In a little-remarked move, the Biden administration announced Monday that Victoria Nuland will take over as the acting second-in-command at the State Department. She replaces Wendy Sherman, who plans to retire at the end of this week.
Nuland’s appointment will be a boon for Russia hawks who want to turn up the heat on the Kremlin. But, for those who favor a negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine, a promotion for the notoriously “undiplomatic diplomat” will be a bitter pill.
A few quick reminders are in order. When Nuland was serving in the Obama administration, she had a now-infamous leaked call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. As the Maidan Uprising roiled the country, the pair of American diplomats discussed conversations with opposition leaders, and Nuland expressed support for putting Arseniy Yatseniuk into power. (Yatseniuk would become prime minister later that month, after Russia-friendly former President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country.) At one memorable point in the call, Nuland said “Fu–k the EU” in response to Europe’s softer stance on the protests.
Carefully hidden inside an otherwise nondescript office tower in the middle of Washington, D.C., with a sweeping view of Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s a secret bar just for political insiders.
Last Thursday, I was promptly kicked out of it.
The lobbying division of Anheuser-Busch, the beer-making conglomerate that produces Bud Light, Michelob, and other brands, owns the bar. The invitation-only pub is off-limits to the public, and the event I briefly attended was an ethically-dubious influence-peddling operation.
While fundraisers for lawmakers are everyday occurrences across the luxurious bars and restaurants that line Capitol Hill and Penn Quarter, this event was slightly different.
Political operatives desperate for cash are turning to brazenly pitching access to congressional staffers that manage the day-to-day work of members of Congress.
Such was the case last week. The lobbyists at Anheuser-Busch offered their private bar to Elect Democratic Women PAC, a group that raised $7.8 million for the Democrats last year. The event was billed as a “Chiefs of Staff Happy Hour,” with tickets ranging from $500 to $5,000.
At the event, I took a picture of the sign-in list of the legislative staff for the event, which showed many Democratic staffers participating in the event:
– Rebecca Walldorff, the chief of staff to Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Ga. – Caitlin-Jean Juricic, the legislative counsel to Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Tex. – Serena Gobbi, the legislative director to Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif. – Sean Gard, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wisc. – Becky Salay, chief of staff to Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. – John Gorczynski, chief of staff to Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Tex. – Sarah Curtis, chief of staff to Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C.
As Art Carden succinctly put it, “The information needed to know whether a particular regulation ‘works’ quite literally does not exist, and the key difference between firms and governments is that firms . . . have market tests for their decisions. Governments do not.”
As we have seen, the government doesn’t have the information it would need to identify what level of pollution is efficient for an entire society, and government officials don’t have the incentives to be particularly interested in efficiency anyway.
In over twenty-five years of teaching undergraduate students, I have heard the same refrain countless times: free markets have many problems that government has to step in to solve. Indeed, students expect government to “step in” so much that markets occupy a peripheral role in their idealized economic system. Even students with an ideological predilection toward markets will be quick to argue that certain problems, such as pollution, require extensive government regulation and probably copious spending of tax dollars.
This is not surprising, given that college students have been bombarded by tales of government fixes for social problems from media, teachers, and parents from elementary school onward. By the time they hear about “market failure” in their first economics class, it doesn’t take much convincing that free markets are impractical at best and a weak rationale for capitalist exploitation at worst. The best-selling economics textbooks at the university level do little to counter these perceptions, and most instructors won’t deviate much from the mainstream books.
Most principles of microeconomics and intermediate microeconomics textbooks devote at least one chapter to market failure, which typically includes “market power” (think monopoly), inadequate provision of “public goods” (goods that the private sector allegedly won’t produce enough of because of an inability to make the users pay), and “externalities” (the unintended side effects of human activity on bystanders, like pollution). While textbooks usually contain some acknowledgment of the fact that governments don’t live up to idealized models of efficiency, it is rare for proportional space to be devoted to “government failure” and easy for students to conclude that government intervention is the answer to these nearly ubiquitous shortcomings of markets.
