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Some favorite quotes

Would we be governed differently if elections were held on April 16^th?

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you caan convince one man by logic. – Robert Heinlein

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.  –  Stuart Chase

“Rent control appears to be the most effective technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing.” – Assar Lindbeck, Swedish economist

Brave men die but once, a coward dies a hundred deaths. – Julius Caesar

The essential prerequisite for learning is the readiness to acknowledge one’s ignorance. – Socrates

Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever. – Robert Heinlein

“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” – Ronald Reagan

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” – Socrates

If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything. – MLK

My father used to say that colored people came out of slavery, Negroes built all of the institutions, blacks helped with the right to vote and African-Americans just complain. – John Sibley Butler

“One cannot hope to reason people out of those things they haven’t been reasoned into” – Jonathan Swift

“The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” John Roberts

Fixing what is broken in Washington is not hard if your own political future is not your pressing concern. – Tom Coburn

Countries don’t have permanent friends only permanent interests – Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston.

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” George Orwell

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.” 
― Robert A. Heinlein

Life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” 
― George V. Higgins, 

The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends. — Ludwig von Mises

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Declaration of Independence)

“Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln

“If you are never controversial, you have probably never said anything interesting.” – Assar Lindbeck

Ominously, as de Tocqueville said “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” I’m afraid that day has arrived.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

We do not know enough to justify anything we believe. – Aristotle

We are too intellectually lazy to verify what we profess to believe – Aristotle

“Nobody seemed to give a damn about my work until very late in my career. Then, I felt like I was on an extended victory lap”. John Steinbeck

G. K. Chesterton’s century-old observation: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

You’re fired!

It is really ironic that I was working on an article on the uptick in black unemployment when yesterday I was fired by the conservative weekly I write a column for because I am too conservative. At least they didn’t fire me because I was black. But first a little background. For twenty years I wrote a monthly business column for our local daily. Then it was sold to Gannet whose editors did not like me – no surprise there. They started editing my articles, sometimes changing their meaning. When I complained they said “If you don’t like it then quit.” They then moved my column from the business section of the Sunday paper to “Opinions”. Why? Because sometimes I expressed an opinion in the pieces. “OK”, I said, “I will now write opinion pieces.” Then during Covid they refused to publish my article that listed all the mandates from our local health department saying that I could not find scientific justification for any of them. Stores had a curfew – I asked did this mean that Covid only spread after hours? There was the 6 foot rule, later admitted by Fouci to be made up. I noted that every rule was a repeat of rules mandated by health departments during the Spanish Flu and asked whether knowledge had advanced since 1918. But our newspaper was in the “let’s keep them scared” camp. They wouldn’t publish the piece. So I quit. It was not a surprise that I was too conservative for the new editors.

Fast forward to yesterday. The publisher of the conservative weekly had called me when he found out I had quit the other paper and said that I could write “anything I wanted”. Turns out that was true only while Joe Biden was president. Although I wrote pieces supporting President Trump on his efforts on DEI, trans and antisemitism, I was opposed to the tariffs, the shakedown of private firms and noted that Trump had lied when he said he was going to be too busy to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The publisher called me obviously upset I had used the word “lied” – maybe I should have called it a fabrication – and fired me. He said that he was receiving too many criticisms of my articles and remember “we are a conservative paper.” It was curious because I had gotten only one email that called me a racist for writing that Europe was a loser and we should look elsewhere for alliances. Recall that months later, the Wall Street Journal had a piece saying the same thing. I reminded the publisher that I was a conservative – a laissez faire, free market, government with a small “g” conservative. But I was not a Trump conservative and the publisher was, agreeing with everything done by this president. So he fired me.

Isn’t it ironic that I was fired from a liberal paper for being too conservative and then fired by a “conservative” paper for the same reason? So my platform continues to shrink. Now there is only my blog. But so be it. I have been told from the womb that my mind works differently. I do this because it is fun. I don’t ask you to agree with me. I only want you to enjoy what I write whether you agree or not. Tell me when you do and please tell me when you don’t. I am an academic. Milton Friedman once said that professors love to profess. And I do love to profess.

