Two Million MORE Federal Jobs Under Trump

John Stossel offers a rebuttal to the idea that Trump "drained the swamp" even a little bit during his first term:

Image by Florida Memory, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

"He made government bigger," Economist Ed Stringham says in my new video. 'That's going in the wrong direction. Looking through a list of agencies, every single one I could see, there were more employees after his presidency than before."

Trump added almost 2 million jobs to the federal workforce.

He did make some cuts at the State Department, Labor Department, Education Department, and his own office. But total spending under Trump nearly doubled. Some was in response to COVID-19, but billions in extra spending came before.

That spending increased the size of the swamp. New programs filled Washington with more bureaucrats.

Trump launched a $6 billion "Farmers to Families" Food Box Program to bring food from farmers to families.

"Last I checked," jokes Stringham, "we have an industry for that. It's called the supermarket industry. It exists for a reason. Markets are good at getting things from farmer to consumer."

I've noted Trump's spending contribution to "Bidenflation" here before, but had not seen other specific examples of his profligacy mentioned until this column.

Specifically, I did not know about the two million new federal employees he hired.

The welfare state is so big that size can be a proxy for abuse of government -- but only if we remind ourselves of the proper purpose of government, which is the protection of individual rights. We need a government to do that, and it should be no bigger or smaller than necessary for the task.

To the best I can tell, Trump's first term included a few marginal -- and often easily-overturned -- improvements on a few things, while, overall, he governed like a Democrat from a few decades ago, to put it charitably.

When Stossel says Trump "doesn't understand the source of the swamp," he's understating or missing the problem: Expanding the swamp as he did (and threatens to do again if elected) indicates a stupendous degree of ignorance or indifference about the problem.

-- CAV

Ad Hominem Is Dumb, Coming and Going

A couple of headlines this morning reminded me of the logical fallacy named above, which Wikipedia reminds us:

... refers to several types of arguments that are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a personal attack as a diversion often using a totally irrelevant, but often highly charged attribute of the opponent's character or background. The most common form of this fallacy is "A" makes a claim of "fact," to which "B" asserts that "A" has a personal trait, quality or physical attribute that is repugnant thereby going entirely off-topic, and hence "B" concludes that "A" has their "fact" wrong - without ever addressing the point of the debate. Many contemporary politicians routinely use ad hominem attacks, which can be encapsulated to a derogatory nickname for a political opponent.

The first headline this reminded me of was "Trump: 'Hannibal Lecter Is a Wonderful Man'" at The Hill. Other outlets jumping on the story -- in an attempt to make news out of a word salad/feeble attempt at humor -- added such things as in apparent praise of the cannibal.

I am no fan of Donald Trump, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't advocating cannibalism. Just a hunch.

My quick read of one was that the above impression on my part is correct, and that this is just another of many hysterical reactions by some of the leftish people who let Trump live rent-free in their brains.

I wouldn't put it past Trump to have deliberately done this to provoke such stories so he can go back and smear all such stories as hysterical nonsense, not that Trump hasn't said and done things that merit condemnation.

So -- although with Trump, He did it randomly on a whim is an equally likely explanation -- Trump now has a new example of what he can call Trump derangement syndrome in the news media in order to discount more substantial attacks from opponents, if they ever get serious enough to raise them.

Trump is an awful officeholder, but a grade-A politician: Whether or not he meant to stir up a hornet's nest, he will not waste a good opportunity to recycle this new ad hominem into one for his own use.

People may make outlandish charges in order to discredit what Trump has to say. The fact that they do so does not mean that we should jump to condemn Trump nor does it mean there aren't good reasons to do so.

I don't care what he says: I'm taking a walk today. (Image captured from video by United States Senate, via Wikipedia, public domain.)

The second time I thought of ad hominem was when I spotted a link to the following headline at the tail end of another news item: "Dr. Oz discusses the many benefits of walking."

