Flag Burning Must Remain Legal

Editor's Note: Due to personal obligations, I am unlikely to blog until June 23, and will be present on X/Twitter irregularly.

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I hear that Trump wants to imprison people who burn the flag, which is both red meat for his base and exemplary of his failure to appreciate the nature of our system of government.

Trump's sentiment is nothing new among social conservatives, and the silver lining to this fact is that there are ample explanations for why this would be wrong.

Indeed, in 1990, The Association for Objective Law circulated a very good explanation that covered two of the most misunderstood points that make many otherwise patriotic Americans want to criminalize flag-burning.

First, most Americans today have forgotten or never learned the nature of rights or of our system of government, which was designed to protect them:

[Rights as being only listed permissions] is not the way rights work; it is not what the founders of this country intended, and it is not what the flag represents.

Rights arise out of the nature of man; as Ayn Rand has explained, they are "conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival." They are not gifts of the state, or permissions, to be withdrawn at any time. Indeed, the only proper purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals from those who seek to violate them by the initiation of physical force. Ayn Rand puts it as follows: "[I]t cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens' protection against the government." [bold added]

A flag is property (with no rights), not an individual (who has, for example, the free speech and property rights that apply to flag burning).

Second, after generations of all-intrusive government, too many Americans imagine that the government should enforce morality or they readily confuse the legal with the moral. These are not the same:

The flag is an important symbol of the system of government embodying these principles, and a showing of contempt for it is despicable. But the destruction of the flag, if the flag belongs to the person burning it and the conduct endangers nobody, is not an initiation of force or a violation of anyone's rights, and nobody seems to be claiming it is. On the contrary, any statute forbidding flag burning is an initiation of force and a violation of an individual right: the right to property, which includes the right to use the property to express any ideas the owner wishes.

Any other view of rights is terribly dangerous. The view that you are not free unless the particular action you wish to take is on an approved list, that you are not free to act unless the government tells you that you may, leaves us all defenseless against those who wish to dictate what we can do... [bold added]

I recommend reading the whole thing and referring others to it. An incompetent who aspires to be our dictator has taken a keen interest in this issue, and more capable people are waiting in the wings, watching.

We must do what we can to ensure that this administration faces an informed and motivated public.

-- CAV

Sex Bland (Also) Sells ...

... and Other Free Market Discoveries

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok brings up a great feature of free markets:

Competition is a discovery procedure.

He brings this up in answer to naysayers who doubt that anyone wants, for example, "to pay thousands to save a few hours" on a supersonic flight. Tabarrok's reply of bottled water illustrates something else that might have seemed too expensive to be a market success, and then adds another:

Fred Smith's FedEx plan got a "C" in the classroom, but the market graded the experiment and returned an A in equity.

The letter grade brought to my mind another example, Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers:

Founders Todd Graves and Craig Silvey were studying at different universities when they wrote a plan for a chicken-finger restaurant which Silvey submitted in a business plan-writing course, receiving a C-minus grade. At the time, Graves worked at Guthrie's Chicken Fingers.

The business plan was rejected numerous times by potential investors, so Graves and Silvey earned the needed money working various manual labor jobs. They obtained an SBA loan, which they used to open their first restaurant... [links and notes omitted]

This chain, despite the low grade and a lack of investor interest, now brings in $1.5 billion in revenue a year.

As a Popeye's fan who is completely flabbergasted by how a chain that sells food I can barely taste does this, I must concur with Tabarrok: [J]ust as in science, there is no substitute for running the experiment.

-- CAV

TACO is the Left's 'Owning the Libs'

A journalist in the financial press noticed that Trump often reduced tariff rates in time for stock trading on Tuesday, and coined the term TACO Tuesday. The acronym stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.

Predictably, this annoys the Snowflake in Chief, so many Democrats have doubled down on the chance to annoy Donald Trump:

... The Democratic National Committee handed out free tacos from a truck emblazoned with the term and an image of Trump in a chicken suit near the Republican National Committee's headquarters in Washington this week. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., posted a photo of an unappetizing taco lunch on BlueSky and wrote, "It's TACO Tuesday on Capitol Hill! I hear the White House celebrates every day." And in a foolishly hawkish spin on the quip, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently condemned "TACO Trump" for negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran after his tough talk toward the country. [links omitted]

As the rest of Zeeshan Aleem's opinion piece shows, not everyone on that side of the aisle is laughing or on board with this kind of provocation. Aleem elaborates on three reasons he thinks the Democrats should cut out the TACO talk:

1. TACO is not entirely accurate.
2. [It dares] Trump to follow through on his most extreme tariff threats.
3. [It] threatens to undermine Democrats' messaging that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy... [I]t's a bit odd to simultaneously argue that Trump is all talk and no action.

