Lego Lockdown

The Lego section of the Toy department of the local Fred Meyer store.

Locking merchandise cases are popping up more and more often in local stores. Whether they're for liquor, Lego sets, laundry detergent or underwear, the number of local stores that use them to prevent theft is growing.

When, that is, the stores even stay open. The Fred Meyer in Redmond, which I'd visited from time to time, has been closed, ostensibly due to a high level of shoplifting. It's the sort of story I've heard several times in the area... employees are told to not challenge thieves, for fear that they are armed, and so people learned that they could simply walk out with armloads of merchandise, and the store eventually simply closes.

This sort of thing is usually treated as a matter of corporate economics when the news media takes it on, but perhaps it should be covered as a policy story. The northern set of Seattle Eastside suburbs aren't exactly low income; there are enough Microsoft (and other tech company) millionaires in the area for McMansions to be fairly common. While poor people from other parts if the region have cars, too, and can drive to other locations to steal things, I suspect that there are a good number local people with an eye towards what they may be able to get for free. While the President chases supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the economy, and consumer confidence, continue to limp along.

And given the number of technology jobs that have been eliminated, so that Microsoft, Amazon and the like can pay for the massive capitol expenditures needed to fund the construction and operation of massive datacenters to power generative automation, it's likely that many people whose livelihoods were downstream of those tech workers are also suffering.

The Administration may be content to ignore what's going on in Blue states, in order to focus on the President's pet projects, but, sooner or later, something's going to need to be done.
 

Worry, Worry

As with most technology, the problem that many people appear to have with generative automation isn't the technology itself; it's the idea that it's being deployed as a weapon against them by other people.

The United States is perhaps the worst place in the world for generative automation, because it's a society where circles of care tend to be small. If the negative consequences from the rollout of some or another technology don't land on the individual, their family or their friends, it's not of much concern. As is common, "not my problem" equates to "not a problem."

And I think that this is what's leading to the current wave of anxiety in the white-collar workforce. Blue-collar communities that have survived their own waves of downsizing, and the increased unemployment that came with it, aren't going to stand up for the same people who showed, by in large, little sympathy for them. And the investor class tends to see every dollar that goes to labor as a direct hit to their broader financial goals; and are willing to bet that enough of a customer base will remain for companies that layoffs will translate directly into increased returns.

And so people in technology are learning the lesson that so many other previously have learned; the United States believes that it can thrive even when fairly large segments of the population are barely (or not at all) getting by. Sure, the effect of ubiquitous automation may be an economic collapse that results in a repeat of the New Deal, but given the federal government's current willingness to fund subsidies with debt, that may not be as simple as people think it is.

Determinative

Security is never free, but policy determines who pays for it.
Bruce Schneier, "US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers," Schneier on Security. Thursday, 2 April, 2026

This is one of those statements that takes what would otherwise be a lot of verbiage, and boils it down into something both succinct and informative. The bigger picture, of course, is that Mr. Schneier's statement is true of everything. Safety, health, education, sidewalks, love... all of them can be slotted into that sentence, and it would still be true. One might even update the old canard of "Freedom is never free" with those last seven words to get something more worth talking about.

And "policy" covers a lot of ground. Sure law and regulation, but social norms and unspoken mores also count as policy, even if they are less stable; enforcement can be even more sure.

American society implements policy that does a lot of shifting of who pays for things. Sometimes, out of an apparent concern for the general welfare, but other times out of an apparent desire to hide the ball, and the true costs of things from those who eventually foot the bill. In the end, it's the lack of transparency of the system that causes the problems. Even without an intent to obscure things, the general opacity of the system means that the general public winds up supporting policies for which it will directly shoulder the costs, even when the intent is to have those costs borne elsewhere. And when anger boils over, and there is a hunt for the sources of people's misery, the search tends to focus in the wrong places.

It would be nice to be able to say that keeping Mr. Schneier's words in mind would help with understanding where the buck ultimately stops (or whose pockets it comes from), but the world is never that simple. Still, I'm pleased to have come across so articulate a distillation of the concept; I think that keeping it in my back pocket will help.

Unreturned

I was listening to the Altruism After USAID episode of Slate Magazine's Money Talks podcast a few days ago, and the guest, NPR's Mary Childs made the point that in the wake of USAID halting disbursements to non-governmental organizations and the like, that the money being withheld couldn't be replaced by philanthropic organizations.

My first thought that this was a matter of will. After all, if the United States government was no longer paying to fight malaria, and instead giving the public tax cuts, nothing stops that selfsame public from deciding to donate the savings to charities and keep the programs funded. The Trump Administration and Elon Musk's DOGE operation targeted USAID because they understood that many Americans feel poor enough that they resent the government giving money to ameliorate the problems of people far away.

But a moment's further thought put that idea to bed. After all, the federal budget isn't balanced; it's propped up by some pretty serious borrowing from global capital markets. Of course, people expect that the United States is good for it, which is why the government can borrow at favorable rates, but it's debt all the same.

