistols) are alternatives to the even more popular AR platform.

In general, AK rifles are manufactured to looser tolerances than ARs. This makes them less accurate, especially at longer distances. But they are also amazingly durable, and function well even under conditions of hard use, such as exposure to dirt.

Jim Grant, an editor of the AmmoLand website, urges Americans not to worry: other foreign countries export the above calibers to the United States, and by the time the existing Russian import licenses expire, some of the Russian manufacturers may be able to shift production to other nations.

Biden’s Ban Isn’t the Only Threat

Although the ammunition shortage may ease up in a year or two, the gun prohibition lobbies have more restrictions on their agenda. Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown” lobby wants America to adopt the British system, in which guns and ammunition must be stored in separate, locked safes.

“We are all safer” in such a system, the Bloomberg lobby claims. True enough, if “we” means “violent home invaders.” But having to open two safes in a few seconds when invaders have crashed through your home’s back door makes life perilous for your family.

Perhaps the biggest current threat is a recent California law misleadingly billed as “background checks for ammunition.” As the history of gun control shows, what happens in California doesn’t stay in California. California prohibits mail-order sales. So rural Californians might have to drive hours to find a retail store with the ammunition they need.

If you can find a store with the necessary ammunition, the California statute requires the ammunition buyer affirmatively to prove American citizenship. Don’t have a handy certified copy of your birth certificate? California will take up to 22 weeks to issue you one. If you can’t get a certified birth certificate (or a passport, which usually requires a birth certificate to obtain), then you can never buy ammunition in California.

If you do have a certified birth certificate, the ammunition background check can begin. It is very different from the background check for firearms purchases.

Don’t Californicate the Gun Market

For the typical firearms background check, the buyer’s identity is checked against lists of prohibited persons (e.g., persons with felony convictions, unlawful aliens who were apprehended, persons under domestic restraining orders). In contrast, the ammunition check blocks sales to everyone who is not on the California registry of gun owners.

California’s handgun registry was created in 1990, and the long gun registry in 2014. If you bought your firearm before that, you won’t be on the list, and your ammunition purchase will be denied. You will also be denied if your current address is different from where you lived when you bought your gun.

As a result, 99.8 percent of California ammunition purchase denials are erroneous. The California appeal system for wrongful denials is opaque and slow. The apparent net effect of California’s “background checks for ammunition” has been to deter or prevent at least 2 million law-abiding Californians from purchasing ammunition.

As California illustrates, the gun prohibition lobbies are more sophisticated than ever, and they have discovered that even if they can’t ban guns outright, choking off ammunition is an effective way to prevent people from using guns.

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This article was published September 7, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Surge in Antisemitism Linked to Spread of Critical Race Theory

There’s a strong connection between critical social justice ideology, including critical race theory, and a rising tide of antisemitism around the globe, according to a new report from the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values.

As more businesses and governments adopt initiatives based on critical social justice ideology, antisemitic and other forms of bigotry are flourishing.

“When you hold an ideology that there are really only two kinds of people in the world, those that are oppressed and those that are oppressors, you’re going to end up empowering ideas of antisemitism,” says David Bernstein, a longtime Jewish advocate as well as the founder and CEO of the Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Jewish Institute for Liberal Values.

He joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his organization’s new report, as well as the implications for continued global acceptance of critical social justice ideologies.

Doug Blair: Our guest today is David Bernstein, a longtime Jewish advocate and founder and CEO of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. David, thank you so much for joining us.

David Bernstein: Great to be with you.

Blair: Great. Your organization just released a white paper on how critical social justice ideology has led to an increase in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. Before we get into the white paper, would you be able to start by defining for our listeners what exactly critical social justice ideology is?

Bernstein: Sure. Critical social justice ideology is an umbrella term for critical race theory and other critical ideologies that we’re seeing—critical gender ideology, for example. It basically holds that bias and oppression are not just a matter of individual attitudes, as we’ve traditionally thought about them, but are embedded in the systems and structures of society. It also holds, problematic, in my view, that only those who are adversely affected by those systems, only the system’s victims, have standing to define racism or prejudice or bigotry for the rest of society.

That’s what we’re talking about here, is that ideology, which has taken hold in so many institutions in American life in the past several years, and particularly in the past year is producing antisemitism, among other problems, of course.

Blair: Where is this located? Are we finding critical social justice ideology in schools and certain political viewpoints? Where do we find this ideology present in our culture?

Bernstein: Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty much everywhere, or almost everywhere. You’re seeing it in newsrooms now, as you’ve seen it in The New York Times recently. You’re seeing it in health care institutions, in medicine, in scientific institutions quite ominously. Can you imagine how that’s going to corrupt scientific research over time? We’re seeing it in K-12 schools, obviously in universities and schools of education. We’re seeing it in the nonprofit world.

It’s pretty much everywhere. It’s in major corporations that are doing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that are quite liberal in nature. We’re seeing it really take hold in a vast array of institutions in American life.

Blair: All right. Now, we have a definition of what this ideology is, what critical social justice ideology is. We can dive into your report. Let’s start with the top line. What relationship did your research find between critical social justice ideology and antisemitism?

Bernstein: When you hold an ideology that there are really only two kinds of people in the world, those that are oppressed and those that are oppressors, you’re going to end up empowering ideas of antisemitism. For example, this idea of Jewish privilege, which is an offshoot of white privilege.

When you say that there’s only oppressors and oppressed, then Jews who have succeeded largely in American society are going to be viewed as the oppressor class, and Israel, which has succeeded largely in the Middle East, is going to be viewed as the oppressor country. That, in the most simple form, is the problem, but it gets more complicated and sometimes more ominous as you look into it more.

I mean, the idea, for example, of intersectionality, which I’m sure your listeners are familiar with, this idea that all forms of oppression are related. That’s a multiplier of this idea of Jewish privilege, and makes it very hard for people to identify with Jews or anybody who’s perceived to be part of the privileged classes.

We can go into some of the other findings as well, but let me just add one more before we do that: equity. This idea that Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at Boston University, has popularized, that all disparities are a function of racism and discrimination.

If there are certain groups that are being discriminated against, and that’s what accounts for all their disparities—not just some of their disparities, but all of the disparities—then there must be people who succeed who are complicit in the system that brought the others down, and that’s Jews, that’s Asians, and other successful groups. It can be weaponized and has been weaponized against Jews in a way that’s increasing the level of antisemitism in society.

Blair: Right. You’ve mentioned intersectionality amongst other concepts that exist in a critical social justice ideology. You define in your report intersectionality as the theory that various identities interact in ways that create compounded discrimination or disadvantage constituting an intersecting system of oppression. In the sort of base level of this, where do Jews fit into the system to somebody who believes in this critical social justice ideology? What do Jews have to do in this system?

Bernstein: It’s very hard for people who buy into this ideology to look at American Jews who have been largely successful or are in their eyes white, and they’ve defined us as white, to say that we’re not part of the oppressor class. We must be, because we’re successful and you can only succeed in this worldview by holding other people down, by getting a bigger slice of the pie for yourself.

No matter how hard Jews tried—and we have tried. I tried, by the way, that’s part of what I would try to do in engaging other communities, engaging progressive spaces in my previous work, was to position Jews as being a marginalized group. We’re marginalized, like your groups are marginalized. And we should have our voice in the intersectional club, but that doesn’t work. It didn’t work. They just do not see it that way.

You also have sort of the intersection, if you will, with the Israeli-Palestinian cause. People insisting that Palestinians are the oppressed group and Israel is the oppressor. Then they look at the American Jewish community that is largely but not entirely supportive of Israel and they say, “OK, you must be part of the oppressor class,” and that’s how we’ve been marked.

Blair: One of the things that I’ve kind of been considering as I was reading this paper is it feels like a lot of the time when incidents of antisemitism come up, we’re reacting to a specific incident. It’s reactionary politics as opposed to a sort of ongoing discussion about where this comes from.

For example, when Black Lives Matter or an activist said something that’s pretty blatantly antisemitic, it seems like we’ll focus more on the specific thing that was said as opposed to the root ideology that leads activists to believe the antisemitic thing that they just said. Do you feel that this is sort of a true assessment of what’s going on? Why or why not?

Bernstein: Yeah. If there’s one finding in this paper that represents a wholesale departure from the traditional Jewish community approach to fighting antisemitism, it’s that we believe that the current ideological environment is like fighting antisemitism in a game of whack-a-mole.

The ideology is going to continue to produce incidents of antisemitism. If we continue to go and condemn this person and condemn that person, which we could do and should do, I guess, but without recognizing that the root cause ideology, the wellspring from which this comes is critical social justice ideology, we’re not really fighting the root problem.

There, I would say that we’ve got to take a massive strategic shift in how we think about fighting antisemitism. It doesn’t work to just fight antisemitism. You have to fight the underlying ideology. You have to start challenging people who claim that they have a monopoly on the truth when it comes to racism and race.

You have to say, “No, I’m sorry. We have the right to speak as well.” You’ve got to stick up for liberalism, because if liberalism starts to slip, and liberalism, by the way, I mean small “L” liberalism, and that is the free expression of ideas in society, if that starts to slip and give way to wokeism, then we’re not going to fare well. Jews are not going to fare well, other minorities won’t fare well either.

So we’ve got to start fighting that fundamental underlying ideology that’s giving rise to antisemitism and not just the antisemitic expressions of it.

Blair: One of the things that I’ve also been considering a lot as we were talking about concepts like intersectionality and this sort of focus on race, like in critical race theory, that both in America and worldwide, Jews are ethnically a minority. We’ve talked about the successes of the Jewish people, but how has it become so ingrained in both conspiracy theories and in critical social justice ideology that Jews are oppressors?

Bernstein: Yeah. Jews have always occupied a very strange space in societies where they lived. Jews have a very resilient culture and have been able to largely succeed in almost any society that they’ve been in. They’re perceived as sort of being intermediary. They are, in the eyes of, let’s say, white supremacists in this country, they’re viewed as the people that are bringing in other minorities to pollute the white dominant culture. Right? …

When you hear people with tiki torches say that Jews will not replace us, that’s what they mean. The Jews will have been the intermediaries that have allowed more Mexicans and other people to come in and replace us white people. That occupies a very special place in their imagination.

I think in the intersectional worldview, also, Jews are really confounding, in a way. We claim to have been discriminated against. We had this thing called the Holocaust that happened to us, we’ve been discriminated against, they see the hate crime statistics, and yet we’re white and successful. In a way, we’re a standing contradiction to that worldview and they have to shove us into one of those two boxes, which leads to sort of the erasure of our identity.

Blair: I do think it’s very interesting that Jews kind of occupy this space of simultaneously the oppressor, but like, historically speaking, you can acknowledge that the Jews have been persecuted on a world scale.

