Hamas, not Israel, is the problem. James Phillips writes:
Much of the news media's coverage of Monday's opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem linked the ceremony to Palestinian riots along Gaza's border with Israel, suggesting that there was a cause-and-effect relationship.
That is a false conclusion. The Gaza border riots were orchestrated by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terrorist organization, as part of its "Great March of Return" propaganda campaign against Israel.
The campaign sought to underscore the Palestinians' self-proclaimed "right of return" by tearing up the border fence, ostensibly to allow Palestinians to "return" to homes that they had abandoned or been forced to leave in the 1948 war that led to the creation of modern Israel.
The riots would have occurred regardless of where the U.S. Embassy was located, because they were aimed at discrediting Israel on the 70th anniversary of its founding. […]
An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is impossible as long as Hamas retains its stranglehold on Gaza. Until Hamas is defeated or discredited, it will go on sacrificing the lives and welfare of the Palestinians it has taken as hostages.
[James Phillips, "Hamas Hides Behind Smoke and Mirrors to Attack Israel," The Daily Signal, May 17]
Richard Pipes vs. the Soviet Union. Richard Pipes, who wrote seminal works of history on the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, died on Thursday at age 94. Jacob Heilbrunn writes of his influence:
Central to Pipes' mission was his stalwart opposition to totalitarianism, a term that came into bad odor in the 1970s as a new generation of scholars, influenced by the Vietnam War, began to paint the United States, not the Soviet Union, as the aggressor in the cold war. Indeed, revisionist historians, as they were known, sought to exempt Lenin and, by extension, the Bolshevik revolution from responsibility for Stalinism by arguing that the horrors of the 1930s were a quirk of Stalin's temperament or they tried to play down the horrors of the Stalin era itself.
Pipes would have none of this. He focused squarely on the 1917 revolution as the source of Soviet totalitarianism. In his view, it was not a popular uprising of the masses, as revisionists intent on claiming legitimacy for Soviet communism claimed, but something else altogether—a coup d'etat led by Lenin and his henchmen that squelched any lingering hopes for a Russian transition to democracy. In his study, The Russian Revolution, Pipes stated that the creation of the Cheka meant that the "foundations of the police state thus were laid while Lenin was in charge and on his initiative." Pipes, who maintained that Russia had a patrimonial tradition that prevented it from embracing democracy, pointed to many links between tsarism and Bolshevism. Hence the titles of two of his books: Russia Under The Old Regime and Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime. Whether Russia really was a uniquely patrimonial state—similar arguments have been made by German historians about Prussia—will remain a matter of dispute. The Soviet dissident and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once observed that reading Pipes on Russian history was like trying to listen to a wolf play the cello. But if Pipes' judgments often aroused controversy, his verdicts were backed by deep historical research and learning.
His penchant for controversy also manifested itself in the political realm. In the early 1970s, Pipes began advising Sen. Henry M. Jackson about the arms race with the Soviet Union. Both Jackson and Pipes believed that the policy of détente toward the Soviet Union espoused by Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger was a recipe for defeat. Pipes wanted to go on the offensive against the Soviet Union. Containment wasn't enough. He argued for rollback—or what is now known as regime change. America needed to rearm, not sign arms-control treaties with the Kremlin.
[Jacob Heilbrunn, "The Importance of Richard Pipes," The National Interest, May 18]
Universal basic income will cost a lot, shift resources from the poor, and undermine work. Robert Doar writes:
The first problem is the money. Universal Basic Income (UBI) would be an unaffordable way to undermine our social safety net's successes. UBI would transfer money away from those who need it most, change the distinctly American relationship between citizen and government, and sharply raise taxes or the national debt (or both). And critically, it would fail to improve upon our current safety net's biggest weakness: UBI would destroy – not improve – incentives to work.
A truly universal payment of $10,000 to every citizen every year adds up to a new expense of about $3 trillion, well more than we spend on our social safety net now, and close to the entirety of the tax revenue currently collected by the federal government.
