Month: April 2021

Biden: Not Knocking Their Socks Off

It comes as no surprise that Biden isn’t enjoying a post-inaugural “honeymoon” with the mass of voters. It is evident that he is intent on screwing them with higher taxes, higher energy prices, and special treatment of illegal immigrants, blacks, and gender-confused persons.

Compare and contrast Biden’s performance relative to the performances of Obama and Trump according to a measure that I devised in the early days of Obama’s presidency. I call it the enthusiasm ratio, which I derive from the Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, published by Rasmussen Reports. It is the number of likely voters expressing strong approval as a percentage of the number of likely voters expressing either approval or disapproval. That is, the ratio omits likely voters who express neither approval nor disapproval, and focuses on strong approval rather than mere approval.

Here’s the comparison:

Trump’s slow start can be chalked up to the phony Trump-Russia scandal and the incessant flow of negative stories about “chaos” in the Trump White House, both of which plagued his first months in office. Despite that slow start, Trump’s support then became — and remained — much stronger than Obama’s. It remained stronger even during the pandemic panic and the bizarre post-election months, when Trump was roasted for daring to assert (correctly, I believe) that the election was stolen from him.

Biden’s early returns are as weak as Trump’s, but the lack of enthusiasm for Biden is self-inflicted, not media-generated.

A 100-Day Scorecard

On January 6, 2021, in “Here We Go … “, I essayed 17 predictions about changes Democrats would attempt to consolidate their grip on America and make it over into a European-style “social democracy” with the added feature of subservience to China and Russia. As I said in the original post, not every item on the list will be adopted, but it won’t be for want of trying.

How are my predictions panning out? Quite well, sadly.

Judge for yourself. Here they are:

1. Abolition of the Senate filibuster.

2. An increase of at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (USSC), though there may be some vacancies to be filled.

3. Adoption of an interstate compact by states controlling a total of at least 270 electoral votes, committing each member state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who compiles the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in each state that is a party to the compact. (This may seem unnecessary if Biden wins, but it will be a bit of insurance against the possibility of a Republican victor in a future election.)

4. Statehood for either the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, or for both of them. (Each would then have two senators and a requisite number of representatives with full voting privileges in their respective bodies. All of them will be Democrats, of course.)

5. Empowerment of the executive branch to do at least three of the following things:

a. Regulate personal and business activity (in new ways) with the expressed aim of reducing CO2 emissions.

b. Commit at least $500 billion in new obligational authority for research into and/or funding of methods of reducing and mitigating CO2 emissions.

c. Issue new kinds of tax rebates and credits to persons/households and businesses that spend money on any item on a list of programs/technologies that are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions.

d. Impose tax penalties on persons/households and businesses for their failure to spend money on any item in the list mentioned above (shades of the Obamacare tax penalty).

e. Impose penalties on persons/households and businesses for failing to adhere to prescribed caps on CO2 emissions.

f. Establish a cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions (to soften the blow of the previous item). (Needless to say, the overall effect of such initiatives would deal a devastating blow to economic activity – meaning massive job losses and lower real incomes for large swaths of the populace.)

6. Authorization for an agency or agencies of the federal government to define and penalize written or spoken utterances that the agency or agencies declare “unprotected” by the First Amendment, and to require media enforcement of bans on “unprotected” utterances and prosecution of violators (e.g., here). (This can be accomplished by cynically adopting the supportable position that the First Amendment protects only political speech. The purported aim would be to curb so-called hate speech, but when censorship is in full swing — which would take only a few years — it will be illegal to criticize or question, even by implication, such things as illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, the confiscation of firearms, or the policies of the federal government. Violations will be enforced by fines and prison sentences — the latter sometimes called “sensitivity training”, “citizenship education”, or some other euphemistic term. Candidates for public office will be prime targets of the enforcers, which will suppress open discussion of such matters.)

7. Imposition of requirements for organizations of all kinds — businesses, universities, charitable organizations, clubs, and even churches — to favor anyone who isn’t a straight, white male of European descent. (The “protections” will be enacted, upheld, and enforced vigorously by federal agencies, regardless of their adverse economic and social effects.)

8. Effective nullification of the Second Amendment through orders/regulations/legislation, to enable gun confiscation (though there will be exemptions for private security services used by favored elites).

9. Use of law-enforcement agencies to enforce “hate speech” bans, mandates for reverse discrimination, and gun-confiscation edicts. (These things will happen regardless of the consequences; e.g., a rising crime rate, greater violence against whites and Asians, and flight from the cities and near-in suburbs. The latter will be futile, anyway, because suburban and exurban police departments will also be co-opted.)

10. Criminalization of “sexual misconduct”, as it is defined by the alleged victim, de facto if not de jure. (Investigations and prosecutions will be selective, and aimed mainly at straight, white males of European descent and dissidents who openly criticize this and other measures listed here.)

11. Parallel treatment for the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism. (This will be in addition to the measures discussed in #7.)

12. Centralization in the federal government of complete control of all health care and health-care related products and services, such as drug research, accompanied by “Medicare and Medicaid for All” mandates. (Private health care will be forbidden or strictly limited, though — Soviet-style — there will be exceptions for high officials and other favored persons. Drug research – and medical research, generally – will dwindle in quality and quantity. There will be fewer doctors and nurses who are willing to work in a regimented system. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace will be shrugged off as necessary to ensure equality of treatment, while ignoring the special treatment accorded favored elites.)

13. Revitalization of the regulatory regime (which already imposes a deadweight loss of 10 percent of GDP). A quantitative measure of revitalization is an increase in the number of new rules published annually in the Federal Register by at least 10 percent above the average for 2017-2020.

14. Proposals for at least least two of the following tax-related initiatives:

a. Reversal of the tax-rate cuts enacted during Trump’s administration.

b. Increases in marginal tax rates for the top 2 or 3 income brackets.

c. Imposition of new taxes on wealth.

15. Dramatic enlargement of domestic welfare programs. Specifically, in addition to the creation of “Medicare and Medicaid for All” programs, there would be a “fix” for Social Security that mandates the payment of full benefits in the future, regardless of the status of the Social Security Trust Fund (which will probably be abolished). (Initiatives discussed in #5, #7, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, and #15 would suppress investment in business formation and expansion, and would disincentivize professional education and training, not to mention work itself. All of that would combine to push the real rate of economic growth toward a negative value.)

