by Warren Coats, Warren’s spaceMay 22, 2024.
Extract:
The recent attack and counterattack were a continuation of 70 years of unresolved relations between the region’s Palestinian and Jewish residents. Netanyahu remains categorically opposed to revising the two-state solution (Oslo Accord), and Saudi Arabia also insists on this point. Ireland, Norway and Spain will officially recognize Palestine as a state starting next week and other countries are expected to follow.
The hitherto insurmountable challenge was not the result of the gathering of Jews into what is now Israel, but of the determination to make it a democratic Jewish state. Religious states, like Iran, are still problematic. Israel can only become a democratic Jewish state by somehow eliminating most Palestinians. The founding fathers of the United States were wise enough to prohibit this by enshrining the separation of church and state in our Constitution.
If Israel renounced being a Jewish state, it could remain democratic and absorb the entire region, from the river to the sea. And every resident would enjoy the same protection of the law and the same rights. It should consider a federal structure in which small districts with local governments could be majority Muslim or Jewish. https://wcoats.blog/2024/01/19/one-state-solution-for-palestine-israel/
By David J. Bier, Cato on the looseMay 24, 2024.
Extract:
The third founding occurred on May 24, 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the National Origins Quota Act, which imposed the first permanent cap on legal immigration. Before the 1924 law, all prospective immigrants were presumed eligible for immigration unless the government had evidence showing that they were ineligible. The 1924 law replaced this system with the Soviet-style guilty-until-proven-innocent quota system we have today.
No law has so radically changed the demographics, economics, politics, and freedom of the United States and the world. This has dramatically reduced the growth of the U.S. population of immigrants and their descendants by several hundred millions, thereby diminishing economic growth and limiting this country’s power and influence. Post-1924 Americans are no longer free to associate, contract, and trade with people born anywhere in the world as they once were.
Legal restrictions have erected a massive and almost impenetrable bureaucracy between Americans and their parents, spouses, children, employees, friends, associates, customers, employers, religious leaders, artists, and other peaceful people who might contribute to our lives. This made the world a much poorer and less free place for Americans and the rest of the world, necessitating the construction of a massive law enforcement apparatus to enforce these restrictions.
My additional thoughts:
We often hear that if we welcome many more immigrants, they will vote against our system. In fact, that was my only major fear – before looking at the evidence. But notice the evidence here. The United States cut off most immigration in 1924. It reopened it somewhat in 1965. And when did we have our greatest expansion of the federal government? During these 40 years or so.
by Dave DeCamp, antiwar.com, May 23, 2024.
Extract:
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Thursday this will allow the seizure of all U.S. assets in Russia to offset any Russian assets taken by the United States.
The executive order could apply to any American individual or company with assets in Russia, and it came after President Biden signed a bill that gave him the power to confiscate Russian assets and use them to pay for the aid to Ukraine.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies froze approximately $300 billion in assets of the Russian Central Bank. According to The Associated Press, there are approximately $5 billion in Russian state assets that the United States could confiscate and send to Ukraine.
Putin’s decree would allow the Russian central bank or any company that has lost assets in the United States to go to Russian courts “purporting to establish the fact of unjustified deprivation of its property rights due to a decision of a State or an American judicial authority and to receive compensation for said damage.
In short, Putin said, I will see your collective guilt and I will elevate you.
by Lee Ohanian, California on your mindMay 21, 2024.
Extract:
California’s budget went from a supposed $98 billion surplus, in which there was so much money in state coffers that Gov. Gavin Newsom was giving $50,000 to randomly selected people to getting vaccinated against COVID-19, at a projected shortfall of $73 billion in just about two years.
Much of this could have been avoided if, in 2022, California had not made obvious and wildly unrealistic revenue assumptions for the coming years that painted a falsely overly optimistic fiscal picture of the state. In a nutshell, here’s what happened: In fiscal year 2021-22, state tax revenues increased by about 55%, or about $70 billion, compared to fiscal year previous. This revenue windfall largely reflected taxpayers making capital gains, particularly high-income taxpayers who then faced a marginal tax rate of 13.3 percent.
by David D. Friedman, daviddfriedman.substack.com, May 23, 2024.
Extract:
The attitude towards his children, treating them as people of the same intellectual status as himself, was applied more generally. He would chat with anyone. I remember arguing with the owner of the New Hampshire garage where we had our car repaired, who claimed that a large company, if it spent enough on advertising, could always sell what it produced. The example he came up with was a new car that Ford had just released called the Edsel.
One of my father’s projects was an economic education experiment that involved arguing with New York City taxi drivers. New York had, and still has, a taxi medallion system. It issues a fixed number of medallions, each giving its owner the right to drive a taxi; each taxi company must have as many medallions as it operates taxis. Medallions are transferable; if you own one, you can sell it to someone else, after which they now have the right to legally operate a taxi. The price of a medallion today, probably at the time, exceeds more than a hundred thousand dollars.
I had a similar experience when I was 19. My friend Don Redekop and I were hitchhiking in the summer of 1970. We were returning from a Sunday morning hike to one of my favorite lakes near the Manitoba-Ontario border. We were picked up by a friendly guy who was a typewriter salesman. We had 100 miles ahead of us and somehow we started talking about imports. He argued that the Canadian government should restrict imports of foreign typewriters. I said, of course, that shouldn’t be the case. He was not hostile but curious: he asked me why. So I presented the comparative advantage without using numbers. He would resist; I would explain. Resist; explain. Towards the end of the 100 miles he admitted that I was right but that he wanted to restrict imports to save his job. We left on good terms. (I don’t recall using the argument that if we had no restrictions on imports there would be more, not less, demand for typewriter sellers. Given my economic understanding of l At the time, I probably didn’t.)
