Posted on by rjonakait

Murder or War Crimes?

I was recently asked by a facilitator of a current events discussion group to talk about Venezuela. It reminded me of my only conversation with a Venezuelan, and it happened some years ago. He was sitting next to me at a jazz brunch, part of a Pennsylvania music festival. Surprisingly, he and his wife had a home in a nearby Poconos community. He explained how that came about, but I don’t remember the explanation. I knew very little about Venezuela, but I had wondered why baseball was so popular there when it was not in the rest of South America. My brunch partner did not have an answer, but he was a baseball fan and seemed to know of every Venezuelan who was in the major leagues. (Today there are more than a hundred.) I asked him about conditions in Venezuela. I was aware that the president, Hugo Chavez, was an authoritarian who styled himself a socialist and that economic conditions had been deteriorating in the country. My retired companion had been the head of the Venezuelan branch of an American insurance giant. He told me that one of his sons had already left the country for Panama, and he was about to buy a place in that country as well. He said that he and his wife worried that someday they might have to flee their country in a few hours’ notice, and they needed a place to go to. I tried to imagine how unsettling that must feel. Now my imagination can more easily encompass such thoughts, even though I have not investigated an escape route from the U.S. Got suggestions?

While many of the Venezuelan economic problems seem unchanged since my conversation with the jazz lover, I was asked to speak at the current events group about America’s recent actions around and possibly in the country. I started by saying that it was hard to talk about the legality of our sinking boats and blowing up humans because the administration has not made public justifications for our destruction. Slogans have been tossed around—self-defense, unlawful combatants, narcoterrorism, foreign terrorist organizations—but not any true legal rationales. We have not been given any facts. How did we know that the boats carried drugs? Even if they did, how did we know that the drugs were destined for the United States and not other Caribbean nations, Europe, or West Africa? These, too are destinations for drugs leaving Venezuela.

Without legal and the information, it seems that we are in an unauthorized war. If so, we may have already committed war crimes; if not, we may murdered people. Moreover, we don’t know how far Trump’s reasoning carries (if it’s reasoned at all). If we can blow up those who are supposed drug dealers, why should it only be in foreign or international waters? By Trump’s logic, drug dealers within the U.S. are aiding drug cartels that Trump labels foreign terrorist organizations. Drug distributors and perhaps drug users could be labeled unlawful combatants under his reasoning. Can Trump have them summarily killed in this country?

Trump has said that each of the ten bombed boats were carrying drugs that could kill 25,000 Americans. In his mind, he has saved 250,000 lives. The Centers for Disease Control collects information about drug overdose deaths. The latest reports are from 2023 when there were 105,007 overdose deaths from all drugs, which is a slight decline from the previous year. Synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl) caused 72,776 of those deaths in 2023, also a slight decline. As tragic as drug deaths are, Trump’s figures are vastly exaggerated.

Of course, synthetic opioid deaths did not start with fentanyl and originally weren’t foreign. There were the prescription drugs oxycontin and oxycodone. In 2023, about 13,000 deaths came from these prescription opioids. Most meth, which has harmed many Americans, is not imported. Ask Walter White.

In Trump’s first term, which he does not mention, opioid deaths increased roughly 50%. One of his campaign pledges was to end the fentanyl crisis.

To put this in some perspective: There were 46,728 deaths by guns in 2023. About 18,000 of these were homicides. Another 27,000 were suicides. We don’t have a “war on guns.”

About 41,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents.

Is the drug problem in America an emergency? The War on Drugs was proclaimed by President Nixon in 1971. In 50-plus years we have not been able to quash the drug trade or drug use. One problem: Illegal drugs are a commercial product that Americans want and are willing to pay for. Trump says this is an emergency. Has he just learned about it?

Trump now hints at land actions in Venezuela. The National Security Act of 1947 authorizes the CIA to collect intelligence, conduct counterintelligence, and undertake covert action. The point to covert actions had been to be able to deny them if compromised. By publicly announcing “covert activities” in Venezuela, Trump is again a norm breaker. According to the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act, the CIA must act only on the basis of presidential findings for covert actions, and the findings must be monitored by House and Senate Committees. This is not happening.

There have probably been many more covert actions in our history than we are aware of, but until now there have been two major realms of activities. The first came out of the Cold War. We undertook many actions fueled by anticommunism. The second came after 9/11 and were part of the War on Terror.