16. Reduction of the defense budget by at least 25 percent, in constant dollars, by 2031 or sooner. (Eventually, the armed forces will be maintained mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Russia and China will emerge as superpowers, but won’t threaten the U.S. militarily as long as the U.S. government acquiesces in their increasing dominance and plays by their economic rules.)

17. Legalization of all immigration from south of the border, and the granting of citizenship to new immigrants and the illegals who came before them. (The right to vote, of course, is the right that Democrats most dearly want to bestow because most of the newly-minted citizens can be counted on to vote for Democrats. The permanent Democrat majority will ensure permanent Democrat control of the White House and both houses of Congress.)

If you’re keeping up with the news, you will know that almost all of those actions are underway or clearly telegraphed by official statements. It’s hard to chosse the most chilling of those statements, but the one that clearly reveals Biden’s totalitarian urge is his campaign against “white supremacy as domestic terrorism”. This will morph into the suppression of anyone who dares question the doctrine that blacks are where they are because of white racism, and not because of their generally inferior intelligence and cultural traits, or anyone who questions the justice of racial discrimination when it favors blacks. Stay tuned.

What Is the Point of It All?

If you have read the preceding post you may have surmised that I have surrendered to statism; for example:

This solution [devolution of political power] is superficially appealing. But it omits crucial realities, which are reflected in the state of the world throughout recorded history (and probably for eons before that). Human beings band together in order to accomplish certain ends (e.g., defense against marauders), and the banding together almost always creates leaders and subjects. Thus is a primitive state established. And once it is established, it exerts control over a geographic area (or a roving band), and everyone who lives in that area (or joins the band) becomes a subject of the state. Primitive states then band together — either for self-defense or because of conquest — forming larger and larger states, each of which holds its subjects in thrall. An occasional revolution sometimes leads to the dissolution of a particular state, but the subjects of that state simply become subjects of a successor state or of neighboring states avid to control the territory and subjects of the defunct state.

So it has gone for millennia, and so it will go for millennia to come.

The tide of statism may pause in its rise — and even recede a bit — but the aggrandizement of the state and its power over the people seems inexorable. Or is it?

There are many good reasons to oppose and resist the aggrandizement of the state. And this blog is replete with arguments for devolution. But this blog and the many like it (most of them more widely read and quoted) seem to be as effective in curbing and shrinking big government as aluminum foil is in stopping bullets.

Facts and logic may be on the side of devolution — and they are — but facts and logic have almost nothing to do with the practice of politics. In the end, it comes to down power-lust, rent-seeking, and free-loading.

So, what is the point of it all — of the incessant if largely ineffective barrage of arguments against the aggrandizement of the state? Well, as long as the minions of the state and the state’s powerful allies are unable to completely suppress dissent from statism, there is at least some hope that totalitarianism can be averted. There is also at least a (dimmer) hope that something will happen to reverse the tide and return to an America that still lives in the memories of many of us: America between the end of World War II and the 1960s.

What might that something be? Who knows? It is impossible to describe the confluence of events that causes a sudden change in the course of history, except in the aftermath of that change. But the change will not occur unless there are pressures that can lead to its occurrence. The Soviet Union, for example, wouldn’t have dissolved were it not for Reagan’s defense buildup, but the defense buildup wouldn’t have made a difference if the Soviet Union hadn’t been economically weak in the first place, and subject to other, internal pressures.

The American state, as it exists today, is an alliance of big-government politicians; their enablers in the academy, the media, and major corporations; and huge blocs of voters who are fueled by greed, envy, anger, and the belief that bigger government will assuage those emotions. This concoction has many potential failure points. By constantly working away at those potential failure points, it is possible — though by no means certain — that one or a few will fail and bring down the entire edifice of the presently constituted American state.

That is the point of it all. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, the only way to avert the triumph of evil is to keep on fighting it.

State Action As Private Action

Anarchists and defenders of non-governmental censorship to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no dividing line between private and state action. I address this point in “Is Anarchy a Viable Concept?“. I elaborate the point here.

Anarchists like to draw a bright line between the state and the private sphere so that they can argue, foolishly, for the replacement of the state by private actors. Defenders of non-governmental censorship (e.g., deletion of tweets by Twitter and deplatforming by Facebook) are simply political theorists in thrall the mistaken belief that the “marketplace of ideas” is self-correcting and eventually yields truth. (Even if it were self-correcting, devastating harm often results before truth emerges.)

I will begin with the futility of drawing a bright line — or any line — between state and private action. Before going any further I should be clear about what I mean by “state”.

A state is defined as “the supreme public power within a sovereign political entity” (4.a.). This definition reflects popular usage, which suggests that a state is some kind of disembodied essence. But a state does not exist unless it is embodied in institutions that are operated by human beings. And the power exercised by those human beings is meant to serve specific (if inchoate) aims that are personal to them or to persons to whom they are beholden; for example, higher-ranking government officials, major campaign contributors, influential voting blocs, or a person or group with whom one wishes to curry favor (e.g., the media). (It is a long-standing custom to refer Queen Elizabeth II as “head of state” of the United Kingdom, but she is no such thing inasmuch as she wields almost no power.)

Government power is exercised through agencies that are usually characterized as legislative, executive, and judicial. But there is a fourth type of agency that operates, much of the time, independently of the other three types. It is the “administrative state”, a conglomeration of executive agencies that usurps legislative and judicial functions. The “deep state” of recent controversy refers to members of the administrative state who strive (often successfully) to thwart the will of the chief of the executive branch through their direct control of the minutiae of government operations. This phenomenon underscores the essentially private nature of state action.

The power of the four types of agency is exercised through a combination of force, fear on the part of the governed, and submission by those among the governed who naively view the state and its edicts as something akin to divinity and divine writ.

The power of government is augmented by its ability to control information and perceptions about governmental activities. Such control, nowadays, is abetted by (most) members of the media when government is controlled by Democrats and undermined by (most) members of the media when government is controlled by Republicans.

