Pruning the Presidency

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

‘Presidents are not kings,” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in the course of ordering former White House counsel Don McGahn to comply with a congressional demand that he testify in the impeachment inquiry. Judge Jackson is perhaps too optimistic: Absolutist rhetoric notwithstanding, few if any kings of old ever aspired to the scope of real-world power exercised by American presidents. There has never been a kingdom quite like this one.

The presidency is the greatest domestic threat to liberty that this country faces today — not President Donald Trump, nor the president who preceded him, nor the one who will succeed him, but the presidency itself. It is right that so much attention has been given to the character of the current president, but more important is the character of the office he occupies. Those who see in Donald Trump a would-be strongman and autocrat owe themselves some careful meditation upon the nature of the presidency that he inherited from his predecessors. Many went before him to prepare the way.

John Adams was deservedly ridiculed for his desire to invest the American executive with a grandiose title of address so that he might stand in similar dignity to the princes of Europe. (Adams proposed “His Highness,” and the portly politician’s enemies mocked him as “His Rotundity.”) But the pomp and ceremony attached to the modern presidency, to say nothing of the practical power attached to it, would have made him blush. The aggrandizement of the presidency has been a bipartisan project in the service of ideological and political goals both progressive and conservative.

The Right has given us the notion that the president enjoys plenipotentiary power over foreign affairs and discretion over military policy that is effectively imperial, a word that is derived, appropriately enough, from the Latin word (imperator) for “commander-in-chief.” As a constitutional question, this is rooted in the mistaken belief that the three branches of government are “coequal,” which they manifestly are not. Under our constitutional system, the president is empowered only to execute the laws that Congress makes. He does not have the power to appropriate money or to make law; he does not even enjoy independent power in the military and diplomatic spheres, which is why Congress and not the president has the power to declare war, ratify a treaty, etc. And, as President Trump is being taught right at the moment, Congress has the power to impeach a president and to remove him from office, a power that it also has over all of his appointees and all federal judges. The Right has pushed the notion of presidential imperiality so far that some conservative legal thinkers, including my friend Andrew C. McCarthy, have argued that the president is effectively above the law — immune from mere statutes — when he is engaged in his constitutional duties. Under the “unitary executive” theory, the U.S. government is like that famous engraving of the composite god-king on the cover of Leviathan, with the president’s mystical immunity communicated down through the bureaucratic ranks to invest the lowliest functionary with that “coequal” juju.

Conservatives may have had some plausible legal argument for this understanding of the presidency — if there is one thing I know about politics, it is that a plausible legal argument can be offered for anything, and such motivated reasoning is of little value — but it also is the case that conservatives have generally favored a more assertive U.S. military stance and diplomatic policy, and they have concluded, based on good evidence, that they are more likely to get this from a president looking to make a name for himself than from a committee of elderly politicians concerned about what another war might to do the price of corn, how it might play back in Peoria, what it might cost, etc. A presidency lasts four or eight years (unless you are Franklin Roosevelt), but a Senate career can last decades and decades.

That used to make senators a little more circumspect, before all of them starting running for president at once. It is hard to blame them: If Joe Biden can get as close to the presidency as he has — and may yet! — then there is hope for every half-bright lawyer from sea to shining sea. And it is the case that the war fever that has infected the presidency has spread somewhat to the Senate, too. All that power is seductive: Senator Obama just about peed himself out of fear that Dick Cheney might peek at somebody’s library card; President Obama created a hit list of Americans he intended to assassinate and boasted about it in the New York Times.

The Left has aggrandized the presidency because it wishes to rule the country administratively rather than through the clunky process by which lawmakers go about making laws in a thoroughly unscientific and unprofessional fashion. That we might return to such a state of affairs is the dread that currently keeps American progressives up at night: Writing in Vox, that great dispassionate explainer, Ian Millhiser raises the alarm that Brett Kavanaugh seems to be taking a more restrictive view of the nondelegation doctrine, which is to say, that the Supreme Court might be poised to insist that lawmakers go back to writing the laws instead of sending memos over to the White House instructing the bureaucracies to write the laws and call them “regulations.” The headline: “Brett Kavanaugh’s latest opinion should terrify Democrats.”

(“Be terrified!” he explained.)

Various progressives have argued over the years that we should extend presidential terms and expand presidential powers in order to make governance more effective, which in this case is a near-synonym for unopposable. They look longingly at the parliamentary systems under which prime ministers enjoy both legislative and executive power, and toward nondemocratic bureaucracies in which empowered expert managers rule by technocratic fiat (Thomas Friedman’s “China for a Day” fantasy). This is partly because they are confident that they will get their way more often under such procedures — look at the nation’s universities and corporate human-resources departments if you doubt that progressives know how to work a bureaucracy — and partly because they maintain a delusional faith in what we are expected to call with straight faces “political science.” They adhere to rationalism, in Michael Oakeshott’s sense of that word, and hence must regard democratic compromises (along with checks and balances and formal limits on state power) as deviations from the optimum policy they believe they can deduce logically.