Having resumed my walking regimen a couple of months ago after our time-consuming interstate move, benefits of walking caught my eye.

And then it landed on Dr. Oz.

Considering my well-founded low opinion of Mehmet Oz as a medical expert, its should be obvious I have no interest in what he might say on the matter. All the same, just because this quack recommends walking doesn't mean it's snake oil.

Realizing that a mindless rejection of walking would be to succumb to that fallacy caused me to make a connection regarding many of Trump's followers, whose approach seems to be trust Trump, regardless of what he says or any past evidence.

While ad hominem is usually used to discount an argument because of who is saying it, it can be useful to consider the perils of making a similar error: Taking the source of an argument (alone) as reason to accept it.

Just because Dr. Oz says walking is beneficial doesn't mean it isn't. And just because someone you might trust claims to have an answer doesn't mean he does. Leftists do this all the time when they treat the advice of government-sanctioned experts like marching orders (See the last pandemic.) and Trumpists are doing the same thing with regard to their orange savior.

To use someone's else's judgement categorically as a guide to action is foolish, and yet accounts for quite a bit of what's going wrong nowadays.

-- CAV

Blog Roundup

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. In "Analyzing the Hamas Sympathizers," Peter Schwartz explains how altruism -- the idea that we owe relief to the needy regardless of why they are needy -- fuels the unjust and puzzling sympathy for Hamas we are seeing today.

Schwartz ends his piece with a quote from someone who has been undeterred by Palestinian barbarism from Day 1:

A New York Times article quotes an Atlanta schoolteacher's Facebook message, shortly after October 7, in which she explains her unqualified backing of the Palestinians against Israel: "The actual history of this situation is NOT COMPLICATED. I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices. Regardless of the extreme acts of a few militants who were done watching their people slowly die."

This is the consistent implementation of the "tyranny of need."

But there is no reason to accept another's need as a moral claim against you. The only valid moral imperative here is the imperative of justice -- the justice of supporting the innocent and condemning the guilty. And the only way to prevent suffering by the innocent is for Israel to do whatever is necessary to destroy Hamas and for Gaza (and the rest of the Palestinians) to be ruled by a government that recognizes the rights of its own citizens and of its neighbors. [link in original]

Incidentally, tyranny of need Schwartz describes, explains many other aspects of the decades-old conflict between Israel and the "Palestinians," as well as other unjust policies that people accept because they confuse altruism with benevolence.

2. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney argues that, while it may be tempting (or even sometimes helpful) to call failure by another name, it is much more powerful to acknowledge it and put it into a broader perspective:

At one point, Jean Moroney suggests finding humor in failure. One might find this image helpful in remembering to do that. (Image by Mick Haupt, via Unsplash, license.)

[S]ometimes, thinking of a failure as a setback is counterproductive. If you review the setback and see no new information revealed, you are likely to conclude "the plan should have worked!" or "I just didn't try hard enough!" Then you will be tempted to just try the same approach, unchanged. They say insanity is trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.

This is the moment when you really need the word "failure."

Your plan FAILED! This is REAL! This is new information! Your plan is a plan that leads to FAILURE!

Fully accepting this fact, including the implication that your plan has a fatal flaw in it, is critical to your eventual success. You need to see that you must have made a mistake somewhere. That's what gets you to step back and look for where you made a mistake.

Notice that last sentence: The goal, or some part of it, or something very like it is probably still salvageable. Moroney later explores when a failure is significant, and suggests an approach to goal-setting that can inoculate against some of the more unpleasant conclusions and emotions that many people wrongly associate with failure.

3. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn calls for an end to the anti-freedom "equity" agenda:

Canada is a clear illustration. Under the current government since 2015 economic freedom has declined. Investment has been fleeing the country, weakening the dollar, and increasing inflation. Consequently, productivity and economic growth have stagnated and job growth has stalled, keeping wages low and prices high. Not only investments but skilled workers are leaving Canada, most of them for the United Sates, where salaries are much higher (46% higher in the technology sector, according to a recent survey) and taxes lower. Those departing increasingly include recent immigrants disillusioned by the high cost of living, limited job opportunities, and comparatively low salaries. [links omitted]

The fact that people are (currently) fleeing Canada for the United States does not, of course, mean that the same folly will work here.

4. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger asks questions about a few "Unnoticed Contradictions," among them:

We constantly hear that man can know nothing for certain, that truth is relative to the individual, that observations are "theory-laden" so cannot claim to be objective, that no scientific claim can be proved true, that we can say only it hasn't been refuted by the data so far. At the same time and from the same people, we hear that catastrophic climate change is beyond doubt, that those who question it are "deniers" who should be kicked out of any position of consequence.

How does the same mind hold, "Nothing is certain" and "Climate catastrophe is certain"?

The obviousness of such questions, along with the fact that most will probably not have seen them raised anywhere else should alarm anyone.

-- CAV

Why a Service Animal Racket Vice an Industry?

Over at Astral Codex Ten, whose author is a mental health professional, is a very interesting description of the unintended consequences of a seemingly benign government regulation.

Let's first consider the intent:

Image by joandcindy, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you're depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you're anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge.

Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.

So far, so good. Who would want to deprive an anxious or depressed person of such an unintrusive and simple aid as having a pet around while they navigate their lives en route to recovery?

I will not beat up the author for failing to ask the following question: What is the best way to help people who actually need emotional support animals? He simply goes with the flow on this one: Like practically everyone else these days, he assumes that the government should decide who gets an emotional support animal. Period. In every single circumstance it might come up.

The American regulatory state has been omnipresent for so long that very few people can even imagine any other way to tackle a problem like this. For most people, the only tool to solve a problem where the needs and desires of different people conflict is to enact a new government regulation.

When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

The hammer here looks reasonable enough: To get your pet into places that might no want it there, all you need is a letter to the effect that you need an emotional support animal from a mental health professional.

But who wields the hammer? Or: What sort of unintended consequences follow?

But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone's permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.

I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody's ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever. [bold added, link omitted]

The problem is named in plain sight within a sample letter from a mill that people who want to carry pets around everywhere can use to get a letter:

[NAME OF TENANT] is my patient, and has been under my care since [DATE]. I am intimately familiar with his/her history and with the functional limitations imposed by his/her disability. He/She meets the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

The three laws named at the end violate the property rights and right to contract of landlords, employers, and businessmen who may not wish to deal with pets brought onto their property by random members of the general public. That is their first sin, and why they shouldn't be on the books in the first place.

A side effect of these laws is that they greatly increase the number of "service animals" people might wish to bring with them to the point that there is a cottage industry of people willing to help people get away with whatever they want -- people with legitimate needs for service animals and people with good reasons not to have pets on their property alike be damned.

Now, we are far from a time when such laws can get repealed, but let's indulge the fantasy and consider how we might solve the problem of, say, a business that wants to accommodate customers who really do need a service animal. Make them, if the owner produces a magical scrap of paper isn't the answer.

Businesses would be free to employ any of the following means from the below non-exhaustive list:

• Personal judgement by a proprietor on a case-by-case basis;
• Consulting a mental health professional of its own choosing whenever the matter comes up;
• Accepting a certificate from an authority of its own choosing as to the safety and suitability of the animal.

Just as there are non-governmental standards bodies for engineers, or for dog breeders, there can be for service animal certification. These private-enterprise solutions work because they protect the ability of the people who use them to make a living in a free market. That is, they align self-interest with quality through the metric of honest profit -- which is surely how, over thousands of years, people have worked out which breeds of dog are best suited to help the blind, and how to train them.

In other words, rather than a cottage industry of con men, we'd have a legitimate industry of people helping make (actual) service animals work well for as many people as possible.