And that's really the part that private philanthropy cannot replace. No rational lender is going to loan a charity several millions (or perhaps even tens of thousands) of dollars to save lives in third-world countries. Because there's no profit in it. Not even China, which makes a big deal out of its investments in poor nations, is doing so out of generosity; they expect a positive return, and when nations start defaulting on payments, China is going to start claiming assets as collateral. Charities, more or less by definition, don't impose repayment terms that entail seizing what few assets poor nations still have.

Given the fact that the United States borrows simply to keep the lights on and doors open towards the end of the fiscal year, some amount of the funding that USAID was providing was in the form of money borrowed from elsewhere. Specifically because poor countries tend to be bad investments, for any number of reasons.

Perhaps it's time that this was more openly acknowledged. There's nothing wrong with the understanding that, as a wealthy nation, the United States has an obligation to alleviate poverty in other parts of the world. And it's true that many Americans overestimate (sometimes wildly) the amount of money that goes into such philanthropy, as a proportion of their annual taxes. Still, this is part of what representative government is all about; having to make the case to the people who will be, ultimately, footing the bill.

Yo Ho Ho

The United States has apparently seized a tanker ship carrying oil from Venezuela to Cuba. The stated rationale for this is that the ship has been sanctioned for, at some point in the past, carrying oil from Iran, when that nation was barred from exporting.

I hadn't realized that vehicles could be sanctioned this way. Until now, I'd been under the impression that sanctioned were always leveled against individuals and organizations, whether those were businesses, governments or other entities. I looked at a United Nations page on sanctioned vessels, and it seems the main penalty there is that such ships are to be barred from ports. Which, honestly, seems kind of toothless to me. After all, if someone is sending goods into North Korea, it makes sense that they would simply use ships that had the range to make it all the way there without needing to make any stops along the way.

So in this sense, the Trump Administration seizing the ship makes a certain amount of sense. What I'm a bit dubious about is the fate of the cargo.

Asked what would happen with the oil, Trump said: "We keep it, I guess."

US seizes sanctioned oil tanker off coast of Venezuela, Trump says

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like it's making the United States Coast Guard into commerce raiders at best, and privateers at worse. But maybe there's some rule that says that people ship things on sanctioned vessels at their own risk.

Still, it creates a perverse incentive for President Trump, at least, to wait for sanctioned vessels to load up on cargoes and then seize them, if the cargo is then free for the taking. This is an act that I can see other nations getting in on. Although President Trump does seem to have a real soft spot for anything having to do with petroleum.

But I wonder about the real goal here. It seems fairly clear that this is a means of putting pressure on the Maduro Administration, although knowing President Trump, I'm doubtful that much thought has gone into what happens if it works. There may be an attempt to set up a pro-Washington client government in Caracas, but I'd be willing to bet that any such effort would be doomed to failure, especially if it seemed that the United States was hoping to set up the sort of cheap resource hub that the Bush Administration supposedly had in mind for Iraq. I suspect that Russia and China already have accounts set up to bankroll and anti-American insurgency if President Maduro loses his grip on power.

The United States playing pirate as a way of throwing its weight around will, of course, have consequences. But not for the President or Congressional Republicans. The rest of us will have to wait and see what this most recent act of international bullying costs us. This could be a very expensive tanker's worth of crude, when it's all said and done. 

Punch Drunk

Lisa Hawkins, the chief of Communications and Public Affairs for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States posted on LinkedIn that "It's time to put American spirits back on the shelves in Canada. U.S. distillers have nothing to do with this trade dispute."

The overall response to Ms. Hawkins' post was sharp and swift. Several Canadians in the comments thread, associating the spirits industry in America with Red states, were quick to point out that the distillers got what they paid for, and the point that Canadian businesses are just as blameless as the distillers was also raised.

What rational incentive do people in Canada have to take actions that the Trump administration will surely see as needy and weak? The trade dispute that Ms. Hawkins notes that "U.S. distillers have nothing to do with" didn't start in Ottawa. It started in Washington. If the White House is willing to sacrifice the American spirits industry as part of its unilateral trade warring, it doesn't make sense for Canadians to roll over to bail them out. The problem lies with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Ms. Hawkins' appeal to Canada demonstrates that Distilled Spirits Council lacks (or is afraid to use) the access and/or the influence to obtain the Administration's agreement to mitigate it.

President Trump used to claim that trade wars were painless, and easy to win. He's now changed that tune, saying that the manufacturing boom is between 18 and 24 months away, and that there will be pain in the meantime. We'll see if the distillers can hold on that long, or if they can convince Americans to drink more liquor.

Two Plus Two

I was browsing LinkedIn and came across the following set of headlines in the "LinkedIn News" feature.

It's an interesting disconnect. The point of the Trump Administration sending Elon Musk into aggressively (indiscriminately?) cut headcount and expenses in the Federal government is, supposedly, that overly high spending on wasteful, fraudulent and/or abusive line items is a drag on the broader economy. The Federal workforce is supposedly so bloated and inefficient that one can simply fire large numbers of people, and not really impact the functioning of the place in any way. Now, we know that last bit is somewhat off, since there have been at least two agencies where there's now a scramble to undo Mr. Musk's "management by random acts of chainsaw" approach.

