Here is an idea: How about somebody trot on over to Thune’s office and remind him that he is a rather big cheese in the branch of the federal government that actually makes the goddamned laws, and he could, if he liked, go ahead and get that bill passed irrespective of whether the president’s delicate sensibilities are ready for it. With 81 co-sponsors, he could even override a presidential veto. (The Russia sanctions bill in the House has wide bipartisan support, too, backed by everyone from Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton to Rep. Elise Stefanik.) But chances are pretty good Thune wouldn’t have to override a veto: Trump has vetoed no bills in his second term—maybe he lost his pen.
(Congress hasn’t passed a heck of a lot of bills, either.)
Thune’s branch is right there in Article I, not lurking down in the penumbras. There was a time when Congress—and Americans at large!—were operating under the quaint notion that Congress, the elected lawmakers and representatives, was there to, you know, govern the country, while the president was there to “faithfully execute the laws” instead of ignoring them (I believe this morning marks the 211th day of TikTok operating illegally in the United States because Trump refuses to enforce a law that inconveniences one of his financial benefactors) or illegally trying to supplant Congress’ role in making them.
Putin probably did not go into the Alaska meeting worried about a ceasefire. He knew he could just say “No,” and Trump would roll over.
So confident were the Russians in their position that their foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, showed up in Alaska wearing a CCCP (i.e., Soviet Union) sweatshirt after serving Russian “journalists” on his plane chicken Kiev—which, beyond being an exercise in trolling, was a way of reminding U.S. allies that if Trump can be backed down when it comes to Ukraine, he can be backed down when it comes to Poland or Lithuania or Estonia. Assuming that Viktor Orbán and right-wing American intellectuals camped out in Budapest threw flowers and their coats down in front of advancing Russian troops and that Putin would keep his hands off of Trump’s in-laws’ properties in Slovenia, there isn’t a hell of a lot standing between the Russians and Venice—if Ukraine falls.
And why shouldn’t the Russians be confident? Before the Alaska meeting, everybody wanted a ceasefire—Trump, the Ukrainians, our European allies, etc.—except Putin. And not only did Trump fail to secure a ceasefire, he abandoned the proposal for one entirely. One of Germany’s former U.S. ambassadors, who was keeping score, called it “a clear 1-0 for Putin.”
There are two possible explanations for this performance.
The first is that President Trump is too lazy, too dim, and too much of a coward to engage in effective negotiation with Vladimir Putin, who didn’t rise as high as he did in the KGB without learning something about how to get what he wants out of people.
The second (equally likely in my view, and more disturbing) is that Americans are going to have to face up to the fact that the president is not on our side—the side of the American people’s elected representatives in Congress, the side of our national interest—in this matter, that he is, in thought and in deed, on the Russian side. It is not insignificant that Trump is surrounded by men and women who believe that the United States should be more like Putin’s Russia, but it probably is more significant that Trump responds with instinctive servility to conventional strong men (which is what he longs to be, when he is not preening around dancing to Village People anthems and salving his emotional wounds with the soundtrack from Cats) and in particular admires the masterful mode in the political realm, heaping praise on tyrants ranging from Putin to Xi Jinping to Kim Jong Un, even putting in a good word for Deng Xiaopeng back in the day for his brutality in putting down the Tiananmen Square protests. I have my doubts about the claim that Trump kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, not because of the Hitler part but because of the book part. I might have believed it if the story had specified a DVD—but, in any case, Trump has reportedly praised Hitler’s generals for their personal loyalty to der Führer. (The Penn graduate is apparently ignorant of the fact that it was those generals who were most active in plotting to do in that malevolent little watercolorist.) The guy, like many of his admirers, simply likes dictators and has profound contempt for law and procedure. Putin’s way is the way Trump thinks a strong country should be run.
As I have written before, America’s saving grace in these past 10 years has been that Donald Trump is less of a Caesar and more of an ordinary shmuck—too lazy, too stupid, too vain, too distracted by shiny objects to make himself into the kind of figure that Vladimir Putin is. But even as he dispatches troops to the capital city under “emergency” pretexts (with other “emergency” situations used as pretexts for everything from his imbecilic trade policies to the armed bullying of Democrats holding political events) and engages in Orwellian shenanigans with public information and does all the rest of that nonsense, Trump’s strongman aspirations are probably going to end up being a bigger problem for the Ukrainians than for Americans. (Probably.) Because the record suggests that Putin is better at pushing around Trump than Trump is at pushing around even such a man of Nerf as Mike Pence. Faced with a genuine hard case, Trump always folds. Surely Xi Jinping has noticed this, and surely the people of Taiwan are doing their best to calculate just how risk-averse the Chinese autocrat is. I wouldn’t bet on 80 miles of salt water to stop Chinese aggression, but I wouldn’t bet on a Brioni suit full of Nestlé strawberry milk, either.