Again. Thank you for being there.

Random thoughts #69

Not particularly relevant to anything but the University of North Carolina played TCU. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor are at the game. They probably don’t remember me but I was on the UNC athletics board and spotted for both of them in the weight room. LT was a beast but I could bench more than MJ. In those days it was thought that upper body muscles would inhibit your shot so the basketball players concentrated on the lower body.

I am surprised that the democrats aren’t demanding that ESPN change the name of their show “NFL RedZone.”

If you want to lease an EV, now is the time. A Kia Niro EV (base price $28,435) can be leased for as little as $40 a month! A Kia EV9($56,761) can be had for $189 month. The dealer uses the $7,500 tax credit which expires at the end of September to lower the lease price of the vehicle. For some weird reason the tax credit does not apply to the purchase of an EV made overseas but does apply to leasing the vehicle. Unfortunately my tastes run more toward a Porsche Taycan. Porsche is offering a $22,000 discount on a lease which lowers it to $949 a month with $(,829 due at signing. I think I will stick to my 2007 Mercedes 350 CLK.

What may stop you from leasing that EV is that Motor Trend has released the statistics showing that the deadliest car in America is (to few people’s surprise) Tesla. Kia is number two.

What’s with the workers at all tech companies that think they can picket their own company, set up encampments and deface property? Microsoft, Google and Tesla have been hit by these leftists who protest their companies doing business with Israel. These employees are getting fired. Apparently, they mistook the “campus” of their employer for a college campus and thought it was ok to act up. Someone said that the office is for work. Who knew?

Also what’s with these celebrities “fleeing” Trump’s America for England? First Ellen DeGeneres and her wife buy a house there and say “Everything here is just better – the way animals are treated, people are polite. I just love it here.” Then someone named Robin Wright fled to England saying “I love being in this country. There’s a freedom of self here. People are so kind.” That freedom apparently doesn’t cover freedom of speech.

I guess they don’t know about the UK throwing people in jail for saying or tweeting the “wrong thing.” Over 12,000 Brits are arrested each year over social media posts deemed offensive. This tells me two things. First, do the British really believe in free speech and two, if you know you are going to be arrested and still post, most people would consider you either very brave or very dumb. One of the people arrested said “It was hard to shake off the sense that I was living in a police state.” Hey, but it is a state where Ellen and Robin at least are free from Trump who hasn’t sic-ed his “Justice” Department on anti-Trump postings – yet.

England does not have a First Amendment. In case you have forgotten, here is ours:

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The UK is even arresting people for praying near abortion centers. Guess they got that one from Joe Biden.

Speaking of stupid, several so-called democrat influencers are still clamoring the pack the court with their kind of people. Recall that this was the rage when Biden was president and that even the liberals on the court said it was a bad idea. It amazes me that the democrats would even utter this while Trump is in the White House and republicans have both the House and the Senate. I had said previously that I was all for court packing – now.

And what happened to Trump’s objections to the EU’s Digital Services Tax and Digital Services Act? Are they still being negotiated? The EU seemed hell bent on keeping them in place regardless of the tariffs. Trump had said that he was willing to lower their tariffs if they scuttled the acts. I have written about the digital services tax The Digital Services Act policies the online environment safer in by policing the tech giants on illegal content, hate speech and child sexual abuse material. Trump calls this censorship and has threatened actions including increased tariffs and even visas revoked against EU officials.

I wrote a piece on the decline of Europe and suggested that we look elsewhere for partners who are vibrant and love freedom. For that I got emails calling me a racist. Well the Wall Street Journal a bit later published a similar piece – “Europe is Losing”. I am sure that they don’t read my blog. I looked at the letters to the editor and found general agreement and no one accusing the Journal of being racist.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europe-is-losing-fe179376

This is unbelievable and I just saw it in Apple News. I’m glad I posted it first.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a65924126/african-union-replace-mercator-map-equal-earth/

A mere sampling of the wisdom of Thomas Sowell

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence they are creating artificial stupidity.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of “diversity”?

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions that by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

What exactly is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce and canonized those who complain. 

You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible. 

