Pun Salad

• Your discourse is toxic. My discourse is gritty and honest. Townhall juxtaposes in a tweet.

  Lori Lightfoot today: "The toxicity in our public discourse is a thing that I think we should all be concerned about."
  
  Lori Lightfoot last week: "F*ck Clarence Thomas!" pic.twitter.com/tUTPmkQVqh

  — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 5, 2022

  I'm not a fan of Saul Alinsky, nor do I think it's good to refer to your political opponents as "the enemy". But I couldn't help but think of Rules for Radicals #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

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• Speaking of rules… David Harsanyi takes on one of the progressive whines about "minority rule": It's Not 'Minority Rule,' It's The Point.

  Here is the pollster Nate Silver:

  “Despite the various, very serious threats to American democracy, things would *mostly* be fine if the balance of elected power more closely reflected the popular will (e.g. Senate seats proportional to population, no Electoral College, less gerrymandering).”

  Silver is confusing the inability to coerce others with minoritarianism. It is not a serious threat to American democracy that New Yorkers are unable to dictate Oklahoma’s abortion laws. Nor that Texans can’t compel Rhode Islanders to adopt their gun laws. It’s the point.

  Elites like to mock the proles when they point out that we don’t live in a democracy. But the system Silver believes problematic tempers divisions. It is the core idea of American governance. If the United States is more divided than it ever has been in modern times, as a New York Times reporter recently claimed, we have even less reason to dispense with the mechanisms and institutions that diffuse power and constrain one side of the divide from lording over the other.

  Harsanyi also takes down Max Boot's WaPo assertion that the "Founders never envisioned such an imbalance between power and population" evidenced by the fact that California and Wyoming are both entitled to two senators.

  Boot’s contention only makes sense if a person is ignorant of the founding bargain between states. As many people have already pointed out, the first American census in 1790 found that Virginia, then the most populous state, was home to around 20 percent of the population. Today, California, our largest state, makes up around 12 percent of the nation’s population. No one complained about the disparity of the Senate in 1790 — or, as far as I know, 1890 or 1990, for that matter — because the “imbalance” was literally codified in the founding document (which, incidentally, mentions “democracy” zero times).

  Fun fact: the only bit of the Constitution that can't be amended away is the Article V guarantee that no state can be "deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."

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• What's worse: (1) they don't know what they're doing; or (2) they do? Peter Suderman has a small reality check: Democrats' Obamacare Subsidies Would Make Inflation Worse.

  Obamacare's headline promise was contained in the title of the legislation that spawned the program: It was the Affordable Care Act, and it promised to make health care, or at least health insurance, more affordable.

  What went mostly unacknowledged by the law's authors and backers was that Obamacare had little if any real mechanisms to bring down the price of health coverage. Instead, it had a system of federally funded subsidies, running about $60 billion annually, which would mask the true price of health insurance by offloading a share of premium costs to taxpayers.

  As it turned out, even this system of subsidies was deemed deficient by supporters of the law, including its namesake, President Barack Obama. This April, Obama commemorated the law's anniversary by warning that, in the absence of a subsidy funding boost provided by the American Rescue Plan (ARP), "health-care subsidies aren't where we want them to be, which means that some working families are still having trouble paying for their coverage." The implicit conclusion was hard to miss: The Affordable Care Act, on its own, had not made coverage more affordable.

  To repeat: the Affordable Care Act did not make care more affordable. However it did make a lot of people more dependent on government, which I assume was the actual goal.

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• Can't we all just get along? The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) has an article outside its domain, but that's OK. Patrick Carroll looks at the latest skirmish: Peterson, Rubin Suspended from Twitter as the Culture War Heats Up. That's Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin, convicted by the Twitter cops of "deadnaming" Elliott-used-to-be-Ellen Page. Carroll's advice:

  First, we shouldn’t have so much compassion that we cancel and attack everyone who is deemed a perpetrator. For one, that approach will likely backfire, because it’s only a matter of time before we are all labeled perpetrators. What’s more, canceling people is antithetical to a genuine tolerance of diverse viewpoints.