And so we have arrived at a practice of government in which the executive can make war independently, refuse to comply with the law and congressional investigations, make or break international agreements, set the terms of service in insurance markets, destroy banks and other businesses on a whim, and do almost anything else it might wish, with powers great and minute, from assassinating American citizens to specifying the font size on mandatory OSHA posters displayed in the breakroom at the XYZ Corp. of Poughkeepsie.

The remedy for this, we are told, is “political,” meaning that misbehaving presidents can be defeated at the polls or, if necessary, impeached and removed from office. But surely these cannot be the only controls on the president. Though norms and traditions are fine, we need some hard-and-fast rules about what presidents can and cannot do and some clarity about our legal and constitutional basis for those rules. And most of all, we need a presidency that is reduced, one that is put back in its constitutional box and limited to its constitutional role: seeing to the faithful execution of the laws.

But to take the presidency down a peg, Congress has to step up and reclaim its institutional self-respect. That is not the same thing as self-importance — the only commodity of which Congress is running a long-term surplus.

“Presidents are not kings,” Judge Jackson wrote. But they will be if you let them.

Democrats’ Cannibalistic Ideology

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Once liberalism and progressivism give way to Jacobinism — and they often do, as we have seen in revolutionary France, China, and Russia — no leftist is safe from the downward spiral to ideological cannibalism. Yesterday’s true believer is today’s counterrevolutionary and tomorrow’s enemy of the people.

We saw something like that during both the Trump impeachment frenzy and the current trajectory of the Democratic debates and looming primaries.

The fury over Trump’s election led to a graduated and escalating series of efforts to remove him by suing three states for supposedly fraudulent voting machines. Then articles of impeachment were introduced. Suits followed citing the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Logan Act was raised, as was the 25th Amendment. At each juncture, the zeal to remove the president accelerated in direct proportion to the failure of the previous effort. A lack of success was always explained as a result of insufficient revolutionary zeal, not an absence of evidence.

The escalation culminated in the appointment of Robert Mueller and his “dream team” of partisan anti-Trump attorneys. After their failure to find actionable obstruction and any evidence of collusion, Mueller confirmed in congressional testimony that he was largely a tired administrative-state figurehead, a shill for the anti-Trump zealotry of progressive prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.

After the collapse of each of these agendas, all that was left was impeachment itself. The criminal was still Trump; but what was needed was a new and better “crime” — and far more passion and hate. And both were found with Ukraine, as first defined as quid pro quo, later replaced by “bribery,” and finally recalibrated as “abuse of power.”

The weekly Jacobin rhetoric made the prior progressive talk seem counterrevolutionary — until we finally reached the crux of the matter with admissions by various Democrats such as Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, and Nancy Pelosi that impeachment was likely the only means to stop Trump in 2020.

The Democrats in their impeachment frenzy have now established that a president can be impeached for thinking about withholding foreign aid to a country that he suspects is mired in corruption, including foreign malfeasance that might have affected him personally in the past and may in the future.

But criminalization of such a hypothetical quid pro quo has all but condemned both Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the court of public opinion. By that logic the Republican House should have impeached Obama in 2012 right before his reelection bid, for dismantling missile-defense plans in Europe in exchange for Putin’s putting off his annexations of Crimea and eastern Ukraine until after Obama’s reelection — in effect bestowing upon candidate Obama a private quid pro quo benefit of assuring voters that Obama’s “Russian reset” was sound foreign policy.

Candidate Biden stands accused of no thought crime, but of actually leveraging foreign aid to force the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who, by his own admission, later claimed he was looking into Biden’s mysterious activities with regard to the board of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company.

Obama had refused to provide needed lethal aid to Ukraine. He sent Biden to Ukraine, who used the stick of threatening to cancel all nonlethal aid in return for the carrot of not embarrassing Biden, Obama, and the Democratic party with a messy investigation of Burisma — and by extension Biden’s son — with obvious importance to the 2016 campaign cycle.

If Trump can be impeached for delaying lethal aid to Ukraine for a few weeks, then surely Obama and Biden should have been impeached for doing something worse. In other words, once presidential prerogatives are criminalized and impeachment is used for short-term political gain, then the revolutionary process takes on a life of its own and will eventually devour its own creators. In such a downward spiral, impeachment has become no big deal, but a simple way of discrediting a president the opposition hates.

From now on, the party that holds the House majority will cite the present impeachment inquiry as good precedent for seeking the impeachment of any first-time president whose agendas they abhor and who they fear will be reelected. We are in revolutionary times, and those who redefined impeachment as a crude political effort will one day discover that they are being guillotined by the very instrument of retribution they erected.

