The Best and the Worst

“None of us is as dumb as all of us,” as the satirical motivational poster puts it. Americans are getting a little taste of that right now, with the American demos collectively choosing policies that few if any of us (the non-psychopaths, anyway) would have chosen individually. 

As it goes in economics, so it goes elsewhere. 

Nobody would choose to have polio. No father would choose to have his child or children killed or crippled by the horrifying disease. And yet it is the case that the only places in the world where polio is endemic are places that choose to have polio: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those places have polio because they refuse to allow international medical workers and Rotary Club volunteers (who have been working successfully against polio for nearly a half century) to operate freely and in safety. Perhaps they do not want their children to be maimed by polio. Perhaps they do not want their countries to be poor, ignorant, backward, and weak. But their leaders, such as they are, choose policies that make these outcomes inevitable, and the people give their implicit consent: Qui tacet consentire videtur. 

Afghanistan and Pakistan could be decently governed countries tomorrow if their peoples chose it; they could be as economically prosperous as Poland or Greece in a few decades and as well-off as the median EU country or Canada in a few more years, if they chose the right kind of policies. Hong Kong went from being one of the poorest places in the world—with basically nothing in the way of infrastructure or natural resources—to one of the wealthiest in only a few years thanks to the entrepreneurship of the people and the benign neglect of their British colonial overlords. But, instead, Afghanistan and Pakistan are distinguished from the rest of the world by the fact that their children suffer death and disability because of their refusal to allow their people access to a vaccine that has been available in the rest of the world since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. 

The first polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk, the son of one of those terrible uneducated immigrants from backwards countries with values alien to our own (his mother was a Jew who had the good luck to get out of Minsk) and a product of that hated “meritocracy” our anti-elitism warriors are always putting sneer quotes around: Being a Jew and coming from a family without money, Salk was effectively excluded from the prep-school-to-Ivy League pipeline but had access to the merit-based—and very competitive—institutions of New York City that were open to people like him: Townsend Harris High School and the City College of New York. 

CCNY was free except for the required library card, which went for 50 cents a semester. In one particularly amazing run, the college produced future Nobel laureates in the classes of 1933, 1935, 1937, 1940, 1943, and 1950—and the class of ’37 boasted three of them: Arthur Kornberg, who discovered how DNA is synthesized, along with Jerome Karle and Herbert Hauptman, collaborators who developed methods for determining the structure of molecules that revolutionized fields from pharmaceutical development to materials design. Kornberg was the son of Jewish immigrants from Galicia; Karle, born Jerome Karfunkle, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland; Hauptman was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Austria. Hauptman’s father, Israel, had enrolled at CCNY as a young man, too, but had been obliged to leave school to get a job to support his family, working as a printer—he carried the torch as far as he could and then passed it to his son. 

Millions and millions of Americans did not want to see that torch carried forward, and hated and despised these foreign-born Jewish printers, shopkeepers, and working men from Odessa and Kyiv, these penniless Polish Jews on the Lower East Side with their basket-weaving businesses and barely a word of English. With just a slight change in the political trajectory of those times, we might have denied ourselves—and our children, and our country—the benefits of the achievements of these men and women, and those of the many millions of the less famous and more ordinary sort of good people, good citizens, good Americans. It didn’t have to be Americans that saved the world from polio and who built so much of the modern world. We could have listened to the Fords and the Lindberghs and the Trumps of the time, who were the Drumpfs of Bad (Very) Dürkheim not that long ago. And, of course, we never really learn: It is of interest to me that so many of our modern Know-Nothings are the Irish American descendants of the very people the original Know-Nothings loathed and feared. And the Know-Nothings weren’t entirely wrong on every point: All those Irish Catholics really did change the political and social character of places such as Boston, whose politics even in our more secular time would puzzle John Adams, who grew up in a Massachusetts where Catholic worship was legally suppressed. I once attended an Evacuation Day political event in Boston that included an open bar at 7 a.m. and Elizabeth Warren clapping out of time as the crowd sang “Charlie on the MTA,” which I suppose might have played out differently if all those immigrants to Boston had been from Buckinghamshire (or Riyadh) instead of the Emerald Isle. 

Choices are a package deal. They are a bundle. 

Nobody wants to have measles. No father wants his daughter to get sick and die of an entirely preventable disease, but:

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” the mother said in English, referring to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination children typically receive before attending school. She said her stance on vaccination has not changed after her daughter’s death.

“The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it pretty quickly,” the mother said of her other four surviving children who were treated with castor oil and inhaled steroids and recovered.

The couple told [Children’s Health Defense] that their daughter had measles for days when she became tired and the girl’s labored breathing prompted the couple to take her to Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock. There, the girl was intubated and died a few days later. The other children came down with measles after their sister died.

When you see “Texas” and “said in English,” you may think the implied alternative is Spanish. In this case, it is Low German, the community in question being Mennonite. 