The Apologists for Environmental Regulation
The problems with monopoly theory and the errors of mainstream thinking about public goods have been dealt with elsewhere. In my experience, externalities—typically, environmental problems—have proven one of the most difficult challenges for students trying to understand markets and government. Don’t pollution problems require government intervention?
Typically, the section on externalities contains a few diagrams showing the difference between private costs (or benefits) and social costs (or benefits). The diagram for negative externalities usually looks something like figure 1, with the marginal private cost (MPC), marginal social cost (MSC), and marginal private benefit (MPB). Students are then directed to observe the difference between the optimal quantity of output (Q*) of the good that results in the negative externality and the quantity of output produced in the market (QM). Any production in excess of Q* adds more to costs than to benefits, creating a net loss labeled “deadweight loss.” The presence of this deadweight loss is deemed evidence of market failure, and the authors normally proceed to evaluate various ways government can push the market toward Q*.
Figure 1: The difference between costs and benefits of the quantity of output resulting in negative externalities
Walter Block has argued that there are problems with the usual treatment of externalities as market failure. If the recipient of pollution is unable to collect damages or procure an injunction from a court—the typical remedy prior to around the mid-nineteenth century—then this is not market failure, but the government’s failure to uphold property rights. Once reasonably diligent in their protection of property rights, the courts began weakening these protections in the mid-1800s. An example is the 1866 case Ryan v. New York Central Railroad Co. (35 N.Y. 210), in which a railroad was not held liable for the loss of a house that had been set on fire by sparks from the railroad’s nearby woodshed, which had burned down due to the company’s negligence. Even so, court protection retained some force long after. As Jonathan Adler pointed out, in a famous 1913 case in New York, Whalen v. Union Bag and Paper Co. (208 N.Y. 1), “the state’s highest court upheld an injunction shutting down a $1 million pulp mill employing several hundred workers in order to protect the riparian rights of a single farmer.”
As court-made law to settle conflicts over nuisances like pollution has been increasingly regarded as inadequate to deal with externalities, government interventions have typically taken three forms: (1) command-and-control regulation, (2) emissions taxes, and (3) cap-and-trade (tradable permit) systems.
Command-and-control regulation is unpopular with many economists because of its tendency to require emissions reductions in ways that are inflexible and therefore likely to be more costly. It is also particularly susceptible to “crony capitalism,” since industry lobbyists can push regulatory bureaucracies to mandate technologies that keep competitors out. Far more attractive to economists are emissions taxes and tradable permits.
Emissions taxes (sometimes called Pigovian taxes after the Cambridge economist Arthur Cecil Pigou, a student of Alfred Marshall) have gained new attention as a part of climate policy. Numerous proposals for a federal carbon tax have appeared in the last several years, including the “Green New Deal,” and even some who claim to be libertarians have proposed them. Tradable permit systems have been in use in the United States for decades, notably with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Acid Rain Program that began auctioning off sulfur dioxide permits in 1993. Tradable permit systems have a superficial appeal to market-friendly economists because, after all, the permits trade in a market. Unfortunately, it’s only a quasi market, with the supply of permits dictated by regulators.
Most economists seem to favor one or the other of these policies. However, both emissions taxes and tradable permit schemes suffer from fatal problems.
The Pollution Calculation Problem
First, the government has no way to determine the costs inflicted by the pollution, whether for the purposes of setting a tax or creating a cap on emissions. Referring to the diagram in figure 1, there is no way to find the MSC, which means that the government can’t know how high to set the tax, and a tradable permit system won’t have useful information about how many permits should be created.