Our government now relies on another rationale, which we could call part of the War on Drugs, a war now longer than our war in Afghanistan and an even bigger failure. But the validity of the drug rationale is dubious, since Venezuela had not been a major supplier of drugs to the U.S. compared to other South American countries. Moreover, cocaine is primarily the drug that comes out of Venezuela, not fentanyl. (Cocaine overdose deaths were 29,449 in 2023.) Fentanyl most often comes from China through Mexico.

Perhaps there is a concern about Venezuelan drugs, but our actions really seem designed to convince Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro that he can’t remain in power. A recent Wall Street Journal article as well as other sources suggest that Marco Rubio has been the prime architect of our Venezuela policy. Rubio as Senator tried for a decade to oust Nicolas Maduro and now he is getting his chance as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. In Republican circles, Florida, particularly Cuban-Americans in Florida, have strong anti-Maduro sentiments, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Rubio are all from Florida. Bondi has placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro, accusing him of working with criminal organizations.

We have a heavy military presence in the region, which has been increased. Nuclear-capable B-52 bombers have been flying off Venezuela’s shores, and an aircraft carrier has been sent to the region. We have thousands of troops at our Caribbean military bases.

Venezuela has moved troops into position and mobilized its militia. This is scary stuff. What would be our reaction if Venezuela were sinking American boats? What if Venezuela shoots down the aircraft blowing up the boats and Venezuelans?

Why force Maduro out? One answer: Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Perhaps our foreign policy is truly always about oil.

But our policy may also be a throwback to the Cold War.  Maduro proclaims his socialism. Hugo Chavez, who was president of Venezuela from 1999 to his death in 2013, expropriated the assets of hundreds of companies. Nicolas Maduro was Chavez’s (last) vice-president and has continued many of these policies. General Motors and Kimberley-Clark are among the factories that have been seized.

But the situation is even more complicated. Venezuela has not expropriated the property of American oil giant Chevron, which has operated in Venezuela since 1923 and now accounts for about a quarter of the country’s oil production. Opposition leaders see Chevron as propping up the autocratic regime, but Chevron says it is a stabilizing force. Chevron’s role in Trump’s policies is not clear.

What is Trump trying to accomplish with all this saber-rattling? We are still guessing.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets (Tariffs and Other Stuff)

Tariffs were controversial before the Civil War. Their benefits and detriments were not equal throughout the country. Brenda Wineapple reports in The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019) that in 1832 the South Carolina legislature said that, if not repealed, a federal tariff was null and void and a ground for secession.

Tariffs were also controversial after the Civil War. They were the chief source of federal revenues until the early twentieth century. The issue was not whether tariffs should be applied but at what rate. As Troy Senik wrote in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland (2023), tariffs had conflicting goals. Should they only be high enough to fund government or go further to protect American industry from ruinous foreign competition? Industry was best protected when tariffs were so high that almost no foreign goods were imported, but then little revenue was collected. On the other hand, tariffs set best for funding the government did not protect industry as much as higher taxes.

Troy Senik also says that Grover Cleveland correctly saw another conflict in tariffs: They helped to raise wages in protected industries, but this gain was offset by higher prices workers had to pay for goods

Friends talk about fleeing to Canada. But what is the point if Canada becomes the 51st state?

No friend talks about fleeing to Greenland. Perhaps that will be different when Trump builds Mar-a-Lago Northeast there.

Deputy Attorney Genereal Todd Blanche said recently that the Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into a leak of “inaccurate, but nevertheless classified” intelligence about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. It comes as a shock that anyone in the Trump administration wants to keep false information secret.

Present policies show that the Republican party has abandoned much of what Ronald Reagan stood for. Nicole Hemmer in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s states that Reagan, fueled by anticommunism, had “a preference for more open borders and higher immigration levels, for fewer tariffs[,] a stingier social net, [as well as] a more aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union.”

Under Reagan, the federal workforce grew by 200,000.

Because of tariffs, the United States has intervened militarily and politically in foreign countries. Sean Mirski in We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and Rise of the American Colossus (2023) maintains that our interventions in Latin America at the turn of 20th century and beyond were not primarily to protect American business interests but rather to keep European governments outside the hemisphere. Some Latin American countries borrowed profligately from Europe and often could not pay the money back. Under international law, the lender countries were entitled to use force to service the debts. This was often a simple procedure: Seize the customhouse and collect the tariffs. The United States was concerned about this potential European presence in the Americas and feared further that the Latin American countries would grant the Europeans concessions that would disfavor the United States. Consequently, the United States thought it was better to intervene in the debtor nations and use the customs revenues to pay the Europeans. Frequently, this was good for the invaded country since the Americans did not skim from the tariffs, or at least not as much as before, and the Latin American country often saw its revenues increase. Moreover, Europe learned that interventions in the Western Hemisphere were expensive. The European powers then often blustered about intervening to get America to do the expensive work. America soon recognized that the problems would recur unless the debtor countries became stable and lived within their means. As a result, the United States became more and more involved in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

Posted on by rjonakait

Twelve Ways to Win

In the last post, “77 Million,” I wrote that the real story of the last presidential election was not the switch to Trump, which was not large, but the “lost votes,” the many who had voted for Biden but did not vote at all this year. A story in a Pennsylvania news source neatly illustrates the point. A Philadelphia district that is overwhelmingly Black had shifted to Trump, but in that district Trump had gotten only three more votes than he had in 2020. Harris, however, had received 81 fewer ballots than Biden had four years earlier.

After the previous post, a friend said that he agreed with my analysis but wondered what my explanation was for the lost votes. I thought more about that and realized that I did not have a single overarching explanation but only a collection of partial possibilities. Here are some of them.

One. Donald Trump is a remarkable politician. His dominant qualities—liar, ignoramus, bully, fearmonger, bad economist, embarrassing dancer—should make him a laughingstock, but despite these characteristics, or perhaps because of them, he connects deeply with a broad swath of Americans. They are devoted to him like teenage girls to a K-pop boy band. There’s a major difference, however: American devotion to him has not been a passing fancy; we don’t seem to grow out of it. Other presidents—Reagan, Clinton, Obama—had devoted admirers, but not like Trump. To me the attraction is inexplicable, but I recognize his draw.

Two. Americans have short memories, and Trump benefited. In 2020, almost all voters held strong and accurate images of the Trump presidency. Despite the pandemic, the economy was about the same as it was under Obama, with some indicators stronger and some weaker than in the previous four years. (E.g., inflation was low under Trump, but it was even lower under Obama.) However, all was not well in the country. Crime had started to increase under Trump which was disturbing. Life expectancy had started to fall even apart from the pandemic. The border was a problem, and Trump had failed to fix it. Even Obama had deported more people than Trump had. Trump’s wall seemed a joke. His attempts to erase the Affordable Care Act were disturbing. Deficits skyrocketed. He played footsy with dictators, which was disturbing. His many grift-like actions were disturbing. A lot of things were disturbing, but that was all forgotten four years later. Moreover, of all the bad things that were predicted to happen because of his four years did not happen. For example, Biden continued the China tariffs that liberals had decried ruinous. Biden continued Trump border policies that were labeled ineffectual and heartless. More and more politicians supported the border wall. Trump was still the same Trump, but to many he did not look as bad as he had in 2020.

Three. Americans are not only forgetful; they are ignorant. Americans want simple answers, and Trump benefited. The border problem has many causes. We need a reform of our immigration laws. We need more border agents. We need more immigration judges. The problem is fueled by criminal gangs and political unrest in various countries. The problem is exacerbated by poor economies in various countries. It is intensified by the wider spread of media coverage that tells more and more people that they can find a better life if they can get to the U.S. And so on. Americans don’t want to confront such complexities. They don’t want to concede that the problem has been years in the making. They want a simple answer. And to many, the border problem is simply the fault of the Biden-Harris administration. (When conservatives refer to 2017 to 2021, they never say the Trump-Pence administration.)

More simplistic thinking follows: If the border were tightened, for example, we could tackle our fentanyl problem. (We have already forgotten that Trump promised to solve the fentanyl crisis when he ran in 2016.) Inflation. Well, inflation was the consequence of many complex events, but Americans didn’t want to understand that. Neither did we want to know that many developed countries had a worse inflation problem than we had, and that perhaps our inflation, bad as it was, was not so bad. Americans did not want to hear that gas and oil trade in an international market, that supply chains are international, and that the U.S. government does not control these markets. Instead, we want a simple answer, and that answer was that inflation was the fault of the Biden-Harris administration.

Four. Fear sells, and Trump benefited. Many campaigns have tried to make the electorate fearful about the consequences of the other side’s actions. In the first election I paid attention to, JFK stressed a “missile gap” at a time when nuclear concerns were high. (That gap seemed to disappear once he took office.) This year Trump and his acolytes did a much better job of spreading fear than the other side—fear of crime generally, fear of immigrant crime more specifically, fear of immigration, fear of fentanyl, fear of transgender people. That last fear should not be underestimated. For most of the election season, I was in Pennsylvania, a swing state for the presidential election with a closely contested Senate seat and several close House races. It seemed as if every third political ad — and the ads ran nonstop — by those on the right brought up Democratic support for trans people. They damned Harris for supporting government payment for gender-transforming operations. They hinted that Democratic candidates were going to allow trans people to play girls’ sports and use girls’ bathrooms. This country may have become more accepting of gays, but many, many Americans see trans people as unsettling and dangerous. Trump and his supporters benefited.

Five. The media has had a fixation on Trump, and Trump benefited. News sources, including, or perhaps especially, liberal ones reported at length whatever Trump was doing or saying. This was not totally surprising. In the run-up to the election, Trump was on the receiving end of multiple lawsuits including his conviction of 34 felony counts in New York. Nevertheless, this coverage overwhelmed coverage of Biden’s accomplishments (how many of us can summarize what is in the Inflation Reduction Act?) and explanations for problems like rising prices or the border. Since memory-impaired Americans seemed less concerned about the bizarre and dangerous behavior of Trump in 2024 than they were in 2020, the media did Trump a favor by focusing on him and not other things.

Six. We don’t know how to handle misinformation, and that benefited Trump, too. A higher percentage of misinformation came from the right than the left, and listeners ate it up.

Seven. Liberals and Democrats are poor at messaging. Who named it the Inflation Reduction Act? I know. I know. It was meant to reduce inflation, and it certainly did help. But it was hard not to hear it as a laugh line when the cost of milk and eggs and gas and mortgages was unusually high. Why didn’t they change the name and start focusing on all the good the Act accomplished?

Eight. But perhaps the chief cause of Trump’s (narrow) victory came throughout Biden’s term. While Americans were concerned about the border and inflation, Biden seemed indifferent to those problems. He might have been able to do little or nothing about them, but he should have appeared more concerned about them. He did not. And Trump won.

Similarly, every third ad against Harris I saw featured her being asked what she would have done differently from Biden. The response was the blank look of a doe in the headlights with the answer of “nothing.” It was powerful each time, and I saw it many, many times. Such a question had to be anticipated. How could she not have had a better immediate response? (Later on — too later on — she did.) There was also the never-ending clip of her crowing about the success of “Bidenomics.” Democrats should have been ready to explain what they were hoping to accomplish and what they had accomplished. They did not. And Trump won.

Nine. In the eyes of many Americans the Democratic Party does not stand for anything, and Trump benefited. Worse: Democrats were seen as the party that stood for trans rights, defunding the police, DEI, and critical race theory. But what else? For many, Democrats didn’t stand for anything that benefited “ordinary” people. Biden’s support for the United Auto Workers made no dint in this perception.

Ten. Covid hurt Trump in 2020. It helped him this year. His inconsistent and bizarre reactions to the pandemic were fresh four years ago. Now many have selective memories of that time. Unless personally affected, few seem to remember that one million American died. Instead, today Covid is remembered by many as a time of unnecessary school closings that harmed kids and strained parents; of unnecessary face masks; of governmental overreach on vaccines and social distancing. These are all reasons to distrust the government, and Trumps surrogates did a great job of reminding us of this distrust. At the same time, some see the Democrats as the ones who believe in big government of the sort that made Covid more hellish. Trump benefited.

Eleven. Many are not ready for a woman to be the Commander-in-Chief. We cannot discount that this country continues to have a strong strain of misogyny. Trump benefited big time from it.

Twelve. What do you think contributed? I’d love to hear them.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Polls divide the public in many ways by separating us by liberal or conservative; political party; age; income; gender; gun ownership; religion; geography; favorite sport; education; race and ethnic group; and much more. However, I haven’t seen the breakdown by other factors that I think might be illuminating. Such as: Do you live in a gated community? Do you read books?

“It cannot possibly be true, can it, the story about Toscanini losing patience during a rehearsal with a soprano, grabbing her large breasts and crying, ‘If only these were brains!’” Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through (Thanks SN.)

The battling bishops. That sounds as if it is an informal name for the American Roman Catholic hierarchy who want to deny some politicians communion. (Do those bishops seek to deny communion to those who support the death penalty? If so, it doesn’t seem to get reported in the press.) The “Battling Bishops,” however, is the nickname of the sports teams for North Carolina Wesleyan College. I thought that this was an amusing, slightly sacrilegious, unique name for a Methodist institution, but then I learned that Ohio Wesleyan teams are also the Battling Bishops.

The present version of the Roman Catholic battling bishops makes me think back to when John Kennedy was running for president. Many prominent Protestants opposed his candidacy. They said that the Catholic hierarchy would dictate policies of a Catholic president, and this would violate our country’s bedrock principle of separation of church and state. Now it seems as if the Catholic bishops are doing something very much like what was feared when Kennedy ran, but I have seen no Protestant outrage at the assault on a fundamental building block of this country. I cannot be surprised. Death and hypocrisy are inevitable.

“Only the little people pay taxes.” Leona Hemsley. (And perhaps another hotelier.)

Sign held by a spectator at the New York City Marathon: Jack, run fast. My water broke.

Former President Obama spoke eloquently at the Glasgow climate summit in favor of combating global warming. Was former president Trump given the opportunity to address the leaders to tell them global warming is only a Chinese hoax?

Got any Aaron Rodgers jokes for this boyhood Green Bay Packer fan?

Big Bird announces an upcoming vaccination. Ted Cruz leaps into a decisive action and denounces the puppet’s words as government propaganda. Perhaps it is beyond Cruz to recognize that Big Bird has always been a propagandist—of innocence, curiosity, and niceness, but perhaps these are qualities that Cruz does not care about. And then an even less likeable politician than Cruz (I know, I know, that is hard to believe) from the Arizona legislature labels Big Bird a communist. I wish I were making this up.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Future of America–Tennis Edition

          President Trump imposed tariffs on specialty steel products. A recent news story indicated that this action had benefited a Pennsylvania mill, which had added thirty or so workers and raised the question of whether President Biden would continue the tariffs. Meanwhile, the protection measures had increased the price of the steel and made it harder to get for American manufacturers, and this may decrease employment at some companies. I have no more than an Economics 101 understanding of macroeconomics, but all this made me think back to lectures on free trade that indicated such trade was good and that it increased wealth across the globe.

Assume you and I both raise cotton and make farm implements, but I am not in a good cotton-growing region and you are. You will grow more cotton than I will for the same effort. If you give up the tool business and devote yourself to the bolls, you could produce more cotton than you and I could together. I can devote myself to the hoe business, and we can both trade the fruits of our labor. The world is richer. It has both more cotton and at least the same number of hoes than without the trade.

That, of course, is the basic idea behind free trade. If each country does what it does best, and we can freely trade our outputs, then total productivity increases. Moreover, if the supply of cotton increases, then cotton should cost less, and those who purchase cotton have money left over to buy other things, increasing demand for more goods, benefiting the makers of other products as well.

          Cotton can be grown in some places more efficiently than in others because of natural conditions, but different factors are at work for the efficient production of cotton fabric, if by efficient we mean cost per unit of cloth. Manmade factors now become crucial. Local wages, the costs of safety measures and pollution controls, local electricity costs and so on can determine efficiency. Although other factors will come into play, whoever pays workers the lowest wage will most efficiently produce cotton cloth. Since the wages in Bangladesh are less than at North Carolina mills, the cost of products from Bangladesh will be less than products from North Carolina. We consumers benefit. I may pay a half dollar less when I buy, in a somewhat ludicrous attempt to be cool, those patterned socks made in Bangladesh compared to those made down South. With fewer people buying their product, North Carolina workers will lose their jobs. Even so, if we add up all those fifty-cent consumer savings, it may be a greater amount than the monetary losses suffered by the workers. Seen as a whole, American society is better off. But, then again, I don’t want to be the one to tell those who lost their jobs, “Buck up. Your loss was worth it for the rest of us.” With free trade, we often get small winners, the consumers, and big losers, the laid-off workers.