But the disconnect between the headlines in red and those in blue is what stood out for me. The central promise of the Trump White House is that all of the things they are doing are going to lead to a greater demand for domestic labor, and accordingly, more and higher-paying jobs. So why aren't we starting to see that happen? It's understood that business and investors are, generally speaking, reactive to changes in government policy that they understand will be beneficial to them. Consider investor's recent moves concerning Mr. Musk's X, which may have managed to increase its valuation by a factor of 5 since the fall:

Investors betting on X are probably making a gamble on its leader, not its business — similar to how Trump’s financially struggling social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group (parent company of Truth Social), has a market value of more than $6 billion, even though its revenue for all of 2024 was just $3.6 million.

In other words, Mr. Musk is close to the President, and investors think that Mr. Musk is going to be able to parlay that into profitability for X that they will be able to share in, even though X's revenues are nowhere near the levels that they were at when Mr. Musk originally purchased Twitter. And investor confidence in Trump Media & Technology Group speaks for itself.

 So if investors are willing to put money in to X and Trump Media & Technology Group based simply on the fact that Donald Trump is President and Elon Musk a "Special Government Employee," why aren't investors expecting that the Trump Administration's actions will buoy and broader economy. I suspect it's because they aren't stupid. They understand the potential downstream benefits of investing in Elon Musk and Donald Trump as people. The companies are merely the vehicles for that.

President Trump's early moves in the White House aren't designed to drive aggregate demand in the economy. And the people who understand that, people for whom acting on faith has higher costs than they're willing to pay because they are judged directly on the financial performance of their investments, are behaving accordingly. President Trump and Elon Musk may promise viable returns; but they're not setting the United States up to follow in that.

Out of Order

The problem with the "Department of Government Efficiency," as summed up in a single headline: US government tries to rehire nuclear staff it fired days ago.

While simply bulldozing a home is one way to "clean up," that's not the same as it being an effective way to do it. Simply going in an firing people whom working-class White people in Red states feel are slackers is not the same as doing the work to streamline an organization; and the people whose opinions really matter, like business executives and investors understand this. The fact that the government of the United States spends more money than it takes in has been on people's radars ever since Ronald Reagan decided that using deficit spending to fund lowering taxes was a good idea. And there's going to be real benefits in fixing that. But it has to be an actual fix, and not simply shutting things off, and then asking what they do.

Top Down

The reason why people turn a blind eye to it is that Thailand is, of course, an incredible economic success story. And this was part of the story with Bangladesh. Its economy was growing so fast that people turned a blind eye to the authoritarian government. Thailand is far, far, wealthier... I mean, it's a pretty poor country, when I first went there in the early 80s. It's now a proper upper-middle income country and, you know, an economic miracle. And this is one of the problems, that the link between being a liberal democracy and delivering growth, which, it was this sort of story for 200 years, has been broken. And increasingly from China to Thailand, people are looking at these more authoritarian models and saying, "Well, we don't really mind as long as we're getting wealthier."
Rory Stewart. "Iran’s Imminent Retaliation & Is The Press Softer On Labour?" The Rest Is Politics Podcast. Thursday, 15 August, 2024.

In other words, if it's not broken, why fix it? For supporters of liberal democracy, and other representative forms of government, autocracy is broken by definition. And they'll point to places such as Venezuela and the like to make their point. But in China, Thailand and other similar places, the fact that the government is autocratic, or even totalitarian hasn't resulted in obvious mismanagement of the place. And so widespread resistance to the regime isn't present, because most people don't see the need to change the government to better their material conditions. And people will put up with a lot if it means raising their standards of living.

Liberal democracy is a means, not an end. If it's going to persist, it has to delivery what the populace demands of it. Increased standards of living may be what people are after, but things like national pride have also pushed people to suffer, if not embrace, governments that appear to be disasters from the outside. This, of course, is true of almost any government, but the individual freedoms that many liberal democracies provide mean that they can, intentionally or not, vote themselves out of existence if they are not careful.

And presuming that support for representative governments is a moral imperative can easily become a form of not being careful. Much is made of politicians who have little patience for "democratic norms," but those are also politicians who tend to understand what their constituents want and expect from them, and they put in the effort to deliver it. And not needing to work around the law or political opposition parties (especially opposition parties motivated by negative partisanship) can make the job much easier than it is elsewhere.

People understand which side their bread may be buttered on, and they understand costs and trade-offs. Western governments today aren't, in my opinion, doing a very good job of making the cost-benefit analysis work to their benefits. Some of it is simply a matter of maturity. Thailand, China and Bangladesh started from much lower baselines; so long as their governments were reasonably competent and free of corruption, the nations were going to grow; they were well placed to take advantage of changes in global demand. Europe and North America are going to have much harder times developing industries that both create a lot of value and employ large numbers of people at better than the current prevailing wages. But some of it is also the kruft, to use the technical term, that builds up in highly complex governments that have formalized and involved processes for change. Take generative automation tools. If various forms of both limited and capable artificial intelligence start erode the need for human mental labor what the industrial revolution did to physical labor, the advanced world is going to undergo a period of serious upheaval. If action is not proactive, it will need to be quick, and slow bureaucratic processes will not cut the mustard. If autocracies prove to be more nimble and responsive, people will continue to sour on liberal democracy, and the citizens of autocracies will be even more convinced that turning a blind eye was the right choice.

