Joe B

[Sing to the tune of Dolly Parton's "Jolene")

Joe B, Joe B, Joe B, Joe B

I’m begging of you please don’t take our liberty

Joe B, Joe B, Joe B, Joe B

Please don’t take it just because you control our country

Your cunning is beyond compare

With nasty patches of snowy hair

With Tom Cruise sunglasses your eyes hidden

Your smile is like the breath of the Grinch

Your voice is hard like a thunderstorm

And we cannot compete with your F-16s

Joe B

At major public events you do sleep

And there is nothing I can do to keep

From crying when Twitter bots defend your name

Joe B

And I can easily foresee

How easily you can take our liberty 

But you don’t know what it means to everybody

Joe B

Joe B, Joe B, Joe B, Joe B

I’m begging of you please don’t take our liberty

Joe B, Joe B, Joe B, Joe B

Please don’t take it just because you can

You could have your choice of trans-men

But we can never have liberty again

It’s the only thing for us

Joe B

I had to write this song for you

Our life, liberty, and happiness depends on you

And whatever you decide to do

Joe B

Joe B, Joe B, Joe B, Joe B

I’m begging of you please don’t take our liberty

Joe B, Joe B, Joe B, Joe B

Please don’t take it even though you can

Joe B, Joe B

California's Reparations Conundrum

The state of California and some of its municipal subdivisions currently contemplate paying reparations to their Black residents. This reparations measure is not for chattel slavery per se, as slavery was historically illegal in California dating to its admission to the union in 1850. Rather, it is a supposed recompense for creating slavery-like conditions that activists ascribe to under-elaborated injustices of California’s past. It is reparations for repression, in other words. 

The sums being discussed, $5 million per person in the case of San Fran and half a million per person by the state’s reparations task force, are as budget-busting as they are eye-popping. The state’s estimate alone comes out to $500 billion if only 1 million of California’s 2.25 million Black residents are found eligible.

For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that the repression claims are true and the sums suggested are just. Let’s also stipulate that California can fairly discern eligibility reasonably well at reasonable cost. That still leaves the huge question of who should pay the big bill?

Certainly not current taxpayers, who had no control over the racial injustices of California’s past. Moreover, because cash is fungible, any federal grants to California and its guilty subdivisions would risk exposing the taxpayers of other states to a liability for any reparations program. As a practical matter, California’s proposed reparations scheme could not be implemented without unfairly confiscating tax dollars from potentially tens of millions of people who played no part in the state’s alleged wrongs.

But it is also not clear that current California taxpayers should have to pay for reparations either, through any combination of increased taxation or decreased government services. They did not create the repressive laws and policies and many opposed them, to no avail.

Besides, two wrongs do not make a right. Who’s to say that in a generation California taxpayers won’t legitimately claim to have suffered repression by being forced to pay for sins they did not commit? Moreover, given California’s admission of its own guilt in the enacting of a reparations program, who could trust it to administer such a large transfer of wealth?

That leaves three sources of funds: the guilty governments themselves, the political parties in power, and the politicians and bureaucrats who voted for and oversaw the harmful laws, and the judges who failed to overturn them.

Forget the third option as individual policymakers are well shielded legally. Individuals could also claim that they were just following orders from their parties or their bosses, which holds up better in civil than criminal cases.

If political parties were held solely accountable, they would have to claim bankruptcy and fold because donors would disappear and they would not have sufficient assets to cover the costs. So score one for making the political parties culpable.

If the state government itself is to pay, it does own assets like roads, parks, buildings, and the like, that could be sold to the highest bidders. Unfortunately, though, California’s most recent estimate of its capital assets (p. 44 of its 2020 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report) reports a mere $137 billion.

Perhaps if culpable cities pitched in all their assets, too, enough could be raised but California and its major municipalities all have other creditors whose interests would obviously be adversely impacted by such a drastic move. And, again, two wrongs don’t make a right.

The only real remedy, it seems, is to declare California a failed state, make it a territory, and allow it, or parts of it, back into the Union after it ratifies a constitution that ensures its people a republican form of government, incapable, by design, of ever inflicting such damage on anyone ever again.

SD Needs Real Reform, Not Con D Virtue Signaling

 A rational, Christian response to a mugging is to aid the victim while ensuring the perpetrator never repeats the crime. South Dakotans know this, which, along with Constitutional Carry, is why crime hasn’t spiked here as in so many other places across the nation. A small majority of South Dakotans, however, have voted to change the state constitution to join California and New York and allow medical mugging to continue.