The state, thus properly understood, is merely an outlet for private action. In so-called democracies (democratic republics) elections and appointments determine which private interests control the power of the state.

Democracies differ from oligarchies only in that voters in democracies go through the exercise of choosing the oligarchies — the collection of interest groups — that will rule them.

The difference between democracies and dictatorships is one of degree, not of kind. The ruling interests in a democracy are simply somewhat more changeable than the ruling interests in a dictatorship. But in both cases the ruling interests pursue private agendas. Dictatorships are more blatantly oppressive. Democracies hide their fascism behind a friendly face.

The bottom line: The state embodies and implements private action.

Given that the state, in the service of many (and sometimes competing) private agendas, must trample on the lives, liberty, or property of most of its subjects it would seem obviously desirable to devolve political power. And, logically, devolution ought to proceed to the lowest level: the person or a group of persons who choose to be treated as a unit (e.g., the nuclear family).

This solution is superficially appealing. But it omits crucial realities, which are reflected in the state of the world throughout recorded history (and probably for eons before that). Human beings band together in order to accomplish certain ends (e.g., defense against marauders), and the banding together almost always creates leaders and subjects. Thus is a primitive state established. And once it is established, it exerts control over a geographic area (or a roving band), and everyone who lives in that area (or joins the band) becomes a subject of the state. Primitive states then band together — either for self-defense or because of conquest — forming larger and larger states, each of which holds its subjects in thrall. An occasional revolution sometimes leads to the dissolution of a particular state, but the subjects of that state simply become subjects of a successor state or of neighboring states avid to control the territory and subjects of the defunct state.

So it has gone for millennia, and so it will go for millennia to come.

That would be the last word … but the duped defenders of corporate censorship cannot go unanswered. As I once observed, power is power. If government censorship is wrong, why is it right for powerful corporations to censor speech and effectively nullify the First Amendment? To put a point on it, why is it right for powerful corporations whose leaders share the ideologies and interests of a particular political party to act as surrogates for that party, and to suppress and distort opposing views?

The revised bottom line: The state embodies and implements private action, and private actors who do the bidding of state actors are merely minions of the state.

Related posts:

Anarchy: An Empty Concept
The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism
A Critique of Extreme Libertarianism
Anarchistic Balderdash
Old America, New America, and Anarchy
Extreme Libertarianism vs. the Accountable State
A Few Thoughts about Anarchy
Anarchy: A Footnote
Another Footnote about Anarchy
Is Anarchy a Viable Concept?

Preemptive (Cold) Civil War
Whence Polarization?
Social Norms, the Left, and Social Disintegration
“Liberalism” and Virtue-Signaling
The Fourth Great Awakening
It’s Them or Us
First They Came For …
Conservatism, Society, and the End of America
The Paradox That Is Western Civilization
Insidious Leftism
Thinking About the Unthinkable
Intellectuals and Authoritarianism
Leninthink and Left-think
Society, Culture, and America’s Future
The Democrats’ Master Plan to Seize America
The Allure of Leftism
Leftism in Summary
Peak Civilization?
A Footnote to “Peak Civilization?”
A Warning Too Late?
FDR’s Fascism, Underscored
Oh, That Deep State
It’s the 1960s Redux
Some People Are More Equal than Others, Illustrated

Reparations? Really?

A purportedly conservative columnist named Gary Abernathy, who seems to opine bi-weekly in The Washington Post, takes on reparations (for blacks, of course):

Like most conservatives, I’ve scoffed at the idea of reparations or a formal apology for slavery. I did not own slaves, so why would I support my government using my tax dollars for reparations … ?…

[I]t could be argued that the idea fits within the conservative philosophy. We’ll come back to that. But it is undeniable that White people have disproportionately benefitted from both the labor and the legacy of slavery, and — crucially — will continue to do so for generations to come.

When slavery was abolished after a bloody civil war, African Americans were dispersed into a world that was overtly hostile to them. Reconstruction efforts were bitterly resisted by most Southern Whites, and attempts to educate and employ former slaves happened only in fits and starts. The government even reneged on its “40 acres and a mule” pledge. After slavery, prejudice and indifference continued to fuel social and economic disparity.

The result is unsurprising. As noted by scholars A. Kirsten Mullen and William A. Darity Jr., co-authors of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” data from the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances showed that median Black household net worth averaged $17,600 — a little more than one-tenth of median White net worth. As Mullen and Darity write, “white parents, on average, can provide their children with wealth-related intergenerational advantages to a far greater degree than black parents. When parents offer gifts to help children buy a home, avoid student debt, or start a business, those children are more able to retain and build on their wealth over their own lifetimes.”

Black author and activist Randall Robinson has argued that even laws such as those on affirmative action “will never close the economic gap. This gap is structural. … blacks, even middle-class blacks, have no paper assets to speak of. They may be salaried, but they’re only a few months away from poverty if they should lose those jobs, because … they’ve had nothing to hand down from generation to generation because of the ravages of discrimination and segregation, which were based in law until recently.”

In addition to the discrepancy in inherited wealth, even conservatives should be able to acknowledge that Whites enjoy generational associations in the business world, where who you know often counts more than what you know — a reality based not so much on overt racism as on employment and promotion patterns within old-school networks that Blacks lack the traditional contacts to consistently intersect….

The cost [of reparations] can be debated, along with the mechanics of a compensation package. But in the current drunken haze of government spending, appropriating trillions for the noble purpose of bringing Black Americans who remain economically penalized by the enslavement of their ancestors closer to the fiscal universe of White citizens surely seems less objectionable than some recent spending proposals.

It is a tenet of conservatism that a level playing field is all we should guarantee. But that’s meaningless if one team starts with an unsurmountable lead before play even begins.

It’s not necessary to experience “White guilt” or buy into the notion of “White privilege,” a pejorative that to me suggests Whites possess something they should lose, when in fact such benefits should extend to all. Supporting reparations simply requires a universal agreement to work toward, as Jayapal said, “righting that wrong.”

That’s not what you were expecting, is it? Where to begin?