Possessed, and Eaten

The Week: The federal government is spending ever more money servicing an ever-larger debt pile. [...] Mostly it's because the government doesn't collect enough tax revenue to cover the cost of federal programs — a problem exacerbated by multiple rounds of tax cuts.

Also The Week: More home sales trigger capital gains tax. Here's how it works and how to avoid it.

And, okay, I get it, taxes suck. And this is where I would normally say "but it seems strange to point out that the United States doesn't collect enough tax revenue to cover the cost of services for the citizens, and then clickbait those same citizens with a potential tax-avoidance strategy." But this is the way the world tends to work. People want "free" government services and benefits; note the constant calls for "free" healthcare from the American Left, or calls for more military and police spending, coupled with lower taxes, from the Right. But there's no such thing as free... someone has to pay for these things. And that would be us, the taxpayers. Granted, typical answers to this are that "billionaires" aren't paying "their fair share" of taxes or welfare programs for the undeserving poor are rife with "waste, fraud and abuse," and so the government should be going after them and leaving the rest of us alone, but I don't recall anyone running a campaign on even returning to the tax rates of the late Reagan Administration or rolling back the welfare state to pre-New Deal. So it doesn't seem that anyone regards this as a winning political strategy.

The United States runs up debts because the citizenry wants things, either for themselves or others, but chafes at what it perceives to be crushing tax burdens. And politicians respond to that, at least if they want to stay in office. And it works to keep them in office because kicking the can down the road, and laying the blame on someone else, gets people what they want. The Week doesn't have a coherent editorial position on this because it's catering to an audience that doesn't have a coherent position on taxation and debt, either.

Doing For Oneself

And at the risk of coming across a broken record (albeit one with a very long cycle time), when someone comes to view themselves as essential to the well-being of another person or persons, they view what is best for themselves as also being in the direct interest of those they are looking after. To fall back on my Good Shepherd analogy yet again, a shepherd may be utterly convinced that sacrificing one or two of the animals in the flock to save themselves is the best thing for the flock. After all, where would they be without the shepherd? And so even if the shepherd aids themselves at the direct expense of their charges, the flock is still better off than it would be under the alternative.
Minding the Flock

I was reminded of this when I was reading a news story about the nakedly self-serving provisions that organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, U.S. Wheat Associates and the National Association of Wheat Growers want to see encoded into law as part of the "American Farmers Feed the World Act." The simple description is that it would prevent a federal program called Food For Peace from giving money or vouchers to recipients. It would also prevent the program from buying food locally in the countries where it works. Instead it would require that the program's budget be used to buy food from American farmers, and use American companies to export it out. It would also move the program from the United States Agency for International Development to the Department of Agriculture.

One could see U.S. Wheat Associates and its allies as being deliberately greedy, backing approaches that work to entrench poverty abroad, rather than fighting it, with the full intention of lining their pockets at taxpayer expense. But I suspect that, as with the Good Shepherd analogy that I keep coming back to, that leaders in American agribusiness see this not as helping themselves, but as helping everyone. And I suspect that this is something that a lot of people outside of the United States realize about it; the tendency to see itself as indispensable to the world. And so the United States see aggressively looking after it own interests as something that it's doing for the world at large.

Of course, this way of looking at the world (and, perhaps, avoiding looking at oneself) existed prior to the formation of the United States, and it will exist even once the United States has passed into history. What's interesting about it is how open it all is. The fact that the United States effectively dumps commodities (clothing being another big one) on poor nations in a manner that crushes their local industries (and therefore, hampers their ability to lift themselves out of poverty) has been known, and talked about, for years. The piece on the NPR website is far from the first time that I've read about it.

Of course, a sense of entitlement also fits the bill. I'm sure that if one were to ask advocates for American agribusiness, they would rather confidently claim that American farmers are deserving of the aid money that is funneled to them, even it means that it's spent less efficiently than it could be. After all, what good is being exceptional, if it doesn't come with financial benefit?

And Going, and Going...

Back when I first started Nobody In Particular, nearly 17 years ago, my first real post was about some activists who met in Lake Forest Park, Washington, and their idea that the modern United States was, or was on the verge of becoming, a police state. At the time I chalked up their attitude to a combination of paranoia, wishful thinking and a certain freedom to not have to consider that political stands that they took might have consequences.

But after more than a decade and a half of encountering any number of other people who like to tell themselves that the United States has become a genuine police state, I've come to realize that a certain level of narcissism can also play into the mix. I noted back in 2006 that "I don't understand what they are doing that would make the Federal government think them enough of a threat to actually do something to silence them." I suspect that I just should have asked them; they likely would have told me. I suspect that I wouldn't have agreed with their assessment that whatever actions they were taking were really that much of a threat to the status quo, but that's beside the point. The fact is that the activists themselves see their actions as a threat to the wealthy and powerful. There are times, I think where people cast themselves as the "scrappy underdog" out of ego as much as anything else.

Recently, I came across a post on LinkedIn from The Epoch Times, pitching their latest media project, a movie by Dinesh D'Sousa (who else?) that claims (wait for it...) that the modern United States has become a police state. Part of the rationale seems to be a bit of revisionist history and selective understanding of the law. People sent to prison after the rioting in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, 2021 are apparently "political prisoners," rather than people who committed some fairly obvious felonies.

