Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn accurately calls the trial of Jimmy Lai “absurd.” A slice:
Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai’s trial resumed last week in Hong Kong. Among the questions asked by the defense was about someone the prosecution characterized as a “U.S. anti-China propagandist.” That would be me. Jimmy answered that we are the “closest” of friends, and that when he became a Catholic, I became his godfather.
All innocuous stuff. But a Chinese friend of Jimmy’s told me the word “godfather” may carry more sinister connotations for the Hong Kong government. Cue the theme song from Francis Ford Coppola’s film epic about the Corleone family.
It’s absurd. But no more absurd than Jimmy’s whole trial, which paints him as Hong Kong’s Osama bin Laden—“mastermind” of a national security threat to China. To drive this home, the Hong Kong government has pulled out props that rival Hollywood’s: the chains they put on a then-72-year-old Jimmy when he was arrested, the massive police presence at his trial as though he might bust out, not to mention the solitary confinement imposed for most of Jimmy’s four years in prison.
With all this, the trial is only showing what everyone in Hong Kong already knows: Jimmy was an incredibly engaged publisher whose journalism proved highly popular.
On Friday Jimmy was asked about an Oct. 27, 2019, interview with him headlined, “What the Americans are telling Us.” The piece called for “continuous lobbying” to gain foreign support for Hong Kong. Asked to explain, Jimmy said “lobbying” meant emphasizing the peaceful and nonviolent nature of the protests.
Mona Charen describes George Will as “conservatism’s vital champion.” A slice:
The conservative renaissance that Will helped bring about beginning in the 1970s bears little relation to the nativist, nationalist excrescence on display in today’s GOP. Like all conservatives, he has, across the past half-century as a Post syndicated columnist, found much to reprove about his country and his times, but the through line of his writing is gratitude and even love. His admiration for James Madison, Abraham Lincoln and other American heroes buoys him, and through him, his readers. Will’s conservatism is not one of grievance or fear, but rather of appreciation and indebtedness to those who have gone before us.
Ramesh Ponnuru isn’t buying excuses from the Biden administration for its economic failures.
Arnold Kling ponders accountability and authority. A slice:
Nobody acts with the intention of doing away with accountability. But in government there is no one with an incentive to maintain accountability. The organizational structures and behaviors that emerge and survive are ones that diffuse accountability.
This is one of the reasons that government processes are not as effective as market processes. In the market, competition for profits tends to punish firms when they become too bureaucratic. It also punishes firms that go too far in the direction of eliminating bureaucracy, because this can result in too little reliability and too much internal conflict.
Competitive forces don’t make corporations perfect. Just ask anyone who as ever worked in one. But they do tend to be more effective than government agencies at aligning authority with accountability.
A nice complement to Arnold’s post is this piece by Mitch Daniels. Two slices:
As vital as keeping score is in business, where the market constantly measures you, it is doubly so in the nonprofit and public sectors. There, miserable performance can go on year after year without consequence; accountability has to be implanted, through monitoring of results and either reward or penalty, as the findings dictate, or it won’t happen at all.
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If “productive government” means “number of activities performed,” it is at best beside the point, at worst an anchor on social and economic progress. Economist Robert Solow, who died last year, earned his 1987 Nobel Prize for demonstrating how productivity — private-sector productivity — is the driver of economic growth. “Government activities performed” too often weigh against the productivity that lifts people out of poverty and powers upward mobility.
One commentator, in the Economist, commended the ONS but tried to explain and excuse poor government performance in ways that unintentionally define the basic problem. Government’s activities are “disproportionately labour-intensive.” Well, yes, that’s what happens when you unionize public employment, swap one spoils system for another and make it impossible to fire anyone.
Maybe “better technology,” the writer suggested, is the answer. Not with byzantine procurement rules that make the time to purchase new equipment longer than the product life cycle of the technology being sought.
And, best of all, “private firms always have the option to quit low-productivity lines of business.” Sure, there are some basic services only government can and must provide. But its paralytic and often self-interested inability to ever, ever quit doing anything, however useless or counterproductive, is a defining characteristic of today’s dysfunctional national state. Having had a long firsthand look, I used to observe to my fellow citizens, “You’d be amazed by how much government you’d never miss.”
GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller explains why “this year’s UN climate conference is different.”
Phil Magness reveals NewsGuard’s connections with the government. A slice:
In 2021, the Department of Defense paid NewsGuard almost $750,000 for a project to track “misinformation fingerprints” on the internet. Another award from the State Department’s “Global Engagement Center” gave NewsGuard $25,000 for access to its website rating system as part of another vaguely elaborated government initiative to combat online “misinformation.” NewsGuard also boasts of its connections to a web of federal agencies in the defense and intelligence sector. Former CIA spy chief Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge sit on its advisory board. The company’s website boasts of similar “partnerships” with the British government to “detect misinformation narratives” and the World Health Organization to fight “online COVID-19 misinformation online” (sic). In these contexts, the ostensibly “private”company begins to look like it’s serving as a paid partner to several high-level government entities supporting their efforts to police online content.
From a constitutional standpoint, that’s a huge red flag. If the federal government launched its own agency to review online content, rate private websites, and pressure tech companies to flag or deboost disliked content, it would likely run afoul of the First Amendment’s free speech protections. But what if the government contracts with the private sector to do some of this dirty work? The Supreme Court has long held that government agencies cannot outsource constitutionally-prohibited activities to private companies.
Joe Lancaster reports on the ugly reality of industrial policy.