This calculation problem has long been recognized. James Buchanan explained the problem in Cost and Choice:
Consider, first, the determination of the amount of the corrective tax that is to be imposed. This amount should equal the external costs that others than the decision-maker suffer as a consequence of decision. These costs are experienced by persons who may evaluate their own resultant utility losses. . . . In order to estimate the size of the corrective tax, however, some objective measurement must be placed on these external costs. But the analyst has no benchmark from which plausible estimates can be made. Since the persons who bear these “costs”—those who are externally affected—do not participate in the choice that generates the “costs,” there is simply no means of determining, even indirectly, the value that they place on the utility loss that might be avoided.
As Art Carden succinctly put it, “The information needed to know whether a particular regulation ‘works’ quite literally does not exist, and the key difference between firms and governments is that firms . . . have market tests for their decisions. Governments do not.”
Over the past several years, thousands of businesses and millions of people have left America’s large left-wing cities. Of course when moderates and conservatives leave, that just causes those cities to shift even further to the left, and the politicians just implement even more self-destructive policies. So now many of our biggest metropolitan areas find themselves caught in a “death spiral”, and there appears to be little hope of turning things around any time soon. The politicians in these left-wing cities clearly understand that their once-thriving communities have been transformed into crime-ridden, drug infested hellholes, but it would go against everything that they believe to do what is necessary to fix things.
When I say that there has been a “mass exodus”, I am not exaggerating one bit. The population losses that we have seen over the past several years have been absolutely unprecedented…
According to the most recent US Census figures, we are in the middle of a mass exodus from America’s largest and most leftwing cities. The data reveals that New York City alone lost over half a million residents, which is more than the entire population of Miami. Additionally, Chicago, often referred to as “Chiraq” by some individuals, experienced a decline of nearly 100,000 residents. Another notable city, San Francisco, has seen a larger share of population loss than any other major city in the United States.
I love to pick on San Francisco, because it is a perfect example of this phenomenon. It is one of the wealthiest cities on the entire planet, and a few years ago it was bustling with activity.
But now everything has changed. One man recently went downtown to capture footage of what the city looks like now, and he discovered that store after store is permanently closed… https://www.youtube.com/embed/ILAYlTLdGvAIn the Union Square area, 203 retailers were open in 2019.
Today, there are only 107 still operating, and another one just announced that it will also be closing…
Century-old Goorin Bros. haberdashery has joined a host of stores shutting in San Francisco’s Union Square, amid widespread crime and plummeting footfall.
The hat boutique has become the latest casualty of the so-called ‘retail apocalypse’ gripping downtown San Francisco.
‘It’s never an easy decision but it was time,’ a company representative wrote in a statement.
What a tragedy.
The retailers that insist on remaining open in downtown San Francisco find themselves resorting to extreme measures in a desperate attempt to survive…
Theft has become so bad in San Francisco that some stores are now padlocking shut their freezers and tying metal chains to ensure the doors remain closed overnight.
Video shot by one potential shopper at a local Walgreens in the city sees aisle after aisle of products locked away behind Perspex and glass, out of the reach of thieves.
Even lower value items such as toothpaste and tissues are kept under lock and key, such is the rampant theft that has been occurring in many of the city’s pharmacies and supermarkets.
Over in Oakland, overall crime is up 42 percent since the first half of 2021.
The Bay Area should be one of the nicest places to live in the entire country, but instead it is one of the worst.
Of course the truth is that crime is on the rise everywhere. Vehicle theft is absolutely exploding, and that is particularly true for Kia and Hyundai models that you can apparently steal “with just a USB cable”…
The US is battling a surge in motor vehicle thefts this year, with cases more than doubling in Rochester, Cincinnati, and other cities, as thieves hotwire vulnerable Kia and Hyundai models with just a USB cable.
A study by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) on Thursday shows how car thefts jumped 33.5 percent across major cities, as thieves brazenly share how-to videos of hotwiring vehicles on TikTok.
That adds up to 23,974 more stolen motors across the 32 cities studied.
If crime rates continue to soar, it won’t be too long before many cities are completely unlivable.
But instead of trying to fix this crisis, many of our politicians seem intent on making it even worse.
