News from 1992, 2000, 2007 … Peace overtures from North Korea are nothing new—and they are always fake. Pyongyang, writes Nicholas Eberstadt, is hardwired to pursue unification of the peninsula under its rule:
A peace treaty between two countries is a legal document that requires one sovereign state to recognize the other sovereign state's right to exist. (Think Camp David accords of 1978, when Egypt agreed to recognize Israel.) Yet North Korea cannot commit to any such thing with South Korea, not least because the existential objective of its ruling family, the Kims, has been to wipe the state of South Korea off the face of the earth.
That goal was the reason for the North's surprise attack against the South in June 1950 that triggered the Korean War. And it has been the main focus of North Korea's external policy since the 1953 cease-fire in that still-unfinished conflict. It is a central duty, fused into the very identity of the state, indelibly registered in Pyongyang's institutions and ideology. […]
And so the North, rather than committing to a legally binding (and potentially destabilizing) peace treaty, is likely to do again what it has gotten away with in previous meetings with the South: dangle aspirational goals in jointly signed, but totally unenforceable, official statements.
Seoul and Pyongyang have a long history of this. In 1992, there were the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression and Exchanges and Cooperation between the South and the North and the Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. At the historic 2000 summit, there was the South-North Joint Declaration, after which President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea famously declared: "There is no longer going to be any war. The North will no longer attempt unification by force, and at the same time we will not do any harm to the North." […]
The problem is that North Korea can walk away from its peace promises at any time. And when it eventually does, it will be able to blame whomever it wishes for this tragic result — potentially polarizing politics in South Korea, igniting tensions in Seoul's alliance with Washington or fracturing the loose coalition of governments that rallied around sanctions against it. In the meantime, Pyongyang will hold the other parties hostage to the fear that if any of its new demands aren't met, it will quit the peace process.
[Nicholas Eberstadt, "North Korea's Phony Peace Ploy," American Enterprise Institute, April 25]
What could go wrong with making government the employer of last resort? David Kreutzer explains why Bernie Sanders's plan to have the government guarantee everyone a job won't work:
In this worldview, the economy is a big pile of money that simply needs to be distributed fairly. Incentives matter little. Tax cuts are thievery and not a means of stimulating job-creating investment.
However, reality is different. Incentives do matter, just as we have seen in the past year. The tax cuts passed in December have already led to pay raises, bonuses, and (more importantly) increased investment. It is this increased investment that will lead to continuing raises and bonuses.
The rhetoric of big-government jobs programs originated in the Great Depression, a time when the unemployment rate was 25 percent. But today's unemployment rate is barely above 4 percent—a level widely viewed as representing full employment.
Of course, there are still people who want to work and can't find a job—but the big picture is backward from what most people think. The problem is not so much with job availability as with finding workers who can show up and pass a drug test.
The issue is not just with marijuana. Seventy percent of firms in one survey blamed opioids for problems with absenteeism, reduced productivity, and safety issues. The track record of federal jobs programs gives little hope that yet another expensive jobs bill will solve what is more a mental health problem than a job shortage.
Wages grow when productivity grows. Stimulating investment, as the recent tax cuts are doing, will increase productivity. Bloated, costly, ineffective federal jobs programs will not. Pretending otherwise may stir up the crowds at rallies of the uninformed, but it won't get them good jobs.
[David Kreutzer, "Bernie Sanders' 'Jobs' Program Would Undo Our Real Economic Progress," The Daily Signal, April 25]
Politicians try to fix congestion with more congestion. Apps like Waze have made it easier for drivers to find shortcuts on neighborhood streets, which is upsetting some people who live on those streets. Rather than addressing the underlying problem—too many cars driving on too few primary and secondary roads—some municipalities are trying to target the apps and their users. But it's not working, writes Christian Britschgi:
Their bizarre strategy: making those neighborhood streets worse to drive on.
