Measures of Success in America

 On this day, a busy day in history:

1864
American Civil War: Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuates Atlanta, Georgia, after a four-month siege by General Sherman
1923
The Great Kantō earthquake devastates Tokyo and Yokohama, killing about 105,000 people.
1939
Adolf Hitler signs an order to begin the systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and disabled people
1939
World War II: Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning World War II.
1972
In Reykjavík, Iceland, American Bobby Fischer beats Russian Boris Spassky to become the world chess champion.
1983
Cold War: Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 on board die, including Congressman Lawrence McDonald.
1985
A joint American–French expedition locates the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.
2004
Beslan school hostage crisis commences when armed terrorists take children and adults hostage in Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia.

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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
~H. L. Mencken

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Daniel Defoe's pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, was an attack on High Churchmen, satirically written as if from the High Church point of view but extending their arguments to the point of foolishness. Both sides of the dispute, Dissenters and High Church alike, took the pamphlet seriously, and both sides were outraged to learn it was a hoax. Defoe was arrested for seditious libel in May 1703. He was put in the pillory. The townspeople, instead of throwing rocks, threw flowers.

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In January 2013, CNN reported that then Secretary of State Clinton was treated with blood thinners at a New York hospital to help dissolve a blood clot in her head.

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Men With Guns Report: Officers entered the Elsberry Riding and Farm pasture at about 12:45 a.m. while searching for a missing person. A baby donkey named HeeHaw approached them. The farm described HeeHaw as a beloved pet who had been bottle-raised and participated in petting zoos.
The farm alleges officers attempted to use a Taser on the donkey before an officer shot and killed him. Authorities have not independently confirmed those details.

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Wendell Berry has died.

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Measures of Success in America

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”--Coolidge

These are tough times in the U.S. Everything is being questioned. And since there are no qualified people with answers, we are seeing many unusual answers. So it's refreshing to see some optimism here:

"The most revealing measure of U.S. competitive power isn’t found in military operations against Iran or a looming $1.5 trillion defense budget. It’s in our private economy.

SpaceX closed with a market cap larger than the gross domestic product of most nations on June 12, its first day of public trading. In the prior two weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI filed to go public, both chasing $1 trillion valuations.

These aren’t the closed deals of an insider class. SpaceX set aside nearly a third of its offering for retail buyers, and millions of Americans now own a sliver of it through index funds and 401(k)s. The spoils of the most dynamic companies on earth are spread among schoolteachers and retirees.

Nothing like this is happening in Europe or China. The U.S. drew about 64% of all venture capital worldwide in 2025, up from roughly 47% a few years earlier, and captured about 85% of global funding for AI.

Almost 80 countries run space programs, yet a single U.S. company, SpaceX, flies more than 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds of everything active in orbit. AI commands the ambition of governments on every continent, but the firms setting its pace are almost all American. In both arenas, the breakthroughs come not from a state ministry but from the inventiveness of private enterprise.

The gap between the U.S. and others is widening, not closing. In the 2024 European Union report on European competitiveness from Mario Draghi, the former central banker noted that not a single European company worth more than 100 billion euros had been built from scratch in the past 50 years. Of America’s dozen or so trillion-dollar companies, half were built during that exact span.

In the past 250 years, a nation once so fragile that it might have been strangled in its cradle has risen above all its major competitors and established itself as the world’s pre-eminent power. How a republic not built around martial genius or government planning did that is the central question of American strategy. The answer is the spirit of enterprise: free markets and free people."--Hillen

This does not appear to be a system that needs dismantling. But sometimes a singer has a song despite what music is played.

Is Hormuz, Suez?

 On this Day:

1099
First Crusade: Christian soldiers take the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after the final assault of a difficult siege
1381
John Ball, a leader in the Peasants’ Revolt, is hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of King Richard II of England.
1685
Monmouth Rebellion: James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, is executed at Tower Hill, England, after his defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685.
1799
The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign.
1806
Pike expedition: United States Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike begins an expedition from Fort Bellefontaine near St. Louis, Missouri, to explore the west.
1815
Napoleonic Wars: Napoléon Bonaparte surrenders aboard HMS Bellerophon
1838
Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers the Divinity School Address at Harvard Divinity School, discounting Biblical miracles and declaring Jesus a great man, but not God. The Protestant community reacts with outrage.

1975
Space Race: Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first joint Soviet-United States human-crewed flight. It was both the last launch of an Apollo spacecraft and the last launch of a Saturn family rocket.

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Socialism is "the result of an unrelenting negativity, carping spirit, and lack of appreciation for achievement and greatness." (cowan)

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The Keres people, who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico, speak a language totally unrelated to that of their neighbors, and their origins have been frequently disputed.
Aliens.

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Replacing the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Mamdani is going to straighten New Yorkers' ties and cancel their subscriptions.

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Roughly 27% of Americans — and 52% of men ages 18–49 — say they have an active account with an online sportsbook

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Researchers at the University of Linz in Austria demonstrated that the color red significantly decreases cognitive functioning in men. The combination of the colors red and yellow together can induce hunger, which has been capitalized on by several chain restaurants.

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Charitable gifts by individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations to U.S. charities increased 5.7% in current dollars (3.0% adjusted for inflation) to an estimated $617.20 billion in 2025.

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U.S. Treasury has borrowed $155 billion every month of this fiscal year—and is now paying $24 billion a week in interest on its debts.

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Is Hormuz, Suez?

A short history of the modern Middle East conflict and what Dalio in Fortune thinks is its direction and destructive outcome:

In late October 1956, Britain and France — alongside Israel — invaded Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the vital trade artery connecting Europe to Asia. Militarily, the operation was a success. Within days, Anglo-French forces controlled the northern portion of the canal, but it unraveled off the battlefield.

The United States, alarmed by the unilateral action and unwilling to allow its allies to destabilize the Cold War equilibrium, applied crushing pressure. Washington threatened to withhold emergency IMF loans as the British pound came under speculative attack. It was financial warfare, and it worked. Eden, facing a currency crisis, withdrew from Egypt in humiliation within weeks.

The military had won. The empire had lost. And what followed was a cascade that Dalio, in Bridgewater’s research, describes as the classic sequence of imperial decline: allies stopped deferring to London; creditors reassessed British debt; the pound sterling — which had served as the world’s reserve currency for over a century — began its long retreat. Within four years of the Suez Crisis, Britain had granted independence to Ghana, Malaya, Nigeria, and Cyprus. Within a decade, Harold Macmillan’s “winds of change” speech had formalized what Suez had revealed: the British Empire was in managed retreat, not strategic expansion.

Yet certainly Britain had exceeded anyone's expectations. A tiny island ruled the waves and the world as a military leader, a commercial powerhouse.

And it still is. Today, Britain is a prosperous, mid-sized economy of nearly 70 million people, with a GDP that ranks fifth globally — behind the United States, China, Germany, and Japan. It is a respected member of NATO and the G7, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and home to London, one of the world’s great financial centers. But its “special relationship” with the U.S. is not the same as it was before the Suez Crisis.

Dalio compared the Hormuz standoff directly to the Suez crisis in March. “We are in the early stages of a world war that isn’t going to end any time soon,” he wrote on his Substack — arguing the Iran conflict was not a standalone episode but a systemic reorganization of global power, one in which the financial and military contests are inseparable.

Two key factors behind the decline are the “petrodollar” system and the national debt. To get the former, you have to flash forward to a 1974 handshake that the public wouldn’t learn about for another 42 years.

President Nixon had dispatched Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret arrangement. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil exclusively in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees. Other OPEC members followed, locking in the dollar as the indispensable currency of the modern world and giving rise to the “petrodollar” system.

Britain’s pound had been the anchor of global trade since the Napoleonic era; it took two world wars, a Great Depression, and a humiliation in Egypt to finish it off. The dollar’s own arc runs roughly 80 years, from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, where the victorious United States anchored the postwar monetary order to a simple promise: every dollar was redeemable for gold at $35 an ounce. It mutated again in 1971, when the costs of Vietnam and the Great Society had so strained American finances that Nixon unilaterally slammed the gold window shut — ending dollar convertibility overnight and untethering the currency from any hard constraint. What replaced the gold anchor was something more abstract and more fragile: the credibility of American power itself, significantly boosted by the forthcoming secret Petrodollar deal.

What is different now — what makes the Iran war more than just another Middle East misadventure — is the convergence: a $39 trillion debt load, a 30-year low in the dollar’s share of foreign reserves, a physically threatened petrodollar chokepoint, and a domestic political climate that has made endurance nearly impossible.

7/15/26

The Sequence To Independence

 On this day:

1687
Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
1830
France invades Algeria.
1934
“Bloody Thursday” – Police open fire on striking longshoremen in San Francisco.
1947
Larry Doby signs a contract with the Cleveland Indians baseball team, becoming the first black player in the American League. (Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League 11 weeks earlier.)
1962
Algeria becomes independent from France.
1996
Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.
1998
Japan launches a probe to Mars, and thus joins the United States and Russia as a space-exploring nation.

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At least two-thirds of federal spending can be described as Congress’ taking the rightful property of one American and giving it to another American, to whom it does not belong. So-called mandatory spending totaled $2.45 trillion in 2015. Thus, two-thirds of the federal budget goes toward Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food assistance, unemployment and other programs and benefits that fall into the category of taking from some and giving to others. (Williams)

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The FBI says it has seized more than 600 drones near FIFA World Cup sites after authorities determined the devices violated restricted airspace since the tournament began on June 11. The total number of seized drones nationwide has doubled in less than two weeks.

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CBS reports Pelosi's husband a suspect in a hit-and-run.

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John Adams thought that July 2nd would be remembered as the great day in America."The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epoch in the History of America," Adams exulted in a letter to his wife."I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."


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The Sequence To Independence


The Declaration of Independence came 442 days after the first volleys of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. It was a long time coming.

The first major colonial opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a measure to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the banner of “no taxation without representation,” colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some organized attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors. After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766.

It was a while before the next problem, the result of the British effort to aid the faltering East India Company. Parliament enacted the Tea Act in 1773 which greatly lowered its tea tax and granting the Company a monopoly on the American tea trade. Many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. In response, militant Patriots in Massachusetts organized the “Boston Tea Party,” which saw British tea valued at some 18,000 pounds dumped into Boston Harbor.

Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops in their homes. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, ordered British troops to march to Concord, Massachusetts, where a Patriot arsenal was known to be located. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington, and the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.

