Deregulation News

Editorial a couple of days ago in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted:

“We inherited a broken, terrible system …,” Trump told reporters on April 18. “Our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile.” That was Trump’s attempt, frequently repeated by the president and recycled in White House presentations, to lay responsibility for the inept pandemic response at Obama’s feet, as if three years in office were insufficient for Trump to repair all the supposed damage his predecessor wrought.

Zorro (Douglas Fairbanks) defends Lolita Pulito (Marguerite de la Motte) from Captain Juan Ramon (Robert McKim). Photo courtesy of Orange County Archives, via very relevant essay at Zocalo Public Square.

But then again, as they pointed out, in his budget for fiscal 2017, maybe in response to the 2015 Ebola epidemic,

Big Government and Big Meat

JBS meatpacking plant in Green Bay, via Wisconsin Public Radio.

It's funny, and not uninteresting, to look at the Trump administration as if it were trying to prove that the conservative theories about Big Government are true—that it's inevitably inept, roughshod, deaf and blind to the realities of life on the ground, and probably corrupt.

But in the case of conservative "federalism" (the bizarre cult around the design of the US Constitution according which it was intended to preserve the autonomy of states against a powerful central government when, as a matter of well understood historical fact, it created a powerful central government to counterbalance the autonomy of the states under the failed Articles of Confederation), it's getting downright spooky.

I'm thinking in the first place about Trump's crusade on behalf of Big Meat, where our capitalism-loving president, so deeply unwilling to use his powers under the Defense Production Act to ensure essential medical supplies, has deployed them to protect our threatened pork, beef, and chicken industry after some plants have become the centers of Covid-19 outbreaks and shut down.

One reason they've shut down is the press, which has been reporting on appalling failure to deal with the pandemic:

For the Record: Miscellany

Twitter is like an intellectual equivalent of the southeastern Australian coast right now, deadly brush fires everywhere you turn demanding your attention so you don't know where to focus.

Why are these Democrats complaining about lawyer lawsuits? We have lawyer lawsuits all the time! You can't FILE a lawsuit without a lawyer!

Oh, FOIA lawsuits?

Never mind https://t.co/oDQGAN880e

— Dopes 'n' Babies (@Yastreblyansky) January 23, 2020

Trump doubling down on his belief that there were no US casualties in the Iranian raids on bases in Iraq, after the army announced that there were a number of cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Literary Corner: Trump With the Toilets, Toilets

1952 GE dishwasher ad. Via.

Say what you will, while all politicians try to focus on kitchen table issues, Trump is unique in his preoccupation with the bathroom. But he really cares about all your domestic water amenities, and your fundamental right to waste water if you live in a region with adequate rainfall. In this new work from last night's Battle Creek rally, the emotionalism of his previous effort has given way to a childlike lyric quality:

Plumbing Songs

by Donald J. Trump

Song of the Recalcitrant Dish Machine

I

Sinks, uh, showers,
all of this stuff,
I did a lot of it.
No water comes out.

You have areas where there’s so much water
you don’t know what to do with it. 

II

You turn on the shower,
you’re not allowed
to have any water anymore.
I mean, we do a lot of it.

Uh, dishwashers.
You did the dishwasher,
right? You press it.
Remember the dishwasher,

you press it? Boom, there’d be like an explosion,
five minutes later, you open it, the steam pours out, the dishes. 

III

Now you press it 12 times.
Women tell me. Again.
You know, they give you
four drops of water.

And they’re in places where there’s so much water
they don’t know what to do with it. 

Annals of derp: Urban planning

Alexander Avenue in Mott Haven, South Bronx. Fort Apache was a really long time ago, before the regulation started to set in. Photo by Michael Kamber/New York Times.

Stupidest thing I heard this morning, on WNYC radio:

The quaint little homes in the charming nooks and crannies of our nation's major cities are costing us billions, according to one economic report.

The economists who did the study found that the U.S. economy would be 9.5 percent bigger, if only three of the country's most productive cities — New York City, San Francisco and San Jose — could squeeze in more people. All they'd need to do is allow developers to knock down those beautiful Brooklyn brownstones and historic Victorians in San Francisco and build taller apartments and condos like other cities allow.

The experts discussing the study on the air allowed as how nothing was likely to ameliorate this unhappy situation, seeing as how people in East New York and Mott Haven treasure the exclusivity and charm of their quaint, walkable neighborhoods so much, but it didn't occur to them to question the researchers' assumption that the aim of producing growth would justify destroying Park Slope. And it didn't occur to them to wonder whether if there might be something wrong with the methodology of a paper that advocates the urban planning strategy that gave the world Lagos and Jakarta.

Trust me

Airbnb in the early days.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Evolution of Trust", July 1 2014:

Well, it turns out deregulating the economy had some unexpected consequences, like millions of liberal arts graduates and non-graduates too, I imagine, don't have stable living arrangements or steady full-time jobs and have to rent out their apartments and cars and hustle freelance gigs to stay afloat, but that's helped them all to learn to trust one another and enjoy fast pseudo-intimacy, easy-come easy-go fluid relationships, and flexible ad-hoc arrangements. So it's all good! Who needs government?