Meanwhile, for most of 2019, no Democratic presidential candidate has allowed any other to appear to his or her left. They’ve gone so far leftward that they’ve begun devouring one another. Hyper-liberal Joe Biden eagerly renounced his prior centrist positions but was nonetheless tagged as a veritable racist by Kamala Harris, herself eager to disown her entire prior career as a California state attorney. Beto O’Rourke tried to trump his rivals by promising to confiscate guns — as if merely banning their sales was right-wing.

Soon frenzied candidates were trying to outbid one another by making calls to pack the Supreme Court and abolish the Electoral College — the latter a constitutional provision revered by leftists from 2008 to 2013, given that it seemed to assure a permanently unassailable blue wall. All rushed to be purist supporters of the unhinged Green New Deal, the abolishment of ICE, slavery reparations, Medicare for All, a wealth tax, and free medical care for illegal aliens — until there was nothing left but a socialist Democratic party without a single issue that could win majority public support. Within weeks they were falling over the cliff, with no ground beneath.

The result was that the candidates served themselves up on their own menus. Elizabeth Warren trashed charter schools, championed noncharter, unionized public education, railed at elitism — and, after customarily lying, ultimately confessed that she had sent her own child to one of the most prestigious, elitist, and costly prep schools in the nation. Thus she de facto negated all of her revolutionary rhetoric, or rather was convicted as a counterrevolutionary by her own admission that she sought an elite refuge for her own.

A doctrine of radical feminism is that sexual harassment includes boorish behavior with women in public — no exceptions allowed for loose, overly familiar talk, paternal condescension, and unwanted physical contact of any sort. That more or less sums up the public career of Joe Biden, whose continued uninvited hugging, squeezing, and blowing into the hair of teenage girls seems almost pathological.

The same zero-tolerance standards exist for racist talk. There can be no slips of the tongue, no clumsy expression. When Joe Biden said of Barack Obama, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” when Joe Biden talked of the ubiquity of Indian Americans (“You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent — I’m not joking”) when Joe Biden boasted of his youthful work at a swimming pool with inner-city kids and claimed he learned there about “roaches” and showed them “his blond leg hairs,” then in progressive logic he opened up windows into a racist mind.

A chief tenet of left-wing identity politics is “disproportionate impact.” The idea mandates that racism does not have to be proved to exist. If a particular professional, field, organization, or company is not as racially diverse, on a proportional basis, as the general population, then it is implicitly racist and must take the necessary reparatory measures.

Of course, “disproportionate” is a relative term and does not necessarily apply to an organization such as the U.S. Postal Service, the NFL, or NBA, in which African Americans are vastly “overrepresented” compared with their percentage of the population.

An empiricist would say that Kamala Harris dropped out because she was a lousy candidate: She had little political experience and a thin grasp of issues, lacked deeply held views, and proved to be a poor campaigner and an ineffective campaign administrator.

Nor is Cory Booker a viable candidate: He is subject to bouts of hyperbole bordering on incoherence; his herky-jerky style is off-putting. He too has no consistent views, veering from near centrism to hard progressivism as the situation calls for. Both self-identified as young charismatic African-American identity-politics candidates. Neither possessed Obama’s political savvy or rhetorical skills, which had demolished white elite Hillary Clinton in the primaries and won him greater white support in 2008, in his defeat of old white male John McCain, than John Kerry had earned in 2004,

But under progressive disproportionate-impact theory, the Democrat field and indeed Democrat voters, at least as evidenced by their preferences in the polls and campaign donations, are all guilty of racism. You see, they somehow have prevented both Harris and Booker (still in the race) from being present on the next presidential debate stage. Note that no one rued the implosion of hapless white male Beto O’Rourke, a charlatan of privilege without any record of achievement other than reinventing himself as a “white Hispanic.”

Without Booker, Julián Castro, and Andrew Yang present, the finalists are lily-white, and thus the entire process is deemed racist not by its methodology but by its disproportionate result. Note also that a slew of dull, uncharismatic white male candidates has fared as poorly as Booker, Castro, Harris, Deval Patrick, and Yang: de Blasio, Bennet, Bullock, Delaney, O’Rourke, Sestak, and others. Indeed, there are far more boring and unimpressive white male candidates than there are candidates of color.

Again, no matter. According to Jacobin logic, there must be nonwhite faces on the debate stage, or the entire party stands guilty of what it regularly accuses others of. The party that insists we are categorized by our superficial appearance has more or less destroyed the candidacies of three black candidates, a Latino candidate, and the sole Asian candidate, not because empirically these were poorer candidates, but, accordingly to their own logic, because Democratic grandees and their constituents were racists!

There are a few Democrats who see the lines lengthening at the guillotine and wish to duck out. Joe Biden is now once more recalibrating, but this time back to good ol’ Joe from Scranton. Pete Buttigieg is suddenly, at least this week, a pragmatic mayor first and an ideologue second. Michael Bloomberg wants to enter the debates and stand on one side of the stage facing all the other candidates to the left. A few newly elected Democratic House members understand that the star-chamber impeachment inquiries rub their own constituents the wrong way, and they are desperate to glue back on their 2018 veneers as sober pragmatists at odds with the hard-left wing of their party.