I would also add that, to the degree that any political opponent of Trump values freedom, that this issue is identical to Trump's juvenile taunting of the left:

It may be fun to see the likes of Nancy Pelosi [or Trump --ed] getting a taste of their own medicine, but irritating Democrats [or Trumpists --ed ] is not the same thing as defeating them. More important, it definitely fails to advance the cause of freedom, and is probably setting it back.

I will admit that I enjoyed a few laughs from some of the TACO Tuesday memes, but it's time to consign them to the dustbin, and work to do the same with the Trump tariffs.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. I have no concrete plans to visit Vegas, but if I do, I plan to refresh my memory of Krista Diamond's list of "15 Unwritten Rules of Visiting Las Vegas." The below snippet from her intro should serve to establish her credentials in terms of knowledge and writing ability:

In 2015, I moved from the woods of Montana into an apartment directly behind a Las Vegas casino, as one does. I had been working in the national parks and wanted to live in the real world -- in retrospect, Las Vegas was an odd choice for that. Since then, I've learned a lot about how to navigate this strange and beautiful city. I know its secrets and myriad hustles. My decade-long Vegas staycation has taught me the rules for a good Vegas vacation. With the right mix of planning and spontaneity and a little insider information, you can not only have a good time in Las Vegas, but the best time.

It's a fun and thorough piece: The points run the gamut from the mandatory (stay hydrated), through the expected (respect the tipping culture), to the optional (consider enjoying natural wonders). I'm not the type to be concerned with knowing a good marijuana dispensary from a bad one, but that's in there, too.

2. My planner alerted me to a small, but potentially important preparation for hurricane season: Verify thaw detector in freezer.

But there was a problem: We lost power for hours last season when Francine passed us closely to the west. The coin in the thaw detector went nowhere, because the ice it was sitting on floated, meaning the thaw detector was worthless. I removed it from the freezer ahead of the ice crystal check I obviously had to do en route to throwing out about half of the food.

Luckily, we were home, rather than returning from an evacuation after the power came back on and everything refroze.

Image by the author.

Also luckily, I found a way to make a better thaw detector. This one is smaller and has a lid, both obvious advantages, but testing it revealed that it addresses the issue I noted above: Because it's small, the weight of the coin will be enough to cause it to at least drop to the side as the ice rolls beneath it if there is a thaw.

Now, if we're away during a similar event, we really will know if the freezer thawed.

3. Fellow geography nerds take note: There may soon be an even smaller sovereign state than Vatican City:

If the prime minister's plan is approved by Albania's parliament and the country's constitution is duly amended, the Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order will comprise no more than 27 acres (0.11 km2, 0.04 sq mi, or 20 football fields). That's just one-quarter the size of the Vatican, meaning the Bektashi state will be not only the world's newest country but also its smallest.

As far as I can tell, this hasn't happened (or been nixed) yet, but the latest news I can find is from very late last year.

4. Derek Lowe provides an update on some groundbreaking work on autoimmune diseases:

... The patients, who had disease so severe that it was destroying their lives, for which no other therapies were available, and whose lupus was of a type that no clinician had ever seen improve on its own ... appear to have been cured. They are in drug-free remission, and no one until now has ever seen anything like it.

That result, which was the culmination of years of attempts by researchers around the world to accomplish such a B-cell reset, attracted a tremendous amount of attention in the immunology field, as well it should have. Now this overview at Nature reports that there are at least 85 therapies involved in about 380 clinical trials following up on this idea (!) ...

Among the diseases being targeted is multiple sclerosis, which is fantastic news.

Lowe had reported some time ago that the cause of that disease may have been found, making its eventual eradication a possibility. I am glad in the meantime that stopping MS in its tracks might also be on the table.

-- CAV

Ask a North Korean

John Stossel recently profiled Charles Ryu, a two-time escapee from North Korea who now warns others of the evils of socialism.

Ryu's story is quite compelling, including the following:

Ryu's time in China was short-lived. Someone told the Chinese officials that he was North Korean. China sent him back.