In any event, a number of people were quick to cosign The Epoch Times' assessment of the situation; mainly, I suspect, because the anti-communist Times tends to see the American Left as only one step away from being the next iteration of a communist dictatorship. This gives them common cause with movement Conservatives (such as Mr. D'Sousa) who see any social program that benefits someone other than themselves (or those they favor) as a death knell for Truth, Justice and the American Way. (Not to mention their own cultural and financial interests.) And like other people who see a police state where it's hard to otherwise conclude that one exists, they see their agitation as some sort of existential threat to a power structure that, in all likelihood, barely pays any attention to them. And in that sense, warnings of a creeping police state are self-congratulatory, calling on people to pat themselves on the back for being able to push the current system into wrongdoing in order to save itself.

Not At All

I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

I know a number of people who would call themselves anything from Libertarians to Anarchists. (While I am given to understand that in some places outside of the United States, the two are considered synonymous, in common American usage, there's a fair amount of daylight between the two.) And they, for the most part, are all in favor of Mr. Thoreau's sentiment, even though they are not all aware of its source. For my part, I can sympathize. I've certainly had my share of occasions to wonder why this or that function or duty should be carried out by a department of government, when it seemed that others were as well, if not better, placed to take it up. And there are certainly things that people would prefer that government be involved in mainly because they view it as a means of exerting control over others. So there are times when I most definitely see the appeal of small government.

That particular ship, however, has set sail and gone out of sight of the shore, only to strike an iceberg and now find itself resting comfortably on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And so those people who desire small government must instead console themselves with an incompetent or dysfunctional one. The House of Representatives being a case in point. With Representative Matt Gaetz and his supporters having ousted Representative Kevin McCarthy from the role of Speaker of the House without having a replacement candidate on deck, the process of electing and installing a new speaker has been something of, well, a disaster. (Not that this should be a surprise to anyone, really.) After Representative Steve Scalise concluded that he wouldn't be able to muster enough votes to win election and walked away from the job, Representative Jim Jordan gave it a shot. Being a favorite of the more conservative (for some definition of "conservative," that is) segment of the Republican Party, many people seemed to conclude that his election was something they were entitled to. Accordingly, those Republicans who were perceived as being insufficiently supportive pf Representative Jordan started to receive harassment and threats; and so did their families. Representative Jordan disavowed such tactics and took to social media to say: "hey. cut that out." (Because this is what's expected of politicians.) But the damage was already done, so now Representative Jordan has bowed (or been forced) out of consideration. This lead to a plan being being floated to give the current acting Speaker, Representative Patrick McHenry, more powers, so that he could take the role on more formally, and allow the House of Representatives to conduct business. It went over like a lead balloon. So as of now, there are about 10 Republican Representatives who are interested in the job. (And in keeping with popular stereotypes of the party, only one is non-White, and none are women.) We'll see if any of them manage to get anywhere.

In the meantime, no business is being conducted in the House of Representatives. Which is also in keeping with the Republican brand. Personally, I would rather have seen Republicans work to create private sector or civil society institutions to take over those functions that they feel that government doesn't do well, but this way plays well in Peoria, I suppose. (Not that I've been back to Peoria anytime recently.) I understand those people for whom gridlock is the closest thing to a genuinely small and unobtrusive government (or at least one that will only bother people they don't like) that they are going to get, and so understand there to be a silver lining in all of the Republican infighting. But I suspect that it will be short-lived if it prompts people to vote for representatives who believe in getting things done.

Unprocessed

Dame Caroline [Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons media committee] then wrote to Rumble, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook owner Meta asking if they would follow suit.

In her letter to Rumble chief executive Chris Pavlovski, she said: "While we recognise that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr Brand, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.

"We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand's ability to earn money on the platform.

"We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour."
Rumble rejects MP's 'disturbing' letter over Russell Brand income

Expecting that someone would have their income withheld on the basis of accusations? No wonder "cancel culture" has acquired a bad name. The fact that legislators would feel that it is appropriate to ask that media platforms take unilateral actions without allowing the accused the chance to defend themselves against whatever allegations have been leveled speaks to the need politicians feel to mirror the judgements that are rendered in the court of public opinion. (And, of course, Parliamentarian Dinenage won't be on the hook if it turns out that Russel Brand is cleared, and sues over the withheld funds.)

The problem with following the judgements of the court of public opinion is that they are fickle. This makes substituting those judgements for due process a more dangerous practice than it is often given credit for. The public is not accountable to anyone for popular opinions. Once can imagine a vocal segment of the public being up in arms over YouTube demonetizing a person's videos for some breach of the terms of service, where the public is on the side of the video creator. Legislators will have a difficult time in asking companies to follow their own rules if they advocate for those rules to be set aside every time they start feeling the heat from some or another group of their constituents.