Speaking of a world scale, I would like to talk to you a little bit about the upcoming world conference on racism that is set to take place this month. Rather famously, the U.S. has previously boycotted these types of U.N.-backed conferences because they have a very strong anti-Israel bias. These conferences will regularly refer to Israel as an apartheid state and discuss how evil the country is on a variety of levels. With that in mind, is there a difference between antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment? On that note, is it possible to be critical of the state of Israel without wading into antisemitism?

Bernstein: I mean, absolutely. I mean, there’s nobody more critical of Israel than Israelis. You see that every day in any Israeli newspaper you might look at in English or Hebrew.

Many American Jews, myself included … we care about Israel. We love Israel. We might define ourselves as Zionists, people who believe in the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. And yet, we are critical of specific Israeli acts, policies that we think might be counterproductive. Many of us will say so publicly. We’ll say, “We think that’s wrong,” and, “Israel should do ‘X’ instead of ‘Y.’” That is entirely consistent with seeing Israel as a normal country or even caring about the Jewish state.

What’s not normal is when people start to deny the very right of the Jewish people to have a state, which is what you see in places like the World Conference on Racism, or you demonize Israelis as Nazis and judge it by a standard that you would judge no other nation.

That’s where you start to get suspicious and wonder, “Well, maybe there’s something much more sinister behind this than just criticism of a country or its policies.” What you’re really seeing are people who hate the Jewish people and are using that as a kind of a cudgel against the state of the Jewish people, which is the state of Israel.

Blair: It sounds like what you’re saying is that … anti-Israel rhetoric … is being used to disguise antisemitism in a way.

Bernstein: Yeah. By anti-Israel rhetoric, I mean, I would mean not just criticism of Israel, but really vicious criticism of Israel that’s completely out of proportion and irrational. And yeah, I think it disguises it.

I’m not going to say that there aren’t people who are opposed to Zionism that aren’t antisemitic. I think that there probably are. There are ultra-Orthodox Jews who, for a variety of reasons, theological reasons, don’t think there should be a state of Israel. I’m not going to call them antisemites. I think what you can say is that the phenomena of anti-Zionism is a category of antisemitism, even if there are exceptions to the rule.

Blair: OK. Other than this conference, and I’m sure there are other examples, would you be able to list some other things that are international manifestations of antisemitism and anti-Zionism?

Bernstein: Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen over the years, especially in the wake of like a war with Gaza, conflict of Gaza, these massive, very often violent protests.

I remember in Malmo, Sweden, I think it must’ve been around 2006, there were these massive protests against the Jewish community, major threats to synagogues and others. You had the mayor of Malmo blame it on the Jews for their support for Israel.

You see that in some European countries and you see, as we recently saw in the United States, by the way, in LA and New York, during the last Gaza round in May, you saw people beaten on the streets. I mean, literally like stopped and beaten at restaurants. These are manifestations of violent antisemitism that really comes from the left side of the political spectrum.

Blair: You’ve spoken a little bit on the implications for the sort of other oppressed classes. I think you’ve talked a little bit about Asians and other racial groups. Are there larger implications in our American society for the proliferation of critical social justice ideology beyond Judaism and antisemitism?

Bernstein: Absolutely. I would even say my primary critique of critical social justice or the imposition of critical justice is the fact that it’s fundamentally illiberal. It’s meant to try to stifle conversation. It stifles science. It stifles the free exchange of ideas.

It makes it harder to solve problems because how can you solve a problem if you’re not allowed to try to define it? In other words, if the only permissible explanation for disparity in the world is systemic racism, and if you proffer any other possible explanation for it, you’ll be deemed a racist, how are you going to actually solve that problem? Because racism doesn’t account for why there’s disparity in many cases.

I think it is fundamentally illiberal and it will create bad social outcomes and it will prevent people from talking to each other. It will be bad for race relations. I think it has many, many bad outcomes besides just the antisemitism and anti-Asian sentiment and the like.

Blair: Given that we can acknowledge that, obviously, antisemitism is a problem, what advice do you have for our listeners who want to push back against the rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Zionism around the globe today?

Bernstein: Yeah, I think it’s time that they recognize that there is this ideology at its root cause and that we have to start supporting liberalism. There, I’m really advocating for a new coalition.

I think the Jewish community has been very focused on sort of engaging the left and the far left of the American political system so that we can stop it from becoming too anti-Israel or too antisemitic. I don’t think that’s working well.

I think the lion’s share of our resources, our energies have to be to building a new coalition, groups with Asian Americans, and black heterodox thinkers, and Latino business leaders, and the like. A new centrist coalition that, on both sides of the political aisle, stands up for the liberal proposition of a society where people can express ideas and think out loud together.

I think that’s the kind of society we want to live in, and that’s the coalition we ought to create. That means that we have to create new institutions that fight for liberalism, and we have to create new institutions that aren’t captured in some cases by woke ideology that are right now making it hard for these institutions to function effectively.

Blair: Given that, do we have any examples of a positive success story that we can point to and say, “Hey, this is working. This is helping out”?

Bernstein: This is a very new phenomenon. I think, obviously, we’ve been watching critical social justice take over in certain institutions for quite a few years and certainly in the academy, but it was really after George Floyd’s murder that we saw … this racial reckoning really start to take effect. A lot of institutions started implementing new racial justice plans and committees and the like. It’s really been in the last year where you’ve seen this incursion at this level, which has provoked a backlash.

Many of us now are, I mean, we founded our organization only four months ago. There are very few existing institutions in American life, nonprofit advocacy organizations and the like, that were already actively fighting against the incursion of critical social justice ideology.

We’re learning as we go along. We’re making some headway in certain places. There are examples of us being able to get more and more people out of the woodwork and fighting against it. We’ve seen some institutions back off from their previous woke pronouncements and the like. But we’re just getting going and we’re going to have to find what works over time.

Blair: Glad to hear that things are going positively. David, we are running a little bit low on time, but I wanted to give the last word to you. Where can our listeners go to learn more about your organization and the work you’re doing to fight antisemitism?

Bernstein: Sure. We are JILV.org, Jewish Institute for Liberal Values … They can find us on Twitter at @JILVORG. They can also look into a new organization called the Institute for Liberal Values—which is an umbrella of groups, not just Jewish groups, but education groups and the like—and that’s ilvalues.org, and it’s coming into existence as we speak. Check us all out.

Blair: Great. Well, thank you so much. That was David Bernstein, founder and CEO of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values as well as a longtime Jewish advocate. David, thanks again for joining us.

Bernstein: Great to be with you. Thank you.

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This article was published on September 3, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

The Rise of Economic Fascism in America

Editors’ Note:  This article was originally published in 1994 and rings even truer today.  Instead of corporations bribing the government into corruption, today government bribes corporations into corruption.  It is not a new idea.

When people hear the word “fascism” they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s as “corporatism,” that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a “model” by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called “fascism” but “planned capitalism.” The word fascism may no longer be politically acceptable, but its synonym “industrial policy” is as popular as ever.

The Free World Flirts With Fascism

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. The American Ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, was so impressed with “corporatism” that he wrote in the preface to Mussolini’s 1928 autobiography that “it may be shrewdly forecast that no man will exhibit dimensions of permanent greatness equal to Mussolini. . . . The Duce is now the greatest figure of this sphere and time.1” Winston Churchill wrote in 1927 that “If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been entirely with you” and “don the Fascist black shirt.2” As late as 1940, Churchill was still describing Mussolini as “a great man.”

U.S. Congressman Sol Bloom, Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said in 1926 that Mussolini “will be a great thing not only for Italy but for all of us if he succeeds. It is his inspiration, his determination, his constant toil that has literally rejuvenated Italy . .”3

One of the most outspoken American fascists was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism, Dennis declared that defenders of “18th-century Americanism” were sure to become “the laughing stock of their own countrymen” and that the adoption of economic fascism would intensify “national spirit” and put it behind “the enterprises of public welfare and social control.” The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was “liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights.”

Certain British intellectuals were perhaps the most smitten of anyone by fascism. George Bernard Shaw announced in 1927 that his fellow “socialists should be delighted to find at last a socialist [Mussolini] who speaks and thinks as responsible rulers do.”4 He helped form the British Union of Fascists whose “Outline of the Corporate State,” according to the organization’s founder, Sir Oswald Mosley, was “on the Italian Model.” While visiting England, the American author Ezra Pound declared that Mussolini was “continuing the task of Thomas Jefferson.”5

Thus, it is important to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and ‘30s. The evil deeds of individual fascists were later condemned, but the practice of economic fascism never was. To this day, the historically uninformed continue to repeat the hoary slogan that, despite all his faults, Mussolini at least “made the trains run on time,” insinuating that his interventionist industrial policies were a success.

The Italian “Corporatist” System

So-called “corporatism” as practiced by Mussolini and revered by so many intellectuals and policy makers had several key elements:

The state comes before the individual. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines fascism as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government.”

This stands in stark contrast to the classical liberal idea that individuals have natural rights that pre-exist government; that government derives its “just powers” only through the consent of the governed; and that the principal function of government is to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of its citizens, not to aggrandize the state.

Mussolini viewed these liberal ideas (in the European sense of the word “liberal”) as the antithesis of fascism: “The Fascist conception of life,” Mussolini wrote, “stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.”6

Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights: “The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans.”7 “If classical liberalism spells individualism,” Mussolini continued, “Fascism spells government.”

The essence of fascism, therefore, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people. Think about this. Does anyone in America really believe that this is not what we have now? Are Internal Revenue Service agents really our “servants”? Is compulsory “national service” for young people, which now exists in numerous states and is part of a federally funded program, not a classic example of coercing individuals to serve the state? Isn’t the whole idea behind the massive regulation and regimentation of American industry and society the notion that individuals should be forced to behave in ways defined by a small governmental elite? When the nation’s premier health-care reformer recently declared that heart bypass surgery on a 92-year-old man was “a waste of resources,” wasn’t that the epitome of the fascist ideal—that the state, not individuals, should decide whose life is worthwhile, and whose is a “waste”?

The U.S. Constitution was written by individuals who believed in the classical liberal philosophy of individual rights and sought to protect those rights from governmental encroachment. But since the fascist/collectivist philosophy has been so influential, policy reforms over the past half century have all but abolished many of these rights by simply ignoring many of the provisions in the Constitution that were designed to protect them. As legal scholar Richard Epstein has observed: “[T]he eminent domain . . . and parallel clauses in the Constitution render . . . suspect many of the heralded reforms and institutions of the twentieth century: zoning, rent control, workers’ compensation laws, transfer payments, progressive taxation.”8 It is important to note that most of these reforms were initially adopted during the ‘30s, when the fascist/collectivist philosophy was in its heyday.