Glaringly absent from Abernathy’s “analysis” are the main determinants of the vast black-white gaps in income and wealth: Blacks are (on average) less intelligent than whites; two-thirds of all whites in the U.S. are more intelligent than the average black. The lower intelligence of blacks, combined with certain cultural traits, means that (as a group) they can never attain the income and wealth of whites. The insurmountable gap is there because of inborn and inbred differences that have nothing to do with slavery or “Jim Crow” and everything to do with genetic inheritance and deeply rooted cultural traditions.

The wrong of “Jim Crow” is several decades in the past, and the wrong of slavery is in the distant past. Both have as much to do with the present condition of blacks as CO2 has to do with “climate change” — which is to say, almost nothing.

Racism? It cuts both ways, and you ignore that fact at your peril. It takes but a few seconds with a search engine to turn up statistics which show that blacks are much more prone to the commission of violent crimes than are whites (or Hispanics, for that matter). Don’t you suppose that the greater propensity for violence among blacks (which is a reflection of intelligence and culture) has a lot to do with the income and wealth gap? (It also has very much to do with the seemingly greater tendency of blacks to be shot by cops while they, blacks, are committing crimes and resisting arrest.)

A level playing field? Where did Abernathy get that one? A level playing field is where the participants are given the same opportunities to make what they can of their natural endowments. No amount of leveling the playing field will give blacks the same natural endowments as whites when it comes to earning a living. (Athletes and entertainers are among the relatively rare exceptions that don’t change the rule.)

Taking money from whites and giving it to blacks doesn’t level the playing field. It merely penalizes (most) whites for something that isn’t their fault and that can’t be fixed by throwing money at it. (Ditto, “climate change”.)

My own view is that American blacks, on the whole, owe me a large reparation for my “contributions” to various government programs. I am thinking not just of the usual handouts to “welfare queens”, the futile Head Start program, preferential treatment for mortgage loans, subsidies for black-owned businesses, etc., etc. Those are just icing on the cake of Social Security and Medicaid, which are designed to transfer income from those with high earnings to those with low earnings (or none). Then there are the taxes that I pay for “public safety”, which are undoubtedly higher than they would be if blacks comprised a smaller proportion of the populace.

Related page and posts:

Intelligence

Affirmative Action: A Modest Proposal
After the Bell Curve
A Footnote . . .<
Affirmative Action: Two Views from the Academy, Revisited
Crime, Explained Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Poverty, Crime, and Big Government
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Crime Revisited Nature, Nurture, and Inequality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
The IQ of Nations
Race and Social Engineering
More about Intelligence
Nature, Nurture, and Leniency
Racism on Parade
How’s Your (Implicit) Attitude?
Why Race Matters
Is Race a Social Construct?
The Complexity of Race
White Privilege
Less Discrimination Means More Discrimination

Which Labor-Supply Curve?

A labor-supply curve, in economics, is a graphical or mathematical representation of the number of units of labor (work) of a specified kind that will be offered in a specified period of time (hour, day, week, etc.) at various rates of compensation (hourly wage or periodic salary or expected earnings from self-employment, plus the monetary value of benefits such as vacation time, pension contributions, etc.). A supply curve (like a demand curve) is ephemeral, in that it consists of the summation of the supply curves of many persons (or firms), each of which varies widely at a given time and shifts over time.

A person’s labor-supply curve is said to represent the choices that the person would make between work and leisure at various rates of compensation. On the assumption that leisure becomes more attractive than work at some point (i.e., a relatively high wage rate or salary that affords the person more than “enough” on which to live), the labor-supply curve is depicted as backward-bending after that point; that is, the worker will work less as his wage rate rises above the critical point. Graphically:

Figure 1

There are also complications due to unionization and minimum wage laws, both of which tend to set a wage rate that is above the wage that most workers would accept in a one-on-one transaction with an employer or prospective employer. (If unions or governments don’t mean to bargain for or dictate a wage above that which an individual worker could obtain on his own, that would vitiate the main justification for unionization and minimum-wage laws.) In any event, the effect of unionization and minimum wage laws is to deprive many workers of employment; thus:

Figure 2

The preceding relationships, interesting as they are, don’t paint a complete picture of the determinants of a person’s labor-supply curve. They are, perforce, inadequate to the task of explaining how various conglomerations of workers (e.g., unskilled laborers in Texas, pipefitters in Michigan, plastic surgeons in Malibu) will respond to compensation incentives.

For one thing, leisure — in the standard treatment — is a catchall for non-work activities: eating, sleeping, recreation, etc. It is simplistic to bundle those disparate activities. For another thing, most workers these days aren’t affected (directly, at least) by unionization or minimum wage laws. In general, the standard treatments fail to account adequately for other factors that may influence a person’s willingness to work for a give rate of compensation; for example, the perceived need to sustain a certain standard of living by working more to offset a reduction in one’s rate of compensation. I therefore submit the following step-by-step analysis of the labor-supply function, which is more complete and accordingly more complex than the standard treatments.

I will begin at the beginning, though I will refer to Figures 1 and 2 where they apply.

A person’s willingness and ability to perform a certain amount of work (L) of a particular kind is a function of several parameters: C, U, B, X, T, N, S, and E, each of which is defined below. I begin with the basic relationship between L and C, and then introduce the variations due to the other parameters.

C = total net compensation for work. This is the product of net compensation per unit of work (c) and the number of units of work (L). Net compensation is the after-tax, discounted present value of wages/salary and benefits (as perceived by the worker), for a given set of government policies that affect net compensation, directly or indirectly. In a simple labor-supply function, L = f(c), in which W responds positively and monotonically to increases in c; that is, the function is represented by an upward-sloping line (L), where c is measured on the vertical axis and L is measured on the horizontal axis:

Figure 3

(The rectangle bounded by the horizontal and vertical axes and the dashed lines that represent specific numbers of units of work, L1, and net compensation per unit, c1, has an area equal to the total compensation for that combination of c and L, which in this case is C1.)

U = utility or satisfaction derived from consumption and wealth accumulation resulting from work. This is usually depicted as a positive and rising relationship of the kind shown in the preceding graph. That is to say, the standard labor-supply curve is upward-rising because U generally increases as c rises (that is, as L rises) because of improvements in the quantity and quality of goods consumed and the accumulation of wealth (which provides even more access to goods of high quality, greater social standing, etc.). The following parameters complicate this seemingly simple relationship between c and L.