Unfortunately, the voices of the sane and the moderate are usually crushed in revolutionary cycles where extremism operates on its own logic and trajectory — until chaos and cannibalism finally lead even to the extremists’ own suicide.

About That ‘General Welfare’ . . .

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, November 25, 2019

Oren Cass, in the great tradition of college sophomores throughout the ages, discovers in the words “promote the general Welfare” a general constitutional license for federal action. Well. The preamble of the Constitution also speaks to concerns about “tranquility,” but I do not think that this empowers Washington to round us up and put us into camps to listen to Deepak Chopra lectures, and I come to this conclusion because of what comes right after the poetical language of the preamble: the establishment of a federal government of limited enumerated powers. I will confess to being lost about what Nicholas Cage has to do with this. Sounds like a question for Kyle Smith to me.

Cass is scandalized by my use of the word “robbery.” But I do not think that Oren Cass of Harvard Law actually needs to have it explained to him that a redefinition of property rights to the detriment of the property owner — which is precisely what “stakeholder capitalism” proposes to do in the case of corporate shareholders — is a taking, i.e. a seizure of property. If Cass doubts that this happens at gunpoint, he should try sitting on some property that the government has laid a claim to and see what happens.

Which brings us back to that “general welfare,” which is in the case of the federal government not a license for action in and of itself but a guide for action, a navigation point toward which federal action might be directed. And it is here that Cass and other like-minded advocates of a more interventionist and managerial economic philosophy for the Right indulge in epic question-begging.

I harp on the case of Senator Marco Rubio and his tender care that the billionaire sugar barons of Florida be shielded from market competition and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s equally narrow concern for the tax bills of Massachusetts-based medical-device manufacturers because they are mirror images of one another, illustrating the same point: Political incentives are a hurricane wind, and the rhetoric of “general welfare” is a pile of dry November leaves. We do not have to imagine what Senator Rubio might do with more discretionary power over economic activity, because we know what he does with the power he has: He abuses it in the interests of his political allies. As does Senator Warren. As does your average senator or member of the House. In the matter of sugar — and in other similar matters — Senator Rubio does not act in pursuit of the general welfare, but serves the rather more specific interest of his own political welfare. Senator Rubio here is not especially weak or especially corrupt — he is only emblematic.

I suppose that I do not need to repeat here how the simpleminded pursuit of the necessarily crude metrics inevitably brought into play in these political calculations reliably lead to catastrophic outcomes in the real world: Rising home prices are very popular with homeowners, who are politically influential (they are less popular with younger, less affluent people struggling to buy a house on responsible terms, who are less politically influential), and they are very popular with powerful special-interest groups such as the National Association of Realtors, and the prospect of wider homeownership enabled by easier access to mortgage credit is very, very popular with mortgage originators and traders in mortgage securities — and these political incentives in combination with others produced the federal policies that led to the 2008-09 financial crisis and the Great Recession, one of the greatest man-made economic disasters of our time. Again, we do not have to imagine what political steering of markets looks like: We have experience to go on.

Cass writes: “Williamson’s choice of Monsanto as exemplar for his policy-free model of prosperity is instructive.” This is an absurd sentence. I am not sure what a “policy-free model” might even look like, or indeed what those words arranged in that order could even hope to mean. The question is not whether we shall have policy in our . . . public policy . . . but what our policies are to be. I advocate generally applicable rules oriented toward the security of property rights and freedom to work and to trade in a stable and predictable policy environment, as opposed to special-pleading advocacy for this or that politically influential business interest (steel, corn, sugar, “green energy,” AIG, subprime-mortgage lenders, take your pick) based on a model of discretion that empowers politicians, giving them a whip hand over the lives and livings of workers and firms. I do not believe that the best alternative to a left-wing Elizabeth Warren is a right-wing Elizabeth Warren.

Monsanto is an interesting example of how business innovations serve the interests of the world’s poor and hungry not because it exemplifies some narrow ideological view of the world but precisely because it does not. That this eludes Oren Cass is a fact that is of some interest to me.

Senator Rubio’s speech and essay provide very little more than shallow, sterile, and banal rah-rah-ism of a vaguely nationalistic flavor. (I do wonder who wrote the speech and would love to know.) If you doubt me in this, please do go and read it yourself, and see if it contains anything that might be generously described as an idea, as opposed to an attitude.

