Pun Salad

I never thought of myself as "old-guard", but after reading Henry Olson, I'm afraid the shoe fits pretty well: Trump-Vance Ticket Puts Old-Guard Conservatives at a Crossroads.

Olson's advice to the old guard: learn to compromise with the populist demagogues. You might not always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

Fortunately, as a crabby blogger, I don't have to compromise with anyone.

Also of note:

• Vero does it right. In her column, Veronique de Rugy points out: The 'Pro-Worker' GOP Is Anti-Worker

  Members of the new right wing of the Republican Party have proclaimed themselves the champions of the working class. I am sure they mean it, despite many of them being among the elite of the elite. And because so many are lawyers—including those like vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance who come from an elite Ivy League school—we can forgive them for failing to understand that their economic policies would hurt, not help, the working class.

  Part of the shift is because Republicans don't believe they should continue as the so-called party of big business. They are correct. It's a sad fact that traditional Republican politicians have often confused being for free markets with propping up and protecting big banks and other companies with subsidies and other handouts. The fact that Democrats do the same doesn't excuse Republicans' behavior.

  A first essential step to earning the moniker of the party of the people is ending all subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, and other government-granted privileges to big corporations. That will undo much of the bias toward businesses while allowing markets to do their jobs and raise all economic boats.

  I doubt the new populists will do it. Instead, expect more counterproductive "pro-worker" policies like raising the corporate income tax. Taxes are paid only by flesh-and-blood people, and corporations, well, are not people.

  I think this is a good response to Henry Olson. "Compromising" with fundamentally unsound economic policies won't help "workers", and you'll wind up being blamed for the resulting mess anyway.

• What do you mean, "we", white economist? Noah Smith has the bad news for Universal Basic Income supporters: Yes, we still have to work.

  In my roundup this week, I flagged some disappointing results for a basic income experiment. When people got $1000 a month, 2% of them stopped working. That’s a significant amount, considering that $1000 a month is not enough to really support anyone by itself. It suggests that a much larger UBI would cause a much larger percentage of people to stop working. That would increase the costs of the program, and probably doom it politically — the idea of having the government pay a large portion of the citizenry not to work is likely to be very unpopular.

  When I posted the result on Twitter X, however, I got some interesting reactions. A number of people told me — often in angry, indignant terms — that paying people to take leisure is the whole point of basic income, and is a good and desirable thing. [Examples elided]

  From an economic standpoint, this argument is unpersuasive. Yes, taking more leisure time is valuable — even if you drop out of the labor force entirely, you’re still presumably doing something you like with all those spare hours. But the benefit of that leisure has to be weighed against the cost of the lost production when the people stop working, plus the monetary cost of providing the UBI in the first place, and the deadweight loss of whatever taxes you had to use to transfer the money. A welfare program that causes a significant number of people to stop working entirely is unlikely to pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

  But what’s interesting here is the deep antipathy to the idea of work that seems to have taken root among some on the political left. Not everyone on the left, of course — back in the late 2010s there were fierce battles between supporters of UBI and supporters of a federal job guarantee. But I notice a bunch of leftist types these days basically saying that work — or at least, most work — is useless and pointless and should be abolished.

  Marx—I think I remember—thought that work in a capitalist system was fundamentally exploitative. That attitude's reflected in some of the vituperation Smith received.

  But as J.K. Galbraith is said to have said: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

• Try to make me care. You might have noticed people—young people—using the word "brat" in no sense with which you are familiar. Fortunately, Jeff Maurer has Jacob Fuzetti on hand to do the research and type up his findings: “Brat” Explained by a Veteran Journalist Who Has to Accept Whatever Assignment We Give Him.

  This week, Benjamin Netanyahu toured the U.S., a software failure threw the global economy into chaos, and a singer called Kamala Harris “brat”. I begged my editor to assign me to one of the first two stories, but he assigned me to the “brat” story. So, I will attempt to elucidate the meaning of “brat”, place that meaning into context, and to do all that without collapsing into utter despair over the state of journalism and also my life.

  “Brat” — pronounced like the word meaning “unruly child”, and not like the German sausage — is a word repurposed by a British “popular music” star known as Charli [sic] XCX. Despite the masculine first name, Ms. XCX is female, and her honorific is pronounced “ex, see, ex” — the letters do not connote Roman numerals. Last month, Ms. XCX released a record album entitled “Brat”, and The Guardian reports that “brat” also refers to “a lifestyle inspired by noughties excess.” The meaning of that phrase could not be determined as of press time.

  Jacob gives it the old college try, as members of his generation are wont to do.

• Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, prats gotta… Jim Geraghty muses on the lonely lives of fack checkers: Fact-Checkers' Pratfall on 'Border Czar'

  Is it just me, or has every big media fact-checker for the past 24 hours sounded like, “Well, Wolf, we’ve checked this out thoroughly, and it turns out that a ‘czar’ is a title historically used by Slavic monarchs. The term is derived from the Latin word ‘caesar,’ which referred to a ruler with the same rank as a Roman emperor. ‘Czar’ is spelled two ways, and its variants were the official titles in the First Bulgarian Empire, which existed from the year 681 to 1018. Not only would Kamala Harris not be born for nearly another millennium, she’s not even Bulgarian. What’s more, there’s no evidence that Harris ever wore a crown, sat on a throne, or carried a scepter. So we’re giving the Republican claim that Harris was Biden’s so-called border czar a rating of ‘Pants on Fire,’ because it’s not even remotely true.”

  Fine. Could someone deal with the simple truth that she was given an allegedly important role concerning illegal immigration, and she did nothing useful?