Dec
3
2025

George Will isn't Mincing Words

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Calling it as he sees it: A sickening moral slum of an administration. (WaPo gifted link) After looking at the Venezuelan drug boat survivor-shooting and the handling of Putin's wishlist for Ukraine, he makes a more general point:

The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.

Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are: Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt. Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external dangers, and a flinching from hard truths.

I fear he's right. More on the drug boats below.

Also of note:

  • We have moved on to the ass-covering phase of the operation. Andrew C. McCarthy has been my go-to guy for honest coverage. Here's his update from last evening: Pete Hegseth Says He Ordered & Observed First Missile Strike, Not Second. (archive.today link) After quoting from Hesgeth's tweet:

    Andrew comments:

    I get it that Hegseth sees his job as pleasing the president, who revels in this style of tough-guy, take-no-prisoners, death-to-all-the-seditionists BS. If you’re going to play that game, however, and especially if you’re going to play it for the ostensible purpose of “defending” yourself from war crimes accusations, you can’t be too surprised if people suspect that you just might have given an order to kill everybody.

    And bigger picture: We are dealing with an activity — cocaine trafficking — that is not an act of war, is not terrorism, is not killing thousands of Americans (that’s fentanyl), and is traditionally handled in the United States by criminal prosecution under an extensive, decades-old set of laws. Yet, President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and the administration have speciously claimed that cocaine shipments — many of which are not even destined for our country — are the functional equivalent of mass-murder attacks; that, they claim, authorizes them to invoke the laws of armed conflict so they can kill people rather than prosecute them.

    Under the circumstances, it is hardly unreasonable for people to conclude that the administration is not especially fastidious about who is and is not a legitimate target under the laws of war.

    The things the administration is not "fastidious" about seems to grow daily.

  • Closed, locked, key thrown away. John McCormack & Michael Warren bemoan The Closing of the Conservative Mind. (archive.today link)

    Last April, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute invited eight college students to what an ISI staffer described in an email as an “exclusive retreat and dinner with Tucker Carlson” in Florida.

    Founded nearly 75 years ago, ISI is a prominent conservative collegiate intellectual institution in the United States. ISI also runs the Collegiate Network, a collection of alternative conservative newspapers on college campuses across the country, and the eight student journalists had been selected by ISI to attend the retreat and dinner because their campus newspapers were top-performing publications. After a Journalism 101 session at the Art Ovation Hotel in Sarasota, the students filed into a shuttle for a 90-minute trip to Carlson’s home on Gasparilla Island, where Carlson dispensed career advice.

    “Thanks to @TuckerCarlson for joining three generations of @amconmag editors/executive directors for a dinner with campus journalists from @ISI’s @collegiatenet,” ISI President Johnny Burtka posted on Twitter alongside a photo of himself, Carlson, then-Collegiate Network Executive Director Dan McCarthy, and The American Conservative editor Curt Mills. “It was an unforgettable evening that our students will cherish for years to come.”

    One person left out of Burtka’s photo was Carlson’s special guest at the dinner that night: Alex Jones, who appeared on Carlson’s podcast that aired the next day, April 9.

    Back in my college days, I was sorta involved with ISI. A long time ago. Sad to see what it's become.

  • Sometimes only a Hayek quote will do. And Eric Boehm deploys one early: Trump's deals with Intel and others are a form of socialism.

    One danger of nationalism, Friedrich Hayek warned in 1960, was the "bridge" it provides "from conservatism to collectivism."

    "To think in terms of 'our' industry or resource," he wrote, "is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest."

    That's a short step that President Donald Trump has eagerly taken. In the first nine months of his second term in office, the president has overseen a giant government leap into the boardrooms of strategically important businesses.

    In June, Trump demanded (and the federal government received) a so-called golden share in U.S. Steel, which effectively gives the White House veto power over much of the company's future. Two months later, the Trump administration purchased a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, the once-dominant and recently struggling American chipmaker. Similar stakes in at least four other companies followed, including ones that produce nuclear power or mine metals such as lithium and copper that are necessary for building high-tech chips and advanced batteries.

    I must recycle my ChatGPT cartoon from back in August:

  • To be fair, most economic doom will be in the future. But Jeff Maurer looks at today's whining and wonders: What Causes Economic Doomerism? And I will steal his impressive graphic:

    Here are some charts that most people probably assume are hallucinated bullshit, like when you ask AI to design a house and it puts the toilet in the middle of the kitchen:

    These charts are real…but how can they be? We’re constantly told that we’re living in tough economic times — I hear that the middle class has been “hollowed out”, and that you have to perform sexual favors on your local Albertson’s manager just to buy a dozen eggs. Generation Z — the story goes — is beyond screwed; the only jobs for them will be OnlyFans modeling and gig work delivering bubble tea to robots. These beliefs are so widespread that in a recent conversation between Sam Harris and George Packer — in which they spoke intelligently on many topics — the notion that Gen Z is struggling economically went unchallenged. It was like hearing two physicists discuss the finer points of quantum field theory and then reveal that they think that thunder is caused by a giant farting dragon in the sky.

    Jeff has possible theories aplenty.

  • But some (relatively) good news The Fraser Institute has released its report on the Economic Freedom in North America, which analyzes and compares US and Mexican states, Canadian provinces. And…

    In the all-government index—which takes account of federal as well as state/provincial policies—the most economically free jurisdictions in North America are New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Idaho.

    The data Fraser used is from 2023, so I assume the demise of New Hampshire's Interest & Dividends Tax will keep us well in front of South Dakota and Idaho in the near term.

Recently on the book blog: