Pun Salad

Consumer note: Sometimes you'll see the "quote" on our Amazon Product du Jour prepended with "Keep voting Democrat." And sometimes it will have a credibility-enhancing date appended, 1987. But (yeah) it's bogus. So even though that's a paid link, I don't recommend you buy it.

Ah, well. As Abraham Lincoln cautioned: "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."

Let's go to a more credible source: John Lehman, Navy secretary, 1981-87: Reagan Would Never Vote for Trump.

Lehman is currently affiliated with "No Labels", which is casting about for a presidential candidate. Like Nikki, I am disclaiming my interest.

Also of note:

• In our "Shut up, they explained" department… Jacob Sullum notes the "news" story (Section A, Page 1, in the Sunday paper): The New York Times Again Worries That Free Speech Endangers Democracy.

  On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, which raises the question of when government efforts to suppress "misinformation" on social media violate the First Amendment. Neglecting that central question, The New York Times portrays the case as part of a conspiracy by Donald Trump's supporters to undermine democracy by promoting false claims that mislead voters and threaten the peaceful transfer of power.

  "In a world of unlimited online communications" where "anyone can reach huge numbers of people with unverified and false information," Times reporters Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers ask, "where is the line between protecting democracy and trampling on the right to free speech?" This is not the first time that Myers has described freedom of speech as a threat to democracy. Last year, he worried that "the First Amendment has become, for better or worse, a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle a problem that, in the case of a pandemic, threatens public health and, in the case of the integrity of elections, even democracy itself." The purported conflict between free speech and democracy is a bizarre and highly misleading way to frame the issues raised by Murthy.

  We linked to George Will's column on this case a couple days ago.

  The NYT is properly jealous of its own rights under the First Amendment. Their contempt for the free expression rights of others is (at best) remarkably short-sighted.

  As Sullum notes, the NYT article goes to great lengths to tie the case to those icky MAGA Trump fans. (Headline: "How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation"; Subhed: "Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online."

  Matt Taibbi was one of the "Twitter Files" whistleblowers on the Biden Administration's censorship-by-proxy effort. And he's prominently mentioned in the NYT story. His reaction: On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece.

  In advance of oral arguments tomorrow in the Supreme Court for Murthy v. Missouri, formerly Missouri v. Biden, the New York Times and authors Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers wrote a craven and dishonest piece called, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

  The Times implies both the Twitter Files reports and my congressional testimony with Michael Shellenberger were strongly influenced by former Trump administration official Mike Benz, whose profile occupies much of the text. Benz is described as a purveyor of “conspiracy theories, like the one about the Pentagon’s use of Taylor Swift,” that are “talking points for many Republicans.” They quote Shellenberger as saying meeting Benz was the “Aha moment,” in our coverage, and the entire premise of the piece is that Benz and other “Trump allies” pushed Michael, me, and the rest of the Twitter Files reporters into aiding a “counteroffensive” in the war against disinformation, helping keep social media a home for “antidemocratic tactics.”

  If you had "Subverted the First Amendment" on your Biden Impeachment Bingo Card, I think you can daub that off, if you hadn't already.

• Is it too early to work up a Trump Impeachment Bingo Card? Rich Lowry wonders: How Would Donald Trump End American Democracy? (That's my final "gifted" National Review link for this month, so don't let it go to waste, readers!)

  If there’s one thing that we’re supposed to know about this election, it is that democracy is on the ballot.

  Joe Biden and other Democrats say it all the time, and so does Liz Cheney. According to the former congresswoman, the U.S. is “sleepwalking into dictatorship,” and the accomplished author and historian Robert Kagan wrote a much-discussed piece for the Washington Post contending, as the headline put it, that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.”

  It’s understandable that people are alarmed by Trump. His conduct after the 2020 election was appalling and impeachable, and he, of course, exhibits zero regret — in fact, the opposite. It is not to defend anything he’s done or said, though, to point out that it is beyond his, or anyone else’s, power to end democracy and establish a dictatorship — at least, not without a whole lot of help that won’t be forthcoming.