A friend from India told me that a countryman of his said “I want to go to America. I want to see a country where poor people are fat.”

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging the fabric of society as a whole.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution.

Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done are people who have done nothing themselves.

It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.

When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

I’m so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

Our national problems usually do not cause nearly as much harm as the solutions.

People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state.

It is fascinating to watch politicians come up sith “solutions” to problems that are a direct result of their previous solutions.

The minimum wage law is very cleverly misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled workers receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer.

Hilary Clinton said you know it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that.

Some ideas sound so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time. Other ideas sound so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time. Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operation of a free market are among the second kind.

Would the president’s obsession with Greenland change if he knew its actual size?

What did you want to be when you grew up? When I was little I wanted to drive a coal truck. My father’s father drove one and I thought that it was really cool. Then in elementary school I wanted to be a cartographer. I was fascinated by maps. My parents bought me a globe and I would spend hours on end looking at every detail, every country, every longitude, every latitude, every lake and mountain range. Everything. I was always bothered when I saw “not to scale.” I would ask my parents “what’s to scale?” They told me to go look in the Encyclopedia Britannica which told me that maps were not to scale but never showed me what the world really looked like. I never quit liking maps but decided in high school that I wanted to be a physicist. I had a great physics teacher and he encouraged me to apply for an NSF grant to study physics during the summer at Norfolk State University. I did and from the first lecture realized that physics was not for me. Maybe I should go back to geography and be a cartographer. But I had a perfectly awful geography teacher and my Dad said “aren’t all the maps already drawn?” So I decided that maybe I would be a lawyer like Dad’s older brother because I did not want to be a school teacher like both of my parents. My older brother wanted to be an engineer and was at Purdue because in those days he wasn’t allowed to go to Georgia Tech but we really didn’t know what an engineer did. Maybe we thought it was like our cousin Herman who was an engineer on the Norfolk Southern railroad. 

The map that was on my globe and all my maps was the Mercator projection drawn by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.  It was used by European ship’s captains because it allowed navigators to plot a straight-line course from point A to point B. But when it translated a three-dimensional shape like the Earth into a two-dimensional projection like a map, it distorted size and distance as you got closer to the two poles. As a result Greenland and Antarctica look huge. Greenland actually looks bigger than Africa even though Africa is fourteen times larger than Greenland.

Is the Mercator projection the source of Trump’s obsession with Greenland? The president said in an interview in 2021 “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.'” Oops. A geography professor said “Anyone who looks at Greenland with a Mercator projection, thinking that it is huge, needs remedial training in geography.” Well that “anyone” is not only Donald Trump but all the rest of us brought up with the Mercator projection.

Why is this artifact of 1569 still used today? There are a lot of conspiracy theories. One is that it is used by the white powers-that-be to make Africa look smaller and the US, Russia and Europe look larger than they are. In fact the Boston schools use the Gall-Peters world map instead to counter “white racism”. But historically cartographers made their homelands greater in size to symbolize its importance and the maps we use were developed by northern Europeans. The Boston school system said explicitly that it wanted to shift away from being Eurocentric. But even the Europeans are moving away from being Eurocentric too. The Gall-Peters world map is now promoted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and is widely used by the British state school system in an effort to depict the Earth closer to how it actually looks rather than how it looked in 1569 to a Flemish cartographer.

But why the Gall-Peters map? It is only one of many of the world. There is the Equal Earth projection map developed by NASA which is based on Robinson projection with the curved sides of the projection suggesting the spherical form of Earth, straight parallels making it easy to compare how far north or south places are from the equator and the meridians are evenly spaced along any line of latitude. There is the Natural Earth projection where the mathematical formulae for the projection were derived from a polynomial used to define the spacing of parallels.

But what would the map look like if China had dominated the world? Here is one drawn by a Chinese cartographer.

I wonder if the Mercator map were not so widely used if the president would be as obsessed with Greenland? But contrary to what my Dad said, there are still maps to be drawn. Maybe I should have become a cartographer after all.

Here is what the countries look like in actual size.

Here is the Gall-Peters map which also distorts the countries as well.