I gather that supporters of Constitutional Amendment D (CAD) voted to help poor people with big medical bills, and use other Americans’ money to do it. What a deal! But Medicaid expansion really does not help the poor any more than reimbursing a mugging victim does, especially when the mugger goes unpunished, poised to strike again. It’s virtue signaling at best and at worst a capitulation to Big Sick Care.

Medicaid expansion under CAD will aid healthcare providers (HCPs), i.e., the perpetrators of the problem, the very institutions that pushed hard for expansion. Yes, HCPs should earn enough to induce them to provide healthcare services, which everyone needs to some extent or another. But do not forget that HCPs already get what a competitive market would pay them and a whole lot more besides. For a full explanation and proof, see Sean Masaki Flynn’s 2019 book, The Cure That Works.

Flynn points out that US healthcare, and unfortunately South Dakota’s too (after showing some promise before implementation of Obamacare), is much too expensive. There are no real prices, just negotiated settlements with insurers or governments. And the fee-for-service model creates a panoply of perverse incentives, including a predilection to treat symptoms but not to cure the underlying causes of illness. It’s more sick care than healthcare.

Early in 2022, my adult son was hospitalized in Sioux Falls for several days. The HCPs thankfully did not kill him, but they did not fix him either. He is still getting bills for services that may or may not have been rendered. (He is no doctor and barely remembers his emergency stay.) He was then earning a little too much to receive Medicaid yet his total cost was in the thousands. Under CAD, Medicaid would have chipped in for him but somebody else earning just over 138 percent of the federal poverty line would be in the same situation as my son, facing huge bills for “services” that may only serve the HCPs.

If South Dakotans really want to help the poor, and everyone else, with their medical bills they should compel HCPs to compete on the quality-adjusted price of their services. Then people can shop around for the best deal instead of committing themselves to pay big, convoluted, unknown bills, often for little or nothing in return.

Yes, such a radically commonsensical policy would run afoul of current federal regulations but some cities and states routinely declare themselves “sanctuaries” where federal laws do not apply. South Dakota has a long history of bucking widespread strictures on divorce, interest rate caps, residency rules, trust funds, and the like. Why not burnish that reputation for policy innovation by offering the country an example of a competitive healthcare system that, as Flynn shows, will be much cheaper and better than the one currently mandated from Washington, DC?

A Universal Basic Christmas?

 By age 4 or 5, I loathed Santa Claus because I noticed that he gave more and better toys to my poorly behaved rich playmates than to me or my little brother even though his production (slave labor?) and transportation costs (lichen for his reindeer) were de minimis and subsidized with literally tons of milk and cookies. Not long after, upon hearing Cheech and Chong’s already classic 1971 bit “Santa Claus and His Old Lady,” I unearthed the conspiracy behind the silly jolly old elf stories. Christmas gifts weren’t magical manna, they were part redistribution scheme, part potlatch, and part savings ploy. At least the consumerist vision of Christmas was, and remains, voluntary.

But now circulating is another implausible legend about economically free gifts, Universal Basic Income or UBI for short. This new legend means Christmas cash for everyone, in equal measure. (It is usually assumed to come once a month, but it could come just on Christmas, or be conceived of as a Christmas present paid in monthly installments.)

I fear that Americans are being subtly conditioned into accepting UBI through repetition of lies and half truths. As I have noted elsewhere, many in the media now label any old welfare program a “UBI pilot” and then tout how it helps its recipients, as if it were not already bloody obvious that extra cash always helps people. The stories, like this one from ABC News in San Francisco, also typically claim that recipients spend all their newfound wealth on “necessities,” as if cash isn’t fungible. The reporters are either morons, or think that their readers are.

While images of poor children having extra socks and other necessities under the Christmas tree may warm your heart as much as it does their feet, adults and even precocious children know that those resources came from somewhere. When the source is voluntary charitable donations, the real spirit of Christmas is fulfilled.

Under a real national UBI, however, the transfers become involuntary. As Aleksandra Przegalinska and I explain in Debating Universal Basic Income (Palgrave 2022), while everyone receives equal UBI payments, the money has to come from somewhere, and in most proposals that somewhere is the middle and upper classes, who end up paying more in taxes than they get from the UBI program.