June 17, 1775 Major General William Howe defeated the Americans at Bunker Hill, the first time the Americans stood and fought. It was a Pyrrhic victory. 140 colonists were killed and 271 wounded. 226 British were dead and 828 wounded. The vast majority of Rebel deaths came from bayoneting the wounded in the field by British soldiers, furious at their losses. The behavior of the British soldiers enraged the colonists and tipped most away from reconciliation with the crown and into separation. Historian Richard Ellis says that the Battle at Bunker Hill scarred Gen. Howe, one of the crown's elite generals. Never again would he be comfortable with assaulting rebel fixed positions and he yearned for reconciliation--a feeling many believe hampered his generalship, especially in the siege of New York.

In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, an influential political pamphlet that convincingly argued for American independence and sold more than 500,000 copies in a few months. In the spring of 1776, support for independence swept the colonies, the Continental Congress called for states to form their own governments, and a five-man committee was assigned to draft a declaration.

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to approve a Virginia motion calling for separation from Britain. The dramatic words of this resolution were added to the closing of the Declaration of Independence. Two days later, on July 4, the declaration was formally adopted by 12 colonies after minor revision. New York approved it on July 19. On August 2, the declaration was signed.

The American War for Independence would last for five more years. Yet to come were the Patriot triumphs at Saratoga, the bitter winter at Valley Forge, the intervention of the French, and the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.

Under America’s first governing document, the Articles of Confederation, the national government was weak and states operated like independent countries. The debate over the power of a unifying federal government went on until 1787 when a convention was held in Philadelphia presided over by George Washington. There delegates devised a plan for a stronger federal government with three branches–executive, legislative and judicial–along with a system of checks and balances to ensure no single branch would have too much power. It was signed on September 17, 1787. The Bill of Rights–10 amendments guaranteeing basic individual protections such as freedom of speech and religion–became part of the Constitution in 1791.

The first presidential election electing Washington was held from Monday, December 15, 1788 to Saturday, January 10, 1789, five years after the Treaty of Paris.

The Fourth

 On this day as well:

1054
A supernova is seen by Chinese, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers near the star Zeta Tauri. For several months, it remains bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula.
1187
The Crusades: Battle of Hattin – Saladin defeats Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem.
1754
French and Indian War: George Washington surrenders Fort Necessity to French Capt. Louis Coulon de Villiers.
1863
American Civil War: Siege of Vicksburg – Vicksburg, Mississippi surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant after 47 days of siege. 150 miles up the Mississippi River, a Confederate Army is repulsed at the Battle of Helena, Arkansas.
1863
The Army of Northern Virginia withdraws from the battlefield after its loss at the Battle of Gettysburg, signalling an end to the Southern invasion of the North.
1918
Bolsheviks kill Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family (Julian calendar date).

1943
World War II: Beginning of the Battle of Kursk, the largest full-scale battle in history and the world’s largest tank battle at Prokhorovka village.
1976
Israeli commandos raid Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing all but four of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by Palestinian terrorists
1997
NASA’s Pathfinder space probe lands on the surface of Mars.

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Fourth of July


America had an exceptional revolution, one that did not attempt to define and deliver happiness, but one that set people free to define and pursue it as they please.--Will

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Isonomy guaranteed … equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος (law) would make them equal. --Arendt

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The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone

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Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.--Thacher

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Jay Leno had a recurring skit where he asked questions to passers-by on the street--questions most people think are rather simple and obvious. He asked several people what the Fourth of July celebrated, when independence was declared, and from whom the country separated. Of course, the results were embarrassing to most of those interviewed. One was particularly interesting. A college instructor knew nothing about the Revolution at all, thought it occurred in the 1920s, and thought China might have been involved.

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A recent survey found that 27% of the people questioned were unaware that the American Revolution was waged against the British.

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Both former U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826–the day of the Jubilee–the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, in an extraordinary and eerie coincidence. Jefferson died shortly after noon at the age of 83 in Monticello, Virginia. Several hours later, Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the age of 90. According to newspaper reports, Adams’s last words were, “Jefferson still lives.”

Exactly five years later, on July 4, 1831, former U.S. President James Monroe died.

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The Fourth

When I was a child in the '50s, the Fourth of July was a great event. The kids decorated their bikes, small local parades were held--every community had some commemoration, and the larger communities had fireworks. It was unlike other secular events like Thanksgiving, which were delightfully family-oriented; this was a commonly held social event. It was a birthday party. And it was heartfelt. Everyone felt that years ago, something of value had been accomplished, something special in the world created. There was a glow.

When Obama was first campaigning, he was asked about American Exceptionalism. (The phrase was de Tocqueville's, from Democracy in America, 1835: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.")

American exceptionalism is a description of how America developed, not what it was. I'm unsure de Tocqueville--or Europeans then and now thought it complementary. It was special. It was unique.

The phrase has been used since by those who saw America as a point of reference in man's search for freedom and liberty. (It was also used by Stalin as a slur, decrying America's self-held belief that it was somehow excluded from the Marxian class warfare generality.) Obama saw the question as a trap--it would not do to talk of "exceptionalism" when we want all people to be the same, all nations indistinguishable. So, he hedged and said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He, unlike those Americans of just a generation or two earlier, does not think that America is unique.

Unique. If that element is lost in this country, a lot has been lost. So, buy a small flag. Decorate your bike.

july 4, 2026

Gettysburg and The Somme

On this day, June 2:

626
Li Shimin, the future Emperor Taizong of Tang, Emperor of China, ambushes and kills his rival brothers Li Yuanji and Li Jiancheng in the Incident at Xuanwu Gate.
1644
English Civil War: Battle of Marston Moor.
1698
Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine.
1776
The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with Great Britain although the wording of the formal Declaration of Independence is not approved until July 4.
1777
Vermont becomes the first American territory to abolish slavery.
1839
Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinqué take over the slave ship Amistad.
1853
The Russian Army crossed the Pruth river into the Danubian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia—providing the spark that set off the Crimean War.
1881
Charles J. Guiteau shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President James Garfield, who eventually dies from an infection on September 19.
1897
Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi obtains a patent for radio in London.
1900
The first Zeppelin flight takes place on Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, Germany.
1934
The Night of the Long Knives ends with the death of Ernst Röhm.
1937
Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan are last heard from over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first equatorial round-the-world flight.
1964
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant to prohibit segregation in public places.
1976
Fall of the Republic of Vietnam; Communist North Vietnam declares their union to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

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"To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of Freedom itself."-- Burke

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French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the SSPX ( Society of Saint Pius X) in 1970 in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the 1960s meetings known as Vatican II revolutionized the church’s relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.

Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal consent in 1988. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four bishops and declared the consecrations a “schismatic act.”

Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 lifted the excommunications as part of his yearslong outreach to the group.

Leo XIV has a shorter fuse.

During a ritual-filled, five-hour Mass on Wednesday, attended by some 15,500 people and their children, the SSPX consecrated four new bishops in direct defiance of Pope Leo XIV, who had urged the SSPX to hold off for the sake of the church’s unity.

In a decree, the Vatican excommunicated the four new bishops and the two bishops who participated in the ceremony. It declared the consecrations a “schismatic act” and declared the society itself had created a schism, or intentional rupture with the Catholic Church.

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One consequence of a wealth tax: When a wealth-tax bill comes due, the owner of a closely held company will often pull out a larger dividend to cover it. Once that money has left the company, it doesn’t go back into payroll or business expansion.

Inherent to taxation is the ability to destroy. That is one of the rationales for the tax exclusion of religions. A wealth tax destroys...wealth.

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Gettysburg and The Somme

Today is the anniversary of Day 2 of the Battle of Gettysburg and Day 2 of the Battle of the Somme.

Gettysburg was a three-day fight.

Nearly one-third of the total forces engaged at Gettysburg became casualties. George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac lost 28 percent of the men involved; Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia suffered over 37 percent.

Of these casualties, 7,058 were fatalities (3,155 Union, 3,903 Confederate). Another 33,264 had been wounded (14,529 Union, 18,735 Confederate) and 10,790 were missing (5,365 Union, 5,425 Confederate).

The Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in all of human history, was fought between July and November 1916 during World War I.

The battle involved more than three million men, of whom one million were either wounded or killed. 20,000 British died on the first day. The total casualties, estimated to be more than 1,000,000, included 650,000 German casualties, 420,000 British, and 195,000 French. Enough to give war a bad name.

The Civil War in the U.S. was fought to preserve the Union and eventually succeeded in ending slavery in the country. WWI would be difficult to categorize; it was a result of complex allegiances and accidents.
Its main effect was to create the foundations for World War II.

The Civil War in the U.S. had some significant long-term value despite the horror, but WWI?

My point here, two days before Independence Day, is to highlight our astonishing good fortune to be removed from Europe's homicidal history and to ask the question: Why do the Europeans have such confidence in the wisdom and leadership of their rulers? Looking at WWI as an example, why would anybody trust these people, who marshal their benighted citizens to fight in inexplicable wars named in decades and centuries? Why would the world not be dominated by laws limiting the damage governments and their minions could do?

And why would any group concerned about the abuse of power that relentlessly victimizes the ordinary people of the world not emphasize the time-honored, obvious, dangerous source of real power: the warlord and the domestic leaders? Those unable to satisfy their ambition and greed through their own talents.

No one in the history of man has ever run into town screaming, "Run for your lives, the farmers are coming!"

june 2

Strongman's Accomplices

On this day:

350
Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, proclaims himself Roman Emperor, entering Rome at the head of a group of gladiators.
1140
French scholar Peter Abelard is found guilty of heresy.
1839
In Humen, China, Lin Tse-hsü destroys 1.2 million kg of opium confiscated from British merchants, providing Britain with a casus belli to open hostilities, resulting in the First Opium War.
1932
Lou Gehrig and teammate Tony Lazzeri hit four home runs in one game, and hit for the natural cycle, respectively. These two feats are both less common than a perfect game, which has occurred twenty-one times in one hundred and twenty years.
1937
The Duke of Windsor marries Wallis Simpson.
1940
World War II: The Battle of Dunkirk ends with a German victory and with Allied forces in full retreat.
1940
World War II: The Luftwaffe bombs Paris.
1969
Melbourne-Evans collision: Off the coast of South Vietnam, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne cuts the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half.
1982
The Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov, is shot on a London street. He survives but is permanently paralysed.
1989
The government of China sends troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square after seven weeks of occupation.