What is most interesting to me about this particular instance of the new right-wing progressivism is that it raises a question I have been meaning to write about at more length, and will in the near future: The coalition that has made the Republican party politically viable for all these years no longer makes much sense; social conservatives and religious traditionalists might sell their support at the price of a few Kavanaughs (silver has gone out of fashion as a medium of exchange), but advocates of limited government, free enterprise, and property rights (different ways of saying the same thing) have fewer and fewer reasons to ally themselves with the Trump-era GOP and the welfare populism that increasingly is central to its political offering. For a long time, the distinct constituencies of the Republican coalition were kept together by the common enemy of Communism; deprived of that common enemy, they have discovered a new enemy: each other.

The Democrats have a temporary advantage in that the outright socialism espoused by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al. is not in the current political context irreconcilable with the New Deal progressivism that remains close to the heart of much of the Democratic coalition; pushed far enough, that socialism will be impossible to reconcile with the politics of certain Democratic constituencies, but the Left is still short of reaching that point. The Republicans, on the other hand, seem to me to have reached the point at which their coalition is obviously incoherent, a fact that is detectable in the incoherency of Marco Rubio’s “common-good capitalism” among other expressions of the same contradictions.

An Election Too Important to Be Left to Voters

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

The Democrats believe that the 2020 election is too important to be left to the voters.

It’s obvious that President Donald Trump withheld defense aid to Ukraine to pressure its president to commit to the investigations that he wanted, an improper use of his power that should rightly be the focus of congressional investigation and hearings.

Where the Democrats have gotten tangled up is trying to find a justification that supports the enormous weight of impeaching and removing a president for the first time in our history.

They’ve cycled through different arguments. First, Trump’s offense was said to be a quid pro quo, a phrase cast aside for supposedly being too Latin for the public to understand; then it was bribery, which has lost ground lately, presumably because of the inherent implausibility of the charge; now, the emphasis is on Trump’s invitation to the Ukrainians to “meddle” and “interfere” in our elections.

This is posited to be an ongoing threat. Nancy Pelosi said in her statement calling on the House to draft articles of impeachment: “Our democracy is what is at stake. The president leaves us no choice but to act because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit. The president has engaged in abuse of power undermining our national security and jeopardizing the integrity of our elections.”

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler said on Meet the Press last weekend that Trump has to be impeached “for posing the considerable risk that he poses to the next election.” Asked if he thinks the 2020 election will be on the up and up, he said: “I don’t know. The president, based on his past performance, will do everything he can to make it not a fair election.”

The gravamen of this case is that the election is too crucial to allow the incumbent president of the United States, who is leading in key battleground states and has some significant chance of winning, to run. In fact, the integrity of the election is so at risk that the U.S. Senate should keep the public from rendering a judgment on Donald Trump’s first term, or deciding between him and, say, his nemesis Joe Biden.

Of course, it’s possible to imagine a circumstance where a president would indeed present such a grave risk to our elections that he’d have to be removed. This is a reason that we have the impeachment process in the first place. But what’s the real harm that Trump’s foolhardy Ukraine adventure presented?

Let’s say that Ukraine had, in response to Trump pressure, actually announced an investigation into Burisma, a shady company that had in the past been under investigation. What would have happened? Would Joe Biden have been forced from the race? His numbers collapsed in Nevada and South Carolina, his best early states? His numbers changed anywhere?

No, it’s not even clear that there would have been any additional domestic political scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s lucrative arrangement with Burisma, an issue that is dogging the former vice president on the campaign trail anyway because his son’s payday was so blatantly inappropriate.

The bottom line is that after tsk-tsking Trump for refusing to say in advance that he’d accept the outcome of the 2016 election, Democrats have steadfastly refused to truly accept the 2016 result (allegedly the work of the Russians) and now are signaling they won’t accept next year’s election either, should they lose again.

Given their druthers, Trump wouldn’t be an option for the voters. They are rushing their impeachment, in part, because they know that as November 2020 approaches, it becomes steadily less tenable to portray the man who wants to run in an election as the threat to democracy and the people who want to stop him as its champions.

With every day that passes, the Democrats risk creating the perception that they themselves are a threat to the 2020 election.

Lessons from Europe, or ‘Europe’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, December 08, 2019

A nationwide series of protests, some of them violent, is convulsing France. The proximate cause is pension reform, and the French are having a splendid time: In news photos, the protesters are positively beaming, and a recent BBC report described the mood, amid the arson and destruction of property, as “festive.”

I suspect that the American version of that will be less festive, when the time comes.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who as a columnist always has had a particularly unkeen sense of timing, in November attacked the “Europhobia” of centrist Democrats. “Going on about how terrible things are in France is a sure sign that you have no idea what you’re talking about,” he wrote. I do not think France is a particularly badly governed country, but the French are mad as hell about it, and surely their opinion must count for something.