Planned industrial “harmony.” Another keystone of Italian corporatism was the idea that the government’s interventions in the economy should not be conducted on an ad hoc basis, but should be “coordinated” by some kind of central planning board. Government intervention in Italy was “too diverse, varied, contrasting. There has been disorganic . . . intervention, case by case, as the need arises,” Mussolini complained in 1935.9 Fascism would correct this by directing the economy toward “certain fixed objectives” and would “introduce order in the economic field.”10 Corporatist planning, according to Mussolini adviser Fausto Pitigliani, would give government intervention in the Italian economy a certain “unity of aim,” as defined by the government planners.11

These exact sentiments were expressed by Robert Reich (currently the U.S. Secretary of Labor) and Ira Magaziner (currently the federal government’s health care reform “Czar”) in their book Minding America’s Business.12 In order to counteract the “untidy marketplace,” an interventionist industrial policy “must strive to integrate the full range of targeted government policies—procurement, research and development, trade, antitrust, tax credits, and subsidies—into a coherent strategy . . . .”13

Current industrial policy interventions, Reich and Magaziner bemoaned, are “the product of fragmented and uncoordinated decisions made by [many different] executive agencies, the Congress, and independent regulatory agencies . . . . There is no integrated strategy to use these programs to improve the . . . U.S. economy.”14

In his 1989 book, The Silent War, Magaziner reiterated this theme by advocating a coordinating group like the national Security Council to take a strategic national industrial view.”15] The White House has in fact established a “National Economic Security Council.” Every other advocate of an interventionist “industrial policy” has made a similar “unity of aim” argument, as first described by Pitigliani more than half a century ago.

Government-business partnerships. A third defining characteristic of economic fascism is that private property and business ownership are permitted, but are in reality controlled by government through a business-government “partnership.” As Ayn Rand often noted, however, in such a partnership government is always the senior or dominating “partner.”

In Mussolini’s Italy, businesses were grouped by the government into legally recognized “syndicates” such as the “National Fascist Confederation of Commerce,” the “National Fascist Confederation of Credit and Insurance,” and so on. All of these “fascist confederations” were “coordinated” by a network of government planning agencies called “corporations,” one for each industry. One large “National Council of Corporations” served as a national overseer of the individual “corporations” and had the power to “issue regulations of a compulsory character.”16

The purpose of this byzantine regulatory arrangement was so that the government could “secure collaboration . . . between the various categories of producers in each particular trade or branch of productive activity.”17 Government-orchestrated “collaboration” was necessary because “the principle of private initiative” could only be useful “in the service of the national interest” as defined by government bureaucrats.18

This idea of government-mandated and -dominated “collaboration” is also at the heart of all interventionist industrial policy schemes. A successful industrial policy, write Reich and Magaziner, would “require careful coordination between public and private sectors.”19 “Government and the private sector must work in tandem.”20 “Economic success now depends to a high degree on coordination, collaboration, and careful strategic choice,” guided by government.21

The AFL-CIO has echoed this theme, advocating a “tripartite National Reindustrialization Board—including representatives of labor, business, and government” that would supposedly “plan” the economy.[22 The Washington, D.C.-based Center for National Policy has also published a report authored by businessmen from Lazard Freres, du Pont, Burroughs, Chrysler, Electronic Data Systems, and other corporations promoting an allegedly “new” policy based on “cooperation of government with business and labor.”23 Another report, by the organization “Rebuild America,” co-authored in 1986 by Robert Reich and economists Robert Solow, Lester Thurow, Laura Tyson, Paul Krugman, Pat Choate, and Lawrence Chimerine urges “more teamwork” through “public-private partnerships among government, business and academia.”24 This report calls for “national goals and targets” set by government planners who will devise a “comprehensive investment strategy” that will only permit “productive” investment, as defined by government, to take place.

Mercantilism and protectionism. Whenever politicians start talking about “collaboration” with business, it is time to hold on to your wallet. Despite the fascist rhetoric about “national collaboration” and working for the national, rather than private, interests, the truth is that mercantilist and Protectionist practices riddled the system. Italian social critic Gaetano Salvemini wrote in 1936 that under corporatism, “it is the state, i.e., the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the state pays for the blunders of private enterprise.”25 As long as business was good, Salvemini wrote, “profit remained to private initiative.”26 But when the depression came, “the government added the loss to the taxpayer’s burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.”27

The Italian corporative state, The Economist editorialized on July 27, 1935, “only amounts to the establishment of a new and costly bureaucracy from which those industrialists who can spend the necessary amount, can obtain almost anything they want, and put into practice the worst kind of monopolistic practices at the expense of the little fellow who is squeezed out in the process.” Corporatism, in other words, was a massive system of corporate welfare. “Three-quarters of the Italian economic system,” Mussolini boasted in 1934, “had been subsidized by government.”28

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is exactly the result of agricultural subsidies, the Export-Import bank, guaranteed loans to “preferred” business borrowers, protectionism, the Chrysler bailout, monopoly franchising, and myriad other forms of corporate welfare paid for directly or indirectly by the American taxpayer.

Another result of the close “collaboration” between business and government in Italy was “a continual interchange of personnel between the . . . civil service and private business.”29 Because of this “revolving door” between business and government, Mussolini had “created a state within the state to serve private interests which are not always in harmony with the general interests of the nation.”30

Mussolini’s “revolving door” swung far and wide:

Signor Caiano, one of Mussolini’s most trusted advisers, was an officer in the Royal Navy before and during the war; when the war was over, he joined the Orlando Shipbuilding Company; in October 1922, he entered Mussolini’s cabinet, and the subsidies for naval construction and the merchant marine came under the control of his department. General Cavallero, at the close of the war, left the army and entered the Pirelli Rubber Company . . . ; in 1925 he became undersecretary at the Ministry of War; in 1930 he left the Ministry of War, and entered the service of the Ansaldo armament firm. Among the directors of the big . . . companies in Italy, retired generals and generals on active service became very numerous after the advent of Fascism.31

Such practices are now so common in the United States—especially in the defense industries—that it hardly needs further comment.

From an economic perspective, fascism meant (and means) an interventionist industrial policy, mercantilism, protectionism, and an ideology that makes the individual subservient to the state. “Ask not what the State can do for you, but what you can do for the State” is an apt description of the economic philosophy of fascism.

The whole idea behind collectivism in general and fascism in particular is to make citizens subservient to the state and to place power over resource allocation in the hands of a small elite. As stated eloquently by the American fascist economist Lawrence Dennis, fascism “does not accept the liberal dogmas as to the sovereignty of the consumer or trader in the free market . . . .

Least of all does it consider that market freedom, and the opportunity to make competitive profits, are rights of the individual.” Such decisions should be made by a “dominant class” he labeled “the elite.”32

German Economic Fascism

Economic fascism in Germany followed a ‘virtually identical path. One of the intellectual fathers of German fascism was Paul Lensch, who declared in his book Three Years of World Revolution that “Socialism must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism.”33 The philosophy of German fascism was expressed in the slogan, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz, which means “the common good comes before the private good.” “The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities,” Hitler stated in Mein Kampf, but in his noblest form he “willingly subordinates his own ego to the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.”34 The individual has “not rights but only duties.”35

Armed with this philosophy, Germany’s National Socialists pursued economic policies very similar to Italy’s: government-mandated “partnerships” between business, government, and unions organized by a system of regional “economic chambers,” all overseen by a Federal Ministry of Economics.

A 25-point “Programme of the Party” was adopted in 1925 with a number of economic policy “demands,” all prefaced by the general statement that “the activities of the individual must not clash with the interests of the whole . . . but must be for the general good.”36 This philosophy fueled a regulatory assault on the private sector. “We demand ruthless war upon all those whose activities are injurious to the common interest,” the Nazis warned.37 And who are these on whom “war” is to be waged? “Common criminals,” such as “usurers,” i.e., bankers, and other “profiteers,” i. e., ordinary businessmen in general. Among the other policies the Nazis demanded were abolition of interest; a government-operated social security system; the ability of government to confiscate land without compensation (wetlands regulation?); a government monopoly in education; and a general assault on private-sector entrepreneurship which was denounced as the “Jewish materialist spirit.”38 Once this “spirit” is eradicated, “The Party . . . is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest.”39

Conclusions

Virtually all of the specific economic policies advocated by the Italian and German fascists of the 1930s have also been adopted in the United States in some form, and continue to be adopted to this day. Sixty years ago, those who adopted these interventionist policies in Italy and Germany did so because they wanted to destroy economic liberty, free enterprise, and individualism. Only if these institutions were abolished could they hope to achieve the kind of totalitarian state they had in mind.

Many American politicians who have advocated more or less total government control over economic activity have been more devious in their approach. They have advocated and adopted many of the same policies, but they have always recognized that direct attacks on private property, free enterprise, self-government, and individual freedom are not politically palatable to the majority of the American electorate. Thus, they have enacted a great many tax, regulatory, and income-transfer policies that achieve the ends of economic fascism, but which are sugar-coated with deceptive rhetoric about their alleged desire only to “save” capitalism.

American politicians have long taken their cue in this regard from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sold his National Recovery Administration (which was eventually ruled unconstitutional) on the grounds that “government restrictions henceforth must be accepted not to hamper individualism but to protect it.”40 In a classic example of Orwellian doublespeak, Roosevelt thus argued that individualism must be destroyed in order to protect it.

Now that socialism has collapsed and survives nowhere but in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and on American university campuses, the biggest threat to economic liberty and individual freedom lies in the new economic fascism. While the former Communist countries are trying to privatize as many industries as possible as fast as they can, they are still plagued by governmental controls, leaving them with essentially fascist economies: private property and private enterprise are permitted, but are heavily controlled and regulated by government.

As most of the rest of the world struggles to privatize industry and encourage free enterprise, we in the United States are seriously debating whether or not we should adopt 1930s-era economic fascism as the organizational principle of our entire health care system, which comprises 14 percent of GNP. We are also contemplating business-government “partnerships” in the automobile, airlines, and communications industries, among others, and are adopting government-managed trade policies, also in the spirit of the European corporatist schemes of the 1930s.

The state and its academic apologists are so skilled at generating propaganda in support of such schemes that Americans are mostly unaware of the dire threat they pose for the future of freedom. The road to serfdom is littered with road signs pointing toward “the information superhighway,” “health security,” “national service,” “managed trade,” and “industrial policy.”

*****

Note: Access all numbered references in the article above at the This Article link below.

This article was published on September 3, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Texas Is Now an “Open Carry” State, Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing thumbnail

Texas Is Now an “Open Carry” State, Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing

By Brad Palumbo

It has always been antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution to require a license to own a firearm

As of September 1, you no longer have to pay the government to carry a gun in Texas.

Most people think of Texas as the Wild West and may be surprised this was ever the case in the Lonestar State. But, Texas previously required a license to carry a gun, a restriction on citizens’ rights you’ll still find in 31 other states. Most of the time, that means citizens can keep guns in their homes or cars, but to carry on their person they must complete a class and then pay the government a recurring fee to obtain their permit. This could cost hundreds of dollars.