B = the effect of meeting basic necessities on the amount of labor that a worker is willing to offer. One factor that complicates a worker’s labor-supply function is the need to earn enough to cover basic necessities (e.g., minimal food, clothing, and shelter). The worker may be willing to work as much as required to pay for those necessities. For example, if his necessities cost him $100 a week and he can earn $10 an hour, he will be willing to work at least 10 hours a week, but if he can earn only $5 an hour, he will have to work at least 20 hours a week to pay for his basic necessities. It is entirely possible that a person who earns $500,000 a year will consider that amount necessary to meet his basic necessities, and that a change in his earning power or government policies will induce him to work more in order to net $500,000 a year. In any event, here is a depiction of the relevant portion of a labor-supply curve where B prevails:

Figure 4

If the worker is willing and able to deliver his labor beyond L3, his supply function would extend upward and to the right from that point. That is, having satisfied his basic needs, he would then be able to increase his utility by working more hours for higher rates of compensation.

X = the effect of changes in government policies on net compensation per unit of work, and therefore on the number of units of work that a worker will offer at a given rate of net compensation. If a worker has certain basic necessities (e.g., minimal food, clothing, and shelter), he will offer to work at least as much as required to meet those necessities, and may therefore offer to increase the number of units worked in response to X. For example, if the necessities have a cost to him $500 per week, he will offer to work as many hours as necessary to earn net compensation of $500 per week. And if his taxes increase by, say, $50 per week, he will seek additional work in order to offset the tax increase. But, if he is earning more than is required to cover his basic necessities, a tax increase of $50 a week — an effective reduction in his  compensation — will cause him to work less.

In this case, the graph of the relevant portion of the worker’s supply curve would look like Figure 3 or Figure 4, but c would be higher at each point along L; that is, the new supply curve would be above and parallel to the old supply curve.

T = taste for work of a particular kind. T is positive and rising with L if the work itself offers some pleasure to the worker (e.g., a doctor who enjoys helping the sick, an athlete who enjoys his sport for its own sake, a lawyer who revels in argumentation), or negative and declining with L if the worker works only for the compensation because of his distaste for the work (e.g., cleaning toilets, babysitting brats, working for pointy-haired bosses). This “psychic income” or “psychic penalty” raises or lowers the amount of work that the worker is willing to perform for a given rate of compensation (c).

Imagine a person who is capable of performing two different kinds of labor, X and Y. If Figure 3 or Figure 4 refers to X, and if the person has a “taste” for Y, his supply curve will for Y lie below the ones depicted in Figure 3 and 4; that is, he will require less compensation to do Y rather than X.

N = preference for non-work time (which includes leisure and time spent on personal functions such as meeting familial obligations, eating, and sleeping). This is the backward-bending relationship depicted in Figure 1. The portion of the supply curve that runs upward and to the right incorporates the tradeoff between compensation and leisure. But at some threshold value of C, the worker responds to higher c by reducing L. It seems to me that this effect should be depicted in this way:

Figure 5

That is, the worker reaches his “saturation” point at L3 and reduces the amount of work that he does as c rises past c3. In this case, he reduces his work time so that his total compensation remains the same as it was at L3.

S = subsidies that discourage work (e.g., unemployment benefits, “disability” payments, food stamps, subsidized housing). Where these are available to a worker, they reduce the amount of work that he is willing to do because they enable him to attain a given U without working. T may be positive and offsetting, but this is unlikely among workers who qualify for subsidies. The S effect pushes the supply curve upward; that is, less labor is offered for a given rate of compensation.

E = external forces that limit the amount of labor that a person is able to offer. There are at least two significant forces of this kind. One is the effect of laws and regulations that dictate the maximum amount of work that may be performed (e.g., zero in the case of most children under the age of 16) or the rate of compensation that must be paid (e.g., the minimum wage, overtime pay for persons in certain occupations). The other major force is the effect of employer-union contracts that dictate rates of compensation and hours of work that cannot possibly reflect the uncoerced preferences of many (or most) individual workers. (E, in its various manifestations, is treated in standard economics by overlaying “floors” or “ceilings” on the labor-supply curve.)

Figure 2 depicts this effect.

In conclusion, a labor-supply curve — even that of one person — can be a complex function, and one that responds in various ways to parameters other than the utility that is gained (or lost) by working more (or less). It is hard to imagine that a meaningful supply curve can be drawn for whole classes of workers. To draw such a curve, the workers must be rather homogeneous in their skills, their tastes (for leisure and other things), their wealth (which can strongly influence one’s willingness to perform certain kinds of work), and their exposure to various governmental policies (unionization, minimum wage laws, etc.). The fluidity of the labor market in the age of the “gig economy” supports my view.

Regarding the Verdict in the Chauvin Trial

What I said here still applies.

And … regardless of the justice or injustice of the verdict, cops will be further demoralized and thugs will be further emboldened by it. Look for less law and order in the months and years to come, unless a “man on horseback” arrives.

The Second Coming of Who?

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is quoted often these days, especially the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. And with good reason, given the maelstrom of strife and lunacy in which the nation and the world seem to be swirling.

Science and mathematics are in the grip of irrational forces; that is to say, sadly, the academic-media-information technology-corporate élites who have swallowed “wokeness” hook, line, and sinker. The same élites are responsible for the wholesale violation of immigration laws; the advancement of shiftless, violent, and less-intelligent citizens (and non-citizens) at the expense of blameless others; the risible belief that one’s sex is “assigned at birth”, to justify self-destructive and child-destructive gender-shifting; the repudiation of America’s past (the good with the bad); the destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well; the blatant theft of a presidential election; and much more that is equally distressing to contemplate.

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, in the aftermath of what was then the world’s most destructive war and in the midst of the pandemic known as the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal than the one from which the world is now emerging. It was a time of moral and physical exhaustion.

What is most remarkable about Yeats’s poem is its prescient second stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And thus did those “rough beasts” Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords — all “men on horseback” — emerge to take advantage of the moral and physical exhaustion of the time.