Labor Day 2025

Isn’t it somewhat appropriate that on Labor Day, it was reported that union membership has fallen below 10 percent of the workforce? In 1983 that percentage was 20%. Much of union membership is now with government workers. In the private sector only 5.9% are union members and a third of those are in the teachers’ unions – government worker too. Is this good or bad for the country? Of course the democrats will say this is bad because it means less money flowing into democrat coffers. Republicans will say that the declining membership is good for the country. The Pew Research Center bears this out and reports “Today, 82% of Democrats say this decline has been bad for the country, up from 69% who said this a year ago. 85% of Democrats also say the decline in union membership has been bad for working people, up from 74% in 2024. By contrast, majorities of Republicans and GOP leaners continue to say that the decline in union membership has been good for the country (62%) and for working people (59%).”

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/27/majorities-of-adults-see-decline-of-union-membership-as-bad-for-the-us-and-working-people/

An important question is why then do the unions continue to occupy an outsized influence in American politics? President Trump has catered to them with the Teamsters’ president speaking at the republican national convention. His vice president loves unions. Remember when Vance showed up on a picket line during the auto workers strike? At least the Teamsters for once did not endorse the democrat candidate for president. But they didn’t endorse Trump either. Trump then went as far as to install as his labor secretary a Teamster favorite who opposed right to work laws and voted to repeal them when she was in the House. I guess for the republicans, the unions matter only in the states where they might make a difference like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Again my good friend Frank Glassner offers his encyclopedic view of the world. Happy Labor Day Frank!

https://blog.veritasecc.com/the-union-label-from-tiger-to-tabby?utm_campaign=78730990-Blogs&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9LO9QUwIySJMU2rcsMd1HEsher12smzl748coVtQwW_RCXnMR178FU5uXNMvDcChFy3nRL1oalF1D-vnfoqdKv40jhUg&_hsmi=13237433&utm_content=13237433&utm_source=hs_email

Random Thoughts #68

DDE’s asking why the EU do not buy US cars made me reminisce. I don’t buy them either. My first car was my Dad’s 1964 Mercury Monterey that he gave me when I got my master’s in 1968.  It proved too big to fit in parking spaces near the Ohio State campus so I bought a 1968 fastback Toyota corolla. It fit but had terrible brakes. Then I bought a 1970 Fiat 124 coupe, I think the spyder was the convertible. I loved that car which is why a bit later my then wife wanted it during divorce proceedings. So I bought a Saab Sonnet which I wish I had kept. To date I have never owned another American car after Dad’s Mercury. But a progression of American SUVs and pickups have followed until my mother’s death when I realized that I had always wanted a Mercedes GLS 450 and my time was getting short. So out went the Chevy Traverse. However, I had an F-150 as a farm truck which morphed into an F-250 diesel when we started towing 5^th wheel toy haulers so we could take the motorcycles with us when we went camping.

When once I said that we camped, I was asked “in a tent?” Hardly, it is in a fifth wheel with two flat screen tvs, two ACs, three burner stove with an oven, refrigerator, microwave, stereo system and an electric fireplace. Home away from home. I once remarked that the only way you could get black people in a tent was to draft them into the army – or attend a revival.

When Trump’s tariffs are declared illegal, do all the importers get a refund?

The drama continues with the NCUA board. Recall that the president fired the two democrat members and had them barred from their offices. They sued and were reinstated because their legal structure was the same as the Fed’s board and the Supreme Court had ruled that the president could not fire a Fed governor (without cause). The two democrat NCUA board members returned to work – probably to the consternation of the sole republican member who had declared himself a quorum of one. The Department of “Justice” appealed and a Federal appeals court just paused the two democrats’ reinstatement while the appeal is heard. Out they go again. The court said that the administration’s request was granted to “give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for stay pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.” Why is this important? Because it bears on the administration’s ability to add the Fed to the list of agencies in which the president has the authority to fire its members despite their being confirmed by the senate. I thought what was interesting is that unlike the Fed, NCUA’s board must be bipartisan by law. I thought that the president would fire one of the democrats so that the republicans could have the majority of members. But perhaps that would have been too subtle a move for this president. Stay tuned.