To address this, the Texas state legislature passed a “constitutional carry” bill during their last session, and Governor Gregg Abbott signed it into law in June. The bill doesn’t actually change the eligibility for purchasing or owning a gun. The state still blocks anyone under the age of 21 from gun ownership, as well as many people with criminal records. And those who wish to purchase a gun must of course still go through a background check as well.

Constitutional carry merely means that citizens no longer have to pay the government, or jump through hoops, to legally exercise their right to bear arms.

But be that as it may, it has not stopped the hand-wringing over the new law by many progressives, firearms instructors (who profit greatly off of licensing mandates), and police — all of whom are now spending considerable time warning the public that this will lead to an increase in gun crime and violence.

“New gun laws in Texas will surely lead to more gun violence,” read a headline in the San Antonio Report.

“New Texas law allowing people to carry handguns without permits stirs mix of fear, concern among law enforcement,” said the Texas Tribune.

And Moms Demand Action, a progressive anti-gun group, is offering to help businesses block consumers who carry.

Candidly, these talking points are tired, and they don’t stand up to reality.

First and foremost, it has always been antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution to require a license to exercise a right clearly defined in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. For no other right do we demand that citizens jump through hoops or pay the government to use them. Imagine if similar requirements were implemented for free speech or freedom of religion. It would be a gross injustice, as are gun permits.

Additionally, making people pay to take a class and then pay to obtain a license from the government does little more than block poor people from exercising their rights. Some of these requirements were put in place to intentionally block people of color from accessing guns in the past—laws that continue to reverberate today—making these measures even more unjust.

There is nothing about paying the government that makes a person less or more likely to be violent. In fact, those who intend to commit violence already intend to break the law, and will not be bothered with a permitting process in the first place. Arguments to the contrary are totally detached from reason, the nature of crime, and everything we know about violence.

Lastly, and without getting too into the weeds, it’s important to point out that the way the vast majority of gun violence and gun deaths are tracked and reported is… deeply problematic to say the least, if not downright disingenuous.

Mass shootings include any incident where four or more people are killed in a general area. That means even when the shooter is known to the victims, they are in their own home, or a crime is gang-related, they all get lumped into this arbitrary category that makes gun violence by strangers seem more prevalent than it is. Suicides are lumped in with homicides, which also leads the public to think there’s more gun crime than there is. And the number of times a year guns save lives is usually overlooked altogether. For the record, estimates show at least 162,000 lives are saved by gun ownership a year and millions of crimes are prevented.

Furthermore, we have strong data that show ownership of guns actually correlates with less violence, not more. Statistics from the US Department of Justice show that “U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011. During the same period, non-fatal firearm crimes decreased even more, a whopping 69 percent.” During that same time period, gun ownership increased significantly, even breaking records in 2012.

On the other hand, we continue to see states with the strictest gun laws lead the nation in actual gun crimes and homicides. California and Illinois, which all but block residents from gun ownership altogether, lead the nation in mass shootings. And New York, which has similar laws in the city, recently experienced a 166 percent increase in gun violence during the pandemic.

The Texas law does not necessarily mean more people will carry guns; it just means they don’t have to pay the state before they do so. But if the new law does lead to more people exercising their rights, it would be a positive story either way.

*****

This article was published on September 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from FEE, Foundation for Economic Education.

Texas Is Now an “Open Carry” State, Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing

It has always been antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution to require a license to own a firearm

As of September 1, you no longer have to pay the government to carry a gun in Texas.

Most people think of Texas as the Wild West and may be surprised this was ever the case in the Lonestar State. But, Texas previously required a license to carry a gun, a restriction on citizens’ rights you’ll still find in 31 other states. Most of the time, that means citizens can keep guns in their homes or cars, but to carry on their person they must complete a class and then pay the government a recurring fee to obtain their permit. This could cost hundreds of dollars.

To address this, the Texas state legislature passed a “constitutional carry” bill during their last session, and Governor Gregg Abbott signed it into law in June. The bill doesn’t actually change the eligibility for purchasing or owning a gun. The state still blocks anyone under the age of 21 from gun ownership, as well as many people with criminal records. And those who wish to purchase a gun must of course still go through a background check as well.

Constitutional carry merely means that citizens no longer have to pay the government, or jump through hoops, to legally exercise their right to bear arms.

But be that as it may, it has not stopped the hand-wringing over the new law by many progressives, firearms instructors (who profit greatly off of licensing mandates), and police — all of whom are now spending considerable time warning the public that this will lead to an increase in gun crime and violence.

“New gun laws in Texas will surely lead to more gun violence,” read a headline in the San Antonio Report.

“New Texas law allowing people to carry handguns without permits stirs mix of fear, concern among law enforcement,” said the Texas Tribune.

And Moms Demand Action, a progressive anti-gun group, is offering to help businesses block consumers who carry.

Candidly, these talking points are tired, and they don’t stand up to reality.

First and foremost, it has always been antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution to require a license to exercise a right clearly defined in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. For no other right do we demand that citizens jump through hoops or pay the government to use them. Imagine if similar requirements were implemented for free speech or freedom of religion. It would be a gross injustice, as are gun permits.

Additionally, making people pay to take a class and then pay to obtain a license from the government does little more than block poor people from exercising their rights. Some of these requirements were put in place to intentionally block people of color from accessing guns in the past—laws that continue to reverberate today—making these measures even more unjust.

There is nothing about paying the government that makes a person less or more likely to be violent. In fact, those who intend to commit violence already intend to break the law, and will not be bothered with a permitting process in the first place. Arguments to the contrary are totally detached from reason, the nature of crime, and everything we know about violence.

Lastly, and without getting too into the weeds, it’s important to point out that the way the vast majority of gun violence and gun deaths are tracked and reported is… deeply problematic to say the least, if not downright disingenuous.

Mass shootings include any incident where four or more people are killed in a general area. That means even when the shooter is known to the victims, they are in their own home, or a crime is gang-related, they all get lumped into this arbitrary category that makes gun violence by strangers seem more prevalent than it is. Suicides are lumped in with homicides, which also leads the public to think there’s more gun crime than there is. And the number of times a year guns save lives is usually overlooked altogether. For the record, estimates show at least 162,000 lives are saved by gun ownership a year and millions of crimes are prevented.

Furthermore, we have strong data that show ownership of guns actually correlates with less violence, not more. Statistics from the US Department of Justice show that “U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011. During the same period, non-fatal firearm crimes decreased even more, a whopping 69 percent.” During that same time period, gun ownership increased significantly, even breaking records in 2012.

On the other hand, we continue to see states with the strictest gun laws lead the nation in actual gun crimes and homicides. California and Illinois, which all but block residents from gun ownership altogether, lead the nation in mass shootings. And New York, which has similar laws in the city, recently experienced a 166 percent increase in gun violence during the pandemic.

The Texas law does not necessarily mean more people will carry guns; it just means they don’t have to pay the state before they do so. But if the new law does lead to more people exercising their rights, it would be a positive story either way.

*****

This article was published on September 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from FEE, Foundation for Economic Education.

Key FBI Agent in Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Posted Anti-Trump Rants Online During investigation

Editors’ Note: What has happened to the FBI in the past 10 years? It appears totally corrupted not only in issues of domestic crime but also in catching spies. To fulfill the mission expected of the FBI, the agency must operate with integrity and efficiency. It needs a complete overhaul.

 

Federal prosecutors dropped the testimony of an FBI special agent involved in the investigation of an alleged plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after findings he called former President Donald Trump a “piece of s***” on social media during the investigation’s course, according to a defense attorney.

Michael Hills — who represents defendant Brandon Caserta, who is among the six people charged in the case — said during a court hearing Thursday that prosecutors decided not to use Agent Richard Trask’s testimony during a pending October trial. Prosecutors gave defense teams access to Trask’s social media posts this week, with at least one taking aim at Trump and his supporters, Hills said , according to the Detroit News.

“If you still support our piece of s*** president you can f*** off,” read the March 28, 2020, post. “As someone whose wife works in the hospital I hope you burn in hell along with your douchebag f****** reality tv star. His ego is going to kill a lot of people and anyone who supports that is a dumbass. This is what you get when you elect an egotistica/narcissistic (sic) maniac to the top office. He needs people to be nice to him or he won’t help. F*** you douche.”

FBI AGENT TOLD INFORMANT AMONG ALLEGED WHITMER KIDNAPPING PLOTTERS TO LIE, DEFENSE ATTORNEY SAYS

It was not immediately clear why prosecutors dropped Trask’s comments. However, the defendants’ “Wolverine Watchmen” militia group had connections to another group, the Three Percenters, whose members were among the group of Trump supporters charged in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The Washington Examiner contacted the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan for comment.

Trask’s involvement in the case had already been complicated after he was arrested in July for allegedly beating his wife during a dispute over a swingers’ party.

Before his arrest, he gave testimony in court about his findings during the conspiracy investigation, and in an Oct. 6 affidavit, Trask swore to an account detailing what agents discovered.

*****

Continue reading this story, published September 2, 2021 at Washington Examiner.

President Biden And Afghanistan: A New Heart of Darkness in Central Asia?

In 1899 Joseph Conrad published his fictional account of a trip up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, nineteenth century Africa’s colonial “Heart of Darkness.”  In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola adopted Conrad’s work to his film Apocalypse Now, which moved the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. While one of the best remembered lines from Apocalypse Now might be Colonel Kurtz’s “The horror! The horror!” Americans would do well to remember another line originally penned by Conrad: “It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

Choices have consequences. The nightmare that has been the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and its possible future consequences for the United States and the West are the result of President Biden’s policy choices.

In his address to the nation on August 17, President Biden clearly stated that the continued presence of U.S. forces in Afghanistan was not in accord with America’s national interests.  Those interests are laid out in the Biden Administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (NSC-1v2.pdf (whitehouse.gov).  Released by the White House on March 3, 2021 and clearly bearing the imprimatur “President Joseph H. Biden, Jr.” in the lower right hand corner, the stated purpose of this document is to “convey President Biden’s vision for how America will engage with the world (Interim National Security Strategic Guidance | The White House).”

On page 14 of his Interim Guidance, the President stated, “We will make smart and disciplined choices regarding our national defense and the responsible use of our military, while elevating diplomacy as our tool of first resort.”  On page 15 he stated, “The United States should not, and will not, engage in ‘forever wars’ that have cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars,” and went on to state that “We will work to responsibly end America’s longest war in Afghanistan while ensuring that Afghanistan does not again become a safe haven for terrorist attacks against the United States.”  

While few would question President Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan, the way in which he did so casts doubt on his administration’s ability to make “smart and disciplined choices” regarding America’s national defense. Rather than working responsibly to end America’s longest war, President Biden has set the conditions for Afghanistan to once again become a repressive haven for terrorists, one likely to be allied with America’s adversaries.