Exceptions arise only when a government is blessed with something akin to magical manna, like the oil royalties that Alaska and Iran use to fund their respective UBI programs. Few governments have access to such cash cows but there is one great untapped source of revenue available to all governments – increased government efficiency.

If the U.S. government, for example, were to end its massive subsidies for the health and higher education sectors, return to systems of private instead of social security, and scale back its bloated administrative state, it could implement a UBI worth 15 percent of GDP without raising taxes any further. 

Ironically, if Uncle Sam were to bestow such a Christmas present upon the American people, instead of presenting them with more inflation and debt like Congres just did, it would unleash so much economic growth that a UBI would no longer be seen as necessary. But this frigid Christmas, most Americans would settle instead for a giant lump of coal.

"UBI Pilot" Is Another False Frame

 America’s airwaves, blogs, and podcasts are awash with praise for, and criticism of, so-called “UBI pilots.” The problem is that none of the pilot programs, which multiplied like bunnies after the Covid scare began to subside a year ago, can rightly purport to inform the debate over the likely costs and benefits of the universal basic income policy (UBI) currently pushed by proponents in the US and around the globe. Journalistic misrepresentation, whether due to economic illiteracy or incentives to promote Woke causes, threaten to pollute the policy debate over real UBI proposals.

Journalistic misrepresentation of economic policies is not entirely new but has become more prevalent in the 21st century due to declining educational standards and perverse incentives. For example, Wilma Soss (1900-1986) in Columbia University’s journalism school in the early 1920s received a solid grounding in economic and political history and theory that allowed her to forecast changes in the macroeconomy and to provide solid investment advice to millions for a quarter century (1957-1980). Her educational preparation stands in strong contrast to the weak, ideological fare spoon fed to most journalist students in the early Third Millennium AD, especially in economic matters.

Soss faced a better set of incentives, too. Her employer, NBC, did not force her to accept corporate sponsorships, which allowed her to build audience loyalty through trust. Listeners did not always agree with what Soss said on her weekly “Pocketbook News” show, but they knew that she only said what she believed. Today, by contrast, most corporate journalists have incentives to write frothy clickbait or regurgitate partisan talking points.

Soss knew, and experts today agree, that most income transfer programs are not UBI because they are not universal in the sense of being paid to everyone. San Francisco, for example, rightly calls its $1,200 monthly stipend Guaranteed Income for Transgender People, or G.I.F.T. for short, because it’s just a welfare program for low income transgenders.

Conflating UBI with welfare causes two confusions that muddle policy discussions. On the one hand, the conflation increases opposition to actual UBI proposals on false grounds. A truly universal transfer program not limited by need (or subject to gender or other tests), for example, would not necessarily entail the creation and funding of yet another huge government bureaucracy.

On the other hand, UBI “pilots,” even the few that are not means tested, provide false support for a national UBI because they are miniscule in scale, of limited duration, and funded by manna from heavenly donors. Analyses of their outcomes invariably focus on that which is seen, which is people who are better off because they have higher incomes. But that misses that a permanent largescale UBI would have to be involuntarily funded by someone.

Pilots cannot tell us how net UBI payers, those whose taxes increase more than their respective monthly stipends, would react to UBI politically or economically. They are also too short to tell us what will happen to education, employment, or birth rates. Pilot participants tend to stay employed and in school because they know the extra cash flow will soon cease but they might drop out if they believed the money was permanent.

Some pilot principal investigators have analyzed results as rigorously as the current state of social scientific inquiry allows. Others, though, clearly seek to score ideological points by claiming that recipients spend every extra dime on education and clean water. Opponents claim that the extra money just fuels alcohol, drug, and gambling addictions. In fact, money is fungible so the focus should be on how consumption patterns change as incomes increase, but economists do not need transfer pilots to study that.

Ultimately, one’s stance on UBI should not come down to the purported results of pilots, most of which come nowhere close to testing the policy that UBI proponents push. Instead, it should come down to one’s values. Should public policies support individual liberty or government collectivism? If the former, urge the government to bolster voluntary transfer programs. If the latter, why not skip UBI and go right to socialism, the results of which are well documented from long experience at scale?

Positive Quarterly Real GDP During Recessions

Three months ago, many scholars, including myself, argued that two consecutive quarters of shrinking inflation-adjusted GDP met the government’s technical definition of recession. A third negative number would have sealed the deal for sure but the estimate for the third quarter, which is weak but positive, muddies matters.

A recent study shows that the U.S., U.K., and Swedish governments produce overly optimistic GDP growth estimates in election years. Even if the numbers are not subsequently revised downwards, the slight growth should not be interpreted to mean that the American economy is in the clear. Housing prices are plummeting while core inflation remains high enough to make further interest rate hikes likely. Real wages continue to lag and most businesses warn of impending layoffs or hiring freezes.

So only something of an economic miracle will prevent the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) from declaring a recession during the Biden administration. A look at the history of its semi-official pronouncements suggests that a quarter of GDP growth will not prevent it from calling the start at the beginning of 2022. In fact, the longest NBER-defined recessions since World War II had one quarter of positive growth embedded in them.

See how the blue line (real GDP) goes above the black line (zero) in the grayed area (NBER recession) during the 1949 recession in the official St. Louis Federal Reserve chart of percent change in real GDP below?

That is not unusual. It happened again in the 1960 recession:

 

And again in 1970, 1974, 1982, 2001, and 2008, i.e., in all of the nation’s longest postwar recessions:

So don’t let a positive GDP number fool you into thinking the US economy isn’t in a recession. Some call a positive quarterly reading during a recession a dead cat bounce, others a double dip. What you call it doesn’t matter: the only economic thing “strong as hell” right now, besides double dip ice cream sales in the vicinity of POTUS, is fear itself.

Peace Through Money?

The launch of Peace Coin cryptocurrency was not the first time somebody thought to equate peace with money. It might, though, be the last.

While the cost of everything seems to be going up these days and people purportedly are “watching their pennies,” Americans still hate loose change – which is one reason why so many prefer paying by card or crypto to avoid cash altogether.

In the 1950s, though, credit cards remained rare and many sellers refused personal checks. People tended to pay in cash, so lots of coins jingled in pockets and pocketbooks.

To legendary public relations pioneer Wilma Soss (1900-1986), who hosted the weekly nationally syndicated radio show “Pocketbook News,” coins meant something, practically and symbolically, and could mean more. Informed by her PR career, Soss tried to advance the cause of world peace through money.

We do not mean that Soss suggested that governments pay foreign soldiers to desert or defect, as the U.S. did during the Vietnam War with its Chieu Hoi Program, or as Ukraine did at the beginning of the Russian invasion in February of this year. Rather, Soss wanted to put the word “Peace” back on U.S. coins, many of which circulated abroad, hoping that the message would truly help in getting people around the world to realize that Americans cared deeply about peace too—albeit peace through strength. Convinced of the importance of the message, she ran a pro bono PR campaign to promote the idea.

Soss was old enough to remember (and fondly) how the U.S. Mint issued Silver Peace Coins after World War I, minting them from 1921 through 1928, and for a brief time in 1934 and 1935.  The impetus was a genuine one: to commemorate the end of the Great War, the war to end all wars. 

Fervent hopes for a lasting peace were dashed by the Second World War. As the Cold War intensified in the late 1950s, Soss thought it high time for the U.S. Mint to mint peace once again.

Accordingly, in February 1958, Soss urged her radio show listeners to send her postcards if they agreed with her that the word peace should be included on U.S. currency. “Everyone wants American dollars,” she explained, “let’s show everyone Americans want Peace.” The response from her audience, which then numbered in the hundreds of thousands, was large and heartfelt.

Margaret Chase Smith, U.S. Senator from Maine and the descendant of former treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, took notice. In March, Smith introduced a bill to put peace back on pieces of America’s metallic money.

How did Soss pull off such a coup? She had learned from the best of the best, Harry Reichenbach, one of the fathers of modern PR. She also was a skilled communicator, with a degree from Columbia’s journalism school (Class of ’25) and several years of reporting experience before she entered the PR world. By the 1950s, she had embraced a new career in shareholder activism, in addition to financial journalism. As detailed in a biography I coauthored with Bucknell’s Jan Traflet, Fearless: Wilma Soss and America’s Forgotten Investor Movement (All Seasons Press, 2022), Soss was a passionate advocate for enhanced corporate governance practices, widespread financial literacy, and many other causes, like world peace.

Impressively, Soss managed to get a peace money bill (the Chase bill) introduced into Congress. Unsurprisingly, though, it never passed.