In Illinois, they have actually eliminated cash bail, and many are warning that this is going to cause all sorts of new problems…
The leader of The Finders, Marion Pettie bragged about infiltrating the CIA. His wife, Isabelle worked for the CIA and their son worked for the CIA-run Air America.
During this same time period was the McMartin Pre-School Scandal, wherein hundreds of parents reported that their children had suffered Satanic sexual abuse at a pre-school in Manhattan Beach, California. And for some reason, evidence seized from The Finders included a map of this same pre-school.
Martinez claimed that every attempt to review evidence was blocked and was finally told by a member of the Metropolitan Police Department that The Finders had come under the protection of the CIA, who claimed jurisdiction by claiming it an “internal matter” and had the entire case labeled “secret”.
In 1987, Tallahassee Florida Police responded to an anonymous phone tip about 6 malnourished children covered in bug bites and scratches, being accompanied by two well-dressed men in a public park.
The two men were arrested for child abuse and suspicion of trafficking children across state lines and so the US Customs Service, the Washington Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI all got involved.
The two men arrested were found to have two fake IDs and were found to be members of a group known as “The Finders”.
The Finders owned multiple properties in the DC area. The investigation of these properties reportedly found evidence of child pornography and photographs of three children and three white-robed men dismembering two goats.
The children described a harsh learning environment, where a man known as “The Game Caller” was in charge of everyone and could talk to the adults with a computer in the van.
One of the games they played was responding to local newspaper advertisements for babysitters, tutors and anything else that could get them into a family’s home, where they would then gather as much information as possible about the family’s habits, identity and occupation.
The Finders were labeled a “Satanic Cult” and the media sensationalized it for a full week until the investigation was called off.
It was reported that the mothers of the children were members of The Finders and that the two men had the full consent of the parents to be transporting them.
The media narrative then blamed their own sensationalism, claiming that the whole thing was blown out of proportion and that The Finders were just a harmless, 1960s-style Hippy community.
Years later, the reports of US Customs Special Agent Ramón J Martinez began bringing attention back to the matter. Martinez claimed that evidence included the intent to traffic children, the ordering of children from Hong Kong through the Chinese Embassy, the instructions on the impregnation of female members of The Finders and a library of books on the subjects of mind control and terrorist warfare strategy.
Martinez claimed that every attempt to review evidence was blocked and was finally told by a member of the Metropolitan Police Department that The Finders had come under the protection of the CIA, who claimed jurisdiction by claiming it an “internal matter” and had the entire case labeled “secret”.
The British press has quoted the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) hundreds of times in the past two years without informing readers it is funded by the UK military, US government and arms corporations, and that it’s a bastion of establishment interests.
Smaller funders include arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Airbus, Babcock, Leonardo, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, alongside the UK Ministry of Defence and the Royal Navy.
RUSI (circled) is next door to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. (Photo: MOD)
RUSI has been cited in 336 UK press articles in the past two years, and is invariably described by journalists simply as a “think tank”.
But the organisation’s funders include the UK and US governments, alongside arms corporations, and its commentaries overwhelmingly reflect the perspectives of the British establishment.
Declassified could find no instances in the hundreds of press articles where RUSI’s funders were mentioned.
In the past two years, the Guardian or Observer mentioned RUSI in 106 articles, the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph in 66 and the Times and Sunday Times in 28 articles.
The references in the papers were quotes from RUSI staff, notably on the war in Ukraine and UK military policy, or reports released by the organisation.
RUSI says it is “an independent think tank engaged in cutting-edge defence and security research” and that it “embodies nearly two centuries of forward thinking, free discussion, and careful reflection on defence and security matters”.
Based in Whitehall, close to the Ministry of Defence, RUSI was founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington, the Field Marshal and later prime minister.
Its second largest funder – providing between £500,000 and £999,000 – is the US State Department while its other large sponsors include the UK Foreign Office, the British army and arms corporation BAE Systems, which all gave up to £0.5m each in 2020-21.
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