Fremont, a Silicon Valley suburb that abuts the heavily congested Interstate 680, delayed traffic signals on its main boulevards and imposed rush-hour turn restrictions in an explicit attempt to scare away Waze users. The New Jersey town of Leonia—situated at the base of the heavily trafficked George Washington Bridge, which connects drivers to Manhattan—has taken this approach to an extreme by banning non-residents from driving on its roads.
Where they are not trying to scare drivers off certain roads, cities have been trying to coax them out of their vehicles by dropping speed limits and converting car lanes into bike paths and splurging on public transportation. Los Angeles has been leading the way with these kinds of "road diets," with city officials turning over whole lanes of its busy boulevards to bikers.
Often these plans have backfired.
Leonia's blanket prohibition has managed to reduce traffic on its residential streets. It's also managed to reduce traffic to its local businesses, with some reporting as much as a 40 percent drop in sales. The town is now being sued for closing off public roads to members of the public.
San Francisco spent $3.1 million to make a busy intersection in the Glen Park neighborhood more bus- and bike-friendly. In response, drivers skipped the intersection—to use narrower nearby roads.
Los Angeles has gone through a similar experience with its road diets. Instead opting for bikes and public transit—relied on for about 6 percent of the city's commutes—drivers have bailed off the boulevards and onto residential roads.
"If traffic doesn't flow any better on them then on the neighborhood streets, what's the incentive not to drive on the neighborhood streets?" says Moore.
[Christian Britschgi, "The War on Waze," Reason, April 25]
Will California's new consumer fraud bill give the state the power to ban books? Yes, says David French:
Scroll down through the list of dozens of prohibited acts, and you'll come to paragraph 28, which bans: "Advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual."
Wait. What? "Sexual orientation change efforts" are in the same category as consumer fraud? So, what is a sexual-orientation-change effort? According to the bill, it means "any practices that seek to change an individual's sexual orientation. This includes efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex." (Emphasis added.)
This definition is far, far broader than the traditional definition of so-called reparative therapy — the effort to change a person's romantic feelings toward people of the same sex — it now includes efforts to change mere behavior. In other words, if for example, a sexually active gay man or woman sought counseling not to change their orientation but rather to become celibate, then the services and goods provided in that effort would violate this statute. If parents faced a child who was identifying as a person of the opposite sex, then services and goods making the argument that, for example, they should persist in calling their daughter "she" and withhold life-altering hormone treatment in part because most children exhibiting symptoms of gender dysphoria desist would violate this statute.
This is a dramatic infringement on First Amendment rights, rendered even more pernicious by its functional declaration of certain kinds of religious speech and argument as the equivalent of consumer fraud.
[David French, "Yes, California Is on the Verge of Banning Some Christian Books, Here's How," National Review, April 23]
Ten percent more regulation = 2.5 percent more poverty. It makes sense that regulation should increase poverty: Making it more expensive to run a business or pursue a profession reduces opportunities and raises prices. Not only that, regulation tends to affect low-income groups disproportionately. But, write Dustin Chambers, Patrick A. McLaughlin, and Laura Stanley, "[e]mpirically estimating this relationship [between regulation and poverty] was impossible until recently because of the unavailability of state-level regulatory data." They continue:
This paper fills this gap in the literature by being the first to examine the impact of federal regulations on poverty within the United States. […] [W]e use the FRASE index, which ranks the 50 states and the District of Columbia according to how federal regulations affect each state. Controlling for a large number of other factors known to influence poverty rates, we find a robust, positive, and statistically significant relationship between the FRASE index and the poverty rates across states. Specifically, we find that a 10 percent increase in the effective federal regulatory burden on a state is linearly correlated with an approximate 2.5 percent increase in that state's poverty rate.
[Dustin Chambers, Patrick A. McLaughlin, and Laura Stanley, "Regulation and Poverty: An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between the Incidence of Federal Regulation and the Occurrence of Poverty Across the States," Mercatus Center, April 26]
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