Pun Salad

We'll forgive Mr. Ramirez's Brit spelling.

From the relevant AP story:

Okay. Can anyone explain Trump's rules for capitalization?

Also of note:

• It's politically impossible right now, but… I'm nevertheless glad to see this forthright recommendation from Kerry McDonald at the Foundation for Economic Education: Compulsory Schooling Laws Have Got To Go. Excerpt:

  Compulsory schooling is incompatible with freedom, as Thomas Jefferson himself recognized. While promoting broad educational offerings, free to the poor, and noting that a society could not be both free and ignorant, Jefferson opposed forced education. “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father,” Jefferson wrote in 1817.

  Instead of criminalizing parents whose children miss school, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons such as bullying, we should seek instead to eliminate compulsory schooling statutes and free families from the government’s coercive clutches. In the absence of these laws, a robust, diverse, and decentralized education ecosystem would emerge that would be grounded in consent over coercion and defined by variety over monopoly.

  Ms. McDonald also recounts the sordid history and motivations behind these nasty laws. For more, see the works of John Taylor Gatto.

• Zombie Reaganites are not after your brains. Rachel Lu makes The Case for Zombie Reaganites

  I’ve been waiting a long time for the Zombie-Reaganite apocalypse. I’m willing to donate my brain to the cause. Though I personally prefer plants, it seems clear that a horde of walking dead can sometimes be the best fix for a dysfunctional political party. Happily, a window to this option opened this summer with the release of the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles.

  For the most part, this is a restatement of classically liberal principles that were once utterly uncontroversial among conservatives. Two or three decades ago, it would have felt ridiculous to lay these out in a dramatic, flag-planting gesture. Today it does not feel ridiculous, and though I am not personally acquainted with Avik Roy, or any of the statement’s key drafters, the point of the initiative seemed clear enough to me when I first read it last June. I was happy to sign, perceiving the statement as a welcome counterpoint to the arguments of “New Right” thinkers and intellectuals who have repeatedly assured us that the entire architecture of Reaganite or Buckley-style conservatism is structurally unsound, fit only for a wrecking ball. Many of us disagree. And though we’ve become fairly accustomed to being cast as the befuddled, out-of-touch straight men of the New Right narrative, we actually have some fairly substantive views of our own that our crusading neo-traditional brethren might do well to address. Maybe it’s finally time for some serious discussion of these matters that doesn’t sidestep critical questions with grandstanding speeches about “cuckservatives” and “market worshippers.”

  Check out that first link; it goes to a statement of principles that a lot of Pun Salad faves have signed onto. Including the author of our next item.

• Gonna watch the GOP candidates debate tonight? Me neither. (Although I'm getting what seems like hourly email from Nikki Haley begging me to.) However, if this fantasy became reality, I'd be tuning in: Kevin Williamson Moderates the GOP Debate

  Thank you all for being here. It is weird not to have the frontrunner here, of course. But, then, it’s a little weird that the frontrunner is the guy who lost last time around and then tried to overthrow the government.

  Which brings us to our first question: Who won the 2020 presidential election?

  I’d like to remind you that those electrodes attached to your … are we allowed to say that on television? … are hooked up to our state-of-the-art Acme B.S. Detector. And thanks to our sponsors at Acme B.S. Detectors! On the other side of that circuit is a Duralast Platinum AGM Battery boasting 750 cold-cranking amps—and thanks to our other sponsors at AutoZone! You know the drill: We have Mitch Daniels standing by with the controls in hand, and, if you try to wholesale the kind of bull you normally feed gullible Republican primary voters and fawning Fox News types to our audience, then it is ZAP! right in the ’nads.

  Instead: Episode 7 of Justified: City Primeval on Hulu.

• One day, you're living in paradise… The next day, paradise is trying to kill you. Horrific. At Cato, Marc Joffe observes: Maui Wildfire Response Sure Looks Like Government Failure

  Bear in mind that government action, whether in Maui or under other circumstances, is often justified by the idea of market failure, a condition in which resources are allocated inefficiently because “individual incentives for rational behavior do not lead to rational outcomes for the group.” One set of market failures is public goods (or services), which the market may under‐produce because potential market actors cannot prevent free riders from benefiting.

  An example of a public good is disaster‐response, like in Maui. As Michel Jarraud, Secretary‐General of the World Meteorological Organization, told a 2015 UN Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, disaster early warning systems are “public goods in all countries, without exception, so they must be financed by public investment.”

  But as we have seen in Maui, entrusting public goods to the government offers no assurance that they will be provided when needed. Hawaii, for instance, has a decades‐old system of sirens, including 80 on the island of Maui that are tested monthly. But public safety employees reportedly failed to activate the sirens during the Lahaina wildfire.

  I was reminded of a book I read a few months back: Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed by Andrew Koppelman. It was a wide-ranging critique, but (from my report):

  The book’s title refers to a Tennessee incident back in 2010, where a house burned to the ground despite the presence of the fire department from a nearby town. People in the area had the option of paying a yearly subscription fee for the department’s services, but the house’s owner “forgot” to do that. This is Koppelman’s lead-off example of a “corrupted variety” of libertarianism. (The fire department in question was government-owned, and was operating under the control of its democratically-elected town government, but never mind.)

  To put it mildly: we have different standards for "market failure" and "government failure". Thought experiment: Imagine what the commentary would have been like if Maui's fire department was privately owned and operated with the same results.

• A lesson for New Hampshire? The "Antiplanner" looks at a current example of an ongoing fallacy: “Priming the Pump” = Subsidizing the Myth

  Maryland has decided it needs to “take a more active role in promoting development around transit stations,” according to an article in the Baltimore Banner. “It’s priming the pump to get these things moving,” says Secretary of Transportation Paul Wiedefeld, who used to be general manager of Washington Metro.

  "Take a more active role" meaning: "spend more taxpayer money". So far, New Hampshire has managed to dodge the commuter rail bullet, but advocates keep shooting.