“Character is destiny,” the wise men say. And I get that, and what it implies, but I do hope it isn’t true. I don’t have a great character, myself, having instead a natural instinct for low things, excess, indolence, and worse. The only hope for people like me is to try to be a better sort of man than we are inclined to be, to be better than our characters, that it should be the case that you are what you do and what you choose. That’s no route to sainthood, either! Not for me, anyway. But it is preferable to the alternative. 

I recently spent an afternoon with the best kind of Americans: I was invited to speak about work at the annual conference of Rotary District 7570, a group of Rotary clubs extending from Winchester, Virginia, to Greeneville, Tennessee, across the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, some of the most beautiful country east of the Mississippi. I have nothing but good things to say about Rotarians, and not only because they gave me a scholarship when I was a senior in high school and was desperate for money for college. (The University of Texas was not very expensive, but it wasn’t CCNY’s 50 cents a semester, either.) The Rotary clubs include my favorite kind of slightly dopey, well-meaning, public-spirited Americans—who are, of course, precisely the sort of people who can change the world when they get a mind to do so. For the Rotarians, that has most famously taken the form of working to eradicate polio, which they have come very close to doing. 

The Rotary anti-polio project is a quintessentially American undertaking of the best kind. In the 1970s, polio vaccines had been around for a while, they had long been established to be safe and effective, they were not very expensive, and, thanks to the work of Albert Sabin (formerly Abram Saperstejn of Bialystok, Russia, who arrived in America with his parents on the SS Lapland in 1921 but attended New York University rather than City College), they were easy to administer in the form of oral drops. But there was still a lot of polio in the world. All that was needed was to raise billions of dollars from pancake breakfasts and the like and to organize millions of volunteer man-hours to deliver and administer polio vaccines around the world to people who needed them, working with local governments and non-government partners—easy! There wasn’t any mystery about how to do it—it just needed doing. Sometimes, you need a genius like Jonas Salk or Albert Sabin to do the complicated thing that nobody knows how to do. And that’s a problem, because you never know where to find a genius like that, even among those unglamorous families of blue-collar New York Jewish immigrants that seemed to be absolutely teeming with them in the 20^th century. You can’t plan on a genius just showing up—genius works on its own schedule. 

But, sometimes, you don’t need a genius—you just need somebody to volunteer to organize that pancake breakfast. And when you just need somebody to do the thing, that’s when you want the Rotarians and millions of other Americans in similar organizations. My friend Tim Carney, who gave a much better and more extensive talk at the same Rotary meeting, talked about the importance of institutions in both big projects such as polio eradication and in private matters, such as adult friendships, which tend to overlap with our participation in institutions of various kinds, from churches to book clubs to business associations. As Carney wrote in Alienated America, these institutions are profoundly important for healthy private and public lives. 

The Rotarians organized their first polio vaccination project, in the Philippines, in 1979. Since then, they have raised billions of dollars to vaccinate nearly 3 billion children in 122 countries. Their efforts have attracted support from governments who understand what a force multiplier American pancake-breakfast organizers can be and from figures such as Bill Gates, whose foundation has for years been providing $2-to-$1 matching funds for the polio project, meaning that the Rotarians’ $50 million in annual fundraising produces $150 million in working funds every year. The thing about this kind of work is that work works: Polio cases worldwide have been reduced by 99.9 percent since the Rotarians took on the disease. These are good people doing good things—no mystery, no radical scientific breakthrough, just consistent hard work by people who have nothing personally to gain by saving children from paralysis in Nigeria. 

I would like to emphasize the contrast here: On one hand, we have those Americans in the Rotary clubs and others like them, who do hard things competently and with humility, dedicating years of selfless effort toward getting it right on one big thing; on the other hand, we have a class of American gadflies who are endlessly self-aggrandizing, who live only for their own status and wealth, whose only credo is “What’s in it for me?” and who are, in spite of their posturing as hard-headed realists, the most absurd gang of chiseling incompetents ever to bring such an abbreviated attention span to bear on the nation’s problems, who wreck institutions and alliances and Ebola-control programs simply because they refuse to do their homework, and who have managed to destroy more than $7 trillion in wealth in only a few days while setting fire to a system of international economic and security cooperation that was built over the course of decades by better and more capable men than these misfits could ever hope to be. The Rotarians don’t talk about politics at their meetings, but there is a politically meaningful contrast to be seen there: between the best kind of Americans and the worst kind. 

Economics for English Majors

On the subject of those trade relationships, I have a slight disagreement with Jonah Goldberg, who argued on a recent podcast that there is a reasonable case, if not necessarily a convincing one, for enacting anti-Chinese tariffs on national security grounds. I think Jonah is wrong about that: There isn’t any national security case for tariffs at all. 

If trade with China is a national security problem—or if trading with China in some particular product or commodity is a national security problem—then the answer still isn’t a national sales tax on U.S.-based companies that import Chinese goods. If you want to prohibit trade with China in x, y, or z, then the thing to do is to prohibit trade with China in x, y, or z. You give them the Huawei treatment, which is a good way of discovering how important your market actually is. (How’s that working out?) One could imagine a serious project to bring China to heel when it comes to the theft of intellectual property (which is a real problem) and the like: trade prohibitions, economic sanctions, an effort to expel China from the World Trade Organization, etc. 

