The Issues & Insights editorialists take on The Man Who Loves To Tax.
The cranky Vermont senator who believes billionaires should be abolished wants to legislate them out of existence. It’s too bad that he doesn’t understand that one billionaire is more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders.
“Billionaires should not exist,” Sanders, who identifies as a socialist, raged in 2019 during his previous attempt to hit the wealthy with an additional tax that punished them for their success.
That effort, the New York Times reported, was “particularly aggressive in how it would erode the fortunes of billionaires” and “would cut in half the wealth of the typical billionaire after 15 years, according to two economists who worked with the Sanders campaign on the plan.”
Our Headline du Jour is a reference to Isaiah Berlin's essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" which contained the ancient Greek aphorism: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
And Hedgehog Bernie "knows" one big, albeit delusional, thing: He (and his allies) would spend the wealth of those hated billionaires far more wisely than they do.
I commented on Bernie's latest envy-fueled scheme a couple days ago. But I guess it's time to comment on Bernie himself. Over to you, editorialists:
Billionaires aren’t caricatures in board games. They are indispensable to prosperity, not just their own but that of all of us. They create wealth, generate jobs, add trillions in value to society, develop lifesaving innovations, efficiently allocate capital, fund charities and philanthropic causes, take risks few others would dare to, and send an immense amount of dollars to the U.S. Treasury (the top 1% of taxpayers were responsible for 40% of federal revenues).
And what has Sanders done? He’s built nothing and lives to tear down what others have produced. He stirs up resentment, rails against choice, has been trying to slay the oligarch dragons for more than three decades, and wants to force the country to join a commune that he designs and runs.
Maybe we were wrong. A single billionaire isn’t more valuable than a thousand Bernie Sanders. A single billionaire is more valuable than a million Bernie Sanders.
Also of note:
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I'm really beginning to appreciate the upside of "boring".
Vince GillVance Ginn pleas: Make Antitrust Boring Again. (NR gifted link)The Federal Trade Commission’s recent appeal in its antitrust case against Meta and the government’s new appeal in the Google search case are not just legal headlines. They are signals to capital markets about how political the federal government wants antitrust policy to be.
If we keep pushing antitrust toward populist storytelling instead of consumer harm, we will get less investment, slower innovation, and weaker competition. Antitrust works best when it is boring. Not toothless, but disciplined.
In the bad old days of the Biden Administration, conservatives and libertarians were properly scornful of "hipster antitrust". (So was Pun Salad.) If you thought Trump would be better, you were wrong.
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This shouldn't have been an issue. But apparently, Trump would prefer to keep his mitts on his unconstitutional gains. Ilya Somin notes the latest: US Court of International Trade Orders Refund of All Illegally Collected IEEPA Tariffs.
Today, in the case of Atmus Filtration, Inc. v. United States, Judge Richard K. Eaton of the US Court of International Trade ordered the Trump Administration to refund all tariffs illegally collected by the Trump Administration using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). On Monday, in V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, the case I helped bring that led to the invalidation of the IEEPA tariffs by the Supreme Court, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit unanimously rejected the Trump Administration's efforts to delay lower-court proceedings on repayment. It is notable that all 11 judges of the en banc Federal Circuit agreed, including the four who voted against us on the merits when the Federal Circuit ruled on the case last year.
The federal government owes some $175 billion in tariff refunds to importers who paid them, and they repeatedly promised they would refund them money if they lost the case - a point which was crucial to their argument that appellate courts should stay the trial court injunction blocking further illegal tariff collection, while the litigation proceeded. Each month the government delays repayment costs taxpayers some $700 million in accumulated interest payments.
$700 million would buy a lot of drones and torpedos. Just sayin'.
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"Better" shouldn't be hard. "Good" might be harder. The WaPo editorialists had a wistful observation on Wednesday evening, 6:53PM: It would be easier to fund DHS with better leadership. (WaPo gifted link)
As government extends its powers more deeply into everyday life, it becomes less effective at everything. That annoyance becomes dangerous when the state isn’t entirely capable of its most important job: providing basic security and stability. Consider the Department of Homeland Security, which isn’t fully funded and lacks the leadership and credibility to effectively make the case for more money.
With conflict in the Middle East increasing the risk for terrorism in the homeland, it’d be nice if DHS was fully functional. But the department has faced a gap in funding since Feb. 14, which has left critical agencies short staffed. DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem tried to persuade lawmakers to end the partial government shutdown this week, and it didn’t go well.
Yeah, we heard. And, unfortunately for Kristi, so did her boss. Robby Soave has yesterday's news: Trump fires Kristi Noem from DHS.
President Donald Trump is replacing Kristi Noem, the embattled secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), due to mounting concerns about her performance, including from many Republicans.
In a Thursday Truth Social post announcing her successor—Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin—Trump thanked Noem for her service and said she would serve as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, a new security initiative that has yet to be formally unveiled. But the face-saving appointment does not change the fact that Trump has effectively fired Noem as DHS head.
Apparently she will be hanging around D.C. for a while, drawing a salary.
North(oops) South Dakota puppies are safe for now.
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Somedays I despair that we've learned nothing from his entire oeuvre. Jeff Maurer is baffled: Did We Learn Nothing From Jeff Goldblum’s Speech in Jurassic Park?
The war in Iran has me thinking a lot about Jeff Goldblum’s speech in the 1993 arthouse film Jurassic Park. And I don’t mean Goldblum’s “your scientists didn’t stop to think if they should speech”, or his “we’ll give the alien a cold” speech, which was actually from Independence Day. I’m talking about the speech in which Goldblum explains chaos theory while not-so-subtly informing Sam Neill’s character that he could totally bang his wife if he wanted to.
He's talking about this:
Small correction: Google tells me that Laura Dern's and Sam Neill’s characters "were not married, but they were in a committed, romantic relationship. "
And I don't think Goldblum's Jurassic Park observations compare to his response to a question posed by a bunch of college girls in the 1977 movie Between the Lines: "Whither rock and roll?"
Goldblum's character responded: "The only real answer to the question … is "hither". Some misguided people think that the answer is "thither", they're wrong, those theories are passé."
Also he points out: "They say that Rock & Roll is here to stay. But where? Certainly not at my place, it's too small."
![[The Blogger]](/ps/images/barred.jpg)