A private certification system would work, because businesses would be free to work with those who don't, say, foist snakes on their customers (as happens now) -- or even simply refuse to do business with people who bring animals to their place of business. The kind of charlatans who operate now would go out of business, and there would be a proper incentive for psychologists whose patients want a letter to give an honest appraisal or a real referral.

As it is now, on top of the widespread violations of rights we have now, observe that some of the people who need these animals can't have them, and some who just want to bring an animal with them everywhere they go get to do this.

-- CAV

Who's Pulling the 'Pro-Hamas' Strings?

And who made that so easy?

Monday, I noted the artificial-looking nature of the anti-"Zionist" protests that have been going on across college campuses, but had to admit I was in no position to speak about funding.

Fortunately, Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian has taken a deeper look at who might be providing financial and other support for these criminal mobs.

I like how the post starts by clearly stating why it is worth taking such a look:

The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible. But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer -- particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.

The post is about a six-minute read, clocking in at about 1,850 words, but it does a good job looking at the findings (or, in one case, coverings-up) of several journalistic outlets, ranging from left of center to right. Menton, a conservative, is even-handed, giving credit to one leftist outlet, while calling out another on this issue. Notably, he compares two accounts of the involvement of one Manolo de los Santos, whom I'd feel comfortable calling a professional agitator.

He starts with an account from the conservative Tablet:

"When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel, when the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism in our lifetime," De Los Santos said in January in front of a cheering crowd in a now-viral video. His remarks were so vicious that South Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) denounced the speech as "Nazi rhetoric," and called for Goldman Sachs, whose philanthropy arm used to direct funds to TPF, to cut ties with the organization.

And then he provides the following, from how the New York Times covers "the same events:"

A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country. One man who was taken into custody inside Hamilton Hall, the occupied campus building, had been charged with rioting and wearing a disguise to evade the police during a demonstration in California nearly a decade earlier. But the examination also revealed that far more of the unaffiliated protesters had no such histories. Rather, they said, they arrived at Columbia in response to word of mouth or social media posts to join the demonstration out of some combination of solidarity and curiosity.

Menton goes further to describe the efforts of the Times to paint the non-university-affiliated protesters as just plain folks who got wind of events and decided to join in. Some of that stuff -- "when he learned the police were moving in and, grabbing a metal dog bowl and a spoon to bang against it, rushed to the students' aid" -- would be funny if what the protesters were advocating weren't so obscene.

While it is important to be aware of such goings-on, there is a bigger context to consider, as well: These contributions to a blatant attack on Western civiliation (with Israel and the Jews as a proxy) are chump change compared to the longstanding idological assault against it -- largely paid for by tax money and government student loan programs -- from much of academia.

For that story, I refer you to the video embedded above, of Leonard Peikoff's 1983 Ford Hall Forum talk, "Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professors' War Against America." From its opening:

Intellectuals around the world generally take a certain pride, whether deserved or not, in their own countries' achievements and traditions. When they lash out at some group, it is not their nation, but some villain allegedly threatening it, such as the rich, the Jews, or the West. This pattern is true of Canada, from which I originally came, and it is true to my knowledge of England, France, Germany, Russia, China. But it is not true of America. One of the most striking things I observed when I first came here was the disapproval, the resentment, even the hatred of America, of the country as such and of most things American, which is displayed by American intellectuals; it is especially evident among professors in the humanities and social sciences, whom I came to know the best.

Were it not for the anti-American, anti-Western ideas propagated by the universities and accepted by so many people today, pikers like De Los Santos would be penniless, isolated cranks at best. Instead, there are plenty of people who feel that he is worth funding or listening to.

-- CAV

Capitalism Fought Jim Crow From the Start

I have long praised a happy result of the free market: It discourages racism. Two memorable examples I have brought up here include commercial desegregation in Houston (when segregation was called "bad for business") and the universal reach of the Sears catalog across the South.

Both of these show capitalism blunting the force of segregation, or helping end it outright.