But more importantly, deciding that the processes and procedures that organizations and institutions have for investigating and sanctioning violations of rules need not apply when some number of people are sufficiently vocal about it, or someone is accused of something unpopular has the effect of turning rules and the like into means of punishing people for being unpopular or the targets of public anger, rather than being the result of a formal finding of fact - even if that finding of fact becomes a mere formality. Concepts like democracy and the rule of law are not meant to be weapons wielded against those who are out of favor, because the perception that they are is what splits societies. Especially when it appears that people in government are looking to the private sector to get around the rules that government has set for itself and/or expects the populace at large to follow. This is what lends the letter from the UK's House of Commons media committee an air of illegitimacy. Russel Brand has been accused of "inappropriate and potentially illegal" activity; and while those accusations may be very credible, he hasn't been convicted of anything yet. Placing the focus on victims shouldn't be a means of circumventing that.

Russel Brand, like a lot of people who deliberately set out to push people's buttons, hasn't done himself any favors with his behavior. That's what makes him so vulnerable to this sort of tactic. It's easy to take the allegations being made as the truth of the matter, even though, to the best of my knowledge, no charges have been filed and all of the accusations have been made anonymously. This forces any accountability to be outside of the formal structures of the legal system. Parliamentarian Dinenage doesn't have many options in calling for accountability other than to appeal to the private sector directly. (This still doesn't make it a good idea.) Mr. Brand, having made himself look bad in front of the court of public opinion (likely because he didn't predict that behavior that he thought was simply "edgy" when he did it would morph into "predatory" several years later), now finds that the public believes him capable of open sexual misconduct.

This leaves legislators in a difficult position. The public has a habit of expecting elected officials to mirror their attitudes and preconceptions back to them. And failing to do so can result in a challenger running on a promise that they will do so. That promise may be implied far more often than it's openly stated, but its there nonetheless. And the public, being merely a rather large mass of individuals, is incapable of being consistent; there will always be people for whom this or that outcome trumps other considerations. And it's worth noting that politicians are members of the public themselves. Be that as it may, however, I think that it's important that people in government not advocate for going around government; it just doesn't end well in the long term.

Peasy

Of the myriad conversations I found myself in over the long holiday weekend, the most surreal was one about homelessness and "crime." But, I think, that a lot of discussions of homelessness and "crime" have this quality, which is that they're spoken of as if they were dirt simple problems to solve, even when the person who claims so admits to having no idea of how they would (or anyone else) would actually go about crafting a lasting solution.

Part of it is, I think, that many people don't seem to understand the root cause of homelessness; which is that some number of people find that the least expensive housing available to them in the area in which they are attempting to live costs more than they can afford to pay for it. Which might seem obvious, but in that case I would remind everyone that my father's definition of "obvious" was something that's so crystal-clear that you're the only person who sees it.

The reason for the miss, in my own opinion, is the fact that very few of the people I speak to who consider homeless to be an easy problem to fix understand their own housing situation to be at all precarious. They tend to own their home, and perhaps one or two others besides. Even if they rent, they tend to do so out of choice, and while their might be circumstances that might warrant them moving for reasons not entirely of their choosing, they're not in a situation where that would land them on the street.

Even so, I tend to be surprised that their ideas of what should be done (vague as they often are) never seem to entail increasing the housing stock to the point that prices would start to come down. Rather they tend to be something akin to deportation or banishment, seemingly unaware that none of the municipal or state governments they think should be acting have the power to simply round people up, force them to go somewhere else and not return.

Likewise, their answers for the sorts of pretty crimes of poverty that bother them (and the only sort they seem to have any actual awareness of) also tend towards the cartoonishly simplistic. Want to stop people from shoplifting? A single security guard near the exit should handle that.

To be sure, what's really at work here is a fairly mild form of the tripartite structure that academics often ascribe to right-wing populism; a corrupt glass of "élites" in government do nothing about the homeless and/or petty criminals who, in turn, offer their political support to the corrupt in government. And, as always, it's "the people" are left holding the bag. The idea that these are problems that have existed for more or less the sum total of human civilization doesn't factor into it. Nor does the idea that the actions, and attitudes, may play a part. The answers to these problems are simple to implement and inexpensive to fund. Just ask them.

Holding the Bag

Sunday is my day for grocery shopping, so I went to the store this morning. Washington state, in an effort to increase the use of reusable bags, has banned most businesses from using single-use plastic and requires that they charge for paper or more durable plastic bags.

I tended to prefer paper to plastic long before this happened, and being the forgetful sort, had built up a modest stock of paper bags, which I now use to avoid paying for new ones. Some of these bags are several years old at this point, and they have drawn comments from store employees. A common comment is that the older bags are better made, and hence more durable, than the current bags.

And this makes a certain amount of sense. A store that's giving away free paper bags with every purchase is incurring an expense; every time that a customer reuses a bag, that's one less that the store has to part with. But when a store is effectively selling bags to customers, when a customer reuses that bag, the store misses out on a small amount of revenue that's nearly all profit. And so why spend money on better quality bags?

None of this is meant to be an argument against the state's policy. After all, people were terrible about making sure that the plastic bags were properly disposed of. The reusable bags, however, are a slightly different matter when compared to paper, but it is what it is. But while the lowering of bag quality was certainly an unintended consequence of the policy, I suspect that it shouldn't have been an unexpected one.