If you are wondering where Professor Krugman is seeing all those centrist Democrats who were terrified of France in early autumn, it is helpful to know that the column is one long stage whisper at Steven Rattner, the Obama-administration Treasury official who wrote in the New York Times that Warren is the candidate for those who “want to live in France (economically).” Warren’s policies, Rattner wrote, would impose dirigiste European practices on U.S. firms. Rattner, who is after all an Obama guy, is generally supportive of New Deal–style welfare statism but fears Warren’s

intention to impose vast new regulatory burdens and to revamp the way business functions, which could have an even more negative effect on our economy. Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated. Shale fracking would be banned, which would send oil and natural gas prices soaring and cost millions of Americans their jobs. And on and on.

The loudest voices in the Democratic party at the moment belong to confessing socialists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and to bitter partisans such as Professor Krugman, who insists “good people can’t be good Republicans,” and his headline writer, who proclaims: “Republicans Only Pretend to Be Patriots; Republicans Don’t Believe in Democracy; The G.O.P. Goes Full Authoritarian,” etc. Conservative critics of President Donald Trump (I am one) will recognize the dynamic at work here: The angry us-and-them tribalists who control 98 percent of the conversation resent the hell out of the 2 percent of us who say, “Yes, but . . . .” As though Steven Rattner’s were a name to conjure with.

He does deserve a hearing, especially from conservatives looking (as they should be looking) for any tendency within the Democratic party that should be encouraged and that might provide some basis for future bipartisan reform efforts.

Rattner is worried less about the tax-and-spend redistribution policies in vogue among Warren et al. than he is about the socialism — the government takeover of parts of the economy — although unlike Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez, he does not choose to use that word. He worries about the hypothetical Warren administration seizing control of most major corporations because . . . the non-hypothetical Senator Warren proposes having the federal government seize control of most major corporations, i.e., all those with $1 billion or more in revenue. As Rattner notes, Warren would require these companies to go to the federal government and beg for permission to operate (corporate charters currently are written at the state level). These companies “could lose their charters if they failed to adhere to an often vague set of principles,” he says. “That would give a President Warren enormous power to punish companies (including putting them out of business) for not adhering to her subjective vision of corporate responsibility.” Why bother owning the means of production when you can avoid a lot of trouble and still treat them as your property?

Rattner’s case against Warren contains much: new schemes of corporate welfare and political steering in the name of “good American jobs,” anti-trade policies far beyond what even the Trump administration has considered, opportunistic currency devaluation, the government dictating the composition of corporate boards, etc. Rattner is a lifelong Democrat. So was Ronald Reagan before the Democratic party left him.

But what about the view from Paris?

The problem with comparisons between the United States and Europe is a lack of granularity. There is no such thing as “Europe,” economically or politically, the best efforts of the ladies and gentlemen in Brussels notwithstanding. There are many different European systems of taxation, of health care, of regulation, of providing welfare benefits. This fact is reliably lost on the American Left: Van Jones, speaking on Chris Cuomo’s program, offered the following daft claim: “In Europe, they have health care. They don’t have health-care insurance, they have health care.”

This claim is both false and preposterous. The British-style monopoly system is in fact an outlier, but even in the United Kingdom and Canada people have health insurance. Health insurance forms the basis of health-care coverage in most of Europe, from Germany to France to Switzerland to Poland. In fact, those monstrous Europeans are way out ahead of the Trump administration: You cannot get a Schengen-area visa without having health insurance.

There are many models of health care in Europe, but none of them is the one that American progressives such as Van Jones seem to believe defines “health care in Europe.”

The lack of specificity is widespread. For example, many progressives will point out that industrial and manufacturing workers in Germany seem to be in pretty good shape, and that their employers are in pretty good shape, and that Germany has much more powerful unions than does the United States. That is all true. But it also is true that Germany’s biggest union, IG Metall, is of a very different character from its U.S. counterparts such as the corrupt and feckless UAW and many others. Of course, our progressive friends will say, “Yes, but when we say we want more power for unions, we want more power for effective and honest unions, not corrupt and ineffective ones.” But that is just another way of saying, “The idealized version of what I want is ideal.” The real world matters, too.

We hear this sort of thing very often when it comes to taxes. In most of the wealthy countries of Western Europe, taxes are a bit higher or much higher than they are in the United States. (Switzerland is an exception.) In the prosperous Nordic countries, taxes are radically higher than in the United States. But being higher is only one way in which they are different. For example, many European countries have relatively low taxes on business income and on capital gains. Sweden has lower corporate income taxes than does the United States; so do Switzerland, Norway, and Denmark. By contrast, most European countries impose substantially higher income taxes on the middle and upper-middle classes than does the United States: Sweden’s top rate (of nearly 70 percent) kicks in at around $100,000, but relatively few people pay it.

Direct comparisons are in some ways difficult to make, being either so oversimplified as to be false or so complex as to be unusable. A lot of very happy and stable countries such as Germany, Norway, and France collect between 45 percent and 55 percent of GDP in taxes, but then so do Cuba and Lesotho. The gross figures do not tell us very much that is useful. France has been recognizably France for a long time, under many different kinds of government policies. There was an England before there was an NHS.