While no new national leader has been announced after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on  August 15, the Taliban (the Religious Students Movement) are the de facto rulers of Afghanistan and have declared it to now be the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the same name under which they ruled the country from 1996 to 2001 (Taliban declare ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ | The Hill).  The return of the Emirate will clearly be regarded as a signal victory in some quarters. Along with capturing enough U.S. – supplied arms and materiel from the Afghan National Army to set themselves up in business as the new global jihadi arms bazaar, the Taliban have “shown the lands of Islam, as well as the Global South, how to defeat the self-referential, seemingly invincible US/NATO empire (The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan back with a bang – Asia Times).”

According to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security intelligence assessment released by Yahoo! News, Taliban control of Afghanistan “provides al-Qaeda and other associated terrorists opportunities to bolster their global appeal by touting [their] longstanding alliance with the group and commitment to driving foreign troops from Afghanistan (Exclusive: Afghanistan withdrawal ‘could drive a surge in radicalization’ and terrorist attacks, says leaked government report (yahoo.com).”   In fact, al-Qaeda senior leaders released a formal statement “congratulating the Islamic ummah [community of believers] on the occasion of the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan (Al Qaeda praises Taliban’s ‘historic victory’ in Afghanistan | FDD’s Long War Journal)” and key al-Qaeda leaders have made a “triumphant return” to Afghanistan, apparently without any concerns for being seen in public (Taliban celebrate, al Qaeda leaders return to Afghanistan day after U.S. exit – Washington Times).

In addition to re-hosting al-Qaeda, the Department of Homeland Security has warned that the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan “could drive a surge in radicalization of U.S. – based violent extremists [a euphemism for terrorists] and probably contribute to increased support for foreign terrorist organizations in the United States including facilitation activities and attempted travel to Afghanistan.” DHS also cautioned that its “ability to provide advanced warning of attacks inspired by the fluid situation in Afghanistan is constrained by the individualized nature of the radicalization and mobilization processes and [terrorists’] ability to conduct attacks with little or no warning.”

The aftermath of President Bidens’ precipitate decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is also likely to present his administration with a new and wider range of strategic challenges. While President Biden has promised to “maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries (The War on Terror—in Afghanistan and Elsewhere—Is Far from Over, Biden Says – Government Executive (govexec.com),” the regional and global security environments have changed significantly since the U.S. first entered Afghanistan in 2001, and the Taliban are likely to benefit from those changes.  

The Taliban have actively sought to cultivate good relationships with some of the key players in Eurasia – Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, and the Central Asian states. Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran all have important security and economic interests in Afghanistan which they are not likely to sacrifice; Pakistan’s Interservice Intelligence (ISI) effectively created the Taliban and provided them with a safe haven. The Russian and Chinese embassies remain open for business in Kabul, with the Chinese reportedly already planning a rare-earth mining agreement with the Taliban (The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan back with a bang – Asia Times).

Russia and China are key players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – which some view as an anti-U.S. bulwark in Central Asia (The Shanghai Cooperation Organization | Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org) – and Iran is reportedly scheduled to join the SCO as a full member.

This raises the specter of an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban playing host to al-Qaeda and serving as both a jihadi arms room and engine of radicalization joined in at least some form of tacit alliance with America’s most dangerous adversaries. Such indeed would constitute a new Heart of Darkness in Central Asia. (This might be predictably dismissed as a worst-case scenario, but that is precisely what policy makers and national security planners get paid to think about and warn against.)

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has no doubt brought continuing horror to many of that country’s people. It is also likely to present the United States with a new and dangerous set of security challenges. Going forward, Americans should remember that all of these are the resultant nightmare consequences of President Biden’s choice.

*****

The author is a retired U.S. Army officer and a retired senior civilian employee of the U.S. Department of Defense. He is a regular contributor to The Prickly Pear on national security issues.

Introducing “Taking The Mask Off”

It’s far past time for the COVID regime to end.

In March 2020, our public health officials embarked on a major public relations effort. The novel coronavirus had arrived in the U.S. from China, and a fearful American public scrambled to stock up for the apocalypse: toilet paper, canned goods, bottled water, and face masks.

So U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams took to the media to get an urgent message out. “Americans get scared when they feel like they’ve lost control,” Adams said then on Fox & Friends, “There are things people can do to stay safe… [but] one of the things they shouldn’t be doing, the general public, is going out and buying masks. It actually does not help, and it has not been proven to be effective in preventing the spread of coronavirus amongst the general public.”

Times have changed.

Now, almost 18 months later, these face coverings have become ubiquitous. After a temporary reprieve over the summer months, when vaccine optimism reigned, mask mandates are back across the country. Children are starting another school year with faces covered. Younger grades may not know a time when seeing classmates’ smiles was allowed. The mask has superseded its [dubious] medical benefits, and is now a potent symbol of right-thinking.

Our public health “experts” seem determined to extend their power to vaccine mandates as well. With the FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine, Big Business—and the government of at least one of our major cities—has moved quickly to force employees and patrons to get the jab. “My body, my choice,” was always a cynical platitude. They never meant it.

We must remember that this was all a choice. No, not the arrival of a deadly disease from China, but the concerted effort to radically alter daily life in response. It’s a choice driven by fear, by a failure to come to terms with our own mortality. And all the while, the goal posts shift, from “15 days to stop the spread,” to “flatten the curve,” to vaccines, COVID-zero, and on and on and on.

Enough. It’s far past time for this insanity to end.

So I’m proud to introduce “Taking the Mask Off,” a new series from The American Conservative. We will call out the hypocrisy of our public health regime. We will highlight the toll lockdown measures and mask mandates have taken on our families and communities. We will urge Americans not to accept a “new normal”. And we will actually “follow the science”, offering alternatives for what a balanced public health policy might look like.

We will, quite literally, take the mask off the COVID regime.

COVID-19 is here to stay, joining the countless other maladies that affect our fallen human condition. The loss of life at the hands of this deadly disease is tragic. Far more tragic would be a society in which living is lost, in which we are unable to pursue that which makes life worthwhile.

We at TAC hope to play a small part in preventing this greater tragedy.

*****

This article was published on August 29, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

New Big Spending When We Can’t Afford It

One of the major issues of the day is the complete lack of fiscal responsibility. This is unfortunately a bipartisan failure because when Republicans were in power, they did little to shore up the finances of the country.  Republicans talked a good game of entitlement reform, but always turned back from what some call “the third rail of domestic politics.”

As a result of this joint culpability, it just does not seem to draw the political fire it used to. That is a shame because where we are headed is truly alarming.

That may be changing as a new report indicates the major entitlement programs are hurtling towards insolvency faster than expected.

To be sure, the Democrats are on a level of irresponsibility that boggles the mind. They are launching huge new programs when it is well known that Social Security and Medicare are both headed for insolvency.

Democrats are pushing $3.5 trillion in new spending as it becomes clear the pensions and medical care of the elderly are in peril.

A quick summary from the bipartisan Committee for A Responsible Federal Budget:

Today, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports on the long-term financial state of the Social Security and Medicare programs. Today’s reports are the first to incorporate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, recession, response, and anticipated recovery.

The latest Social Security projections show the program is quickly headed toward insolvency and highlight the need for trust fund solutions sooner rather than later. The Social Security Trustees found:

  • Social Security is Only 13 Years from Insolvency. Social Security cannot guarantee full benefits to current retirees under current law. The Trustees project the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund will deplete its reserves by 2033 and the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) trust fund will become insolvent by 2057. The theoretical combined trust funds will exhaust their reserves by 2034, when today’s 54-year-olds reach the full retirement age and today’s youngest retirees turn 75. Upon insolvency, all beneficiaries will face a 22 percent across-the-board benefit cut.
  • Social Security Faces Large and Rising Imbalances. According to the Trustees, Social Security will run cash deficits of $2.4 trillion over the next decade, the equivalent of 2.3 percent of taxable payroll or 0.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Annual deficits will grow to nearly 5.0 percent of payroll (1.7 percent of GDP) by 2080 and total over 4.3 percent of payroll (1.4 percent of GDP) by 2095. Social Security’s 75-year actuarial imbalance totals 3.54 percent of taxable payroll, which is 1.2 percent of GDP or nearly $21 trillion in present value terms.
  • Social Security’s Finances Are Deteriorating. Social Security’s finances have worsened over the last year – insolvency is projected to occur a year earlier, and the 75-year actuarial deficit is over 10 percent larger. The 75-year shortfall is nearly 85 percent larger than it was projected to be in 2010.
  • Time is Running Out to Save Social Security. Lawmakers have only a few years left to restore solvency to the program, and the longer they wait, the larger and more costly the necessary adjustments will be. Acting now allows more policy options, lets policymakers phase in changes more gradually, and provides more time for workers to adjust their work and savings if necessary.

Medicare is in even worse shape and could run out of funds in just five years.  

Note how steep spending must rise until about 2038.

  

Yet the knowledge of these shortfalls has been known for years and has accelerated by not only Covid but demographic trends.

Demographics are like gravity. You are in peril if you ignore it. Our population is aging rapidly and families are not having children. Social Security and Medicare both were set up as Ponzi schemes, that is the first participants are funded by supposedly more later participants. Only now, the number of new payees into the system is shrinking fast, rather than growing.

In a fully funded pension system, this is not that much of a problem.  But in a pay as you go system that we have, today’s workers are not funding their own benefits, they are funding their parents and grandparents.  The nub of the problem is the number of elderly is expanding due to the aging of the Baby Boom, and the population coming up from behind is much smaller.  You simply can’t BS your way out of the compelling math.

It is also just a fact of life, that most medical expenses occur in the last years of life, so it stands to reason that an elderly population will spend an increasing amount on medical care.

In simple terms, you have more money flowing out than flowing in, cash flow goes negative and assets in the fictitious “trust funds” must be liquidated and then you reach insolvency.

We say fictitious because the “trust funds” were never really invested, they were put into government bonds, which themselves are just a promise to pay based on the governments ability to tax, print, and borrow.

And we would add, since the geniuses at the FED started their policy of zero interest rates, the return on the “assets”held by the “trust funds” have been earning a pitiful, albeit negative rate of return.

Modern Monetary Theory advocates that dominate the Democratic Party say as long as government can print money, no default can occur. That is true in the narrow sense. What they fail to mention is massive printing schemes depreciate the value of money, hence inflation. So what you really get is a default of sorts in the value of money, but the bonds paid off in confetti stay technically solvent.

So that is where we are headed. To pay for the shortfall in Social Security and Medicare, we have less money because more is being directed into new spending like ObamaCare and all the new Covid related spending, and now massive new programs to reshape America along Socialist lines.

