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Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

Earlier this week, Nobelist Vernon L. Smith penned an important piece, “Trump’s Best Deal Ever: Privatize the Interstate,” which was published in The Wall Street Journal. Smith correctly argued that the Trump administration should expand the scope of its privatization efforts to include the Federal government’s vast holdings of commercial public lands.

Unfortunately, President Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, is dead set against privatization. Indeed, during his confirmation hearings, Zinke said, “I am absolutely against transfer or sale of public lands.”

Zinke’s misguided views bring back an echo from the past: President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior and Sagebrush Rebel James Watt. Fortunately, Reagan the intellectual slapped Watt down and fully embraced the idea of privatizing public lands. Whether Trump will take Zinke to the woodshed remains to be seen.

Let’s take a closer look at Reagan the intellectual and the case for privatizing public lands. A true intellectual conveys to the public new ideas on a wide range of subjects, unearthing these notions long before most people do. That is the essence of Nobelist Friedrich von Hayek’s definition of an intellectual. In his 1949 University of Chicago Law Review essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” Hayek also underlined that for better or worse, intellectuals are more important than most people think. After all, they shape public opinion.

Austrian economist Hayek was one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite thinkers. And Reagan, by Hayek’s definition, was an intellectual. Reagan the intellectual? The book Reagan, In His Own Hand answers that question. This volume, with an illuminating preface by George Shultz, contains 259 essays Reagan wrote in his own hand, mainly scripts for his five minute, five-day-a-week syndicated radio broadcasts in the late 1970s. The essays were Reagan’s own handy work, not material written by his staff. And they laid out the philosophical framework for his presidency.

No wonder Reagan always appeared to be relaxed and in control. He had thought things through. As someone who was a senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during 1981-82, I saw his intellectual acumen firsthand.

One of my early assignments was to analyze the federal government’s landholdings and make recommendations about what to do with them. This was a big job. These lands are vast, covering an area six times that of France.

These so-called public lands represent a huge socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system. As is the case with all socialist enterprises, they are mismanaged by politicians and bureaucrats, who dance to the tune of narrow interest groups. Indeed, the U.S. nationalized lands represent assets that are worth trillions of dollars, yet they generate negative net cash flows for the government. I first presented my recommendations to the annual Public Lands Council meeting in Reno, Nevada in September 1981. The title of my speech was “Privatize Those Lands.”

My Reno speech caused a stir. James Watt was furious.  He was adamantly opposed to privatizing public lands. Instead, he favored the transfer of federal lands to state governments – exchanging one form of socialism for another. Needless to say, I thought I was in deep trouble. Hoping to avoid political immolation, I rapidly sent my analysis to the President.

Much to my surprise, Reagan instantly responded, taking my side. Better yet, he swiftly made my proposals the Administration’s policy. He went public in his budget message for fiscal year 1983 when he endorsed privatizing public lands: “Some of this property is not in use and would be of greater value to society if transferred to the private sector. In the next three years we would save $9 billion by shedding these unnecessary properties while fully protecting and preserving our national parks, forests, wilderness and scenic areas.”

It turned out that Reagan had already thought about this issue. Reagan, In His Own Hand contains several essays on the subject that clearly foreshadowed his policy statement. His 1970s musings on public lands echo the writings of another fine thinker, Adam Smith. While Reagan never cited Smith, their reasoning was similar.

Smith concluded in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that “no two characters seem more inconsistent than those of the trader and the sovereign,” since people are more prodigal with the wealth of others than with their own. In that vein, he estimated that lands owned by the state were only about 25% as productive as comparable private holdings. Smith believed Europe’s great tracts of crown lands to be “a mere waste and loss of country in respect both of produce and population.”

Political opposition stopped Reagan from privatizing. Consequently, U.S. nationalized lands remain ill-used. But Reagan the intellectual had it right long ago. While there is no evidence that Trump has even thought deeply about public lands, as Reagan did, we shall wait to see whether Trump will override his Secretary of Interior and embrace privatization.

This piece was originally published on Forbes. 

via http://ift.tt/2u6Ls8o Steve H. Hanke

A new internal US Army investigation found that the most deadly chemical and biological agents known to man were improperly handled and tracked at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground. Dugway was the focus of international headlines in a 2015 investigation which found that "egregious safety failures" over the period of a decade resulted in the shipping of live anthrax spores to 194 laboratories located in 50 states and nine foreign countries via commercial shipping companies like FedEx. At the time of the 2015 scandal, over two dozen personnel at Dugway were treated for potential anthrax exposure, and an Army review board disciplined ten civilian and military overseers, which included "career-killing" reprimands of the base commander, Brig. Gen. William King.