No such person is now on the horizon in America (though the élites feared that Trump might be that man). But if the maelstrom continues to swirl, a man on horseback will emerge, either from within or from without. In the latter case, given the feckless leadership in America, the man on horseback is likely to ride out of China, perhaps accompanied by a Russian.

And given a choice between a man or horseback and the élites who have corrupted America and who pamper the rabble, the man on horseback will be welcomed with open arms by those who are suffering at the hands of the élites.

Why Not Confiscate Automobiles?

It is obvious that the aim of “gun control” is the confiscation of all privately owned firearms in the United States. There will be exceptions for private security forces who protect well-heeled leftists, of course.

Why is “gun control” such a visceral issue for leftists? Well, there’s the usual leftist urge to control things, especially “risky” things. This is compounded by leftists’ aversion to things that are associated with masculinity, and which have (male) sexual connotations. (Guns shoot bullets — very Freudian.) Leftists of my acquaintance really do have a visceral aversion to guns. It’s on a par with an aversion to broccoli, which is equally irrational.

Which leaves me with this question: If deaths from gunfire are so horrendous to contemplate, what about deaths from automobile accidents — which claim more lives? (It wouldn’t even be close if suicides by gun weren’t counted — and they shouldn’t be, in this context. We’re talking about people who take the lives of other people.)

Well, in fact the very same leftists who want to confiscate guns also want to force people to use bicycles and public transit. That’s why leftist-controlled cities are rife with bike lanes and light-rail networks (or plans for them). That’s why leftists are so keen on taxes that penalize the ownership and operation of automobiles. (Which doesn’t bother rich leftists, who own fleets of gas-guzzlers.)

So leftists are trying to confiscate automobiles (just not their own).

This Is Military Wisdom?

There’s a new book on the market, New Principles of War: Enduring Truths with Timeless Examples. Its author is a retired analyst of military operations. Given his quantitative training and accomplishments as an analyst, one would expect more than pap. In fact, the jacket blurbs would lead the prospective reader to expect deep, compelling, and novel insights into the conduct of war; for example:

“This is a fascinating book most useful for the practitioner and student of war, with many ideas also applicable to other competitive activities such as business. Marvin Pokrant gives us multiple historical vignettes that illustrate the good and the bad of principles of war from around the world and make a compelling case for significant revisions. Highly recommended!”—Col. John A. Warden III, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), and president of Venturist, Inc.

“Marvin Pokrant has masterfully distilled historical and international writings about the conduct of war and uses many historical examples to develop his new principles of war. I believe they form an important resource for study by both the professional military and our national security leadership.”—Adm. Henry H. Mauz Jr., U.S. Navy (Ret.)

“The principles of war: prescription for battlefield success or dangerous mental straitjacket? Marvin Pokrant’s seminal exploration of the fundamentals of warfare that have been taught around the globe for generations is sure to engage and provoke. And in these dangerous times we need to rigorously challenge our preconceptions. This book does just that.”—Sean M. Maloney, PhD, professor of history at the Royal Military College

“All active-duty military officers should read this book. It would be perfect as a text at military war colleges. People dealing with strategic studies and national security will find this book valuable due to its suggestions of new principles to guide American military efforts. Readers of military history will find this work interesting because of the numerous historical examples.”—Phil E. DePoy, PhD, former president of the Center for Naval Analyses and founding director of the Wayne E. Meyer Institute for Systems Engineering, Naval Postgraduate School

“Marvin Pokrant’s New Principles of War is an excellent examination of the development of the principles of war throughout history and how they have differed over time and among countries. . . . If you are a student of military thought, this work is a must-read and will be a welcome addition to your library.”—Michael A. Palmer, PhD, author of Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century

I was therefore expecting something more than banalities. But that, in the end, is what the book delivered. Here are some key passages from the book’s concluding chapter:

Because objectives guide all military operations, commanders should put a lot of thought into selecting and prioritizing them.

Commanders should seek battle under conditions of the greatest possible relative advantage.

Commanders should seek to keep enemies so busy meeting threats that they have no time for their own schemes.

Commanders should take active measures to assure [that] everyone understands the overall purpose of an operation. They should demand [that] subordinates cooperate with each other to attain unity of effort.

Surprise can gain the initiative and a relative advantage, but the strongest effect of surprise is often its moral effect on the enemy. [As if the “moral effect” were always negative. But remember the Maine, and remember Pearl Harbor.]

The goal of deception should be to cause the enemy to act in a specific manner that you can exploit.

All forces should have good situational awareness of the location of friendly forces. [Awareness of the location of enemy forces is helpful, too.]

To defeat your enemy, you must learn as much as you can about your enemy.

The environment is often a decisive factor.

With my corrections, these are useful points to keep in mind when thinking about how to conduct a military operation. But why did it take the author some 300 pages (in the paperback version) to arrive at them. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the classic of this genre, is rated at 96 pages in the hardcover edition. It would be much shorter than that without the front and back matter, the illustrations, the large typeface, the wide margins, and the ample line spacing (leading, in printer’s parlance).

New Principles of War is much ado about the obvious.

Is Anarchy a Viable Concept?

Even within a family, clan, or voluntary community there are usually persons who possess some combination of status, physical strength, strength of will, cunning, or persuasiveness that enables them to impose their will on the group. The motivation — an urge to control the group or a sincere belief that the group will benefit from their control — is unimportant; the fact of control is what matters.

There is the complementary need, felt by many persons, to be led or dominated because of lack of status, physical weakness, weakness of will, lack of cunning, etc.

Thus do leaders emerge, even within a family, clan, or voluntary community. And they may be venerated and prized just as they may be feared and hated. But they do lead (command) the group, and in doing so they set state-like rules that may help the family, clan, or community to thrive and survive — or put it on a path to strife, poverty, or extinction.

Businesses, of course, are notoriously and unavoidably commanded. As are gangs (which aren’t necessarily voluntary), cults, religious organizations — and on and on.