To be fair, shoring up these programs was always going to be expensive. What is truly remarkable, and irresponsible, is Congress has known this and has answered the problem by making it much worse.  They have launched brand new very expensive programs knowing full well this problem was festereing.

Progressive Democrats act as if there is no limit on how much can be spent or borrowed on new programs and have done nothing to shore up existing programs known to be in severe financial peril.  It has been a giant “screw you we’ve got elections to win” to both the elderly and the young that will be greatly impacted by this impending debacle.

There are only four possible solutions: print money and inflate the currency, borrow even more and drive interest rates higher in a debt bubble,  raise taxes to much higher levels or severely cut benefits. However, the spending now is so off the charts, it is likely no combination of the four can be finessed without doing damage to something.

Printing money creates inflation. Borrowing crowds out the private sector and can force interest rates higher, making the existing debt bubble unstable. Raising taxes takes money out of people’s hands so they have less for their own support thus hurting the economy. Cutting benefits will hurt those elderly who depend on these programs and it catches them at a stage in life where there is little they can do for themselves.

It is difficult to imagine a more irresponsible and immoral policy, than to get people dependent on a government program, and then pull the rug out from under them when they are too old and enfeebled to do much about it.

What is so striking is that if you were to design a plan to throw Social Security and Medicare into crisis, and then make a rescue all but impossible, you could not design a better plan than what the Democrats have implemented.

Do the elderly citizens of this nation understand this? If so, why the silence?

Start screaming now to stop excessive new spending and see that what we are already committed to is properly funded.

As for those younger, you will face higher debt, higher taxes, and a weaker economy because of these policies.

For the unborn, talk about taxation without representation! Those unborn and very young are having huge burdens put on them to which they have no knowledge and have given no consent.

It is hard to think of a more immoral and anti-American set of policies.

98% Propaganda

As an employee of the Commonwealth of Virginia, I had the honor of receiving an email message: “Vaccinations and Mask Wearing.” The message spoke of further requirements:

Vaccination remains the most effective means of protection. We know the vaccines work—since January, more than 98% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths have been among unvaccinated Virginians. Do your part and get your shot.

I guess the 98% line is used pervasively. My father urges my 20-year-old daughter, who has had Covid, to get vaccinated. He gives the same 98% line. I guess it’s repeated on television or in the newspaper. I come from a family of lifelong lefties.

The 98% propaganda is the fallacy of mistaking an “If A, then B” statement with its inverse. I don’t know how true the 98% claim is, but let’s suppose it’s true. In fact, let’s suppose it’s 100%, not 98%.

That’s the “If A, then B” statement. If vaccinated (A), then no hospitalization and death from Covid (B).

The inverse of an “If A, then B” statement is: “If B, then A.”

In this case, the inverse would be: “If one avoids hospitalization and death from Covid, then one is vaccinated.” That statement is false.

The truth of an “If A, then B” statement does not by any means ensure the truth of the inverse (“If B, then A”).

For example: “If one is a pediatrician, then one is a doctor” does not imply “If one is a doctor, then one is a pediatrician.”

My father, in fact, is a pediatrician, now retired. He urges my daughter (his granddaughter) to get vaccinated. He tries to justify that urging by saying: “Everyone who is vaccinated avoids hospitalization and death from Covid.”

But if there are other surefire ways to avoid hospitalization and death, the justification may be a complete non sequitur.

We can equally say, I tell Dad:

Everyone who has recovered from Covid infection avoids subsequent hospitalization and death.

Everyone who is 20 years old avoids subsequent hospitalization and death.

My daughter, then, on two counts, doesn’t need a vaccination to avoid hospitalization and death from Covid. Meanwhile, there is so much about the vaccination, its development, its rollout, its liability status, and so on that is unknown and irregular—downright bizarre. The matter is not so simple.

Authoritarianism indoctrinates its votaries and buffaloes others into a false and oversimplified worldview, in which the only important factor is vaccination. But the causes of hospitalization and death are multifarious.

The causes that pertain to the individual are known best by the individual. Contrary to diktats, freedom enables individuals to act on the basis of his or her particular conditions, such as whether she has had Covid, whether she is young, whether she has comorbidities, and so on.

Covid authoritarians might say that everyone has to be vaccinated because of spreading. That, too, doesn’t acknowledge natural immunity. As for the rest, the possibility of asymptomatic transmission of the Covid-19 virus from the unvaccinated is extremely low. So again, all the authoritarians seem to have is propaganda.

Tomorrow my daughter and I shall go visit Dad. I’m vaccinated. But we’ll do a test the day of, just to make sure. Focused Protection.

*****

This article was published on September 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from AIER,  American Institute for Economic Research.

The Federal Reserve Is the Monetary Equivalent of the Kabul Airport

Speaking to the virtual Jackson Hole conference of the Federal Reserve System, Fed Chair Jerome Powell says that inflation will go away soon. He sees “…upward inflation pressure dissipating and, in some cases, reversing …. As supply problems have begun to resolve, inflation in durable goods other than autos has now slowed and may be starting to fall. It seems unlikely that durables inflation will continue to contribute importantly over time to overall inflation.”

Can’t blame the guy — he’s interviewing for a job with Joe Biden. Powell has to feel for his prospective boss. The Fed is the monetary equivalent of the Kabul airport. After dumping $5 trillion of helicopter money into the U.S. economy and overstretching supply chains in almost every industry, the Fed is faced with the worst inflation since the Carter era. And the worst is yet to come, as I wrote in Asia Times today (extract below). The rent on a new lease has jumped 10% year-on-year according to the search site Zillow, but rent inflation according to the government is just 2%. That’s because it takes a year or two for leases to expire and the new, higher rents to kick in. A huge jump in inflation driven by higher rents is baked into the cake for 2022. That’s the elephant in the parlor, and Powell didn’t mention it.

The Fed can’t control inflation except by reducing demand, and that means slowing the economy. It’s damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t, so it might as well pretend that nothing is wrong for as long as possible — kind of like Biden’s commanders in Afghanistan.

Real income is falling and families are losing ground. Powell’s performance recalls Groucho’s line, “Who are you going to believe — me or your own eyes?” Anyone who has tried to buy a pound of hamburger, rent a house, buy a used car or a household appliance, or any other item in the consumption basket knows that inflation is out of control.

*****

Continue reading this article published August 27, 2021 at  PJ MEDIA.

Stakeholders v. Stockholders

The notion that stakeholders and stockholders battle for control of major business corporations is an oversimplification of a much more complex reality involving managers, regulators, investors, and social justice warriors (SJW), many of whom seem to have forgotten the reasons that corporations formed in the first place. All the major players need level-headed thinking on the question of corporate control lest the American people lose a major driver of economic growth to the vague vagaries of wokeness.

Corporations have always been concerned with the interests of their major constituents, including stockholders and other securities holders, employees, customers, suppliers, and broader social interests, all of which constitute the economic ecosystem in which corporate profits or losses are made. In 1975, for example, a survey by Harvard Business Review revealed that three in five US managers believed that they served all those interests “as fairly and equitably” as they could (John J. Flynn, “Corporate Democracy: Nice Work If You Can Get It,” Small Business and Society, U.S. Senate Hearings, 1975, p. 406).

That survey sounds a lot like the 2019 Business Roundtable (BRT) resolution that companies should “serve not only their shareholders, but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support the communities in which they operate.” Talk about stating the obvious! Companies in competitive markets that do not deliver value to their customers will soon fail, as will those that do not pay taxes to support the communities in which they operate or that regularly break the law. And successful businesses, almost by definition, invest just the right amount in their employees, in just the right way, at just the right time.

The crux of the BRT’s statement was that corporate managers should “benefit” all stakeholders, not just stockholders. That sentiment could be just as innocuous as it was in 1975 except that unlike many managers today, most managers in the 1970s understood that corporations interact with their sundry stakeholders in fundamentally different ways. Within legal and regulatory constraints, they interact with employees, customers, and suppliers via voluntary markets, i.e., mutually beneficial transactions. That inherently limits their power because if corporations push too hard, employees, customers, and suppliers will go elsewhere for a better deal. Although some business discretion is involved, e.g. in whether or not to pay “efficiency wages” or to relax the terms of a vendor contract (i.e., “relational contracting”), managers need not, and indeed should not, pay more or accept less simply to appear nice, to gratuitously aid a counterparty, or to serve some political agenda.

Managers interact with securities holders via voluntary markets, too. Securities holders can sell off their holdings for any reason, including the mere suspicion that they will earn a higher risk-adjusted return in an alternative investment. As part owners of the business, however, stockholders also have legal claims on corporate managers and directors, the most important of which is that stockholder interests should come first, even before those of the managers themselves.

For managers to assert that they should or will put their own interests, or those of other stakeholders, before those of stockholders is not just capitalist apostasy, it is illegal and needs to remain so. De facto or de jure rejection of the primacy of stockholder interests would spell economic disaster. As I chronicle in Corporation Nation, “Devolution of the Republican Model of Anglo-American Corporate Governance,” and elsewhere, traditional checks and balances against managerial self-dealing have eroded significantly since Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, Thomas Willing and other financial Founding Fathers formed America’s first business corporations in the late eighteenth century. The biggest remaining check is the legal requirement and moral presumption that managers and directors must do their darndest to maximize stockholder value. They might fail, but they have to try.

Without stockholder primacy, the publicly-traded, joint-stock corporate form of business organization would no longer make any sense. Valuation, a difficult proposition even when only economic and political forces are at play, becomes impossible when future cash flows also fall to the whim of managerial bargaining with sundry stakeholders.

Foremost, managers need to follow actual scientific findings and not the skewed, oversimplified messages that tend to come out of the mass media. Rational investors know that systemic racism, Covid-19, and global climate change are not existential threats to the nation and should be able to invest accordingly, taking into account the business risks associated with potential policies like reparations, lockdowns, and environmental regulations. But if investors fear that they must also calculate the probability that some “woke” corporate manager, entrenched in his or her position by virtue of management control of the corporate proxy apparatus, will expose the corporation to major lawsuits or even give away some of their profits to some outside interest group, especially one currently socially favored due to dismisinfoganda, they will surely divert resources into other asset classes like crypto and real estate.

Consider, for example, the $200 monthly surcharge that Delta Airlines (which is not affiliated with the Delta variant, or the delta blues for that matter) plans to impose on non-vaccinated employees to cover their $50,000 medical bills should they be hospitalized for Covid. There are several major problems with that policy, one statistical and one legal. Statistically, the Delta employees most vulnerable to Covid infection and hospitalization already have imposed those costs, so the percentage of employees adversely affected by Covid will trend lower regardless of vaccination status. In addition, those employees least likely to suffer vaccine side effects have already received their shots, so the percentage of adverse vaccine reactions among the remaining employees will likely increase. [People are not rubes when it comes to their own care. See John C. Goodman’s New Way to Care: Social Protections that Put Families First (Oakland: Independent Institute, 2020).]