As reported by the Army Times, the latest investigation conducted by the DoD Inspector General (IG), specifically identified failed protocols and oversight while tracking inventories of sarin nerve agent. Sarin is deadly in extremely small amounts and even at low concentrations. Dugway also handles and tests other well-known nerve agents like VX. The Pentagon has described facilities like Dugway as ground zero for the “high-risk, zero-defects world of biological select agents program."

The Salt Lake City facility has been rife with accidents and failures in protocol over recent years. A 2011 incident involving a misplaced vial of less than 1 milliliter of VX (or less than a quarter-teaspoon) sent the 800,000 acre base into complete lockdown. The crisis was resolved when the VX vial was found to have been mislabeled.

Anthrax growing in a lab dish. Source: AgriLife Today/Flickr

The new 2017 report entitled, The Army Needs to Improve Controls Over Chemical Surety Materials, included specifics on the alarming recent case which involved missing sarin. According to the Army Times:

Additionally, Dugway officials did not “immediately notify the chemical materials accountability officer” of a 1.5 milliliter shortage of sarin discovered during an April 19, 2016, inventory. That amount is enough to cause death within minutes, according to the CDC.

The report further identified routine use of insufficient containers for deadly agents, primarily by contractors, which contradicts Army protocol for storage and handling. Tracking chain of custody is essential in accounting for theft, leaks, or natural evaporation, but one authorized contractor was found to be using plastic containers with resealable tape instead of the standard stainless steel cylinders with tamper-resistant seals. According to the IG report, this "provides no assurance that only authorized personnel had access to chemical surety materials." The report concludes of chain of custody protocols that,

By not fully implementing the Army’s accountability controls and not having adequate oversight and guidance, the Army is at increased risk that chemical surety materials are not properly stored and accounted for at Dugway and the contractor.

Dugway Proving Ground. Source: Global Security

Looming in the background is the 2001 anthrax bio-terror attack, which began a mere seven days after 9/11. In the ensuing months a total of five people died after exposure to anthrax spores which had been mailed to US media and Senate offices. The FBI systematically focused its field investigation on US military labs because of the likelihood that such an advanced bio-weapon could only be procured in a government lab.

The eight-year final FBI investigation implicated Army scientist Bruce E. Ivins who worked at the Fort Detrick bio-defense lab in Maryland (he committed suicide in 2008). But subsequent studies, including a 2011 study produced by the National Academy of Sciences and a 2014 investigation by the Government Accountability Office cast severe doubts on the FBI's findings, and culpability has remained the subject of debate and scrutiny.

Disturbingly, the string of mishaps and carelessness which saw live anthrax mailed by FedEx all across the country and other parts of the world (even reaching South Korea and Australia) which marked Dugway's prior scandal occurred significantly after the 2001 attacks. The fact that the DoD's new report still finds continuing significant problems at Dugway involving nearly indetectable lethal chemical and biological agents going unaccounted for should be cause for growing alarm, but the latest findings have still gone largely unreported in national media.

via http://ift.tt/2u6CtUE Tyler Durden

Somebody is taking Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's lighthearted musings about running for president a little too seriously.

In a formal filing with the FEC first reported by The Hill, somebody has filed to create the campaign committee to draft Dwayne Johnson, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood who is better known by his WWE wrestling moniker “The Rock,” into running for office.

Paperwork establishing 'Run the Rock 2020,’ the name of the official organization, was filed on behalf of Johnson with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Sunday, according to FEC records. It was filed by a man named Kenton Tilford under a West Virginia address. Tilford's connection to Johnson and his motivation for filing the organization is not clear.

Johnson has often joked about a White House bid. During his fifth appearance on SNL – he hosted the show during the season 42 finale that aired in May – Johnson's humorous "launch" of his White House bid provided grist for his opening monologue, where he he would run backed by his vice presidential pick, Tom Hanks.

America, I hear you.

Tune in TONIGHT for our season finale of @nbcsnl for suprises and big laughs. #SNLFinale #5xHost #2020 ???????????????????? http://pic.twitter.com/EdEgDwXX4V

— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) May 20, 2017

Speculation that the actor could enter the political arena has been circulating for years. Last June, the Washington Post published an editorial suggesting that he could be a strong candidate. In May of this year, in a GQ cover story that coincided with his SNL appearance, he told the magazine that a Johnson candidacy was a “real possibility.”

Of course, as the magazine noted, when you think about the improbable trajectory the Rock’s career has taken – from University of Miami football star, to WWE wrestler, to Hollywood icon – the notion of a switch to politics doesn’t seem so unlikely:  

“So far, Johnson's tale of success has been your classic rags-to-stretch-fabrics-to-riches story. He was born in California, the only child of Rocky Johnson, a pioneering black Nova Scotian wrestler who performed in a tag-team duo called the Soul Patrol, and Ata Maivia, who has ties, through her father, to the Anoa'i family—a legendary clan of Samoan wrestlers. Despite the legacy, Johnson grew up poor; he speaks of his family's eviction from a one-room apartment as the formative experience of his adolescence. He racked up numerous arrests for fighting and petty theft while still a minor. In high school, he found football, which helped him find college.”

