We don't know if it's the most important policy news of the past twenty-four hours, but it's certainly the most interesting: via a post on Truth Social, President-elect Donald J. Trump has expressed, after a meeting with Harold Daggett, President of the International Longshoremen Association, his opposition to the automation of American ports.

Is this bad policy? Oh yes. Your correspondent is not unsympathetic, in the abstract, to the argument that economic efficiency is not the highest good of society, and that other goods such as social cohesion and, specifically, wage levels for workers, can or should on occasion be prioritized over pure efficiency. But the structure of the actual tradeoffs we are talking about matters: American ports are the most inefficient in the developed world, lagging far behind peers in China, Japan, and Europe (and its regulated labor markets and powerful unions). The ports' agreements with their unions detail, in excruciating detail, how even the most mundane parts of the work of loading and unloading ships cannot be done with the aid of machines. It is reminiscent of horror stories about certain American locales where you cannot change a light bulb in an office and instead must call a unionized worker to spend four hours doing it. Unionized workers are paid very generous salaries and benefits for almost pure make-work, including a 61.5% wage increase over six years, which will see workers paid at an hourly rate of $63 by the final year of the new contract. These inefficiencies are not bad in some theoretical sense, they make it harder and more cumbersome to ship things in and out of the US, resulting in price increases for businesses and consumers, at a time when we are worried about the cost of living. Oh, and have we mentioned the ILA's extensive links to organized crime, and the fact that the ILA's President was acquitted of racketeering charges in a trial where a co-defendant, an alleged Genovese capo, was found dead in a car trunk? This is like every anti-union stereotype put together in a nice package and wrapped in a bow.

It's bad policy, but it's good politics. Rail against Luddism all you want, but it remains stubbornly intuitively appealing to millions of people. The Republican Party's coalition is becoming more working-class, and as it does so, its politics have to match. New Right think tanks and magazines have all sorts of clever schemes for making pro-worker policy that doesn't offend basic laws of economics or common sense, and these should be and remain an important part of the policy conversation on the right-of-center, but sometimes politics is not done with clever schemes but instead very forthright affirmations of support for actual, physical workers—such as longshoremen in US ports.

And it raises an intuitive question: how do you keep together a coalition that includes the Longshoremen Association and the Teamsters, and someone like, say, Elon Musk, who runs the only major US car manufacturer without union representation and has publicly feuded with unions for at least a decade?

Artfully, we presume, is how.

We wrote about this particular conflict previously — SEE ALSO: How to Fix the ILA Strike →

Policy News You Need To Know

#DEI #VibeShift — "The Fifth Circuit en banc, in an opinion by Judge Andrew Oldham, holds that the SEC acted unlawfully in approving a Nasdaq policy that forces corporate boards to implement an identity-based diversity quota that looks at race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, or provide a written explanation for why they failed to meet the quota." (Via Cory Liu) Using DEI to pick company board members is, of course, a terrible idea.

#DEI — Speaking of, the good people at Parents Defending Education have uncovered a grand total of $1 billion (!) in Ed grants to far-left NGOs and causes. Some of the highlights: "Multiple grants feature programming that advances race-based teacher recruiting, hiring, and training, including the use of race-based affinity groups. Several grants were issued for youth activism programming widely used in far-left ethnic studies courses. A $4,000,000 grant was given for a 3-week residential “culturally responsive” computer science summer camp for 600 11th and 12th graders. […] The University of Iowa received a grant award of $1,261,718 to train 40 elementary teachers to “enact equity-centered education” in partner K-12 districts." It's a rigorous investigation and it makes for enlightening reading. The fact that the left consistently uses government to reward its friends while the right consistently fails to do so is quite frustrating.

#Media — Astonishing headline from Politico: "DOJ inspector general says he has found NO evidence that there were any undercover FBI employees at the Capitol or nearby protests on Jan. 6." The actual, more interesting revelation, which would have been the headline from an honest publication, is that there were 26 confidential human sources of the FBI in or around the Capitol on that day. In other words, right-wing "conspiracy theories" about, at least, intrusive monitoring and infiltration of the American right by the FBI, are quite true, it turns out. Read the whole report, and if you want honest reporting on DC-related matters, encourage your friends to subscribe to PolicySphere!

#TheEconomy — Corporate bankruptcies have quietly reached a 14-year high, macroeconomic observer Moses Sternstein points out. That's not good.

#AdministrativeState — Last night, Elon Musk tweeted a photo of a letter ostensibly sent by one of his lawyers to SEC chair Gary Gensler. The letter states that the SEC "issued a settlement demand that required Mr. Musk agree within 48 hours to either accept a monetary payment or face charges on numerous counts." After this, the letter becomes…strange. The letter alleges that the SEC has been harassing Musk, which, for some definition of "harassing", is surely true, and for other definition probably false, and closes with an allegation that the Commission is "engaged in an improperly motivated campaign against Mr. Musk", followed by a mention of 5 § USC 7324(a) and 5 Fed Reg 2635, two texts that forbid Federal employees from engaging in political activity. Letters from lawyers must be parsed carefully. Especially since this one doesn't say anything while seeming to say a lot. It doesn't actually give any answer to the SEC's settlement demand. It contains a veiled threat, action under 5 § USC 7324(a), except the threat is empty. "Political activity" under the statute refers to electioneering, or taking a public position on a politically sensitive issue. Taking enforcement action that may or may not be politically motivated surely does not fall under the statute. The bottomline is that Musk is using his platform to try to bully the SEC away from taking enforcement action against him. To which one may sensibly reply that the SEC has been engaged in bullying him for a long time, so fair's fair. Which is fair enough. Still, we are fascinated with lawyers' art in the matters of seeming to say a lot while saying nothing.