As he left the Oval Office in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained that the nation’s leaders had fallen under the sway of a military-industrial complex geared for war, not peace. Soss eventually realized that, calling on her listeners in 1968 to pray for “peace on earth” as war raged in southeast Asia despite implementation of the hush-hush Chieu Hoi Program of pacification. 

Although she believed that “world trade is better than world war,” Soss, like many Americans, believed in peace through strength. So she could not countenance disarmament even in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the gold dollar gave way to its flimsy paper simulacrum, the only message of which, she believed, was weakness. Putting peace back on money no longer made sense to her. 

With physical coins already relatively rare and possibly soon extinct, more likely due to the adoption of central bank digital currencies than the rise of cryptocurrencies like Peace Coin, Americans should look for other ways to express their desire for world peace. Mutually beneficial trade, in dollars but also financial investments, goods, and services, remains the best way to conjoin interests in favor of peace.

Plague of Plagues

 It’s a little known fact that bubonic plague killed over 100 San Franciscans between 1900 and 1902, in part because public health officials and the mayor botched the response, first by imposing a quarantine based on race, then by denying the extent of the epidemic to keep the city’s economic boom going. Several later waves took fewer lives but tarnished the Golden City’s image.

This bit of epidemiological history is of interest in its own right but also for its effect on the life of Wilma Soss, the subject of my new book Fearless (with Jan Traflet). Born in San Francisco in 1900, PR pioneer and media maven Soss later quipped that the earth shook when she was born. We found no evidence of an earthquake that day but the plague helps to explain why Soss was in Brooklyn with her maternal grandparents that fateful day in April 1906 when her birth city first shook and then burst into flame.

Harnessing Defection: The Untold History of Paying People to Stop Fighting

Unfortunately, wars are again all the rage. It’s difficult to find good political economy commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, possible incursions into Taiwan by the CCP, and the like because military history, and its buddy economic history, were casualties of university culture wars decades ago. Few people study the “sinews of war,” the connection between economic and military outcomes, anymore because it just doesn’t fit easily into Woke U curricula. That’s a shame because perspectives from military economic history could help policymakers to make better policies, ones that lead to less blood and treasure being spilt.

Anybody conversant with the writings of Frederic Bastiat knows that wars, or in other words lots of broken windows and shattered lives, hurt the economy. But sometimes wars have to be fought nonetheless. The United States used to have substantial checks against entering into hostilities without due cause. Today, not so much, which makes winning the many armed conflicts it enters as cheaply as possible more important than ever. 

Many of America’s recent military victories have been Pyrrhic in that it (arguably) successfully achieved objectives, but only at tremendous cost. One might object that the country’s “safety” or “freedom” are priceless, but if those same objectives had been achieved more cheaply by other means, resources would have been freed up to achieve additional national security objectives. Inefficiency always lurks, an unseen but substantial additional foe.

Consider, for example, the recent decision to send $40 billion in arms and ammunition to Ukraine. Maybe it will bring an end to the war by signaling to Putin that America means business. Maybe it will just prolong the conflict. Maybe prolonging the war is what some Americans want. If that is the case, $40 billion might just be the first of many installments totalling hundreds of billions and perhaps eventually trillions of dollars. If that sounds like an exaggeration, remember inflation runs rampant and that the U.S. spent over $2 trillion and over $2.3 trillion prosecuting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively.

How else might the United States have spent the $40 billion it sent to Ukraine? Well, $40 billion divided by the 280,000 Russian soldiers is over $140,000 each. Could America have ended the war by offering money directly to Russian soldiers to defect to the West? 

Recent history suggests yes, though what one researcher recently called “an analytical blind spot” makes making the case more difficult than perhaps it ought to be.

In March, Ukraine offered Russian soldiers 5 million rubles to lay down their arms and additional funds, in the millions of dollars, for turning over military equipment when they surrender. The offer was not easily disseminated to Russian troops, however, and was not widely perceived as credible. Plus, it would mean living in Ukraine during and after the war. Nevertheless, the incentives worked in at least one case, when a Russian turned in his tank for $10,000.

According to one of the few studies focusing on past attempts to harness defection, promises must be communicated to enemy troops in credible ways and the total compensation, including amnesty and future region of residence, must be adequate, while remaining credible. The U.S. could make a more credible commitment than Ukraine to pay what is promised, plus provide a path to a more attractive U.S. or EU citizenship. With Ukrainian help, it might have a better chance of using fancy technology, like leaflets dropped from drones, to get the offer in front of Russian troops with the lowest morale.

