Voters Are Not Babies

Mornings aren’t as tough as you might think, at least not all of the time—they can be lovely, if everybody is cooperating, which isn’t always the case with 9-month-old triplets. But, on a good day, the boys get up one at a time, each taking his bottle without too much fuss, and then playing or napping contentedly while his brothers get their breakfasts. Yes, the first digit on the kitchen clock may be four, but, with happy babies, a fire in the fireplace, the dog sitting quietly, some coffee—it is not too bad at all. 

The thing is, babies aren’t rational. You can’t reason with them. Like any number of adults I will have the good taste not to name, they hear but they do not listen. If the triplets all wake up at the same time and all start crying for breakfast at the same time, there’s no good way to talk them down and get them to take turns. And then, they’ll probably wake up their older brother, who isn’t going to be happy about that. Babies want what they want, and they want it now. 

The urgent displeasure is especially intense when they want incompatible things. E.g.: It takes a little time to warm up a bottle, and, sometimes, the wait is more than one of the little ones is prepared to endure, at which point there will commence “a veritable Wagner opera of alarm and distress and grief.” I want to explain it: “You can have your bottle warm, or you can have it now. Choose one.” But the babies aren’t having it—because they are, you know, babies.

You, American voter, are not a baby. 

The American voter does not have that excuse—not that anybody would know it from observing him, listening to his absurd and incompatible demands, enduring his temper tantrums. You know the classic case: “I want lots of spending, low taxes, and a balanced budget.” Populism is a way of trying to accommodate that infantile mentality by means of dishonesty: “Of course we can have lots of spending and low taxes without ballooning the debt—we’ll just arrange things so that we spend the money on you rather than on those undeserving people and then put the taxes on those undeserving people rather than on you.” 

Donald Trump’s imbecilic views on tariffs are based on the same refusal to accept inevitable trade-offs as is my hungry infant’s demand for his bottle before it is ready. Trump insists that the tariffs will generate tons of revenue and that they will protect domestic industries from foreign competition, but, of course, only one of those things can be true: If the tariffs are being paid, that means the imports are still coming in, because people are still buying them; if the tariffs succeed in keeping imports off the U.S. market, then they aren’t generating any revenue, because you don’t pay taxes on imports that don’t happen. Trump is too much of an ignoramus and too fundamentally stupid to work through that, but my friend Larry Kudlow doesn’t have that excuse. Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to understand basic economics, but surely she has someone around her—I assume Jamie Dimon has her phone number—to explain that while she says she wants house prices to come down the policies she is pushing would cause them to increase: lower mortgage interest rates and easier access to credit, large subsidies for purchasers, etc. 

J.D. Vance, who is not stupid and who does not even do a particularly good imitation of a stupid person, says that Trump’s proposed massive national sales tax—which is what a tariff is—wouldn’t lead to disruptive price increases because the revenue raised would be laundered back to consumers through tax cuts: i.e., that the upward pressure on prices caused by the new taxes would be handled by spreading around a bunch of money, which also would put upward pressure on prices. Which is to say, Vance proposes to treat economic pneumonia with a secondary lung infection. Of course it is stupid, but more to the point here is that it is dishonest: J.D. Vance is not suffering from a mental disability but from a moral one.

Trade-offs are a real thing, in many cases best understood as a subset of the much larger universe of unintended consequences. Subsidies given to consumers tend to raise prices—consider the cases of higher education and health care as hallmark examples. We want promising young people to have easy access to college educations, and we want everybody to have access to excellent, affordable health care. (Excellence and affordability are in tension, too, and often impose trade-offs.) But wanting good things is not the same thing as having a way to get those good things. If you have nine apples to divide among 10 children, there isn’t any scenario in which every child gets an apple of his own. If you have nine apples to divide among 10 children and you also have $1 million, there still isn’t any scenario in which every child gets an apple of his own. Because money isn’t apples. But you could use that $1 million to plant some apple trees, or, since we’re talking about people who work in Washington—and who, therefore, unless they are at the gym, never lift anything heavier than money—you could use that money to encourage other people to plant some apple trees. That’s a step in the right direction: Whether it’s apples or oranges or doctors, more is more. 

But if you spend that $1 million encouraging apple orchards, you can’t spend it on orange groves or cancer research. And subsidies given on the producer side are subject to political gaming and rent seeking and will tend to enrich people who already are rich and powerful and influential. If you try to counteract the price effect of consumer subsidies with price controls, you create shortages and rationing—and rationing, like business subsidies, tends to work in the favor of those who already have power, wealth, or political connections. Higher minimum wages reduce employer demand for low-skilled labor and tend to reduce employment opportunities for young people and workers with marginal skills. 

As the engineers like to put it: “Fast, good, cheap—pick two.”

I do not blame politicians (I do not blame them very much) for trying to put a positive spin on their policy ideas, emphasizing the benefits while minimizing the costs. I do blame them when they lie about those things, as both Trump and Harris—and Joe Biden; let’s not forget that he is still the president of these United States—reliably do. I blame the people a good deal more. It is the demos, after all, that rewards politicians for eliding the complex facts of public life, and it is the demos that punishes the rare few who go out and try to tell the plain truth about things. I do not blame my little babies when they want their bottles and want them now. But I blame grown American adults when they act like babies. 