Trump says that he has fired Fed governor Lisa Cook who says he can’t fire her. There is no word that Trump will sic the FBI on her by invading the Fed building to oust her physically. Cook, in turn has sued the president (just like the NCUA board members). Cook says that she will stay on the job until the courts rule. Like NCUA this one is destined for the Supreme Court. What is interesting is that the president says that he will nominate someone to take Cook’s seat. You mean that the Senate will hold hearings when the vacancy may not be a vacancy? What if the person is then confirmed? What happens next? Do they share an office and a vote since the Board can have only seven governors.

At last, some of the president’s sycophants have gathered up enough nerve to vocally oppose one of his actions. Pursuing his American socialism, the president is having the government inject itself into private business – mining, Intel, US Steel. Commerce secretary Lutnick says that they are considering having a stake in defense contractors. Larry Kudlow who to date has been a Trump apologist and Stephen Moore who put together some comical charts to give credence to the president’s charge that the BLS jobs numbers were rigged to make him look bad actually can’t find it in themselves to endorse Trump’s turn toward socialism. Moore was on Kudlow’s show on Fox and was asked “How about the U.S. government owning 10 percent of Intel?” Moore said

“I hate corporate welfare! That’s privatization in reverse! We want the government to divest of assets, not buy assets! So terrible, one of the bad ideas that’s come out of this White House.” Kudlow concurred: “I am very, very uncomfortable with that idea.” Now if only the republicans in the House and Senate had the guts to just say “no.”

Note that neither Kudlow nor Moore could bring themselves to say the “S” word. Hey, but Bernie Sanders likes it and interestingly Gavin Newsom doesn’t. Politico reports the following: Gavin Newsom said that people would be “outraged” if Joe Biden had done the same deals that the Trump administration did with Intel and Nvidia. “This is outrageous. It’s reckless. If Joe Biden tried to nationalize Intel, if Joe Biden did a deal to send to H20 chips to China. “People would be outraged. Are you kidding me?” Newsom then said “It sickens me to the core.”

Isn’t it interesting that Newson is “sickened to the core” but we have heard nothing from the so-called Freedom Caucus? The republican leadership in the Senate (John Thune) and in the House (Mike Johnson) have been mute. No Chip Roy, no Andy Biggs, no Andy Ogles or our Tim Burchett. No Marsha Blackburn either. Of course she is running for Tennessee governor and wants Trump’s endorsement. Ogles and Burchett want her senate seat so they have turned into yes-men too. I guess the only principled members with guts come from Kentucky in Thomas Massie in the House and Rand Paul in the Senate who called the move a “terrible idea” and suggested that the government owning a stake in Intel is “a step toward socialism.”

It is.

More mortgage fraud, goodbye AJC, hello socialism and other thoughts

The mortgage fraud allegation just hit Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general who is looking to unseat incumbent senator John Cornyn. So now Paxton joins Adam Schiff, Letitia James and of course Lisa Cook in what some people say is rather common but seldom prosecuted. But what strikes me is that the clamor is only for Lisa Cook to be fired. You would think there would be demands for James to step down, for Schiff to resign his senate seat and for Paxton to leave the Texas race. But no. Why not? Seems to me that there should be pressure on all to resign not just Cook.

One under the radar thing to be aware of is that Trump may be hoisting himself on his own petard (I’ve always wanted to say that). The saying is from Hamlet and means that Trump may harm himself by his actions to bring harm on others. Consider that Trump is boasting that he will soon have control over the Fed with four of the seven governors being his nominees. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that this is true. If so, I guarantee that the bond market will react with higher yields and a lower value of the dollar. The higher yields would be the opposite of what Trump wants. Recall that he wants lower rates in order to be able to keep spending more at a lower cost of borrowing. But most of the Treasury issues are no Treasury bills but longer term notes and bonds. So Trump controlling the Fed would likely lead to higher, not lower, borrowing costs.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is eliminating its print edition at the end of the year. Its print circulation has fallen from 600,000 to 40,000 so they are going digital only. I grew up with that newspaper. Its editor Ralph McGill was a moderate and sane voice during the turbulent civil rights times in Atlanta.  For a time he was the only white editor who covered the civil rights movement and was an outspoken opponent of segregation. He was vilified, threatened, crosses were burned in his yard and his shots were fired at his house. He never wavered. He was called all sorts of names and branded a communist. But in those days any threat to the status quo of segregation was called a communist. After he retired, the AJC morphed into a typical left wing media voice of the democrat party and I recall once writing a letter to the editor saying that a particular stance by the paper would have McGill rolling in his grave. Still I would buy the Sunday AJC on my trips to see my Mom. I still have visions of my Dad picking up the paper and always first reading the comics. RIP all.