History provides additional examples of harnessing the power of defection to weaken opposing armies.

During the U.S. Civil War, Union general Benjamin F. Butler offered slaves working on Confederate fortification projects military protection and paid work if they defected to the North. Hundreds of them soon fled to Fort Monroe, the strategic Union stronghold at the confluence of the James River and Chesapeake Bay in Virginia that Butler commanded. Although technically “contraband of war” owned by the Union military, the slaves knew they were better off working for the North than the South. The British had employed a similar strategy during the American Revolution.

The number of “contraband” runaways swelled during the Civil War to the point that although the vast majority of slave conscripts had been relegated to non-combat roles in the Confederate Army, their shift from working for the South to working and fighting for the North helped to speed the Union’s victory. Armies need cooks and ditch diggers as much as they need generals.

Victory might have come more quickly, and cheaply, if Lincoln had considered paying poor white Southerners not to fight rather than paying much richer plantation owners for their slaves. Many poor Confederate soldiers deserted or defected anyway. Some 6,000 of the so-called “Galvanized Yankees” joined the Union Army and were dispatched to the West to fight Indians and protect transportation routes to the Pacific states.

Defection (going over to the other side) and desertion (fleeing military service) have both influenced the course of many military conflicts, including the Russian Civil War (1918-22), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the struggle for Slovenia and the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and the wars for the Korean peninsula, Southeast Asia, and hundreds of millions of hearts and minds worldwide during the Cold War. Various forms of military insubordination, including desertion and defection, also played major, if still somewhat murky, roles during the Arab Spring.

In many cases, no payment was needed to induce conscripts to flip, or at least stand down. In some instances, however, the United States employed seldom studied strategies designed to induce enemy defection and desertion during the American Revolution, the Philippine insurgency, and the Vietnam war, among other conflicts. The Chieu Hoi Program allegedly resulted in “the defection and neutralization of over 194,000 VC/NVA” in Vietnam between 1963 and 1971. In the Philippines, the Economic Development Program (EDCOR) promised rebels who surrendered themselves and their arms amnesty, land, and agricultural capital on the underpopulated island of Mindanao.

Other nations have also paid poor soldiers to sit out conflicts that did not directly affect their personal interests. Most famously, though vastly outnumbered, British Colonel Robert Clive won the Battle of Plassey in the Bengal section of India in 1757 in part because a rich Hindu known as the Jagat Seth (“banker to the world”), paid about a third of the enemy soldiers to not join the fight. It helped that the soldiers were headed by a traitor who had been promised a leadership spot if the British prevailed and that the loyal Indian troops did not manage to keep their powder dry during a timely downpour. 

British attempts to pacify rebels in Malaya proved less successful than they might have, however, because their promises to help defectors “to regain their normal life” were too vague. That was a shame because, as one study of defection inducement strategy noted in 1971, “defection saves human lives on both sides.”

All is fair, they say, in love and war but what strategies will be most likely to work cannot be known in advance because many factors are at play, including an unknowable critical mass or tipping point at which military units dissolve via mutiny or surrender, as Iraqi units did during both Gulf wars. National histories, religious and ethnic divisions, and customs may play a role too. Some 500 U.S. soldiers of Irish birth, for example, defected to the side of their fellow Catholics during the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and took up arms against their former comrades. Apparently, switching sides is a well-accepted practice in Afghanistan but punishable by summary execution in other places, including the former Soviet Union, which employed “blocking units” to dissuade deserters.

In short, we cannot know if paying Russians not to fight in Ukraine would work without actually trying it. Perhaps Russian conscripts are not as demoralized as claimed, or, maybe, knowing what happened to the families of deserters and defectors in Chechnya (2000-2005), they fear too much for the fate of their families. Of course policy success or failure will occur at the margin but on its face a $140,000 average payment seems like it would be a sufficient trigger as, despite the recent inflation, it remains a good chunk of cash, even for most Americans.

The point here is that U.S. policymakers did not even have a discussion about defection because too many self-proclaimed experts, many beholden to interests within the military-industrial complex, pound on the save Ukraine at any expense mantra coming out of the Roosevelt Room. It’s like Covid policy censorship all over again. And that bodes ill for America’s national debt, national security, and national sanity.