If you are looking for a real test of rhetorical excellence—a real test of the fundamental skill of a political performer—imagine (you will have to imagine) a politician of whatever stripe you like being able to go out and give an honest speech about entitlements or health care or higher education, a speech in which he was honest about the trade-offs involved and the limitations that reality puts on our policy ambitions, and—here’s the trick—coming out of that speech in a better political position than he had enjoyed going into it. Harris couldn’t do it. Trump couldn’t do it and wouldn’t be inclined to try, being, as he is, a man who lies even when it is not necessary, presumably just to keep in practice. Barack Obama, famed orator, couldn’t get close. Neither could the “Great Communicator,” Ronald Reagan.

Ironically, one of the few American presidents who did get pretty close was Dwight Eisenhower, not famed for his rhetorical cleverness, passion, or cerebral approach to politics. But even in the first year of his presidency, the plainspoken Eisenhower—who had very little to prove to anybody in Washington, or anywhere else—had the confidence to be direct. Set aside, for the moment, whether you agree with the underlying policy assumptions in Eisenhower’s “A Chance for Peace” speech and take in the rare, edifying spectacle of an American president speaking to the people as though they were functional adults. 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Compare:

So it’s such a great question in the sense that people don’t think of grocery. It sounds like not such an important word when you talk about homes and everything else, but more people tell me about grocery bills where the price of bacon, the price of lettuce, the price of tomatoes, they tell me, and we’re going to do a lot of things. Our farmers aren’t being treated properly, and we had a deal with China and it was a great deal. I never mentioned it because once COVID came in, I said that was a bridge too far because I had a great relationship with President Xi and he’s a fierce man and he’s a man that likes China and I understand that, but we had a deal and he was perfect on that deal. $50 billion he was going to buy. We were doing numbers like you wouldn’t believe for the farmer, but the farmers are very badly hurt. The farmers in this country, we’re going to get them straightened out. We’re going to get your prices down.

Well. 

Words About Words

From Slate:

The number of pedestrian deaths in the United States is skyrocketing. In 2022 traffic crashes killed 7,805 people on foot—that’s an 83 percent rise from 2009, and a 40-year high. The vast majority of those deaths involved a car colliding into a human.

As an editor, I would very much like to retire “skyrocketing.” I cringe every time I catch myself using it. 

But my beef here is with “colliding into.” 

You don’t collide into. You collide with. 

Colliding is a kind of mutual act. The co– in collide is the same “together” root as in collaborate or coexist. Even though one of the parties to the collision may have all of the motive force—you can collide with something that is not itself in motion, of course—the collision is something that happens between the objects. It is like punch or strike—as hard as George Foreman could hit, he didn’t punch into his opponents’ faces, though he could punch into the air during practice or a moment of exhalation. You don’t strike into your enemies, though you might strike into enemy territory. Into means something. 

Bad journalistic writers have a tendency to want to fancy up the language and add stuff that isn’t needed and doesn’t belong. Hence advocate for instead of advocate, or epicenter for center. I suspect that the author originally had written something more energetic such as “plowing into a human” or something simple such as “running into a human.” The bad kind of editor—which seems to be the only kind Slate employs—makes copy worse by “fixing” things. 

Economics for English Majors

Our friend Megan McArdle notes an interesting and useful economic fact in the context of the 2024 presidential election: Total factor productivity in the United States peaked in 2019. Ask the average voter what the hell that means, and you’ll get a blank stare. “But they know how it felt,” McArdle says. When people say they were economically better off during the Trump administration, this is part of what they are talking about. Never mind that presidents do not actually have all that much effect on the economy, particularly when it comes to big, long-term trends like changes in total factor productivity. High productivity tends to go along with strong wages and employment, and there were steady prices for the most part in those years, pre-COVID, anyway. 

Total factor productivity is a way of talking about changes in economic output that are not simply the result of bringing new productive factors online. Often, what we’re really trying to talk about is labor productivity, so, think about it like this: If GDP is $30 trillion this year but goes to $33 trillion next year without some big influx of new workers or capital into the marketplace, then what happened is that labor and/or other factors became more productive, creating more economic output per man hour of work. If you want work to pay better, then there are all sorts of artificial ways to goose the system—most of which amount to one form of price control or another, wages being the price of labor, with the predictable downsides of such controls—but none of them is as good as making a man hour of work in reality more valuable as an economic question. At this point, some of my progressive friends will point out that wage growth has not always closely tracked productivity growth, and they are not wrong about that. Labor markets are complicated, and productivity is not the only factor affecting wages. Higher productivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the kind of wage growth I’m trying to get at here.

The inevitable question during presidential elections: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Maybe. Maybe not. People judge for themselves, of course, and they don’t make those decisions on strictly economic bases—maybe you are doing a bit better, but not as much better as you had thought or hoped, and, so, the weight of your disappointment overbears the weight of the extra gold in your purse. There are empirical questions that can be answered and questions of sentiment and emotion that can be interrogated. 

But the belief that this reflects primarily the influence of the president is pure superstition. 

Elsewhere … 

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

You can buy my other books here. 

You can see my New York Post columns here. 

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

In Conclusion 

Fascinating stuff in the Wall Street Journal:

In an antidrone technology competition earlier this year, Boeing showcased a futuristic laser weapon that can punch a hole straight through a hostile aerial threat.

The multinational—and several other defense giants—lost to four college students who knocked drones out of the sky using sound waves. The rookies’ device was developed in the backyard of a student’s parents using an old car speaker.

Elections come and go. America is still America. God bless.