If any element of the current safety net is going to be preserved, taxes will have to be raised dramatically, beyond what is politically plausible or economically desirable, or the U.S. would have to borrow even more money than we already do. Proponents of UBI should have to answer: what social programs will be cut to make room for their proposal? […]
[I]n the major study of UBI-like programs provided in Seattle and Denver, substantial, unconditional payments were found to cause a near 14 percent decline in labor force participation, and a 27 percent reduction in hours worked by women. That's a labor force drop-off greater than the difference between the highest participation rate we've ever seen in this country and the lowest.
That doesn't only mean people will be less driven than ever to earn their way out of poverty. Less work also means fewer "feelings of citizenship and social inclusion," worse mental health and feelings of wellbeing, less happiness, worse self-esteem, even worse health among children, more crime, and way more drug abuse. The benefits of working are vast and well-documented, and anti-poverty programs should encourage work – not discourage it.
[Robert Doar, "Universal Basic Income Would Undermine the Success of Our Safety Net," The American Enterprise Institute, May 17]
Thinking about artificial intelligence. Henry Kissinger writes:
AI may reach intended goals, but be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions. In certain fields—pattern recognition, big-data analysis, gaming—AI's capacities already may exceed those of humans. If its computational power continues to compound rapidly, AI may soon be able to optimize situations in ways that are at least marginally different, and probably significantly different, from how humans would optimize them. But at that point, will AI be able to explain, in a way that humans can understand, why its actions are optimal? Or will AI's decision making surpass the explanatory powers of human language and reason? Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them?
How is consciousness to be defined in a world of machines that reduce human experience to mathematical data, interpreted by their own memories? Who is responsible for the actions of AI? How should liability be determined for their mistakes? Can a legal system designed by humans keep pace with activities produced by an AI capable of outthinking and potentially outmaneuvering them?
Ultimately, the term artificial intelligence may be a misnomer. To be sure, these machines can solve complex, seemingly abstract problems that had previously yielded only to human cognition. But what they do uniquely is not thinking as heretofore conceived and experienced. Rather, it is unprecedented memorization and computation. Because of its inherent superiority in these fields, AI is likely to win any game assigned to it. But for our purposes as humans, the games are not only about winning; they are about thinking. By treating a mathematical process as if it were a thought process, and either trying to mimic that process ourselves or merely accepting the results, we are in danger of losing the capacity that has been the essence of human cognition.
[Henry Kissinger, "How the Enlightenment Ends," The Atlantic, June 2018]
Obamacare is still driving up insurances prices and reducing choices. Michael Tanner writes:
One undeniable aspect of the clearly misnamed Affordable Care Act is that it has driven up premiums, which have roughly doubled since the law's inception. A study by McKinsey and Company for the Department of Health and Human Services found that as much as 76 percent of premium increases since 2010 can be traced to Obamacare's regulations. While subsidies offset some of those increases, that merely shifts the increased costs to taxpayers. Now premiums are set to rise even more sharply. Already we are seeing insurers submit requests for premium increases running as high as 91 percent in Maryland and 64 percent in Virginia, the first states where 2019 rate requests have been made public.
And while the individual mandate has been repealed, the law's employer mandate remains in place. Indeed, the New York Times reports that Trump's IRS is enforcing the employer mandate with renewed vigor. While economists debate the mandate's impact on jobs — it is hard to tease out the employment impact of a single policy, especially at a time of rising employment overall — it seems likely that it has contributed to a shift toward part-time employment and acted as a drag on wages for low-skilled workers.
There also continues to be little choice of insurers on Obamacare exchanges. In roughly one-third of U.S. counties there is only a single insurer participating. The one small glimmer of increased choice, Rand Paul's proposal for "association health plans," continues to languish under Department of Labor regulatory review.
[Michael D. Tanner, "Obamacare is Still with Us, and Getting Worse," Cato Institute, May 9]
An event for your calendar: Trump's America: The Truth about Our Nation's Great Comeback, featuring Newt Gingrich, The Heritage Foundation, May 22, 2 p.m.
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