But when GQ's Caity Weaver offered Johnson the opportunity to take a shot at President Donald Trump, the actor demurred.

“’How do you think Donald Trump is doing?’ I ask.

 

‘Mmm… With any job you come into, you've got to prove yourself. And…” Johnson pauses, performing lightning-fast mental calibrations. “Personally, I feel that if I were president, poise would be important. Leadership would be important. Taking responsibility for everybody. [If I didn't agree with someone] on something, I wouldn't shut them out. I would actually include them. The first thing we'd do is we'd come and sit down and we'd talk about it. It's hard to categorize right now how I think he's doing, other than to tell you how I would operate, what I would like to see.’”

There is, however, one complication that could make a 2020 White House bid difficult – unless the actor decides to circumvent the already weakened two-party system and seek to run as an independent. The Rock, while a registered independent, has traditionally identified more with Republican politics, even speaking at the party’s national convention in 2000.

But as one Hollywood executive quoted in the GQ profile noted, Johnson has traditionally tested well in “all four quadrants” – old men, young men, old women and young women – a quality that “virtually guarantees butts in seats.”

But will it help The Rock  at the polls as well? Trump's TV career was certainly an asset, but he also had experience building a billion-dollar enterprise. The American people might not be so charitable when thet know there might not be much backing up the Rock's presidential bid besides good looks and a charming smile.

But after Tump's improbable rise from long-shot primaery contender to the Oval Office, writing him off at this stage in the game could be dangerous. Of course, the election of a Hollywood action star president would be a little too close to the dystopian future predicted in the 2006 Mike Judge film "idiocracy."

One things for sure: Given the Rock's on-screen successs, producers at CNN would probably have a field day if he ran.

via http://ift.tt/2ub5v6s Tyler Durden

One day after The Hill reported that “more than half” of Comey’s leaked memos of his conversations with Donald Trump contained classified information, the Columbia University Law School professor, confidant of former FBI Director James Comey, and ultimately leaker to the NYT has spoken up, and in taking another page out of Hillary Clinton’s playbook, countered the accusation that Comey violated FBI protocol because none of the memos were marked classified.

According to CNN, Daniel Richman, with whom Comey shared at least one memo the contents of which Richman shared with New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, said President Trump was wrong in accusing Comey of sharing classified information with journalists.

“No memo was given to me that was marked ‘classified,'” Daniel Richman told CNN. “No memo was passed on to the Times.”

Well, not quite: Richman did share the contents of one memo, he said, but “the substance of the memo passed on to the Times was not marked classified and to my knowledge remains unclassified.”

Well, not quite again: During his June testimony Comey said he specifically wrote the memos to avoid including classified information to make them “easier to discuss.”

“My thinking was, if I write it in such a way that I don’t include anything that would trigger a classification, that’ll make it easier for us to discuss, within the FBI and the government, and to — to hold on to it in a way that makes it accessible to us,” Comey told senators.

And here, as in the case of Hillary Clinton, is where the problem emerges, because what Comey considered not confidential – just like Clinton – has differed from others’ opinion. As The Hill reported late on Sunday, “more than half of the memos former FBI Director James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.“

In other words, whether he wrote or rewrote the memos to make the leak “easier” – which also begs the question what else was redacted or added to the original content – the confidential information remained.

As we discussed yesterday, the first similarity with the Clinton case is that according to The HIll’s original report, by leaking confidential information, Comey likely “broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol” that Comey criticized Hillary Clinton for disregarding.

As CNN adds, in yet another similarity with the Clinton email server case, some of the info in the memos may not have been deemed classified – supposedly by Comey who was the only one to have access to his own creations – but have since been upgraded to classified, although that does not answer who would have done that, considering the only person to have possession of said memos is Special Prosecutor Mueller who, as his recent interactions with the president suggest, is not exactly a fan of Trump.

via http://ift.tt/2u6AYpy Tyler Durden

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The disgrace of America’s putative intellectual class is nearly complete as it shoves the polity further into dysfunction and toward collapse. These are the people Nassim Taleb refers to as “intellectuals-yet-idiots.” Big questions loom over this dynamic: How did the thinking class of America sink into this slough of thoughtlessness? And why – what is motivating them?

One path to understanding it can be found in this sober essay by Neal Devers, The Overton Bubble, published two years ago on TheFuturePrimaeval.net — a friend turned me on to it the other day (dunno how I missed it). The title is a reference to the phenomenon known as the Overton Window. Wikipedia summarizes it:

The Overton Window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas the public will accept…. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy….