While employers can charge different types of employees different amounts for healthcare, it is flat out illegal under the Affordable Care Act to charge employees more because they represent a higher risk, except for tobacco use (Goodman, 140-41). It is a dumb provision but clearly the law of the land. Moreover, it isn’t clear that corporations that force or coerce employees into taking a Covid vaccine won’t be held liable for any damages the vaccine may cause. They will certainly be on the hook for medical, workers’ compensation, and disability claims and possibly for punitive damages, because the mere approval of a substance by the FDA does not mean that it is safe for everyone, even if POTUS implies otherwise. (And now that there is clear evidence that natural immunity is much better than one of the best “vaccines” at preventing infection, symptomatic spread, and hospitalization lots of people have more “splaining” to do than Lucille Ball!)

Moreover, the SCOTUS case upholding the constitutionality of vaccine mandates, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), strictly applies only to smallpox vaccine mandates made by state and municipal governments, not to businesses. Moreover, the decision appears ripe to be overturned. Even on its centennial, long before the Covid-19 scare, public health experts were calling for its demise on the grounds that personal liberty and bodily autonomy are much more important considerations in most instances.

Managers particularly need to be constrained from making corporate donations, cash ones for sure but also the donation of brand power to further social or political causes. As many business leaders are learning to their chagrin, “progressive” causes are not always popular or profitable ones. By injecting personal views into business decisions, like which spokespeople (if indeed any) to hire to shill their products, corporate managers threaten shareholder value. Until ancient shareholder rights to discipline managers who aggrandize themselves ahead of their bosses are restored, regulators ought to prevent corporations from taking any stand on social, economic, or political issues other than those directly affecting the regulation of the corporation’s core business. Banks, for example, should be fighting costly regulations that add nothing to systemic stability, like deposit insurance and “living wills,” instead of jousting at social justice windmills.

Like the corporations they invest in, stockholders pay taxes. Capital gains taxes might be too high or low or unduly distortionary but stockholders as a group indubitably do their lawful part and deserve the best that managers can do to reward them for the risks they have assumed in this complex world. Most investors don’t want the corporations they own to oppose X or support Y and those who do are free to reinvest dividends or the profits from stock sales in whatever lawful causes they wish. Managers have discretion, and problems, enough already without worrying about what is trending on Twitbook.

*****

This article was published on August 28, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Greenhouse Saturation Research Could Kill The “Climate Emergency”

The “climate emergency” appears to have died, far out on the scientific frontier. Word of this death has yet to reach the mainstream.

Professors William van Wijngaarden (Canada) and William Happer (USA) have published some extremely important research on the radiation saturation of the major greenhouse gases. Their first report is titled simply “Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules”. It makes use of a major breakthrough in radiation physics.

Until recently the estimates of greenhouse potency were based on approximation bands of absorbed radiation wavelengths. Now the authors have done line by line spectral analysis, looking at over 300,000 individual wavelengths within these bands.

It turns out that saturation occurs much sooner than previously thought. In particular the primary greenhouse gases, CO2 and H2O, turn out to be “extremely saturated” at present atmospheric concentrations.

These results strongly suggest that the dangerous multi-degree warming assumed by the climate emergency simply cannot occur. Is CO2 significantly impotent? This should now be a major research question.

The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16465. Their second paper — Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases — is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098.pdf

The second paper extends the research to include methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. All three have important climate policy implications, including agricultural policy. Methane in particular has become the target of a climate policy witch hunt. Professor Happer has an illuminating video on this topic. See my introduction and the video here: https://clintel.org/agriculture-policy-is-a-climate-change-witch-hunt/.

I first wrote about this ground breaking research a year ago, see my article: https://www.cfact.org/2020/09/26/study-suggests-no-more-co2-warming/. Since then I have done a bit of research on their research. There is almost nothing on greenhouse saturation in the scientific literature and that needs to change.

Aside: there is a huge literature on “CO2 saturation” but it is about the saturation of porous rock during deep well injection. This is a big problem with so-called carbon sequestration, where CO2 is removed from our emissions and (hopefully) stored underground.

There is also some confusion. As explained below, saturation is not an absolute, rather it comes in degrees. There is no such thing as complete saturation, so when a scientist says CO2 is saturated they mean a lot saturated, not completely saturated. This is important because I have found several articles where the author says skeptics claim CO2 is saturated and then points out that it is not completely saturated. This is just a straw man argument because skeptics who know the science never claim complete saturation.

CO2 Saturation explained: The surface emits a limited number of photons (or units of radiation) of the sort that atmospheric CO2 absorbs. In effect the molecules are competing for the available photons. So as the number of CO2 molecules increases the absorption per molecule goes down. More and more molecules are looking to absorb the same number of radiation photons.

The greenhouse warming is based on the absorption not on the number of molecules. Thus the warming potency of the CO2 does not rise nearly as fast as the number of molecules. This diminishing effect is called “saturation”.

The warming first drops off rapidly as the number of molecules increases. This means most of the warming occurs when the number of molecules is relatively small, far fewer than we have today. After that the warming changes very little as more and more molecules are added. That is where we are today, with a little over 400 ppm of CO2 molecules. The CO2 is extremely saturated. Even doubling the number of molecules to over 800 ppm would have relatively little warming effect.

That H2O is also extremely saturated is very important. Much of the amplified warming built into the emergency computer predictions is based on a strong positive water vapor feedback from the relatively modest CO2 induced warming. But as water vapor is already extremely saturated this strong feedback cannot occur, even if the number of water vapor molecules increases a lot.

More broadly, all of the scary IPCC warming projections are entirely based on these five gases creating a lot of future warming. None of the climate models include the high degree of saturation found by Professors van Wijngaarden and Happer. And according to these researchers, their pioneering results are confirmed by satellite measurements of radiation.

In short it looks like the IPCC climate modeling is simply obsolete. The models need to be redone to include all this saturation. And of course there is a lot more research to be done on greenhouse saturation itself.

But in the meantime it looks like the so-called climate emergency is dead. It has been killed by a big breakthrough in radiation physics. The greenhouse effect does not work the way the scary computer models have all assumed, instead it is dominated by saturation.

This is how science is supposed to work: hypotheses die as science advances.

*****

This article was published on August 31, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow.

Environmentalism as Religion: Unpacking the Congregation

Dramatic headlines and images showing a deteriorating environment exist to demand swift, decisive, and large-scale action. We saw this approach in the 1960s when the first made-for-TV environmental crises showed oil-drenched seabirds on the California Coast and more recently in depressing videos depicting starving polar bears. Dramatic imagery has become the norm when discussing environmental issues.

We also see trends in editorial writing, discussions among political groups, changing business practices, and increasingly scholarly claims that also use dramatic imagery. At face value, these trends could indicate that the public demands dramatic governmental action on environmental issues. Some scholars, however, see this as more than mere increased public demand for government intervention, and they highlight similarities between environmentalism and religious movements. For example, Laurence Siegal states:

In the decades since modern environmentalism began, the movement has taken on some of the characteristics of a religion: claims not backed by evidence, self-denying behavior to assert goodness, (and a) focus on the supposed end of times.

Scholars have tuned into the general public’s zealous interest in the environment and more importantly, emphasis on government action, to push forward their own ideological goals under the guise of scholarship. Whereas the ultimate goal of scholarship is to mitigate climate change and improve sustainability, the reality is instead corrupted by thinly veiled ideology masquerading as scholarship, which is sure to distort any useful policy recommendations.

This phenomenon is illustrated by a recent study making the rounds in Science Daily and The Climate News Network. The authors, Vogel et al., claim that the world must decrease energy use to 27 gigajoules (GJ) per person in order to keep average global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a recommendation included in the Paris Agreement. Our current reality illustrates the outlandish nature of this suggestion. We are a far cry from this goal both in 2012, the year chosen for this study, as well as in 2019, the most recent year for available data. Here is a snapshot of current per person energy consumption (GJ):

2012:                                                         2019:
United States: 285.59                             United States: 287.63
China:                 84.56                             China:                 98.83
Canada:            385.67                             Canada:            379.94
Denmark:         127.97                              Denmark:         120.73
Germany:         165.10                              Germany:          157.33
Russia:             201.26                              Russia:              204.32
India:                  19.84                              India:                   24.92

Using these data, the authors pair what they view to be excessive energy use with a failure to meet basic human needs worldwide. In their own argument, they acknowledge that among the 108 countries studied, only 29 reach sufficient need satisfaction levels. In each case where need satisfaction is met, the country uses at least double the 27 GJ/cap of sustainable energy use, thereby creating a conundrum both for those concerned about the environment and human well-being.

The authors, however, provide a solution arguing that their research shows a complete overhaul of “the current political-economic regime,” would allow countries to meet needs at sustainable energy levels. Some of their recommendations include: universal basic services, minimum and maximum income thresholds, and higher taxes on wealth and inheritance.

These policy recommendations are not supported by the research and directly contradict a body of literature that argues economic growth, not government redistribution, is our way forward. Vogel et al. argue against the necessity for economic growth and even go as far as to support degrowth policies on the grounds that their model finds no link between economic growth and maximizing human need satisfaction and minimizing energy use.

In short, their proposed solution would punish affluent countries and favor a collective misery in which any market driven environmental improvements are crushed under the promise of equality and sustainable energy use.

Conversely, Laurence Siegel in Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance and the 2020 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) argue that economic prosperity allows countries to invest in new technologies and policies that improve not only environmental health but also the well-being of the people. Thus, if we want to continue to improve our relationship with the environment and human progress, we should be more supportive of economic growth and the entrepreneurship that drives it.

If the above relationship between economic prosperity, environmental health, and human well-being is the case, how can these authors claim the opposite? The most likely conclusion is that the authors allow an ideological bias to drive their research, a claim that is supported by their normative descriptions of affluent countries as examples of planned obsolescence, overproduction, and overconsumption as well as the authors’ obvious demonization of profit-making.

As Vogel et al. demonstrates, environmental issues can be exploited by the drama and religious nature of the movement. Unfortunately, academics, such as Vogel et al., have learned to use these tools to stretch their limited findings into a full-blown rallying cry for their own preferred policies; in this case, socialism on a global scale.

Brnovich Warns Biden Secretary of Education About Meddling in Arizona School Mask Ban

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s Office says it will not tolerate a federal government investigation into Arizona’s school mask policies. That’s according to a letter from Brnovich to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona on Aug. 31.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced Monday that they “opened directed investigations in five states exploring whether statewide prohibitions on universal indoor masking discriminate against students with disabilities” by obstructing their ability to attend in-person classes, according to a press release.

The five states under scrutiny are Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.