***

"[classics] teaches you 'to read difficult things. ... In a global environment of fact-dodging, misreporting, conspiracy theories, fake news, and outright lies, skills in reading difficult things are those that the world most needs."--Mary Beard

***

Bass secured a spot on the November ballot and Pratt was running in second place as of early Wednesday morning, ahead of progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman. These are the best candidates for mayor in LA's drifting hulk.
The electoral talent search for Maine senator seems to settle between a 120-year-old career politician and a Nazi.

***

Apparently, accusations of being a Nazi are true unless you have Nazi tattoos.

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Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist congressional candidate endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, deleted a previous Twitter account that included thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist.

***

The metaphor of “running different software” that fathers sometimes use turns out to be a reasonable approximation of what the neuroimaging shows in new fathers.

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Tom Steyer, running for California governor, spent over $200 million of his own money on the race. Is that reasonable?

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Strongman's Accomplices

The American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media, jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview in its entirety and unedited, "we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting.

This is not normal political combat. It isn’t just more of the partisan roughness that Mr. Dooley had in mind when he remarked that “politics ain’t beanbag.” This is unabashed White House thuggishness, a vengeful aggressiveness that makes no effort to disguise itself by pretending to care about constitutional norms or democratic values. And all of it is cheered by tens of millions of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of President Trump’s cascade of gratuitous cruelty, insults, and threats.

When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any check on his powers, he didn’t bother with euphemisms. “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

For anyone who takes the American constitutional system seriously, that statement is genuinely terrifying. Not because Trump is wrong but because — let’s face it — he’s right.

The British statesman William Gladstone praised the US Constitution as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” For more than two centuries, the self-correcting durability of the constitutional framework the Framers devised has rightly been regarded as a masterpiece of statesmanship.

But now the checks and balances on which that system depends are failing. Built into the constitutional architecture was an assumption of public virtue. It was not designed to contain a president who would openly declare himself restrained only by his own (nonexistent) morality and whose outrages would be endorsed by a major political party.

…..

The Trump phenomenon isn’t an aberration our constitutional machinery can correct. It is the failure the Founders anticipated when they warned of what happens after virtue collapses and applause replaces judgment. The Constitution still exists on paper. What is disappearing is the public will to enforce its meaning. A republic does not fall when a strongman declares himself unchecked. It falls when millions hear him say it — and approve.--from Jacoby

Jacoby's pretty rough on Trump because he's implying this dangerous phase of our republic is somehow limited to him, or characterized by him. Rather, the country has struggled with its ideals since its inception.  It is the basis of the Civil War, the battles between amoral political parties, the essence of those politicians who claim they plan on "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." These people are not ignoring America's principles; they don't like them.

Politicians eager to seize the wealth of citizens or gerrymander a state are not redirecting the nation; they are changing its nature. Politicians who would pack the court are trying to bypass the very checks and balances that have allowed the country to succeed. Trump is philosophy-free, but he is no aberration. You don't fight repeated, pointless wars, allow erosion of fundamental American rights, and amass $38 trillion in debt without true incompetence and a deep disregard for the citizenry. Trump is a problem, but he is only the current iteration of a long line of them. And, as the results of incompetence, greed, ambition, and cynicism circle the landing strip,  there will be more to come.

 

A Fifth Column

On this day:
1178 BC
The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War.
1457 BC
Likely date of the Battle of Megiddo between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh, the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail.
73
Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Jewish Revolt.
1746
The Battle of Culloden is fought between the French-supported Jacobites and the British Hanoverian forces commanded by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, in Scotland after the battle many highland traditions were banned and the Highlands of Scotland were cleared of inhabitants.
1917
Lenin returns to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland.
1945
More than 7,000 die when the German refugee ship Goya is sunk by a Soviet submarine torpedo.
1945
The Red Army begins the final assault on German forces around Berlin, with nearly one million troops fighting in the Battle of the Seelow Heights.
2007
Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest spree killing in modern American history. Seung-Hui Cho, kills 32 and injures 23 before committing suicide.

***

"Nothing is more suicidal than a rational investment strategy in an irrational world."--John Maynard Keynes

***

Has the attack on Iran been so successful that we don't know who is negotiating their surrender?

***

Culloden was fought between the British and the Scots, Catholics and Protestants, Highlanders and Lowlanders. The Campbells turned coat to fight for the Brits. I had a friend named Campbell who was refused service there because of his name.

***

Does the Swalwell fiasco open the door to the Governor's mansion to Kamala?

***

A Fifth Column

A new report from The New York Times highlights a significant change in the types of individuals and entities funding political campaigns across the United States. Rather than traditional individual donors, an increasing amount of political money is now coming from wealthy, anonymous sources, raising concerns about transparency and the influence of undisclosed interests in the electoral process.

Wealthy. And anonymous. 

Americans have a lot of concerns and interests. And not a lot of time or organization to do it. That's one reason we have governments. Governments can try to maintain the integrity of the nation. Safety. Protection from invasion and piracy.

We are constantly burdened with someone's idea of a brave new world as street activists and aggressive politicians try to reshape us. This NYT information suggests their ideas may not be their own. Other nations have big budgets; why not spend it here, trying to influence policy and money flow? It's probably cheaper than war.

One would hope these public servants would suppress their tendencies to be public reformers and just do the basics to protect us. We, not foreign money, should determine our future. We, not thieves, should determine where our money goes. If it is really true that 15% of the national budget is stolen every year, we should know and pursue that; with that volume, it should be easy to find.

Unless, of course, these "public servants" are complicit in this national and economic erosion.