  Lowry has an interesting array of scenarios. None of which seem remotely plausible, but are pretty entertaining, assuming they remain fictional. His bottom line:

  Those most fearful of Trump seem to think that we are in a state equivalent to the Weimar Republic, with the regime so weak that it just needs a good push to collapse. But the American constitutional system has been remarkably enduring and stable, and it still retains broad and deep public support. It obviously survived a civil war. Frontal assaults on it will engender a fierce reaction. Also, pretty much every power center in the system would, once again, be hostile to a President Trump.

  In short, most of what we are likely talking about is forms of threats to the legitimacy of the electoral system and to the rule of law — in spirit or actuality — that we’ve already seen for a decade and a half or more. That’s not good, obviously. What we should want is someone who will slam the brakes on this slide toward an unmoored executive. But that option isn’t on the ballot this year.

• This will not end well. Jennifer Huddleston has a suggestion: Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech. After describing the EU's (successful) decree that Apple use USB-C for its iPhone charging connection:

  Many Americans first experienced the impact of the European regulatory approach in May 2018, when they started noticing more click-through requirements to accept cookies and updated privacy policies. All those annoying security pop-ups and repeated notice of updates to terms of service on websites were the direct result of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an E.U. policy that required companies to adopt specific practices around interactions with user data and users' rights related to those data.

  The GDPR didn't just bring a bunch of annoying pop-ups, it also caused huge corporate compliance costs. When the GDPR went into effect in 2018, companies reported spending an average of $1.3 million on compliance costs. A Pricewaterhouse-Coopers survey found that 40 percent of global companies spent over $10 million in initial compliance. These weren't one-time costs; some companies spend millions annually to comply.

  Unsurprisingly, some organizations decided to pull out of the E.U. market entirely rather than comply with these rules. Others chose to deploy these changes all around the world rather than try to tailor compliance to the European Union. In other words, they treated the E.U.'s rules as global requirements.

  This is a common result of tech regulations: Laws passed in one region end up affecting citizens located in other areas as companies standardize practices.

  Some of those regulatory costs are visible ("annoying pop-ups"), but most are well-hidden, passed along to shareholders and consumers. And even less visible is innovation-stifling; good ideas whose implementations are economically unfeasible, thanks to high bureaucratic hurdles.

• It needs to be said. And Kevin D. Williamson says it: There Is No Labor Shortage.

  Our friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce occasionally publish reports arguing that the U.S. economy is being held back by a “labor shortage.” They just came out with one in February, in fact.

  But there isn’t any labor shortage. The Chamber of Commerce does a lot of very good work as an advocate for U.S. businesses, but its views on labor tend to be distorted—for entirely understandable reasons—by self-interest. What we need isn’t more workers willing to take low-wage jobs—what we need is better wages for those jobs.

  As the Chamber’s own findings confirm, healthy industries offering high-paying jobs do not have much trouble getting workers off the sidelines and into the game. Whether measured by the “quit rate” (the share of workers leaving their jobs) or by the industry-specific unemployment rate, the issue of relatively intense labor scarcity is concentrated—this will not surprise you—in largely low-paying hospitality and retail jobs. There’s no urgent labor shortage on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood, in Big Law, or in manufacturing. In the Chamber’s report, we read that the quit rate in hospitality (4.3 percent) is more than three times what it is in manufacturing (1.3 percent). The Chamber of Commerce’s analysis reflects these facts: “Workers in traditionally lower paying industries, including leisure and hospitality and retail, have been most likely to quit their jobs. Meanwhile, in more stable, higher paying industries, the number of employees quitting has been lower.” While the workforce participation rate has declined, there are still workers out there: The unemployment rate in hospitality (4.8 percent) is two-thirds more than it is in financial services (2.9 percent) and more than twice what it is in manufacturing (2.1 percent). That means there are many workers looking for jobs in those industries but not taking the jobs on offer.

  Conclusion: Put that filthy lucre on the table and watch those supply curves slope upward like that’s what they were born to do, because they were.

  KDW's article has one of those annoying little padlocks, so you should subscribe.