#Reg — R Street issues its 2024 Insurance Regulation Report Card. Bottomline: "Innovative, new products could be more widely available if more states were to free their insurance markets by embracing regulatory modernization." That seems to be quite right.

#Immigration — Timely piece from CIS's Nayla Rush: "With Assad Gone, What’s Next for Syrians in the U.S.?"

#DeathsOfDespair #StateOfMen — Depressing finding from the American Institute of Boys and Men: across all races, drug deaths are on the rise among men.

#IQ — If you've spent any time at all in the policy world, you've heard of the theory, supported by many peer-reviewed studies, that there is some sort of link between lead exposure and IQ. It's the kind of finding that is catnip to a certain kind of policy wonk, because it immediately suggests (a) an easy policy fix (ban lead in paint products); (b) that produces significant widespread improvements in welfare (magically raise the average IQ of the population); (c) without significant tradeoffs (non-lead paint is fine); and, perhaps especially, (d) doesn't involve a conflict of values (Christians and utilitarians have no disagreement over whether chemicals that poison children are bad). It is a kind of technocratic fantasy: through superior data sleuthing, a mildly-counterintuitive fact about the world is discovered, one which enables a kind of philosopher king to easily improve everyone's lives. Ideas that fit this kind of template circulate a lot. And they're almost always wrong, because the real world is a lot messier than that, and most policy choices involve value, as well as empirical, judgements. The stats blogger Crémieux explains that the effect found in most of those studies is driven by publication bias, and the evidence for the link is actually quite poor.

#Intellect — Behold! A new right-wing magazine is born! This one is called Civitas Outlook, and it is published by the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas-Austin.

Friday Essays

The first essay we want to mention here is "The Year in Sex," by writer Charlotte Shane. It's golden because it's written by a woman who clearly identifies with the feminist left broadly understood, and yet allows herself to notice what it is not usually polite to notice: we have never been more saturated with sexual inducements and yet we seem to be having less sex and enjoying it less; the liberalization of sexual mores has ended up with a situation where women are more at the mercy of predatory men, not less; porn-brained men either subject women to degrading sex acts or opt out of the dating pool altogether; women have a disturbing tendency to sabotage other women ("coupled women’s paranoia runs amok. They post screenshots of text conversations online to ascertain from strangers if their partner is cheating. (The crowd-sourced response is always yes.) They […] reassure one another that following a hot girl’s account is a type of infidelity."); our lack of shared moral values creates only failures to coordinate and frustration ("what sex is, as well as who and what it’s for, are assumptions unexamined, and the obscured perspective changes with every new open mouth. Without foundation, these debates take place in free fall, all parties hectoring into the void"). And more. Apart from a brief recitation of contemporary leftist dogma which seems to be perfunctory even to the author, it is simply a pitilessly frank account of where we are.

The "Psmiths" (the p is silent) are a pseudonymous married couple who one day took a New Years' resolution to read books together and review them on their Substack. And their output is very good, the selection of books eclectic and fascinating, the prose engaging. Their latest review is of a book your correspondent happens to have read recently as well, "Reentry," by Eric Berger. This is an account by a very good journalist of how Elon Musk and SpaceX accomplished one of the great engineering achievements in human history: reliable rocket reusability. It is also, necessarily, by implication, a portrait of one of the great heroic entrepreneurs of the age, and one who is set to have a significant influence on government policy in the next four years (at least). The review captures the flavor of the book, and its account of why Elon can produce such exceptional accomplishments, very well.

The (in)famous Michael Anton has been appointed to the key position of Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. PolicySphere doesn't cover foreign policy so we will not comment further on the appointment itself; instead, we will simply note that Anton is a man of great intellect and varied interests, who has written excellent essays on a great number of topics. His former boss, Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams, has produced a thread listing his best essays, and we highly recommend you browse it and read what seems interesting to you—you won't regret it.

Sphere Podcast guest Ross Douthat (watch his episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube), incidentally an acclaimed author and a columnist at the New York Times, has written a particularly perceptive column on what may be the most interesting and important question to be resolved over the next four years: the possibility (if it exists) of a kind of synthesis (dare we say "fusionism"?) between the pro-technology, pro-dynamism faction of the new Republican coalition, and the populist, and social conservative faction, as represented by two unusually successful men, namely Elon Musk and JD Vance. Douthat illuminates very well the potential—and perils—of this incipient synthesis.

Speaking of unusual men: one of the great men of letters and thought active today is Edward Luttwak, author, among many other classics, of "Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook" and "The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire." Santi Ruiz's excellent publication Statecraft interviewed him, and you do not want to miss it.

The Atlantic has a surprisingly sympathetic profile of Bishop Robert Barron, the widely popular Catholic evangelist and social media personality, written by Molly Worthen. Barron, she writes, perceptively, "is scouting a future for Christianity: a Church that embraces the internet as an evangelizing tool, refuses to assimilate to mainstream culture, and welcomes the young men who are beginning to outnumber women in the pews. Driving this mission is a simple but risky bet: that many seekers don’t want a faith that is easy and accessible. They want something difficult and strange."

We've already linked to this one, and we'll link to it again. (We know not all of our readers read us every day, and that's ok—as long as you share!) The author Tom Owens has a comprehensive and convincing argument that the "life difficulty index" has gone up, a lot, for younger generations, with sadly predictable consequences for opportunity, the American Dream, and politics.

Since there have been reports that President Trump is set to break with decades of precedent and recognize the mostly-functional and de facto independent state of Somaliland, we recommend this story by Armin Rosen in Tablet magazine about the country's objectively impressive accomplishment of building a functional democracy in one of the most benighted areas of the world.