Biden just put $6 billion of student debt from 78,000 public employees on the shoulders of taxpayers. Lay off the 78,000 public employees, and we’ll call it even.
◼ President Biden has been getting increasingly hostile in his rhetoric toward Israel in recent weeks, particularly when it comes to Israeli plans to finish the job against Hamas by invading Rafah, a town in southern Gaza. Vice President Kamala Harris chastised Israel for the planned offensive, claiming, laughably, that she had “studied the maps” and decided that Israel’s plan to evacuate civilians from the area wasn’t feasible. Then the administration betrayed Israel at the United Nations by allowing the Security Council to pass a resolution demanding an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza while Hamas remains in power and still holds 130 hostages. The resolution makes no mention of the October 7 massacres, and while it “also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” it does not make the cease-fire contingent on their release. Unsurprisingly, Hamas rejected the cease-fire proposal hours after the resolution passed. Why make any concessions knowing that the U.S. is pressuring Israel to give up its fight anyway?
◼ If Biden hoped to embarrass Israel when he announced that the U.S. would construct a makeshift pier in the Mediterranean for humanitarian aid, his plan has been complicated by the fact that the only people who seem to like the idea are the Israelis. Humanitarian organizations have condemned it as insufficient. So, too, has U.N. secretary-general António Guterres. But Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant welcomed the proposal. And this week, we learned that the Israel Defense Forces have acceded to U.S. requests to establish a “security bubble” around the makeshift harbor to protect what Politico said would be the “U.S. personnel building the pier as well as the individuals involved in offloading and distributing the aid.” Yes, Biden’s jetty ties up Israeli resources and frustrates its tactical goals in this war. But it also relieves the pressure on the IDF, whose soldiers are disbursing humanitarian assistance in Gaza at considerable risk. What’s more, Biden’s plan directly involves the U.S. in aspects of the Israeli campaign, coupling American policy with Jerusalem’s and even leaving open the possibility that Biden will have to backtrack from his pledge that there would be “no U.S. boots on the ground” in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective, what’s not to like?
◼ In September 1986, the Kremlin nabbed a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, Nicholas Daniloff. The Soviets imprisoned him for 13 days. He was a hostage, essentially. The U.S. government traded for him. In March 2023, the Kremlin nabbed another correspondent, this one for the Wall Street Journal: Evan Gershkovich. He has been imprisoned for a year with no end in sight. A Russian court (if “court” is the word) has just extended his “pre-trial detention” to June 30, at the earliest. Vladimir Putin and his dictatorship are lawless. They are anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-human, as they demonstrate day after day, in multifarious ways. Any lingering illusions are perhaps undispellable.
◼ A New York appellate court slashed by two-thirds, down to $175 million, the amount that Trump must post to bond to block the state from enforcing an astronomical $454 million judgment against him for fraud. Judge Arthur Engoron, an elected progressive Democrat, set that judgment at a recent civil-fraud trial in which Attorney General Letitia James proved no fraud victims. The reduction was a setback for James, another progressive Democrat who vowed to use state power against Trump and who had been chirping about the still-mounting judgment (on which interest was accruing at more than $112,000 per diem) while publicly coveting Trump’s New York properties. The appellate ruling means James will not be able to force Trump to sell some of his real estate (likely at fire-sale rates) or seize his properties to auction them off. The court’s intervention was appropriate. There is substantial evidence that Trump exaggerated the value of his assets, but the wildly disproportionate “disgorgement” penalty for this wrong is grist for an Eighth Amendment claim.
◼ The mandate that the EPA has granted itself to remake the U.S. auto industry is a step too far legally and many steps beyond what the government should be doing as a matter of principle. While it does not, strictly speaking, ban the sale of “traditional” cars (that’s surely on the drawing board for another day), it will make it increasingly difficult for Americans to buy many types of cars that they like and that have served them well. It takes little account of consumer choice or of economic, technological, logistical, or geopolitical reality, an exercise in arrogance that will have highly destructive consequences. Adding pointlessness to injury, the mandate will do little or nothing for the climate. China’s electric-vehicle makers, however, will be grateful.