Daily Bread

So where I live, in a quiet section of the Seattle suburbs, there are a number of different places where one can buy groceries and the like. There is Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target, Costco (although Costco really isn't a grocery store),  Safeway, Albertsons, Haggen, Quality Food Centers (QFC) and Fred Meyer. Expand the radius out farther, and you'll find Wal Mart, Win Co, PCC, Grocery Outlet and some other independent stores.

QFC and Fred Meyer are both owned by the Kroger Company, the largest supermarket operator in the United States. Safeway, Albertsons and Haggen are all owned by Albertsons Companies, Incorporated, which is the second largest. And now they want to merge. Supposedly to retain their ability to compete against their smaller rivals. In order to appease regulators, the combined chain has promised to sell off a few hundred of its stores. This is nothing new. When Albertsons and Safeway merged back in 2015, they divested a number of stores. It went poorly. The American Antitrust Institute noted, according to the National Law Review, that "several stores were sold to an untested rival that could not maintain them, and, ultimately, most of these stores were shuttered or reacquired by Albertsons." That "untested rival" was Comvest Partners, a private-equity firm out of Florida, which had purchased Haggen. Under Comvest, the newly-expanded Haggen foundered badly, and, less than a year later, went into bankruptcy. Which is how Haggen came to be owned by Albertsons.

Thus did a divestiture, mandated by the Federal Trade Commission as a means to maintain competition, result in even further consolidation of the local grocery industry.

I bring all of this up because of the list which with I started off this post. While there are about a dozen names on the list, the Albertsons and Kroger-owned stores are the lion's share. Generally speaking, the "neighborhood grocery store" is going to be one of those. The two nearest stores to me are both Safeways. And that means that, more than likely, this is going to be an area where the combined company sells or closes stores. Amazon might purchase some of them, to add to it's grocery holdings. Whole Foods, however, is already a pricier and lower quality shopping experience than it had been earlier.

And the uncertainty over what is going to happen is beginning to worry people. Grocery workers are worried for their jobs. Neighborhoods are concerned about their access to grocery stores in their local areas; Albertsons kept leases on some shuttered stores, and entered into restrictive covenants on others to prevent other grocers from moving in. One neighborhood in Bellingham won't be able to use a former Albertsons location for another grocery store until 2038.

Given how thoroughly the FTC allowed the last merger to go sideways, I'm expecting that this one, if it goes through, will also be a disaster for many people. If the FTC didn't think to explicitly disallow openly anti-competitive practices like extending the leases on closed locations to prevent other companies from operating in areas vacated by the merged company last time, it seems likely that they'll miss something that turns out to be important this time as well.

And the ideas that the nation's number one and two grocery chains are merging to a) preserve their ability to stay competitive and b) provide better value to customers seem like a child saying that they really, really, need to have whatever it is they saw in a store and that they promise to be good if they're allowed to have it. It doesn't take a degree in child development to understand that they're saying what they think people want to hear.

In any event, I will admit to a morbid curiosity to see just how badly everything goes. Companies in the United States have a habit of putting metaphorical guns to the public's head whenever they want something. Accordingly, I suspect that even Chairwoman Lina Khan's open criticism (see below) of the earlier merger may not be enough to prevent this one.

The [divestiture] remedy in the Albertsons/Safeway case is arguably even harder to fathom. To allay the FTC’s concerns, the merging entities sold 146 Albertsons stores in towns and cities in the Western United States, where they competed with a Safeway, to a small supermarket chain called Haggen. Following this acquisition, the number of Haggen stores increased from 18 to 164. Even a casual observer could have predicted that Haggen would have great difficulty expanding its storefronts nearly ten-fold in a very short period of time. The skeptics have been proven right. Haggen struggled to integrate the new stores and, despite its reorganization efforts in bankruptcy, may be forced to liquidate. Underscoring how the remedy backfired, Albertsons has reacquired a number of the stores it sold through the bankruptcy process.

(As an aside, as someone who lives in the area, and has shopped at Haggen for most of the time I've been out here, Ms. Khan's statement that "Haggen struggled to integrate the new stores" is putting it very mildly. One would not have been considered foolish at the time to bet that Haggen would simply fold.)

Did You See What They Did?

I spent some time this evening wandering down a short rabbit hole of a few different news articles about how people in China see the United States. More specifically, how they understand violent crime, mainly mass shootings, in the United States. While there is a general accusation that Chinese state media, along with the government, sensationalizes the events in order to cast themselves as caring for their citizenry by comparison, I'm not sure that domestic media does a much better job of placing mass shootings into a useful context, either.

But what I found to be the most interesting thing about this is what one might understand as a point of agreement; in order to prevent citizens attacking and killing one another, what is needed is control. And some people welcome that level of control, while others recoil from it.

Faith in institutions to act on the best interests of people who are not themselves direct members of the institution is always a matter of individual outlook and worldview. The governments of both China and the United States each tend to cast the other as institutions that don't deserve the faith that people, whether their own citizens or others abroad, place in them. Each plays up what it understands to be the sins of the other while keeping quiet, via various measures, incidents that it understands might give others grounds to criticize. This is not to say that the two are equivalent, mainly because their methods are different. While supporters of China might claim that it's all a pack of malicious lies, my general understanding is that China's Communist government is somewhat more, shall we say, heavy-handed in its public-relations apparatus than the government of the United States could expect to get away with. The two-party system we have here may be a disaster for many reasons, but each party looking to call the other one out for any missteps made while in power does have some benefits.