I subscribe to both the print and digital editions of the Wall Street Journal. I enjoy the print edition more.

Speaking of which there was a story in the Journal with the headline “Higher prices are coming for household staples.” Well I guess people will have to use paper clips instead.

Trump’s stake in Intel dilutes stockholder’s value. I wonder if any Intel stockholder would sue? I know I would.

Has there ever been a successful government assisted private business? Typically government involvement means less competition, less innovation and less consumer value. All the while there is cronyism, favoritism, kickback, graft and bribes. What’s not to love?

The amount that companies spent on lobbying expenditures has jumped 277 percent since Trump has been in office. I bet if you follow the money you will see all the carve outs that have occurred and are occurring under the guise of negotiations and dealmaking. The number of registered lobbyists has increased from 89 to 212 in the same period. Not surprisingly the firm most closely aligned with the president has profited the most. Ballard Partners revenue has tripled since Trump became president. Its clients are all large corporations giving further evidence that Trump’s policies favor bib business and the impact may well be anti-small business.

Isn’t it interesting that while Trump is bringing more socialism to America, the erstwhile socialist countries in Latin America are throwing out their rulers and are electing more market oriented leaders. First there was Argentina. The media scoffed when Milei was elected president of Argentina. But he has slashed inflation from over 200% to under 2 percent. Poverty rates have fallen as well and there is less ridicule for Milei than before. Bolivia has just thrown out its socialist government. Ecuador, a country where I have spent a bit of time, has also gone from socialist to a more market oriented leader in Daniel Noboa. Elections are coming in Chile and Honduras with candidates right of center favored to win. This leaves only Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as bastions on the far left. This would be a wonderful time for Trump to scrap the tariffs on these countries moving away from socialism and enter into free trade agreements to help bolster their economies and to end their previous leaning toward China. But alas, I won’t hold my breath.

Who is afraid of AI?

I am not AI proficient. But some of my readers are and I salute them. Elon Musk has apparently banned me from using Grok. Chat GPT and I don’t quite communicate right now. There is the AI that appears sometimes when I google and it is okay. A friend of mind sent me a podcast where a group of AI engineers were talking. They were predicting a massive displacement of workers and the need for a guaranteed annual income for all those thrown out of work. I told my friend that “those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it as well as those who do know history but are still doomed to repeat it.”

The AI engineers either do not know history or think that somehow this time will be different. Every major innovation has caused disruption and displacement followed by higher standards of living and new jobs that few dreamed of. The agricultural revolution threw people off the land and into the cities. There was awful poverty. The industrial revolution did the same. Recall poor Ned Ludd who lost his job as a weaver when the auto looms displaced him. Ludd responded by trying to burn down the textile factory and was hanged for his troubles. But the term Luddite lives on for those who resist change. What about Henry Ford? The automobile displaced the horse industry throwing out of work most of those associated with it. Some said that our national security was threatened as we were losing the cavalry. What were we going to do with so few horses? Transportation and the movement of goods were predicted to be impacted resulting in fewer jobs and a lower GDP. When I was in graduate school, my then wife got bored and took a job as a telephone operator. Do they still exist today (telephone operators not ex-wives)? My grandfather never quite got used to a rotary telephone, being so used to picking up the receiver and saying “Hey Hazel.” My Dad’s father drove a coal truck and one of his brother’s was a milkman. Dad once was a postal clerk for railway mail, sorting letters as the train traveled from town to town. All those jobs are gone and yet unemployment is low. A great depression from technological job loss we do not have.