All of the organizations mentioned thus far (and their unmentioned ilk) may not be dictatorships or oligarchies. That is, their leaders may, formally or informally, seek the advice or consult the preferences of those whom they lead. But in all cases, there is a hierarchy of some kind, and the person or persons at the top have the moral or physical means to command obedience to their decisions.

In sum, the removal of a formal state does not mean the removal of state-like control over the lives of individual persons. At best, it devolves that control to smaller — but still state-like — institutions. And those institutions — like formal states — will devise various means of cooperation and conflict resolution, or like states they will engage in outright coercion and conflict of one kind or another (ostracism, rules enforced by sanctions, combat, economic warfare, etc.).

The argument for anarchy is therefore an argument in favor of replacing a formal state with myriad state-like institutions. These will range, in their preference for cooperation or conflict, from close-knit neighborhoods to mutually beneficial contractual arrangements to violence-prone gangs (of many scales) to uncompromising sectarian and religious organizations that are bound ideologically (e.g., Communist and Islamic cells).

It is beyond me how this would make the United States (let alone the world) a better place — in practice, that is, as opposed to Utopian dream-spinning. The realistic alternative, therefore, is an accountable state, the power of which is checked by constitutional means. It is far from a perfect alternative, as I will soon explain, but it is the only viable one.

Arguably, the United States was once something like an accountable state. And even then (from the late 1700s until the early 1900s), it was far less than a paragon of classical liberalism. Since then, aside from participating in at least a few senseless and horrendously costly wars, the central government has been depriving Americans of much of their liberty. Even the advances for blacks and other identity groups have not been unmitigated gains for those groups — think “welfare dependency”, for example. And those advances have imposed on most Americans the deadweight losses of taxation, reverse discrimination, punishments for “wrong thinking”, etc., that inevitably accompany favoritism for some groups at the expense of others.

But the retrogression of the United States as a force for liberty doesn’t mean that anarchy is a viable alternative to the kind of state represented by the United States. All it means is that no kind of human endeavor is exempt from corruption. Anarchy is just another kind of human endeavor, one that can deliver economic and social liberty only if the all-too-human urges to dominate others and to commit violence against them could be eradicated.

Those urges can’t be eradicated or kept in check — as history amply attests. The urge to perfection — as history also amply attests — only gives the “perfectionists” (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc., etc.) an excuse for waging war on their own people and on the wider world.

What would a doctrinaire anarchist do if he saw others behaving un-anarchically to his detriment? Well, I suspect that if he were not a pacifist (i.e., self-destructive) he would organize his fellow thinkers into some kind of pro-anarchic army (oxymoron alert), and that the army would have to be hierarchical in order to succeed. I suspect, further, that if it did succeed, the result would be the de facto creation of an anti-anarchic “anarchy”, for the protection and preservation of anarchistic dogma. Shades of dictatorial “peoples’ republics” and Orwellian double-think.

Anarchy, after all, is an ideology. And ideologies always run afoul of human nature, in one way or another. And ideologies aren’t to be trusted because ideologues are dangerous, no matter what they profess to believe. If the Constitution of the United States, which was framed in the light of human nature, failed to deliver lasting liberty to Americans, what can one expect of a naive ideology that dismisses human nature?

The answer to the question posed by the title of this post is a resounding NO.

Related posts:

Defense, Anarcho-Capitalist Style
Fundamentalist Libertarians, Anarcho-Capitalists, and Self-Defense
Anarchy: An Empty Concept
The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism
A Critique of Extreme Libertarianism
Anarchistic Balderdash
Old America, New America, and Anarchy
Extreme Libertarianism vs. the Accountable State
A Few Thoughts about Anarchy
Anarchy: A Footnote
Another Footnote about Anarchy

How to Reform Election Laws

The brouhaha about recent changes in Georgia’s election laws is all about Democrats trying to make it easier for Democrat-leaning voters to vote. If Democrat politicians have their way, not only would D.C. and Puerto Rico become States, thus making it almost impossible for a Republican to be elected president (as long as the Electoral College remains in place), but also: the voting age would be lowered to 16 (14?, 12?); ballots would be mailed to everyone old enough to vote and could completed, collected, and turned in by anyone; online voting (easily corrupted) would be allowed; and anyone who happens to be in the country at election time would be entitled to vote.

All of that, and whatever else Democrats hope to do to secure permanent control of the central government, goes in exactly the wrong direction. Voting should be severely restricted, not opened up. Specifically, voting should be restricted to mature and responsible and who have “skin in the game”. Here is how it should work:

There would be one vote per household — irrespective of the sex of the head of the household (if I may use that quaint term) — inasmuch as a household is an economic and social unit.

The household must include at least one person who is 30 years of age or older, and one such person must cast the household’s ballot on election day (see below).

No member of the household may have demonstrated grossly irresponsible behavior, as indicated by a conviction for a felony.

There may not be an outstanding tax lien against property held by any member of the household.

At least one member of the household must hold a deed to real property with an assessed value of at least $50,000 (to be adjusted upward for inflation), and any outstanding debt secured by the property must not exceed 80 percent of the purchase price of the property.

At least one member of the household who is 30 years old or older must not be receiving unemployment benefits or must not have received them within six months before election day.

Every member of the household who is 21 years old or older must be a citizen of the United States or a legal, resident alien.

To ensure the integrity of ballots and the casting thereof on the basis of up-to-date knowledge of the candidates and the issues, all voting would occur in-person, on election day, at polling stations in numbers and locations adequate to avoid long lines at closing time. Each person casting a ballot for a household would have to produce the household’s government-issued voter-registration card and an approved form of identification (e.g., government-issued driver’s license, military ID card).

There would thus be no need for absentee voting, except in cases where an entire household is disabled (e.g., a household consisting of one or two elderly persons), as certified by a licensed physician, or stationed overseas. (Other households would have to plan vacations so that one qualified member can cast an in-person vote on election day.)

Election day would be shifted to a Saturday. All polling stations in the country would be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., local time. No votes, including absentee ballots, would be counted before the last stations close (i.e., the polling stations in Hawaii).

Thinking about Thinking — and Other Things: Beliefs, Herds, and Oppression

This is the sixth and final post in a series. The previous posts are here, here, here, here, and here.