OCR said they are not investigating Florida, Texas, Arkansas, or Arizona at this time due to the lack of enforcement of the states’ bans on indoor mask mandates as a result of pending litigation. However, the press release said that the department will “continue to closely monitor those states and is prepared to take action if state leaders prevent local schools or districts from implementing universal indoor masking or if the current court decisions were to be reversed.”

In his letter, Brnovich demanded that the secretary “retract” his threat, saying that the state would address violations of its constitutional rights in federal court.

“Our legislators and courts will ensure that our state Constitution is followed, not your radical agenda,” he wrote.

Cardona’s office said the investigations would determine if the states comply with Sec. 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The two laws prohibit disability discrimination in schools and public entities, including public education systems and institutions.

“The Department has heard from parents from across the country – particularly parents of students with disabilities and with underlying medical conditions – about how state bans on universal indoor masking are putting their children at risk and preventing them from accessing in-person learning equally,” Cardona said in the OCR press release.

Brnovich stressed that the state of Arizona is well aware of the importance of balancing power between the federal and state governments.

“It is true that over many generations, this crucial balance has been tested as the federal government has grown beyond its original intent,” Brnovich said. “It has perhaps never been more of an issue than in this first year of the Biden Administration though, where we have seen historic threats and attacks on powers reserved for the states.”

Such attacks against the Ninth and Tenth Amendments threaten the liberties of every American, Brnovich stated, adding that Arizona would take legal action against any federal attempts at overreach into state affairs.

“As I have stated previously, my office will not tolerate any effort from the federal government to undermine or interfere with Arizona’s sovereignty,” Brnovich wrote.

*****

This article was published on September 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

Arizona Businesses Warn PRO Act Would Erase State’s Economic Edge

Arizona’s business leaders say labor legislation awaiting consideration in the U.S. Senate would cause a seismic shift in labor-employer relations, nullifying many aspects of state law employers look for when considering relocation.

Associated General Contractors Arizona chapter President David Martin praised Arizona Democratic U.S. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly for their “pragmatic approach” on the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act of 2021. He pressured President Joe Biden to keep his promise to be an “inclusive president.”

“The PRO act prohibits employers’ ability to communicate with employees during an organizing drive,” Martin said Monday during a news conference. “It allows private info on employees to be provided to the union, allows strikes at any time and for any reason.”

The U.S. House passed PRO Act March 9 along partisan lines. A similar version passed from the House in 2020 but was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Several states already have laws that implement much of the bill, meaning the PRO Act would force more business-friendly states to adopt the act’s labor-friendly policies.

“The PRO Act is a harmful bill that would, essentially, give unions free rein to wreak havoc on local businesses by lifting limitations picketing and causing economic injury to third parties,” said Michelle Ahlmer, executive director of the Arizona Retailers Association.

One of the most significant changes contained in the PRO Act strikes right-to-work laws at the state level. Right-to-work laws ban union membership as a condition of employment.

Arizona and 26 other states have right-to-work laws pertaining to the private sector. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that public-sector right-to-work laws were a violation of free speech.

“We know that right-to-work states typically outperform non-right-to-work states with higher job growth, lower unemployment rates, and better economic output,” Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry President and CEO Danny Seiden said.

The AFL-CIO and its 56 labor organizations wrote Kelly on Aug. 3, pressuring him to support the PRO Act.

“The US is falling behind on numerous fronts, and our labor protections are no exception,” the union wrote. “Workers need you now to show your support for the right to organize.”

The AFL-CIO told Kelly the PRO Act would give workers “a voice at the table to bargain for better wages, retirement, health and safety standards, and other vital benefits.”

*****

This article was published on September 1, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Center Square.

As the Political Divide Grows, It Makes Sense to Redraw State Boundaries

Editor’s Note:  We are not entirely convinced what the author suggests is the way to go. However, the divisions among voters are there and it seems unreasonable from a small d democratic perspective for the people or rural Colorado or Oregon to be ruled by militant Progressives. Some suggest the U.S. is headed for a civil war. Allowing states to reconfigure their boundaries might be a reasonable way to address this growing problem. For those who don’t want to live under socialism, what is their choice? Though we are uncomfortable reading this, it still should be considered.

In the coming decade of heightened political tension, cartographers may have to make serious adjustments to the borders of several American states.

The American left’s desire to micromanage activities ranging from people defending themselves to relying on cheap, nonrenewable energy sources has provoked a significant backlash. And it’s not just manifesting itself in the form of an average political protest or a regular election to vote the proverbial bums out.

Several states are already witnessing their rural counties attempting to separate from the rest of their state. On previous occasions, I’ve showcased the examples of Greater Idaho and a number of Virginia counties wanting to join West Virginia as signs of how burgeoning discontent among citizens of blue states is being channeled into separatism. Weld County, which has been trying to break away from Colorado in the last decade, is no different.

Back in 2013, Weld County County commissioner Sean Conway suggested that the county provides more oil and gas revenue to the state than it gets in return for public services such as roads and schools. Shortly thereafter, Conway and other dissatisfied activists in northern Colorado counties attempted to create a new state via ballot initiative. Although voters only approved the initiative in five of the eleven counties, it did mark a shift in the political conversation. The idea of politically embittered residents of northern Colorado separating from the state would no longer be seen as a fringe thought experiment.

Movements to have Weld County leave Denver’s orbit have not gone away. In 2020, Christopher Richards registered Weld County Wyoming, a political committee with the ostensive goal of putting an initiative on the November 2021 ballot that could fundamentally reshape politics in northern Colorado. Under this initiative, the Weld County Commission would be given the power to consider a potential annexation by its northern neighbor, Wyoming.

The reasoning behind Weld County Wyoming’s initiative for Weld County to relocate to Wyoming is that Colorado’s northern neighbor has a more amenable political environment for the citizens of Weld County. For example, Wyoming has no income tax and regulates oil and gas in a less energetic manner than its southern neighbor.

The latter point has become a pressing matter for Weld County residents in recent years. Colorado’s state government recently passed legislation that adds another layer of regulations to oil and gas, while Boulder County went above and beyond by enacting the most stringent regulations on fracking in the Rocky Mountain State.

Natural gas is a key economic driver for Weld County and any full-fledged push toward completely phasing out natural gas would have a devastating effect on Weld County’s economy. The Wattenberg field, the fourth-largest oil field in the US in terms of proven oil reserves, is largely situated in Weld County. Additionally, it is the ninth-largest gas field in terms of proven natural gas reserves. Weld County is the source of approximately nine out of every ten barrels of new crude oil produced in the Colorado.

Curiously, Colorado was not as leftist in previous decades, and in that period, it would have been doubly absurd to fathom the idea of parts of the state floating the concept of attaching themselves to Wyoming. Colorado gained notoriety for voters approving the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) amendment in 1992, which constrains state and local governments’ ability to tax and spend without the approval of voters. Colorado was also one of the first states to allow law-abiding citizens to concealed carry on university campuses, even adopting the law before states like Texas.

However, political winds have blown dramatically left over the course of two decades. Electoral and policy trends have borne this out. Colorado is generally viewed as a safe blue state and has gone to Democrats by comfortable marginsin presidential elections since 2008.

On gun policy, Colorado’s lurch toward statism has been remarkable. Following the Aurora movie theater shooting of 2012, Colorado politicians have made gun control a major pillar of their political agenda. In the immediate aftermath of the Aurora massacre, Colorado successfully passed high-capacity magazine bansand universal background checks. A few years later the Colorado state government passed other items on Gun Control Inc.’s wish list such as red flag gun confiscation orders (2019) and a mandatory firearm storage law (2021).

Due to the rapid cultural transformation of Colorado’s electorate, Colorado state politics seem alien to Weld County voters nowadays. Colorado has one of the most college-educated populations in the country, occupying the fifth-place ranking on WalletHub’s list of the most educated states. To boot, it enjoys first place for the percentage of people who are associate’s degree holders and second place for the percentage of people with bachelor’s degrees nationwide. It’s no secret that universities are the indoctrination centers that have been effective in churning out professionals who hold leftist beliefs running the spectrum from managerial leftism to outright Marxism.

On a micro level, the educational and political differences between Weld County and the more populated counties of Colorado also typify these trends. Boulder (62 percent), Larmier (47 percent), and Denver (49 percent) Counties all have higher percentages of individuals twenty-five years and older who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. This is in contrast to Weld County, where only 27.5 percent possess a bachelor’s degree or higher. Further, these areas are more affluent than Weld County. Boulder ($46,826), Larimer ($37,363), and Denver ($43,770) Counties enjoy higher per capita incomes than Weld County ($31,793).

Denver and Weld County are political worlds apart at the federal level. Weld County was a safe win for Donald Trump in 2020, when voters pulled the lever for the real estate magnate by a comfortable 58 percent–40 percent margin. On the other hand, Denver was a blowout for Joe Biden; voters decisively went for the former Delaware senator, by a margin of 82 percent to 17 percent. Larimer County was a safe Biden win (56 percent to 40 percent), while Boulder was a landslide victory, with Biden winning the county 79 percent to 19 percent.

Some conservatives may lament the state’s political transformation, but not all is lost, as evidenced by Weld County’s growing push to join Wyoming. In fact, Colorado’s new political changes present novel opportunities for jurisdictional reconfigurations. Most blue states are dominated by one or a few metro centers, surrounded by massive swathes of semirural/rural areas that are culturally distinct from major population centers. This growing bifurcation transpiring nationwide is fertile soil for a decentralization revolution.

Separatism is in the air in America, and we should celebrate it. Discarding the starry-eyed fantasy of unity is the first step in acclimating Americans to the idea of radical decentralization. People are already fleeing blue states and sorting themselves out in states with like-minded individuals. Realistically speaking, this will be a drawn-out process marked by stumbling blocks along the way, but it must start somewhere.

*****

This article was published on August 28, 2021 and is reproduced with permission form the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Supreme Court Refuses To Block Texas Heartbeat Law Which Virtually Bans Killing Babies

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Texas law that protects babies who have a detectable heartbeat from being aborted in the Lone Star State.

In a 5-4 decision, the highest court in the nation declined to block Texas’ newest abortion law despite protests from Planned Parenthood, other abortion activists, and even journalists.

Radical pro-abortion facilities and activists first brought an emergency petition to the Supreme Court with the hopes that the justices would at least temporarily block the law from going into effect on Sept. 1. The court passed on acting on the petition on Aug. 31, meaning the law, which gives private citizens the power to file civil suits against anyone who performs abortions after six weeks or assists a woman in obtaining an abortion, went into effect on Wednesday. Violators of the law could be forced to pay $10,000 to the plaintiff.

Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three leftist justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, each wrote a dissent lamenting the final decision to oppose a block on the law.

“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas.”

In the majority opinion, the rest of the court argued that the request for a temporary stay did not meet the qualifications necessary to get judicial relief.

“The applicants … have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue. But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden,” the opinion stated. “In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit.”

*****

This article appeared on September 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

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