Sineater

On this day:

1046
Naser Khosrow begins the seven-year Middle Eastern journey which he will later describe in his book Safarnama.
1616
Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is banned by the catholic chuch
1770
Boston Massacre: Five Americans, including Crispus Attucks, and a boy, are killed by British troops in an event that would contribute to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (also known as the American War of Independence) five years later. At a subsequent trial the soldiers are defended by John Adams.
1836
Samuel Colt makes the first production-model revolver, the .34-caliber.
1933
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party receives 43.9% at the Reichstag elections. This later allows the Nazis to pass the Enabling Act and establish a dictatorship.
1940
Members of Soviet politburo sign an order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intelligentsia, including 14,700 Polish POWs, known also as the Katyn massacre.

***

The Cassidy Report diagnosed FDA as a bottleneck to innovation.

***

This year there will be over 9 billion--BILLION--trips from China.

***

Korea imports nearly all its fossil fuels, including oil and natural gas, all of it brought in by tanker. About 70% of Korea’s oil imports and up to 30% of liquified natural gas come from the Middle East.

***

Amanda Askell has been hired by Anthropic to teach Claude, its chatbot, the sense of right and wrong.

***

Sineater

The last few years have been a concentration of questions and problems that have bobbed on the surface of America's stormy sea of self-definition and interpersonal governance. Obama's benign, enept power accumulation, the palace overthrow of the Biden Regency, and, now, this. Trump is a reaction to the last administrations, which have left us with huge problems whose only solutions seem to be traditionally unmanageable. Trump is bringing solutions outside the history of constitutional constraint.

Trump is philosophy-free, a casual utilitarian. He solves problems by decree. Wry and without philosophical roots, he is a difficult politician to pin down. He adopts as his justifications the bumper-sticker declarations of previous Leftist policies: patriotism, 'working families', and 'the children.'

Iran has been killing Americans for 40 years as national policy. We have been ignoring this as our own policy— and, in Obama's time, paid them off, like nuclear Barbary pirates.

The Latin American countries have been infiltrating drug damage and human trafficking into the country as routinely as interstate commerce.

The Biden Regency became the poster child for paralyzed neglect with their border non-policy.

We are now bombing Iran into oblivion, sinking mysterious boats in the Caribbean, stalking the streets for dark-complected men with accents.

Illegal immigration has dropped. Drug importation is down. Iran is gasping. Military success seems to justify the adventure.

The previous politicians created a vacuum. Trump is filling it, by hook or by crook. 

This looks, horribly, as if many Americans believe that their well-being cannot be managed lawfully in the modern world through Constitutional limits.

Arrogance, Stupidity, and the Limits of Ambition

American-born Olympic freestyle skier Eileen Gu has made headlines for her talent and for her decision to compete under the Chinese flag — a choice National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said is, though “not in the legal sense, of course . . . adjacent to treason.”

***

Right now, there are about 70 million white-collar workers in the United States.

***

Arrogance, Stupidity, and the Limits of Ambition

Who invites whom to Munich's Security Conference? And why? Can anyone just show up? Could I go and talk about baseball? AOC looked like a moron. Newsome looked like a social climber. Fortunately, Rubio was consoling for poor Europe.

In any sensible world, AOC in Munich would be her Dan Quale "potato moment." She could not have looked dumber. She, our Latina heroine, did not know where Venezuela was. Then, when asked a routine question about Taiwan, she blubbered for 10 seconds before denying the question's validity.

Most unsettling, she knew, presumably, that she was at a world conference on security. While it may just be a tax-funded good time, she certainly could have anticipated discussion about several of the world's top four or five concerns. But she didn't. She did not bother to study, even superficially, the problems she was auditioning to solve. Because she is: 1. entitled to the position, 2. pretty, 3. a popular minority, and 4. favored by the Press.

It will be interesting to see the response of her handlers/champions. Even in America, high cheekbones and a good jawline should only get you so far. (Melania aside.) Ambition should have some quality ceiling. We'll see if the culture--and the Press--have any discriminating scruples.

The Constitutional Flaw

On this day:

1503
Disfida di Barletta – famous challenge between 13 Italian and 13 French knights near Barletta.
1542
Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII of England, is executed for adultery.
1692
Massacre of Glencoe: About 78 Macdonalds at Glen Coe, Scotland are killed early in the morning for not promptly pledging allegiance to the new king, William of Orange.
1935
A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.
1945
World War II: Royal Air Force bombers are dispatched to Dresden, Germany to attack the city with a massive aerial bombardment.
2000
The last original “Peanuts” comic strip appears in newspapers one day after Charles M. Schulz dies.

***

Buffett: On Focus. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

***

The Pirates' All-Star reliever Elroy Face has passed away at 97.

***

The parody continues. Nevada is the only state where people can legally purchase sex, and now 'sex workers' at one of the state’s oldest brothels are fighting to become the nation’s first to be unionized.

***

The Constitutional Flaw

For the last year, the winds of lies, innuendo, and manipulative conspiracies directed against Trump have reaped their poetic whirlwind.
A man, and a political group, who have been maligned and ridiculed by a small elite for as long as they can remember, have the upper hand for the first time since Reagan.

Jacoby summarizes it. "In just the past few weeks, the American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview complete and unedited, we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting."

Jacoby calls this vengeful thuggishness, and to some degree, he's right. But how much Federal rummaging through your wife's underwear can a guy take? How much journalistic-approved lying vitriol are you supposed to tolerate?