          Our free trade conversations now seem to center on those who have been harmed with little discussion of the benefits. To save the North Carolina cotton mills, we could put a tariff on those Bangladeshi socks, but while the tariff may be imposed on the foreign company, it really means that consumers will be charged more for the socks. If the tariff is high enough, the North Carolina mill will be competitive and will not have to shut down. Jobs are saved. But, of course, now consumers pay more for the product and have less disposable income for other stuff. If the country overall was better off economically when the foreign socks came in without a tariff, keeping them out with a tariff must mean overall the country is now worse off. 

          Besides a tariff or its equivalent, we should be discussing other ways to ameliorate the problems of those who have been the big losers to free trade. We should be thinking of a social net—health care, training, relocation assistance, infrastructure jobs, education incentives–if not generally, at least for those whose jobs have moved abroad. But this discussion is generally off the table. Such a social net is “Big Government,” and, goodness knows, we can’t have that. Meanwhile, a tariff–for reasons that have a mystifying logic–is somehow not considered to be Big Government even though it, in effect, is a widespread tax on consumers, a tax, like most consumer taxes, that is regressive leading to more income inequality.

          A discussion of how to help workers who lose their jobs because of systemic societal changes would be valuable since it would apply to more than just those workers who have lost out to free trade. So, for example, coal miners face unemployment not because of NAFTA or other such trade agreements. President Trump had suggested that declining mining jobs would come back once those Big Government regulations were rescinded. Perhaps some work would, but, of course, just as tariffs impose costs on the larger society, the deregulatory approach also imposes widespread costs. Many of those “regulations” are protections against industrial accidents and water and air pollution that impose costs not only on hurt individuals but on society in general. However, the removal of such protections is not going to bring back many of the mining jobs. Better technology has made competitors to coal more efficient, and better technology has led to the more efficient extraction of coal. Fewer miners are needed to mine the same amount of coal as were needed a generation ago, and natural gas competes better against coal than it did in the past. No matter what, all the coal mining jobs are not coming back.

          The coal industry is in illustration of an important fact: many jobs are not lost because of free trade or government over-regulation, but because of new technologies. Most of us do not see the dramatic effects of technology on employment, but in a minor way it was on display for millions in the recently completed U.S. Open tennis tournament. This sport has employed many officials for each match. In addition to the chair umpire, four officials make calls on the sidelines, one or two for the center lines, two for the baselines, two for the service lines, and one for calling lets when a serve clips the net…or, at least, it did. Through the years, an electronic device has replaced the human for let calls, and electronics were used when a player challenged a human’s line call. The Open, however, went further and dispensed with all human officials except for the chair umpire. All the in and out calls were determined not by people but by an electronic sensor and an electronic voice that sounded more human than Siri’s. This won’t make a huge difference in our employment statistics; the tournament lasts only two weeks. But a great many line callers lost their jobs.

          I may not have thought of technology changing employment in tennis tournaments until recently, but the fact that technology affects jobs in all parts of our economy has been apparent for quite some time. Another minor example, this time as-seen-on-TV: In a segment of the show This Old House, plans were shown for a house with intricate, curved, intersecting roof beams. The viewers were taken not to an old-fashioned woodworking shop, but to a modern factory that had Computer Numeric Control machines. The CNC devices, after some programming, quickly cut the beams and fabricated the complex joints. Norm, a carpenter on This Old House, was duly impressed and noted that it would have taken him days to produce one such beam, while one person operating a CNC machine for a few hours could make all of them. This technology may have had the benefit of making the costs lower for spectacular building designs, but, of course, fewer people with old-fashioned skills will be employed in the fashioning of some roof beams.

          Jobs are lost for many reasons, including international trade deals and technological advances. At least some of the time, I benefit because of lower costs. I have done nothing to deserve the benefit of free trade’s lower sock prices or roof beams made cheaper by technology. (On the other hand, the elimination of all those tennis lines people did not seem to translate into lower ticket prices. If the costs of the tournament were less, where did that money go?) And, of course, the mill worker, the carpenter, and the tennis line callers have done nothing to deserve a job loss. And this should lead to the societal question we don’t much discuss: Should I surrender at least part of my undeserved benefit to help those who got the punch in the gut?