North Korea then punished him for escaping. "I was beaten ... fed only 150 kernels of corn. One morning I was marching ... I saw dry vomit on the road and was so hungry that I got on my hands and knees and began picking the rice out of the dry vomit. I didn't stop ... until the beating from the guards was too unbearable."

Nine months later, he was freed from prison labor because "I lost so much weight that I was a worthless worker."

Eventually Ryu escaped again, sneaking past guards into the Yalu River.

Stossel's entire piece is worth reading and includes links to Ryu's YouTube channel.

Stossel notes that, with nearly two thirds of young Americans having a favorable opinion of socialism, there is a strong need for a corrective.

But people liking socialism is hardly the only danger to freedom here today. I can think of at least one prominent figure -- regarded by many as our savior from socialism -- who openly admires the operator of that slave pen.

Socialism is simply one variety of tyranny, and focusing too closely on just it can cause us to fall victim to one of the others.

-- CAV

Sure They'll Agree to That.

Donald Trump has repeatedly failed to avail himself of the historic opportunity to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, including not being on board with Israel doing the same. He'd rather "make a deal" -- just like all the appeasing American Presidents before him.

His proposal sounds superficially different from the rest, however:

US President Donald Trump said he envisions a nuclear deal with Iran that would allow the destruction of "whatever we want" in the country including labs, a version of an inspections regime that is likely to be rejected by Tehran.

Speaking at the White House on Wednesday [May 28], Trump briefly outlined his vision of a deal that is "very strong, where we can go in with inspectors. We can take whatever we want. We can blow up whatever we want. But nobody getting killed," he said.

Trump also said he believed a deal with Iran could be completed within "the next couple of weeks" and that talks had made "a lot of progress." But his comments about destroying nuclear facilities highlight a major sticking point between the two over whether Iran should be allowed to produce its own enriched uranium. [bold added]

Why on earth would a country that is obviously building weapons and interested in using them -- and is used to us kicking the can down the road -- agree to this? Other than to renege later, knowing how much Trump wants to avoid a war diverting attention from himself, that is.

Is Trump this naive? He's not that bright, but I doubt it. Does he think the Mullahs are idiots? Again, I don't see it. My guess is that he thinks the American people are idiots on the strength of everything else they've swallowed or ignored from him so far, and for that I can't blame him.

My take on Trump's foreign policy, such as it is, is that he finds a blustering, belligerent way to appease our enemies (or even help them outright, as with Russia) that the cultish core of his base will mistake for toughness, and that far too many of the rest of us will give a pass since it has been normalized for so long.

All these negotiations seem likely to accomplish is to confirm to Iran that (1) we'd really, really like its nuclear weapons program to disappear, and (2) we still won't do what it takes to make that happen.

-- CAV

Trump Tariffs: Down but Not Out

The BBC discusses what's next, short- and long-term, after the recent US Court of International Trade decision on the legality of the "Liberation Day" tariffs.

As you probably already know, the ruling has been set aside temporarily for legal reasons. But what happens if the Supreme Court rules in the same way? Given that tariffs have been a longstanding idée fixe for the President and are a cornerstone of his agenda, how much of an impact will the ruling have after he and his cronies find ways around it?

Decidedly mixed:

[E]ven if Trump lost [in the Supreme Court] it would not necessarily spell the end of his tariff plans.

For one thing, the ruling noted that the president does have the power to impose tariffs of up to 15% for 150 days to address concerns about the balance of trade, which the White House had argued were an emergency.

If the administration chose to go that route, those new tariffs could go into effect within days, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs.

Trump could also turn to the other, more established laws that he used in his first term to justify tariffs, which focus on issues such as national security and unfair trade policies. Those require investigations and periods of public comment before tariffs go into effect.

Goldman Sachs said Trump might also turn to an untested part of a 1930 trade law that allows the president to impose tariffs of up to 50% on imports from countries that "discriminate" against the US. [bold added]

The best-case scenario, assuming both a Supreme Court loss in the current legal battle and Trump trying to maximize his ability to levy tariffs at whim, I'd expect him to use his ability to levy 15% tariffs to the hilt, while causing another round of lawsuits by using the 1930's law similarly to the way he abused the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for his "Liberation Day" tariffs.

We're not out of the woods by any stretch, although Trump could change tariffs by smaller amounts and perhaps not on a daily basis.

To my legally uneducated mind, the best-case I can see is that Trump also loses on the 1930's law and can only moderately screw everyone with 15% tariffs after that.

-- CAV