At the university there were vast numbers of women in the typing pools, typing the manuscripts of faculty and administrators. Where are they now? The desktop computer displaced thousands of middle managers. Are they on the unemployment lines? What happened to the people who used to come by your house to hook you up to utilities? Where are all the Walmart cashiers? Yes there has been job loss. American manufacturing’s job loss is blamed on the Chinese but it was actually caused by technology. We simply did not need that many workers making stuff. Just like once we had 60 percent of the workers in agriculture, now it is only 2 percent. No one says that the Chinese “stole” those jobs. We all know it was technology.

The best – and likely the most complete – article on technological displacement is by Frank Glassner’s “Your Vanishing Career: A Houdini History of Jobs.” https://blog.veritasecc.com/your-vanishing-career-a-houdidni-history-of-jobs?utm_campaign=78730990-Blogs&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8kUFDYm1P_ODOPoRmCMaipX6ZRN5zPe3AHi6dmw8jTl4pTeLhXS1mA0-LQbswpTISp9hBKVfrTgvEzMESiVpqU9JrNWnikGVKR8kOufDaG9J9mycw&_hsmi=12854812&utm_content=12854812&utm_source=hs_email

I told my friend that the AI engineers with their doom and gloom were a repeat of when I was at Georgia of a group of social scientists from “elite” universities who called themselves the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution. They sent an open memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 concerning the increasing use of automation, the nuclear arms race, and human rights. Of the three they were mainly concerned with what they called the “cybernation revolution” of increasing automation. This is from Wikipedia: The committee claimed that machines would usher in “a system of almost unlimited productive capacity” while continually reducing the number of manual laborers needed, and increasing the skill needed to work, thereby producing increasing levels of unemployment. It proposed that the government should ease this transformation through large-scale public works, low cost housing, public transit, electrical power development, income, union representation for the unemployed, and government restraint on technology deployment. Our AI engineers likely would endorse all of the above as would Bernie Sanders and AOC.

Yet they all forget history. Each major leap in innovation has fostered new jobs, less drudgery and more prosperity. We are an innovative ingenious people and that won’t stop with AI. As a matter of fact I am optimistic of my grandchildren’s future. I firmly believe that AI will create wonders that will make their lives better and more productive. When I was working on my dissertation I had a carel in the library stacked with books and journals. I typed the draft of the dissertation on a selectric typewriter having to change the balls when I wanted to type scientific symbols. I punched my own IBM cards and lived in the computer center with its mainframe but also cots and cafeteria. I would submit a job and with a few hours hoping to get hundreds of pages of printouts only to realize that I had made an error somewhere because the output was only a scant couple of pages. Research was slow and tedious. Yet by the time I retired all had changed. I was much more productive with my desktop (I didn’t even know where the computing center was), all the on-line databases and google scholar. I didn’t even need to go to the library anymore. Are there still graduate student carrels?

But just think of all the hundreds of workers who once toiled at the university that are no longer employed there. Shouldn’t we have provided all the things suggested by the Ad Hoc Committee since they would not only be unemployed but would be unemployable? And what about that guaranteed annual income? What about income redistribution? By the way, if everyone is unemployed where does the income that is to be distributed come from?

The Wall Steet Journal had an article on the new Hyundai plant in south Georgia. It is really spooky seeing all the robots welding, assembling cars and doing what were once dangerous tasks performed by humans. The plant does employ 1,450 people who do the work that the robots can’t. I wonder if one day robots will do those jobs too.

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/hyundai-factory-georgia-automation-jobs-6d7d4e5d?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1

There is one current academic paper on whether AI will displace a significant number of workers. The paper itself uses AI to crunch ‘anonymized data on millions of employees at tens of thousands of firms, including detailed information on workers’ ages and jobs, making this one of clearest indicators yet of AI’s disruptive impact.” The finding? That “AI can help people in their work, rather than replace them, employment among young people is improving.” Big whoop! They crunched millions of numbers to come up with that?

So be not of despair – unless you were one of the ones hoping for a free ride on guaranteed income while playing video games and looking at Tik Tok.