President Biden’s parting shot to democratic norms was announced Monday at 11:38 a.m., or 22 minutes before his constitutional term ended at high noon. Citing “unrelenting attacks” on his family, Mr. Biden issued pre-emptive, unconditional pardons for his siblings and their spouses, blanket immunity for any “nonviolent offenses” they might have committed since 2014.
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This is the inevitable political logic of President Biden’s lawfare campaign. His Administration became the first in history to unleash the Justice Department on a former President and political rival. As we and others warned, the precedent would tempt future Presidents to do the same, perhaps as early as Mr. Biden’s immediate successor.
Also decrying Biden’s lawless, banana-republic-like pardons is Reason‘s Jacob Sullum.
Yep:
“I think we’re going to have a very hard time critiquing Donald Trump’s improper use of the pardon power because of President Biden pardoning his own family members,” Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.) told reporters on Monday, adding that he was “very disappointed” by the move.
Eric Boehm rightly criticizes Trump’s lawless and dangerous threats to Panama. A slice:
Trump is right that the U.S. is stronger when it isn’t going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But he’s wrong to be threatening an ally and preparing to tear up a treaty over a nonexistent threat.
George Will – after pondering Trump’s second inaugural address screech – wisely counsels a long-run perspective. Three slices:
Donald Trump does not deal in felicities. His second inaugural will be remembered for being worse than 59 others, including his first (about “stealing,” “ravages” and “carnage”). It was memorable for its staggering inappropriateness.
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The speech replicated what have become the tawdriest events on our governmental calendar: State of the Union addresses. Wherein presidents leaven self-praise with wondrous promises, as their partisans repeatedly leap onto their hind legs to bray approval. There was much such leaping in the Capitol Rotunda on Monday.
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Most people, however, realize, around age 7, that the universe under its current administration produces many disappointments. Then they shrug and get on with their lives. Today, many emotionally dilapidated obsessives experience either despair or euphoria about the inaugurations of presidents, who come and go. Both groups should rethink what they expect from politics, and why they do.
Samuel D. Peterson is not impressed with Mariana Mazzucato’s thesis of “the entrepreneurial state.” A slice:
One of the most famous inventions of all time, invented by two brothers, was also privately funded. I am, of course, speaking of Orville and Wilber Wright’s airplane. After some failures, the brothers successfully managed to have a manned flight of their Wright Flyer. All of this was done without a penny from the government. It should also be noted that the U.S. government funded Samuel Langley’s Aerodrome project, a different attempt at a flying machine, but it failed with no successful flight occurring.
There are numerous problems in Mazzucato’s work, much of which is addressed in Alberto Mingardi and Deirdre McCloskey’s excellent book The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State. In their work, Mingardi and McCloskey show that innovation can and has worked from the bottom up. Rather than innovation being the result of top-down planning, history shows that some of the most important innovations come from the private, profit-seeking sector. Additionally, many state-sponsored projects reduced standards of living below what they would have been if the state had not funded these projects. They also note that a primary driver of state-sponsored inventions has been war, which led to a loss of life and liberty for millions of people worldwide. Furthermore, Mazzacato’s claim that the government created the Internet is incorrect. Much like other innovations, like Velcro, the automobile, Post-it notes, and the airplane, the Internet is the result of private innovation.