Tariffs are no part of that, because tariffs do not have that effect and, in many cases, will have no effect at all on Chinese producers, who mainly sell to U.S.-based distributors rather than to U.S.-based consumers. A big tariff on Chinese-made flip-flops might be a problem for the company that supplies them to Walmart, and it might be a problem for Walmart, but it isn’t necessarily a problem for the guys at the Chinese flip-flop factory. Buyers don’t have to buy your stuff, but sellers don’t have to sell you their stuff, either. There’s a big, wide world out there, with billions of feet all but crying out for cheap flip-flops. You think some Chinese firm is going to just pony up to cover an American firm’s new taxes … because? What’s the U.S. firm going to do? It’s not going to buy its flip-flops from a nonexistent U.S. flip-flop factory, and with tariffs on every overseas source, it doesn’t necessarily improve its tax position by switching from Chinese sandal suppliers to Vietnamese or Bangladeshi or Italian ones. 

Tariffs do one thing—and are intended to do that one thing and nothing else: They give politically connected domestic firms an opportunity to raise their prices by removing lower-priced substitutes from the marketplace entirely or by putting upward pressure on the prices of those substitutes. What’s dumb—I mean, there’s a lot that’s dumb in this, but here’s one big dumb thing—is that most of the Trump administration’s tariffs will land on products that do not compete with U.S.-made goods, so they simply will put upward pressure on the prices of products that have no domestic substitutes in the market—with any pricing advantage going to other overseas firms. If there aren’t any flip-flop factories in the United States, then a tariff on Chinese flip-flops is just a subsidy to flip-flop producers in countries subjected to a tariff rate lower than the one applied to their Chinese competitors. And that may be good news for flip-flop entrepreneurs in Cambodia or Bangladesh or wherever (and who knows where the rates will be in 24 hours?) but all it means for Americans is higher prices.

This is more obvious if you consider an extreme case. We aren’t going to let Chinese firms design the guidance chips for American nuclear ICBMs. That’s a real, obvious national security risk. So, how do we go about keeping that from happening? With a 5 million percent tariff on Chinese-made ICBM guidance systems? No. We just forbid the use of them in U.S. military goods. Tariffs are simply the wrong tool for the national security job. You can sharpen a pencil and tape it to the barrel of a rifle, but you’d be better off with an ordinary bayonet, if that’s what you need. 

Words About Words

Item A: In a recent Washington Post column, Fareed Zakaria wrote that Russian forces had “leveled the Chechen capital of Grozny to the ground.” I asked what I thought was an obvious question: What else would Grozny have been leveled to if not the ground? Putin’s desk? The height of the average elderberry bush? The column has since been amended. 

Item B: New York Times headline: “Dollar Tree Is Selling Family Dollar for $1 Billion.” Call me old fashioned, but isn’t that like $999,999,999 too much? Either everything’s a dollar or it isn’t. Oh, I know, I know. But you thought the same thing. 

Item C: Michelle Cottle, writing in the New York Times, has discovered a Democratic congressman who supports gun control, Jason Crow of Colorado. Which doesn’t seem like much of a discovery to me, but, she adds: 

Mr. Crow also grew up hunting “everything that flies or walks or runs through the woods,” and he recognizes the importance of hunting in many people’s lives. “For us to ignore that and to write that off or to malign it — and for some Democrats literally not to know what the hell they’re talking about,” he said, “is unforgivable.”

The thing about the Second Amendment is: It has not one expletive deleted thing to do with hunting, you rather more florid expletive deleted nincompoops. Do you really think our Founding Fathers wrote a frickin’ hobby into the Bill of Rights? Like it or not, the Second Amendment is paramilitary in character—it references the militia, not Elmer Fudd. Americans are not going to abandon their civil rights because some Democrat in the Denver suburbs once shot a whitetail. “For some Democrats literally not to know what the hell they’re talking about is unforgivable.” 

Elsewhere

You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here. 

You can buy my other books here. 

Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t. 

You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here. 

In Closing

Matt Taibbi deserves to win his libel lawsuit against Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a California Democrat who baselessly smeared him as a “serial sexual harasser.” The claim is simply fabricated. I disagree with Taibbi about a great many things and kind of suspect I wouldn’t like him if I knew him, but the habit—still more pronounced among Democrats—of inventing sexual misconduct allegations as a way of smearing critics and those with differing political opinions is dishonorable, unseemly, and profoundly corrosive to democratic discourse. It is poison when the abuse is directed at our friends, and it is poison when it is directed at those who are not our friends. A member of Congress should not be permitted to defame critics in this way. As a legal matter, Taibbi’s case is on solid ground; as an ethical matter, Sydney Kamlager-Dove owes him—and her congressional colleagues—an apology. Taibbi is right to defend himself in this way, and more people should follow his example. It is the only way to draw a line that has a chance of being respected.