Notably, thanks to a recent John Stossel article, we can now add a historic example of capitalism actively resisting Jim Crow due to the power of self-interest:

Image by Unknown Photographer, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

"It's often forgotten that owners of buses, railways, streetcars in the American South didn't really segregate systematically until the late 19th century," says [economist Johan] Norberg [, author of Capitalist Manifesto]. "It was probably not because they were less racist than others in the South, but they were capitalists. They wanted money, they wanted clients, and they didn't want to engage in some sort of costly and brutal policing business in segregating buses."

Even when segregation was mandated, some streetcar companies refused to comply. For several years after Jim Crow laws passed, black customers sat wherever they wanted.

Norberg adds, "Those owners of public transport, they fought those discriminatory laws because they imposed a terrible cost….They tried to bypass them secretly and fight them in courts. They were often fined. Some were threatened with imprisonment."

The streetcar company in Mobile, Alabama, only obeyed Jim Crow laws after their conductors began to get arrested and fined. [bold added]

Notice that capitalism, the system that respects individual rights, strongly penalizes racism, because it is antithetical to a person's actual self-interest: It took the active abuse of government, in the form of fines and imprisonment, to fully implement the costly folly of treating customers badly, or forfeiting them altogether.

I have not myself read Norberg's book, but on this evidence, it appears to be worth consideration by any serious advocate of capitalism or racial equality.

-- CAV

Poe's Law Headines and Pro-Hamas Astroturfing

Over the weekend, I heard a podcaster speculating on reports that someone was paying people to stage pro-Hamas "protests," i.e., tresspass, squat on, and vandalize college campuses, while threatening Jews or counter-protesters.

Given the overall looniness of this day and age, any headlines to that effect would remind me of Poe's Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

Only now, one often needs to replace the emoji with a reputable source and creationist with conspiracy theorist, while remembering that there are some bat-#$%& crazy things going on out there because nobody is calling out the nuts, bigots, or war-mongers for what they are even as they accuse civiilized people of exactly those things.

Reputable news outlets are indeed reporting strong evidence of as much. From NBC News at the first link:

New York City officials said that a significant number of people arrested this week at campus demonstrations were not affiliated with the schools. Nearly 30% of the people arrested at Columbia were unaffiliated with the university and 60% of the arrests at City College involved people who weren't affiliated with that school, the mayor said.

And The Wall Street Journal, in a report titled "Activist [sic] Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests" adds:

Image by jakerome, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

In March, there was a "Resistance 101" training scheduled at Columbia with guest speakers including longtime activists with Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based group that celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The administration twice barred the event, citing some of the organizers' known support of terrorism and promotion of violence. Columbia students hosted the event virtually nonetheless, which prompted Columbia President Minouche Shafik to suspend several of them.

...

Polat said student organizers at Columbia learned the discipline and planning needed to pull off an effective protest movement not only from their work with veteran demonstrators and outside groups, but from participating in Black Lives Matter marches or student labor organizing.

Some tools they learned were practical, such as how to raise money via student fundraisers and donations from friends and supporters to buy tents for encampments.

The links came from a post at the conservative Hot Air blog which asserts that these sources confirm not just that non-affiliated people are protesting, but that they are funded by George Soros.

While the latter wouldn't surprise me, I see no proof of that particular allegation. (That said, I do not know nor have looked into whether Soros is a major funder of some of the groups giving aid and comfort to these non-student, non-faculty thugs.)

-- CAV

P.S. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, astroturfing is (or was) a smear that leftists used to dismiss any kind of campaign of protests or rallies they didn't like, on the grounds that they allegedly didn't have as much organic support from the public as they seem to.

It's funny how that word hasn't come up yet, although, to be fair, many college students and faculty do support Hamas, thanks to the ideas that saturate college campuses: "Elite colleges are now reaping the consequences of promoting a pedagogy that trashed the postwar ideal of the liberal university." (HT: Yaron Brook)