Professor Krugman tells us Eurosclerosis is a thing of the past and that France’s lower per capita economic output is really only a matter of vacation time, “a choice about work-life balance, not an economic problem.” The BBC tells us France is “paralyzed.” The French prime minister, Édouard Philippe, offers the very intelligent rationale (U.S. leaders would do well to heed it) that France’s pension system is not yet in a meltdown, which means that this is precisely the time to act, “reasonably, progressively, without brutality, when we still have time.”

Maybe you think the lessons from Europe are that we should have more generous health-care subsidies and more bicycle paths. Fair enough. But maybe the lesson is that our tax system is too easy on the middle class and that entitlement reform is best undertaken earlier rather than later.

There is much to be said for many European practices, things to admire both for the Left and the Right in the United States. But Rattner’s principal complaint with Senator Warren is not that she supports larger health-care subsidies or more stable fiscal policy. It is that she would use the power of the federal government to radically alter the legal regime in which major U.S. firms do business, centralizing market power in Washington, subjecting corporate boards and managers to political litmus tests, and diminishing the property rights of shareholders. If there is a very good model of Senator Warren’s desired policies producing the desired results, it is not to be found in Europe, or even in “Europe.”

We Are Not Winning the Trade War

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, December 04, 2019

The problem with winning a race to the bottom is that you end up at the bottom.

President Donald Trump’s idiotically conceived and incompetently executed trade war with China shows no signs of abating — the president himself said this week that he’d be happy to see negotiations drag on throughout the coming year — and now Trump has decided to expand the theater to Brazil and Argentina.

Trump says he is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum from Brazil and Argentina because those two countries have engaged in a policy of competitive currency devaluation, i.e., they have artificially driven down the value of the real and the peso, respectively, in order to gain an unfair advantage for their exports. Trump charges that this has hurt U.S. farmers and says he is imposing these sanctions on their behalf. The Commerce Department, Treasury, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the governments of Brazil and Argentina learned about this on Twitter in the wee hours, because that is how the Trump administration makes policy.

Like a great deal of what comes out of this White House, the new tariffs and the rationale undergirding them exhibit a very fine blend of dishonesty and stupidity.

It is true that the real and the peso have declined in value of late. But this is not programmatic devaluation; rather, both Brazil and Argentina are in the midst of severe self-imposed crises in their national economies (when are these South American giants not in the midst or on the verge of economic crises?) caused by excessive public debt and misgovernment, afflictions with which the United States is increasingly familiar but as yet resistant to, owing to the sheer size and dynamism of our economy. When a nation’s finances tank, its currency tends to fall in value as investors scurry off rodentially from the keeling schooner that is the ailing nation’s economy. Your people get poorer, and so do your businesses, particularly those with debt denominated in foreign currencies and those that buy a lot of imported goods or inputs. But your exports do get cheaper. That’s the one real upside.

Another way of putting that is that as the economy collapses and the cratering national currency immiserates the people, they become more like the people in poor developing countries who must capitalize on the only asset they have: their poverty. A low standard of living makes labor cheap, and it makes locally produced commodities and finished goods relatively cheap in export markets.

Being poor is the worst kind of competitive advantage to have, and only two kinds of people pursue that advantage as a matter of national policy. The first kind is tyrants, such as the ones in Beijing, who for years artificially lowered the standard of living of the Chinese people on the theory that the Communist bosses could play a long game in which economic development would happen on their terms and under their control, without much real economic power accruing outside of the state. Keeping people unnecessarily poor in order to consolidate the party’s political power and to maintain a firm nationalist whip hand over politically sensitive industries is a monstrous policy but one that has its admirers in managerial nationalists in the United States both left and right.

This policy also appeals to a second kind of people: idiots.

That would be us.

Americans are so selfish that we even envy foreigners their poverty. Americans — President Trump and his advisers are hardly alone in this — look at the situation of Argentina, Brazil, China, India, etc., and say to themselves: “That’s not fair! We need some of that, too!” We believe, without quite putting it that way or understanding what we are advocating, that we would be better off if we were more like the poor, low-wage, backward countries with troubled currencies. And so President Trump has taken a break from labeling other countries’ “currency manipulators” to demand that the Federal Reserve engage in a new policy of more robust currency manipulation. Fed chairman Jerome Powell, to his credit, so far has refused to comply. Devaluing the U.S. dollar would make American consumers and businesses poorer. It would be equivalent to a tax on savings far hungrier than the one Elizabeth Warren contemplates. It would ruin businesses that import components and raw materials: We already have seen this ironically manifested in the ruination of a few domestic steel businesses by the Trump administration’s tax on imported steel, which was enacted without anybody apparently giving a second’s thought to the fact that many U.S. steel companies make a lot of their money processing imported scrap. The tariffs are a tax on one class of goods; devaluing the dollar is a tax on everything, especially on savings and investment.