Devers refines the definition:

The Overton Window is a concept in political sociology referring to the range of acceptable opinions that can be held by respectable people. “Respectable” of course means that the subject can be integrated with polite society. Respectability is a strong precondition on the ability to have open influence in the mainstream.

This raises another question: who exactly is in this corps of “respectable people” who set the parameters of acceptable thought? Primarily, the mainstream media — The New York Times, The WashPo, CNN, etc. — plus the bureaucratic functionaries of the permanent government bureaucracy, a.k.a. the Deep State, who make and execute policy, along with the universities which educate the “respectable people” (the thinking class) into the prevailing dogmas and shibboleths of the day, and finally the think tanks and foundations that pay professional “experts” to retail their ideas.

The Overton Window can be viewed as a mechanism of political control, demonizing anyone who departs from the consensus of respectable thought, and especially if they express their heresies in public speech.

This has consequences.

Deavers explains:

The trouble with the Overton Window as a mechanism of political control, and with politicization of speech and thought in general, is that it causes significant collateral damage on the ability of your society to think clearly.

 

If some thoughts are unthinkable and unspeakable, and the truth happens in some case to fall outside of polite consensus, then your ruling elite and their society will run into situations they simply can’t handle….

 

An unwise political elite is one incapable of thinking clearly about their strategic situation, acting in concert, or sticking to a plan….

 

An insecure political elite is one which has either no sufficient mechanisms of political power short of the politicization of speech and thought, or is faced by such powerful but somehow never decisively powerful enemies that they need to permanently escalate to a state of vigorous politicization of speech and thought. We can compare this state to “intellectual martial law” for its structural similarity to the physical-security equivalent.

We’re now living under that condition of “intellectual martial law.” The consequent degradation of thinking means that the polity can’t construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to it (or devise a plan for what to do about it). This is exactly the point where the Overton Window turns into an Overton Bubble, as described by Devers. The bubble comprises ideas that are assumed to be self-evident (though they actually aren’t) and notions that are potentially destructive of society, even suicidally so.

Here is a partial list of the current dogmas and shibboleths inside today’s Overton Bubble:

• Russia hacked the election of 2016 (no evidence required).
• Russia (Vladimir Putin in particular) is bent on destroying the USA.
• All immigrants, legal or illegal, have equal status before the law.
• National borders are inconvenient, cruel, and obsolete.
• Western Civilization is a malign force in human history.
• Islam is “the religion of peace,” no matter how many massacres of “infidels” are carried out in its name.
• Men are a negative force in society.
• White men are especially negative.
• Brownie points given for behaviors under the rubric LBGTQ.
• All discussion about race problems and conflicts is necessarily racist.
• The hijab (head covering worn in public by some Muslim women) is a device of liberation for women.
• There should be a law against using the wrong personal pronoun for people who consider themselves neither men nor women (recently passed by the Canadian parliament).
• A unifying common culture is unnecessary in national life (anything goes).
• Colonizing Mars is a great solution to problems on Earth.

That list defines the general preoccupations of the thinking classes today – to the exclusion of other issues.

Here is an alternative list of matters they are not generally concerned about or interested in:

• The energy quandary at the heart of our economic malaise.
• The enormous debt racked up to run society in the absence of affordable energy inputs.
• The dangerous interventions and manipulation in markets by unelected officials of the Federal Reserve.
• The extraordinary dysfunction of manipulated financial markets.
• The fragility of a banking system based on accounting fraud.
• The dysfunction and fragility of the American suburban living arrangement.
• The consequences of a catastrophic breakdown in the economy due to the above.
• The destruction of planetary ecology, threatening the continuation of the human race, and potentially all life.

Now, the question of motive. Why does the thinking class in America embrace ideas that are not necessarily, and surely not self-evidently, truthful, and even self-destructive? Because this class is dangerously insecure and perversely needs to insist on being right about its guiding dogmas and shibboleths at all costs. That is why so much of the behavior emanating from the thinking class amounts to virtue signaling — we are the good people on the side of what’s right, really we are! Of course, virtue signaling is just the new term for self-righteousness. There is also the issue of careerism. So many individuals are making a living at trafficking in, supporting, or executing policy based on these dogmas and shibboleths that they don’t dare depart from the Overton Bubble of permissible, received thought lest they sacrifice their status and incomes.

The thinking classes are also the leaders and foot-soldiers in American institutions. When they are unable or unwilling to think clearly, then you get a breakdown of authority, which leads to a breakdown of legitimacy. That’s exactly where we’re at today in our national politics — our ability to manage the polity.

Read Neal Devers’ excellent article, The Overton Bubble.

via http://ift.tt/2sXGICB Tyler Durden