Thanks to some documents that the world’s greatest security apparatus left on a printer in the hotel hosting the Trump-Putin meeting, we now know that Trump faced Putin with “bumbling f—ing idiot” Steve Witkoff on one side and Pete Hegseth on the other, which is another superfluous reminder for America: It is time to get sober. Putin may not be Hitler, but when he has der Apfelstrudelführers on the other side of the negotiating table, he doesn’t have to be.
Economics for English Majors
Call it “single-serving autarky.”
I like living in the South, and in a small town in the South at that—about 97 percent of the time. But being in a small Southern town has some drawbacks, one of which is counter service. If you have ever stood behind some elderly Edna trying to figure out what she wants at Starbucks—because she doesn’t know!—while you are going through caffeine withdrawal, you know what I mean. Things really do move slower in the South, especially if Edna’s great-grandniece went to second grade with the older sister of the poor young woman trying to take her order, which means you are basically going to sit through a miniature family reunion by proxy.
I’m too reactive, I know: Lee Greenwood songs make me want to join the Taliban, visiting the DMV makes me want to join an anarcho-capitalist seasteading venture, and listening to the after-church crowd debating the 10-item menu at my local café on a Sunday afternoon makes me want to move back to New York. I thought I would miss the theater—what I actually miss is the benign indifference of New Yorkers, who are practicing what is (secretly) a form of good manners in the crowded and busy city, where the rent is too high for anybody to afford having their time wasted.
But I spend a lot of time working in cafés, and so I spend a fair bit of time getting aurally assaulted by other people’s conversations. And so I’ll do my version of the Tom Friedman-interviews-his-taxi-driver bit and use one as a jumping-off point.
There were two very nice-seeming ladies, yoga-and-crystals types who seemed like they would be your favorite aunts, if they were your aunts. (You know: the hippie aunts who would help you score some weed, if you were into that sort of thing. Note to all hippie aunts: The first one of you who gives weed to one of my kids is going to get murdered so hard the police won’t even find your Birkenstocks. My kids don’t actually have any hippie aunts, but they have some honorary aunties who definitely own a couple of bongs.) And they were talking about some kind of cult self-help retreat they were going to or had been to, and what they were learning about “radical self-reliance.”
They weren’t talking about Stoic self-sufficiency or anything like that, but material self-reliance, like growing your own squash and green beans. (One of the delights of later summer is all that extra produce cultivated by the sweat of someone else’s brow. Yes, I will have some of your tomatoes, thanks!) I have a lot of neighbors who keep chickens and a few who butcher their own hogs. And that isn’t exclusively crackpot stuff—we get pretty good eggs at the grocery store (Vital Farms, because I used to spend my money on guitars and motorcycles but now have four little boys, three of whom will fight you over some scrambled eggs, and so we buy a dozen good ones every other day or so), but the ones from our local farmers are better, as are their chickens. (Mrs. W makes a world-class roasted chicken.)
But that isn’t radical self-reliance—that is consumerism, or, to put it in fuzzier terms, neighbor-reliance. Capitalism’s defenders sometimes suck at our chosen task, and we overemphasize the competitive aspects of the free market while underemphasizing the more meaningful cooperative aspects. Market competition is instrumental, a means. The end is human cooperation. Market competition helps us to discover the most valuable ways to serve one another. Profit—and, maybe more important, loss—is how the world helps you to distinguish between what you want to be good at, what you think you are good at, and what you are actually good at.
The notion that radical material self-reliance is the path toward a more fulfilled or authentic life isn’t just romantic horsepucky—in fact, it runs in the direction that is most precisely opposite to that suggested by real-life human experience. Human beings are intensely social creatures—there is a reason solitary confinement wrecks people. (A reminder: Solitary confinement for reasons of safety may be a necessary evil, but solitary confinement as a means of punishment is just torture, and it is a practice that should be done away with.) Whether you are looking at the world on the intracellular level, or looking at the organs of a body, or trying to understand where The Wealth of Nations comes from, or examining trade between nations, the division of labor enabled by specialization is what makes life possible. It is, in biology, something very close to the meaning of life—that which is living is organized, with coordinated and specialized parts. Social life is rooted in the division of labor—the word economy comes from the Greek term for household management, and the word karma comes from the Sanskrit term for work. Ludwig von Mises’ opus, Human Action, might sensibly have been titled Karma, which would have nicely captured the entanglement of spiritual effort with ordinary work. Labor omnia vincit, as our friends in Oklahoma say.