What this series adds up to is that human beings can and will believe anything. And much of what they believe – even “science” – is either mistaken or beyond proof. Belief, at bottom, is a matter of faith; it is a matter of what we choose to believe.

And why do we choose what to believe? We choose to believe those things that make us feel good about ourselves in one way or another. Here are four (not mutually exclusive) ways in which our beliefs serve that purpose:

  • Logical or epestimic consistency, which can be intellectually satisfying even if the logic is fatally flawed or the knowledge is cherry-picked to fit a worldview.
  • The (usually false) reassurance that a belief has been proclaimed “true” by an authority — “science”, religious leaders, political leaders, etc.
  • No skin in the game: The holding of views (for reasons listed above) that are inconsequential to the holder of the views but which (when put into action) are harmful to others (e.g., a rich person who has private security forces and lives and works in secure settings who calls for defunding the police).
  • Groupthink: Going along to get along, also known as “taking sides”.

On the last point, I defer to Michael Huemer:

There’s … a study that finds that political beliefs are heritable. (Alford et al, “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?”) They get a heritability estimate of 0.53 for political orientation (p. 162), much larger than the influence of either shared environment or unshared environment. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it — who knew that you could genetically transmit political beliefs? But of course, you don’t directly transmit beliefs; you genetically transmit personality traits, and people pick their political beliefs based on their personality traits.

But, as Huemer notes,

the primary choice people make is not so much which propositions they want to be wedded to, but which group of people they want to affiliate with. Maybe there’s only a very tenuous link between some personality trait and some particular political position, but it’s enough to make that position slightly more prevalent, initially, among people with that trait. But once those people decide that they belong to “the same side” in society, there’s psychological pressure for individual members of the tribe to conform their beliefs to the majority of their tribe, and to oppose the beliefs of “the other side”.

So, e.g., you decide that fetuses don’t have rights because the fetus-rights position is associated with the other tribe, and you don’t want to be disloyal to your own side by embracing one of the other side’s positions. Of course, you never say this to yourself; you just automatically find all of your side’s arguments “more plausible”.

And, as we have seen, belonging to a “side” and signaling one’s allegiance to that “side” seems to have become the paramount desideratum among huge numbers of Americans. “Liberals”, who not long ago were ardent upholders of freedom of speech are now its leading opponents. And many “liberals” – executives and employees of Big Tech companies, for example – demonstrate their opposition daily by suppressing the expression of ideas that they don’t like and denying the means of expression to persons whose views they oppose. They can conjure sophisticated excuses for their hypocrisy, but they are obvious and shallow excuses for their evident unwillingness to countenance “heretical” views.

This hypocrisy extends beyond partisan politics. It extends into discussions of race (i.e., the suppression of “bad news” about blacks and research findings about the intelligence of blacks). It extends into discussions of scientific matters (e.g., labeling as a “science denier” any scientist who writes objectively about the evidence against CO2 as the primary cause of a recent warming trend that is probably overstated, in any case, because of the urban heat island effect). It extends elsewhere, of course, but there’s no point in belaboring the obvious.

The worst part of it is that the hypocrisy isn’t practiced just by lay persons who wish to signal their allegiance to “progressivism”. It’s practiced by scientists, academicians, and highly educated persons who hold important positions in the business world (witness Big Tech’s censorship practices and the “wokeness” of major corporations).

In other words, the herd instinct is powerful. It sweeps all before it. Even truth. Especially truth when it contravenes the herd’s dogmas — which are its “truths”.

And a herd that runs wild — driven hither and thither by ever-shifting “truths” — is dangerous, as we are seeing now in the suppression of actual truth, the suppression of political speech, firings for being associated with the wrong “side”, etc.

Today’s state of affairs is often likened to that which prevailed in the years leading up to the Civil War. There is a good reason for that comparison, for the two epochs are alike in a fundamental way: One side (Unionists then, the “woke” now) assumes the mantle of virtue and thus garbed presumes to dictate to the other side.

Yes, slavery was wrong. But that did not justify the (successful) attempt of the Unionists to prevent the Confederacy’s secession on the principle of self-determination — the very principle that inspired the American Revolution that led to the Union.

Yes, it is fitting and proper to treat the (relatively) poor, persons of color, and persons whose sexual proclivities are “unusual” with respect and equality under the law. But that does not justify the wholesale violation of immigration laws, the advancement of the “oppressed” at the expense of blameless others (who are mainly straight, white, males of European descent), the repudiation of America’s past (the good with the bad), or the destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well.

Ironically, the power of the central government, which was enabled by the victory of the Unionists, now enables “progressivism” to advance its dictatorial agenda with little effective opposition.

Donald J. Trump did oppose that agenda, and opposed it with some success for four years. That is why it was imperative for the “progressive” establishment — abetted by pusillanimous “conservatives” and never-Trumpers — to undermine Trump from the outset and, in the end, to remove Trump from power by stealing the election of 2020. There has never, in American politics, been a more heinous case of wholesale corruption than was evidenced in the machinations against Trump.

Having said all of that, what will happen to America? The slide toward fascism, which has been underway (with interruptions) for more than a century, now seems to have reached its destination: the dictation of myriad aspects of social and economic intercourse by our “betters” in Washington and their cronies in the academy, the media, and corporate America.

And most Americans — having been brainwashed by the “education system”, bought off by various forms of welfare, and cowed by officious officials and mobs — will simply acquiesce in their own enslavement.

Related reading:

Matt, “Varieties of Opinion“, Imlac’s Journal, March 14, 2021

Frank Furedi, “Big Brother Comes to America“, Spiked, February 8, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson, “Our Animal Farm“, American Greatness, February 7, 2021

Arnold Kling, “Rationalist Epistemology“, askblog, February 26, 2021

Arnold Kling, “Cultural Brain Hypothesis“, askblog, March 5, 2021

Mark J. Perry, “Quotation of the Day on Truths That We Are No Longer Allowe to Speak About … “, Carpe Diem, February 2, 2021

Malcolm Pollack, “The Enemy Within“, American Greatness, February 13, 2021

Quilette editorial, “With a Star Science Reporter’s Purging, Mob Culture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase“, Quilette, February 9, 2021