In El Salvador, not much; in America, a lot.

This country is not an accident of geography, not a religious or ethnic redoubt. It is a philosophical creation, an embodiment of ideas and principles long debated. It is complicated because its citizens do not recognize each other in the street by their color, their physiogonomy, or their religious apparel. They are united by belief, a belief that, until recently, any man in history could only dream of. But there is a change in the country, a change that Trump does not epitomize but only represents. It is an essential defect in the Constitution.

The Constitution makes an assumption, an assumption of a precondition in its citizens and its leaders. Virtue. And the preference for the betterment of the nation over the whims of the few. 

These last years have revealed a loss of virtue. People do not take the Constitution's morality seriously.

Many of our problems--particularly foreign ones--are missteps. Bad judgment. With good intent, they will self-correct. But the real problems that threaten the nation are simple moral laxity and malice. A disregard of-- or overt animosity to--the guiding principles of the country--and how they impact the very health and well-being of the nation.

How could the national debt not be a front-page discussion topic? The topic? How could the Biden Regency — the complete takeover of the executive branch by a small cabal — not be in the daily conversation? How could Obama amend environmental legislation without a word of objection? How could Trump's gratuitous insults and chest-thumping--however gratifying to those who have been ignored, belittled, and insulted for so long--not be rejected? 

How have the politics of El Salvador immigrated here?

When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any checks on his powers, he was his direct self in response: “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

The fatal flaw of the U.S. Constitution is revealed. The law of the land must start with reverence for it. Its virtues. It's not a tool in a shed; it is a relic in a tabernacle. And it is worthless when it takes itself more seriously than do the people it is supposed to guide.

 

Immigration

On this day:

588 BC
Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon lays siege to Jerusalem under Zedekiah’s reign. The siege lasts until July 23, 586 BC.
1493
Christopher Columbus sets sail for Spain from Hispaniola, ending his first voyage to the New World.
1559
Elizabeth I is crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey, London.
1870
A political cartoon for the first time symbolizes the United States Democratic Party with a donkey (“A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly).
1919
Boston Molasses Disaster: A large molasses tank in Boston, bursts and a wave of molasses rushes through the streets, killing 21 people and injuring 150 others.
1919
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps.
2004 

Emma is born.

***

AOC has introduced a laughable distortion purposefully into a topic that should be beyond debate: insider trading and conflict of interest in Congress. She said the laws under consideration favor the rich lawmakers. So the successful thieves get special treatment? Isn't that the way all governments work?

***

NASA’s Crew-11 leaves the International Space Station in the facility’s first medical evacuation after an astronaut suffered a medical episode.

***

"White House post nods to racist, far-right subculture, extremism expert says." This is a headline from The Guardian. 

How can there be a jobs problem when someone is hiring 'extremism experts'?

***

Germany has sent troops to Greenland, but not to Ukraine.

***

Immigration

In December 2023, China announced visa-free entry for citizens of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia. Almost all of Europe has been added since then. Travelers from five Latin American countries and Uzbekistan became eligible last month, followed by four in the Middle East. The total will grow to 75 on July 16 with the addition of Azerbaijan.

About two-thirds of the countries have been granted visa-free entry on a one-year trial basis.

The United States faces a shortage of high-IQ workers, yet instead of treating international talent as resource, every immigrant is cast as a threat. Today, it can take months to years just to get an interview to visit the US. At the same time, we are deporting international students, making them feel unwelcome, cutting research funding, and, as a result, losing ground in the competition for academic talent.

Attracting global talent is not China’s strength—the world’s best would rather join the United States. But if America abandons the openness that has long underpinned its exceptionalism, it will squander one of its biggest advantages and decline into a second-rate power.--Tabarrok

Aside from the obvious outliers who are allowed to roam free, America is the great and successful nation of modern times. We have always needed good people because our demands grow with our vision. 

The special situation of illegal immigration is cluttering the news, but should not be a factor in our national life. Selecting high-quality immigrants should be the easiest thing in the world. Not being able to do so can only imply a betrayal of the nation's founding principles, national vision, and effort.

Some New Year Notes

On this day:366
The Alamanni cross the frozen Rhine River in large numbers, invading the Roman Empire
1920
The second Palmer Raid takes place with another 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists arrested and held without trial. These raids take place in several U.S. cities.
1935
Bruno Hauptmann goes on trial for the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh
1959
Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, is launched by the Soviet Union

*

What is going on inside Iran?

*

Mandani is now Mayor of New York.

This is going to be so much fun.

*

Are the Pirates spending money because streaming demands a real product?

*

The 64-year-old wife of Jill Biden’s ex-husband was found dead in her Delaware home after law enforcement responded to investigate a domestic dispute late Sunday, authorities said.

*

The very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children might hear their parents arguing outside their bedroom door late at night. It may not matter much now, but as the children grow up and assume a larger role in the world, it will.--Cowen

*

A few years ago, a poll found that whereas 63 percent of voters said they viewed the Founding Fathers as heroes, among those under thirty, that figure shrank to 39 percent. Meanwhile, fully 31 percent of U.S. voters under 30 said they saw the Founders as “villains.”

"Villains."

Can a culture that does not hold itself in high regard survive?

*

Is the Constitution compatible with the power and conformity requirements of socialism and Islamism?