◼ The Supreme Court heard two lawsuits from groups of doctors challenging Food and Drug Administration approvals of the mifepristone-based chemical-abortion pill known as RU-486. Breathless press coverage notwithstanding, the suit threatens no ban on the pill. It challenges 2016 and 2021 decisions stripping the safety precautions for do-it-yourself, at-home chemical abortions, which not infrequently send women to the hospital or requires further medical treatment. The FDA, under the past three Democratic administrations, has strained to expand the pill’s availability, insulate the FDA from judicial scrutiny, and time its actions to limit political accountability. The pill was approved in 2000 by the Clinton administration under a fast-track process meant for AIDS drugs. A legal challenge filed against the FDA in 2002 was left unresolved for nearly 14 years, thwarting judicial review while the pill’s market share expanded. Then the Obama and Biden administrations loosened regulatory restrictions in 2016 and 2021, first scaling back reporting requirements for health complications and then eliminating rules for in-person medical consultations. The lawsuits may fail if the justices believe that doctor groups don’t have standing to sue. That may even be the right legal call. But it will remain true that the pill-pushers have acted without regard for the law or ethics.
◼ Sure, sure, free trade for most things, but steel is different, some say. Steel is needed for defense production, the argument goes, so protectionism is justified. Never mind that the top proponent of that view in the Trump administration, trade representative Robert Lighthizer, was previously a highly compensated steel-industry lobbyist. The protectionists also want you to ignore a recent article from William Greenwalt, who was deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy—not the sort of job doctrinaire libertarians hold—from 2006 to 2009. He points out that the Pentagon usually buys less than 1 percent of U.S. steel output in a given year, so blanket protectionism doesn’t seem wise. More crucially, he argues that steel protectionism weakens national security. Complying with the various bureaucratic hurdles to source steel drives up costs for the Pentagon and slows the speed at which equipment can be produced. For the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) program—it was, he wrote, likely the largest defense-related steel order since the Liberty ships—Greenwalt ended up sourcing a lot of the steel from Sweden, Germany, Israel, and Australia. “When DoD urgently needed more steel, the US industry basically told Uncle Sam to pound sand,” Greenwalt writes. Any time the steel industry comes knocking for more privileges, Uncle Sam should return the favor.
◼ Back in 2022, free-market advocates were shouting to anyone who would listen that baby-formula shortages were happening because the government had screwed up the market. Now, the Federal Trade Commission—no friend of free markets in recent years—has put out a report in large part agreeing with that argument. It found that because of the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) nutrition program, the U.S. essentially has 50 separate baby-formula markets, each dominated by one producer facing negligible competition. WIC is supposed to subsidize formula for families in poverty, but it has expanded to cover a majority of formula purchases in the U.S. Individual states sign single-supplier contracts to earn steep discounts on formula, and unsubsidized customers pay higher prices to compensate. The supplier that wins the WIC contract ends up with nearly all formula sales in the state. The FTC pointed to an example from California in which winning a contract took one supplier from 5 to 95 percent market share in about a quarter. Similar trends have been recorded in 29 other states. Would anyone tolerate this kind of government failure in the market for food for grown-ups? The market for baby formula, like any other, needs reliable price signals, and it needs them now.
◼ Princess Catherine, Britain’s potential future queen, became the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories after she disappeared from public life following abdominal surgery in January. Kensington Palace made matters worse on March 10 (U.K. Mother’s Day), releasing a manipulated photograph of the princess meant to reassure the public. Kate herself made an apology on social media for causing “any confusion.” The rumor mill continued to churn. On his show, Stephen Colbert gleefully peddled rumors of Prince William’s alleged infidelity as an explanation for her absence. Three staff members at the hospital where she was treated allegedly attempted to access her medical records. Finally, the 42-year-old mother of three addressed the media frenzy in a short video, revealing that tests after her “major abdominal surgery” revealed that “cancer had been present.” She graciously thanked the public for their “wonderful support and understanding,” expressed gratitude for having William “by my side,” and explained that the desire for privacy came out of concern to protect her young children. Unwanted publicity may be a price tag of royalty. But it takes a cold heart to fault someone with cancer for mishandling public relations.