The thing about the criticisms that the governments level at one another, however, is that they never really seem sincere. Sure, Chinese Media might proclaim that "Racism a poison running through [the] American body politic," after an event like the shooting at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, but as a Black person in the United States, I don't feel that the Chinese government cares any more about the situation of Black Americans than the Soviet government did. Likewise, who honestly thinks that the United States honestly gives the treatment of the Uyghurs in China a moment's thought outside of using it as a means to flog China for its human rights record? Each side stands up and calls the kettle black because its in their specific interests to do so.

Which is the way of the world. Transparent pretenses that ethics or principles are important are what is expected. It's the way the game is played, even when there's no apparent prize for winning. There isn't going to be some sort of worldwide referendum on which government people would rather have. And the number of people who base their purchasing decisions on such matters is vanishingly small. (As an aside, I'm always tickled when politicians talk about bringing jobs back to America from overseas. Because who would take those jobs at the rates of pay that offshore workers command? Or would by the products whose costs reflected what domestic workers would want?)

I admit to not understanding it. I think because I can't really convince myself that anyone in this entire business is being genuine; I couldn't make those sorts of arguments with a straight face if my life depended on it. Not that I think that people in China don't honestly think that their government is the best around, and the same for people in the United States. But there's that part of me that thinks that there's more looking the other way going on, than genuine blindness.

Easy Answer

You may have seen this picture before. Or one like it. Someone posted this sign a couple of miles from where I live back in 2009. There was another sign like it, which read "Cut Spending," just down the street from me. And as someone who always carries a camera around with them, I took some pictures. After I posted some of them online, they popped up all over the place. Every so often, I look around for them. One was even used by The Atlantic. Or at least a crop of it was.

Turns out there's a thriving industry of businesses that take photos from the internet, modify them in some way, then sell the modified photo as their own work. It's a hazard of posting photos on Flickr. Or anywhere online, really.

But that's beside the point.

The point that I wanted to make here is that being anti-taxes is easy. Normally because most people who are anti-taxes are really anti-money-going-to-people-they-don't-like. People advocating for cutbacks in services that they actually use and value is fairly rare. Or, as the saying goes: "There's government spending, and then there's my government spending." And so people fight over whose ox is going to be gored.

There is an easy way to lower tax burdens, and most politicians have figured out what it is; simply borrow the money. Citizens receive the services they want and avoid taxes they don't want. At least for a time. Although, to be sure, it might be quite a long time. And it may turn out to be sustainable. A change in the economy might generate enough revenue to retire debts that previously lacked the funding sources to properly service them. It's a gamble, but gambles sometimes do pay off. The question here is how many people understand that they're rolling the dice?

And Justices For All

After oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, it's been considered pretty much a given that the judicial precedent set in Roe v Wade will be overturned. Whether this is a good or a bad thing seems to largely depend on what one thinks about abortion rights. Which is fair, given that this case is about the state of Mississippi wanting to either substantially limit or do away with the practice within its territory.

But, of course, the Supreme Court of the United States is capable, within limits, of enacting much broader changes than this in the legal framework of the nation. And given that, maybe being clear-eyed about the role of the court in the nations government is in order.

While many people, Supreme Court Justices included, would argue that the role of the court is to be a non-political arbiter of whether specific laws and regulations fit within the limits that the Constitution and other laws set for them, the idea of a non-political Court doesn't really make much sense, given that the people who select the members of the court and ultimately empanel them are themselves politicians. The fight over whether President Obama should have been allowed to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia and, subsequently, whether President Trump should have been allowed to fill Ruth Bader Ginsberg's seat after her death, and indeed, the whole fact that people talk about filling vacancies on the Supreme Court when speaking of the importance of both presidential and congressional elections should have made clear that many people have, for some time, believed that the role of a Supreme Court Justice is to interpret the Constitution and the laws of the United States in accordance with the wishes of those who place them on the bench. So why not own up to that?

There is no such thing as a non-political branch in an inherently political institution. And pretending otherwise doesn't serve anything, other than, perhaps, people's desire to see their wants and needs as being in line with some higher standard than their own interests.

It's easy to see Supreme Court precedents going the way of Executive orders; a particular incarnation of the Court rules one way, and as soon as the Court's partisan makeup swings back the other way, activists and politicians create pretexts to push lawsuits to the Court in order to have that ruling overturned. Until the Court swings back the other way and the cycle continues. While a number of commentators that I've heard recently propose that such goings-on would lead to the Supreme Court becoming illegitimate in the eyes of the public, I think that such presumes that "the public" is somehow completely incapable of understanding what time it is.

As long as there is an understanding that part of the role of the United States government, of whatever branch, is to mediate between mutually hostile groups with an eye towards determining which of them will have their interests gutted in favor of the other(s), the institutions that make up that government are going to be seen as legitimate only to the degree that they appear to side with any individual's chosen group. There is no reason for the Supreme Court to be above this dynamic. So it's not really where the focus should be.