*

Fossil fuels are cheap, available, and efficient. Their substitutes are less so. Fossil fuel substitution suggests energy decline, an inevitable energy contraction. There will be a general and widespread self-sacrifice, all for the greater good.

 

Shutting down the world's energy will create circumstances considerably deeper and more serious than can be borne by a stiff upper lip. Production will decline. Living standards will decline. Economies will implode. Agricultural and industrial production will be reduced, sometimes to nothing. People will die. Some cultures will suffer disproportionately.  

What if some resist? Or, worse, what if they see their energy-less neighbors as an opportunity for exploitation? Or revenge? What if some see it to their advantage?

What if some nations see a sliding scale of 'self-sacrifice'?

*

The Russians are losing 41,000 men a month in Ukraine.

*

One might be curious and suspicious about the development of a culture that accepts misrepresentation and mendacity as staples in its daily life. What is chilling is the casual way these people view their deceits, suggesting they, themselves, don't take themselves seriously. 

That is true nihilism.

*

What is more of a threat to the Republic, the Jan. 6 riot, or Packing the Supreme Court?

*

Communism was doomed from its inception. Adherents who sneered at the "invisible hand" saw a mysterious invisible force in history that picked its fights toward an idyllic endpoint of incentive-less, motiveless production of peace and wealth, leaving behind a path littered with the bodies of those poor souls only placed on this earth to facilitate as antagonists to communism's great march. This strange, murderous idealism violated all the laws of human reality yet staggered on, storming trenches, deracinating appropriate families, and slashing and burning the present to plant the seeds of the future. It is said that it attracted the idealist--but who could say its mayhem and murderous creed was, in any way, idealistic? No, it attracted the foolish, the embittered, the cynically ambitious, the irrational, and the overtly psychopathic, who unsurprisingly rose in its hierarchy. But eventually, after years of misery and death, the cause flagged, failed, and died.

*

In 2025, SpaceX launched 165 separate Falcon spacecraft. 165.

*

We have become obsessed with the outlier. 

A gift from Critical Theory: an individual cannot escape or transcend his group. Strange and outrageous behavior by one individual has become generalized to represent a larger group. So one lunatic cop is representative of all cops. And those cops are representative of all society.
The wide generalization from small experiences to large populations is a virtual definition of bigotry.

*

"Democracy" implies "virtue" to our arrogant minds. It is not. It is a simple way of deciding. In the American example, it is ingenious--but only because of the limits created by its founders. Its success is defined by its self-imposed restraints. The potential for tyranny is constrained by the Constitution. But this is not a characteristic of democracy; it is unique. Russia votes. Hitler was elected.

*

One of the authors of an anonymous Department of Human Health and Services (HHS) review published in May, penned an op-ed for the Washington Post on Thursday detailing how the report found that “gender-affirming” procedures for minors “rests on very weak evidence.”

This may be true, but it is much more revealing that the review was originally published anonymously.

*

Where does the U.S., or any country, get the authority to determine the internal workings of another state? We are reasonably afraid of the implications of a maniacal, homicidal theocracy that has threatened its neighbors and the U.S. and periodically killed our citizens. They are, without question, a malignant threat to the U.S. and the world. The world will rejoice at the effort, albeit probably silently. But where does the justification for such a huge military action come from?

***

Americans and Europe

The Americans are deeply criticized by a loud, intense, European minority. Some are simple foreign agents on a relentless, insincere social media crusade, some are fanatical faith-based social zealots, and many are mean, jealous outsiders with a nationalist bias. Here is a clarifying little snippet that is informative:

'While Europe has created 14 companies worth more than $10 billion in the past 50 years, with about $400 billion of market value in total, Americans have created nearly 250 such companies, worth $30 trillion.

That success has driven up America’s middle-class incomes. The median disposable U.S. household income, according to the OECD, is now 25% greater than the median German household and 60% greater than the median household in Italy.

Europeans’ incomes would be even lower if they weren’t free-riding on American innovation, defense spending, and higher drug prices, which incentivize research. America’s median incomes would be higher if we had more talent devoted to supervising and creating jobs for blue-collar workers or Northern Europe-like distribution of test scores.

The outsize success of America’s talented entrepreneurs doesn’t stem from their superior intelligence. It comes from working at companies such as Google and Microsoft, which mine the technological frontier and expose employees to valuable knowledge, insights, and opportunities. Apple is worth more than the 30 largest German companies combined. Apple’s employees and its alumni use their knowledge and training to create more value than their counterparts in Europe.

Unlike Europe, the enormous success of American entrepreneurs motivated an army of talented Americans to get valuable on-the-job training, work longer hours, take risks, and succeed. A small amount of success bubbles up from a large pool of failure.

…..

When entrepreneurs capture as little as 5% of the value they create for others, it makes little sense to encourage successful risk-takers to quit working long before they achieve outsize success. With the effect technological success has on the productivity of talented American workers, who are our constraint to growth, and the effect of their productivity on the growth of middle-class incomes relative to Europe, that’s not a “policy failure.”'--Conard

There are myriad additional factors involved with the distinctions here. Many are outlined by the insightful McClosky. Another is the failure of Americans to indulge in vindictive, self-destructive tax policies. However the major one is an old De Tocqueville observation: Americans regard success highly and do not see the success of others as an impediment to their own individual efforts to attain similar success.