I love this letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren believes that the nation would be better off if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were to cede 2% of their wealth annually to her control. She wants us to believe that, somehow, she’ll spend it more productively than they would.
This makes as much sense as believing that the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive productivity would benefit from giving her 2% of Patrick Mahomes’s allotted snaps from center.
Stay in your lane, Ms. Warren.
Jeff Sourbeer
Belleaire, Fla.
Pierre Lemieux is rightly appalled by the arrogance of top public-health officials.
Judge Glock reports on California’s siege of property owners. A slice:
The state’s tenant accommodations would be comic if they weren’t so destructive. Consider one Los Angeles owner who rented out his accessory-dwelling unit for six months. After the lease expired, the resident took advantage of state and local tenancy laws and lived there, rent-free, for more than a year. She said that she would move only if the landlord paid $100,000 in relocation costs.
Some California citizens are taking direct action. After squatters invaded his mother’s house, Flash Shelton started a business that gave them a taste of their own medicine. Shelton enters squatters’ “homes” and refuses to leave, setting up video cameras to record every moment; his presence often prompts them to move away. Another new California company, Squatter Squad, promises “fast and effective squatter removal.” It typically charges up to $10,000 for the service but notes that the costs of allowing squatters to stay can be higher.
Instead of coming to landlords’ defense, the state government seems increasingly intent on protecting scofflaw tenants and squatters. State Attorney General Rob Bonta, for example, proclaims, “If you live in a rented home in California, you have rights. California law protects tenants from San Diego to Siskiyou—regardless of immigration status or employment status, race, or gender identity.” When a radical squatting group took control of a vacant Oakland house, the city’s mayor and Governor Gavin Newsom helped negotiate a deal to buy and turn over the property to them. Similarly, when a group occupied and rented out rooms at a $4.5 million Beverly Hills mansion, a local administrator pushed back against attempts to evict them, claiming that “squatters have rights.” Even the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department admits that removing such derelicts can be hard. The department’s web page explains that the “best way to deal with squatters is to prevent them from moving in.”
[DBx: Note that, as the above makes clear, the market can and will, when the state fails, supply at least some services that textbooks insist can and will be supplied only by the state. Note also that textbooks assure us that people acting in their private capacity are prone to prey on each other and violate each other’s property rights, and that the state can be – must be – relied upon to prevent such predation. The state in California is flipping this script.]
Ilya Shapiro applauds the end of Chevron. A slice:
As I wrote for City Journal before Loper Bright was argued last fall, Chevron led to agency overreach, haphazard practical results, and the diminution of Congress. Though intended to empower Congress by limiting the role of courts, Chevron instead enabled agencies to aggrandize their own powers to the greatest extent plausible under their operative statutes, and often beyond. Courts, in turn, have gotten lazy in interpreting statutes. It’s become a vicious cycle of legislative buck-passing and judicial deference to executive overreach.
And as I wrote in an amicus curiae brief, Chevron deference rests on the presumption that Congress won’t overdelegate and that agencies will be loyal agents. But experience has shown that Congress loves shirking accountability, and agencies love pursuing their own interests.
Commentators were wondering why Biden didn’t fact-check Trump in the midst of the 45th president’s lies. Answer: Biden doesn’t know the truth well enough to check his own facts, let alone audit what’s coming out of his opposite’s mouth.
Like most hustlers, Biden made it 50 years in the game because he could muster enough bluster and hogwash to run over his opponents while maintaining enough arrogance to look sure-handed while doing it.
But maybe I’m still sore about Paul Ryan’s debate with Biden in 2012, when as a first-time voter, I was dismayed to see just how much better prepared and presenting Ryan was and how that it didn’t matter because Biden used many of the same guffawing interjections and pejoratives that Trump would use four years later — only Biden did so to the delight of Democrats twelve years ago. Ryan prepped for an American Enterprise Institute summit, and Biden, a bottom-of-the-class type, knew every way to distract from the substance deficit he had relative to the valedictorian across from him. Biden knew the power of bullsh**.
I am still having trouble coming to terms with the fact that a substantial number of Americans think government censorship is a good thing, akshually.
Did they read Fahrenheit 451 and somehow think the firemen were the good guys?