Our friend Larry Kudlow is a partisan of “King Dollar.” The guy he works for advocates regicide.

What’s particularly idiotic and dishonest here is that none of this was necessary, and none of it has anything to do with monetary policy in Argentina or Brazil. U.S. farmers have lost market share to the South Americans not because of crafty decisions made in Buenos Aires or Brasilia but because of dumb ones made in Washington by the Trump administration, i.e., by the same cabal of backward, slavering incompetents who now are rolling out this new policy.

How?

When the Trump administration enacted tariffs on China, Beijing enacted retaliatory tariffs, some of which targeted American soybean farmers. The Chinese import a lot of U.S.-grown soybeans: The Chinese like pork, and pigs like soybeans. (Most Chinese soy imports are used for animal feed, not tofu.) Soon, U.S. soybean producers, who had spent decades and a considerable amount of money building their Chinese export market, found themselves essentially shut out of China. But the Chinese didn’t stop importing soybeans. They just turned to new producers. As dumb luck would have it — emphasis on the dumb — this trade war coincided with a glut in the worldwide soybean market. When beans are scarce, Northern Hemisphere producers and Southern Hemisphere producers in effect alternate as providers for big export markets. But with lots of beans on the market, and a whole lot more beans in storage, Beijing had the option of simply shutting out U.S. producers with only modest effects on domestic prices. The outbreak of swine fever in China also resulted in the death of 100 million pigs, which took some of the edge off demand.

The American Soybean Association had an office in Beijing for a quarter century before U.S.-grown beans started hitting Chinese feed troughs. Export markets don’t just organize themselves — that enormous and enormously profitable export operation took time and money to build. It took only a few strokes of a politician’s pen to destroy it. The U.S. position in China almost certainly has been permanently diminished — President Trump can sign whatever trade deal he manages to negotiate (bear in mind that the Great Negotiator couldn’t even make a deal on his beloved wall when his own party controlled both houses of Congress), but the damage is done and will not easily be undone. That’s the cost of political incompetence and ignorant adventuring: The productive value of an entire sector of U.S. agribusiness has been permanently diminished because a politician who couldn’t tell a soybean from a hairy coconut let a fit of nationalist pique run away with him — and didn’t have anybody around to tell him: “Hey, dummy — don’t do that.”

Now President Trump proposes to mitigate the effects of his incompetently executed trade war by expanding that incompetently executed trade war. He is trying to cure arsenic poisoning with cyanide.

Who is poorer? American farmers, for one, and others involved in agriculture. (It never seems to occur to anybody that most farmers’ biggest asset, their land, is worth less when its products are cut off from major overseas markets. And the bankers who have accepted that land as collateral have diminished assets, too, as do people invested in those banks, and so on and so forth, throughout the economy in subtle connective tendrils.) If the president is successful in devaluing the dollar, then Americans as a whole will be worse off, too: And if we should happen to devalue our currency to the extent that it falls as fast as the Argentine peso has? Argentina’s inflation rate was above 50 percent in October. Does that sound like the road to victory to you?

But at least we are sticking it to the Chinese, right? Don’t be too sure. Xi Jinping is doing fine, and China’s economy in the third quarter grew at three times the U.S. rate.

Funny kind of “winning” for the Trump administration.

Good Riddance to Kamala Harris

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, December 03, 2019

Senator Kamala Harris laughs during the U.S. Democratic presidential candidates debate at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. November 20, 2019. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

Per Edward-Isaac Dovere, Kamala Harris is no longer running for president. This is excellent, welcome news — the cause for celebration. Good riddance! May Harris’s failed attempt to find higher office destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.

I’m told that I’m not supposed to feel like this — or, at least, that if I do feel like this, I’m not supposed to say so in public. People worked on that campaign, you see. People tried really hard. But that, I’m afraid, is a load of old nonsense. Harris was running for the presidency, which is another way of saying that she was running to acquire power. I did not want her to have that power. It is true that some people tried their best to help her gain that power. They’re probably upset today. But they’ll get over it. She’s not that special.

On the contrary: She’s a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far has been to fight “tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors”; who has openly promised to act without Congress; and who showed us exactly who she is during the Kavanaugh hearings, at which she implied that she knew something terrible about the nominee for the sole purpose of sharing the insinuation on her Twitter feed. Harris is a woman who, if successful (“successful”), would have overseen the mass confiscation of millions of firearms, the seizing of patents, the federalization of abortion law, and, depending on the polling, the elimination of (her word) the private health insurance plans of 180 million people.

Everything that is wrong with American politics is summed up in Kamala Harris. She’s a weather vane. She’s dishonest. She’s a coward. She’s condescending. And she’s a phony. She’s the answer to no useful or virtuous question. Nothing good has come from her election. She has nothing of value to offer America. Goodbye. Bad luck. That’s all, folks.