◼ The Daily Wire, co-founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, announced that its relationship with Candace Owens had ended. Although Owens had “staked [her] entire professional reputation” (her own words) only the week before on her claim that the wife of French president Emmanuel Macron was in fact a male-to-female transsexual, most believe that her increasingly obvious antisemitism was the primary cause of the break. One suspects that more was going on underneath the surface; for well over a year now, Owens has behaved like someone seeking to get fired. Her escalating rhetoric was a means of forcing the Daily Wire to give her a “martyrdom” story that would springboard her into a new career. We can be sure she will find the audience she deserves.
◼ “Martin Greenfield, Tailor to Sinatra, Obama, Trump and Shaq, Dies at 95.” You would expect an amusing obituary about a celebrity tailor—or a tailor to celebrities. (Actually, Greenfield was a bit of a celebrity himself.) And it was. But the New York Times, in that obit, told us much more than that. Greenfield learned to sew at Auschwitz—and it enabled him to survive. They are now going, the survivors. Soon they will all be gone. Their stories will live, one can hope: to amaze, to inspire—and, of course, to caution. R.I.P.
◼ “We are often confident even when we are wrong,” Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow, a masterpiece in cognitive psychology. Wrong he often was, to his delight. “Finding that I’m wrong—there is some pleasure in that. I feel I’ve learned something.” He studied intuition and rationality and their complementary functions in decision-making and self-correction. An unexpected kindness from a German soldier surprised him, a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris, and fed a curiosity that later led him to study human psychology, at Hebrew University and then Berkeley. Early in his academic career he published extensively with his collaborator Amos Tversky. Kahneman’s research undercut the assumption that people make rational choices when they consider their immediate interests. We tend to feel the pain of loss more than we enjoy the pleasure of equivalent gain. Such findings had obvious applications for economists. Kahneman developed prospect theory, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. After a series of academic appointments in Israel and North America, he joined the faculty at Princeton in the early 1990s and stayed for the next three decades. Dead at 90, R.I.P.
Joseph Lieberman, R.I.P.
Joseph Lieberman, four-term U.S. senator from Connecticut, was noteworthy for two reasons, one of special interest to this magazine, the other of interest to the nation. In 1988, WFB, a Connecticut resident, had had it with Senator Lowell Weicker who, besides being politically undesirable—he was a liberal Republican—was gaseous and vain. Democrats had taken control of the Senate two years earlier, so keeping a nominal R no longer mattered. Bill accordingly endorsed Joe Lieberman, the Democratic state attorney general. The two had met as fellow editors of the Yale Daily News and become friends, though they matriculated years apart. Lieberman’s views were relatively moderate, tempered by his Orthodox Jewish faith and his commitment to a robust foreign policy. Bill formed the humorous PAC Buckleys for Lieberman, wrote a column in Lieberman’s support, and encouraged his wife Pat to hand out pro-Lieberman bumper stickers at the local supermarket. It was Bill’s last personal intervention in politics, and among his most successful.
As a senator, Lieberman was liberal enough to be Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 (his religious orthodoxy was not strong enough to make him pro-life). But then came 9/11, and after that the Iraq War. Lieberman had become the friend of Senator John McCain, and like him he supported the Iraq War and the surge. Such views made him a pariah in his own party. In 2006 he was beaten in the Democratic Senate primary by Greenwich liberal Ned Lamont. Lieberman, running as an independent, held on to his seat (WFB endorsed him once again, even though he had come to oppose the Iraq War himself). Two years later Lieberman endorsed McCain for president—as dramatic a partisan swing as any in U.S. politics.
As the war faded into stalemate then memory, Lieberman returned to his Democratic roots. He never lost WFB’s friendship, thanking him, in a eulogy delivered on the Senate floor, for “all that I learned from him, all the good times I had with him.”
Dead at 82, R.I.P.