  LGBTQ activists, of all people, should appreciate the value of such tolerance. After all, it was this very tolerance of diversity that allowed them to get as far as they have come. It was free speech—not just as a legal principle, but as a cultural value to be upheld in social and academic platforms—that allowed them to get their ideas into mainstream culture in the first place. It would be incredibly hypocritical for them, having championed free speech as a means of advancing their cause, to suddenly turn their backs on it now that their detractors also have something to say.

  Having said that, just as too much compassion can be a problem, it would also be wrong to completely neglect compassion. Just saying “deadnaming doesn’t matter, I’ll say what I want” is a callous approach that spits in the face of those extending tolerance in your direction.

  Don't go out of your way to offend people with problems, I guess. I don't know how Peterson and Rubin would handle Deirdre McCloskey.

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• Things are more like they are today than they've ever been before. With Spending and Inflation, It's More of the Same.

  The go-to policy for dealing with nearly every modern problem is more government spending. So it was just a matter of time before Democrats tried to revive the failed "Build Back Better" (BBB) program to address today's economic troubles. Of course, if they succeed, the result will be much the same as what we've experienced over the past 18 months: more debt and rising inflation.

  As a reminder, the $2 trillion proposed BBB legislation came on the tail of an oversized $2 trillion third COVID-19 relief bill and a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. It was killed when two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, joined all Republican senators in opposition. They rightfully worried that more spending would inflate our debt and produce inflation. But now, their party is back at it again. In the midst of the largest inflation in four decades, they've been negotiating behind the scenes for weeks in hopes of passing a slimmer BBB.

  As a reminder, the $2 trillion proposed BBB legislation came on the tail of an oversized $2 trillion third COVID-19 relief bill and a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. It was killed when two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, joined all Republican senators in opposition. They rightfully worried that more spending would inflate our debt and produce inflation. But now, their party is back at it again. In the midst of the largest inflation in four decades, they've been negotiating behind the scenes for weeks in hopes of passing a slimmer BBB.

  Well, I guess we're doomed.

Note the subtitle, which hints strongly that I shouldn't have been reading this book. Consulting the actuarial table … has anyone written a book with handy recommendations for the last 16% of life?

Nevertheless, I got the book from Portsmouth Public Library. Why? Because I am an Arthur C. Brooks fan. Back in 2014, I attended the "Freedom Summit", a conservative/libertarian dog-and-pony show put on in Manchester NH by Citizens United and Americans for Prosperity. lots of pols spoke, as did The Donald Trump, but Brooks gave the speech I enjoyed most, with a substance/slogan ratio far over the norm for the day. Since then, I've read a couple of his books: The Conservative Heart and Love Your Enemies. (The latter inspired by a conversation Brooks had at that 2014 conclave, not with me. It was very prescient about today's political hatreds.)

No politics in this book, though. Instead, it's written to address a problem that many people encounter midlife: inevitable physical and cognitive decline, and how that decline can impact one's professional and personal life. Brooks observes that (with some scientific backing) that one's early career is marked by "fluid intelligence". It drives creativity and innovation. But that's what starts declining.

Fortunately, there's "crystallized intelligence" which is maintained better with age. (And "crystallized intelligence" sounds better than "petrified intelligence", doesn't it?) This is the ability to "use a stock of knowledge learned in the past". If you're lucky, this looks a lot like wisdom.

Brooks suggests strongly that you plan to transition your life from one to the other ("strength to strength") as smoothly as possible. Good advice on doing that abounds. Approximately none of which had any applicability to me. (I won't bore you with details of my professional career.) Nevertheless, it was a fun read, because Brooks is a wise and punchy writer. And, well, anecdotes like (p. 9):

There are some famous cases of classical musicians who go on and on, performing into old age. In 1945, double bass player Jane Little joined the Atlanta Symphony at the tender age of sixteen. She retired seventy-one years later at the age of eighty-seven. (Well, she didn't exactly retire: she actually died onstage during a concert while performing "There's No Business Like Show Business.")

And you really should pay attention, no matter your age, when Brooks begins a sentence with "As the Dalai Lama once reminded me,…" (p. 58).

Brooks concludes with "Seven Words to Remember":

Use things.
Love people.
Worship the divine.

Sorry, maybe I should have said "Spoiler Alert" there.