But we do not labor alone. We work together.
You might know the story of Andy George, who decided to make a chicken sandwich from scratch—from scratch for reals, raising his own hens, milking cattle to make cheese and butter, even producing his own salt from seawater. It took him six months and about $1,500. But, of course, there’s from scratch and there’s from scratch. Domesticated pigs? You didn’t make that! That’s 10,000 years or more of human effort. The process of domesticating cattle probably began before that. There isn’t any wheat in the ancestral environment—put in another 10,000 years or so of effort by how many unknown ancestors following how many dead ends and failed experiments.
This is an obvious Hayekian point, but it is one that has to be repeated and repeated until people get it: A solar panel isn’t some magical thing disconnected from the worldwide industrial economy of petroleum and steel and concrete—it takes the whole economy to produce a solar panel, or a section of pipe, or a house. When Andy George went down to the seashore to make salt, he traveled in a vehicle (manufacturing, mining, petroleum, engineering) on a road (manufacturing, mining, petroleum, engineering), and he put that salt in a plastic (i.e., petroleum) bag (manufacturing, mining, petroleum, engineering). I’m not trying to make some Landman point about oil-and-gas energy or the like (although the point is a valid one), but about the unbelievably complex interconnections of basically every aspect of human material life to every other aspect.
Even though I don’t have the cash handy, I’ll make a $10 million bet: I’ll turn you loose on some verdant, well-watered land in south Texas or some other nice part of the country (make it Aroostook County, Maine, for all I care) with nothing but your clothes, a bedroll, and some good boots, and I’ll give you 10 years to make a ham sandwich with no inputs save those found in the land itself. My imaginary $10 million would be safe: You’ll either give up the effort, or you will die trying.
Radical self-reliance is not what human beings are made for. Single-serving autarky is simply a slow method of suicide—and not necessarily a slow one.
I would like to propose, or advance, an alternative view of self-reliance, competition, and free-market economics: one in which we acknowledge that the rewards under such a system will necessarily be unequal (radically so, in some cases) while also affirming that we have obligations to one another beyond the obvious rules of market exchange, in that the lonely genius laboring in his basement to create the next big thing that improves all of our lives in real material terms is able to do so because he doesn’t have to make his own ham sandwich from scratch. The Elizabeth Warren stuff about publicly provided infrastructure isn’t really where the action is: Bridge maintenance in Philadelphia is important, but it is pretty small beer compared to the domestication of chickens or the fact that I can just roll on down to Whole Foods or Home Depot or Pollard Friendly Ford and avail myself of the best, most innovative efforts undertaken by pretty much the whole human race, highly organized and coordinated through an almost magical system in which no one is in charge, and do so in a way that requires very little from me. It’s a miracle, and damn your eyes if you can’t see it.
Some years ago, I was at a party at Jay Nordlinger’s apartment, and I met a guy who said that he was the head of strategic planning at Con Ed, the local utility. I gave him some grief: “Do you need a strategic plan? Isn’t your strategic plan to keep on being a monopoly? Because that would be my strategic plan. It’s a good plan!” He was used to hearing that sort of thing, and his answer was: “Yeah, but when you flip the switch, the light comes on. You never think about us except when it doesn’t.” It is a fair point. All of us take these miraculous things for granted from time to time.
We cannot spend all of our time thinking about how miraculous every little aspect of our world is. It would be exhausting. But it is worth keeping in mind that all work—even the most menial, the most thankless, the most humble—is part of a great effort, a great campaign, one that we as a species have been successfully executing, day after grinding day, as we push back poverty and misery and expand the frontiers of prosperity and material well-being. You can be a little bit proud of that. And we could all afford to be a little more grateful, too, for the work that others do for us.
Words About Words
A headline from The Dispatch: “Why the War of 1812 Matters.”
I can tell you why: Because if not for the success of Andrew Jackson et al., we’d all be speaking English.
Elsewhere
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here.
You can buy my other books here.
You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here.
In Closing
I’ve been revisiting the Ozzy Osbourne catalog (and my junior-high years) since the singer’s death. I have four little boys, and I am hoping that music will be an important part of their lives, as it has been for me. (They’d make a good string quartet, I think.) I mostly play classical music for them, but my oldest loves AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” and the littlest of them recently delighted his father by raising his fists in the air and stomping along to Ozzy’s “Crazy Train.” Sometimes, just when you think you’re going off the rails …
