TCS: Richard Tren's dispatch from Washington

This article was first published by The Common Sense.Key topics:Joe Kent resigns from Trump counterterrorism post amid antisemitism claimsUS economy struggles with inflation, tariffs, and midterm election risksPaul Ehrlich’s population theories debunked; human innovation praised.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Richard Tren.As I write this, things remain in a state of flux in the Straits of Hormuz and although the Israeli and United States (US) forces are picking off the leaders of the Islamic Republic like the targets at a country fair shooting range, the Islamists are not down yet.Who Is Joe Kent?The Trump Administration is continuing to prosecute the war against the Islamic Republic with great resolve and, so far, effectiveness. So, what to make of the resignation of Joe Kent, director of Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center? Kent’s resignation was accompanied by a public letter in which he claimed he didn’t support the war, that Iran posed no threat to the USA, and that Trump was duped into attacking the Islamic Republic by the Israelis.Kent’s resignation was greeted enthusiastically by Tucker Carlson, the far-right podcaster who has donned the mantle of Father Coughlin and become one of America’s leading modern-day antisemites. Carlson described Kent as “the bravest man I know”. At this point praise from Carlson is a mark of dishonour. Remember that Carlson described the pseudo-historian and crank Darryl Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. Cooper claims, among other things, that Winston Churchill was the true villain of the Second World War.It turns out Kent is a run-of-the-mill antisemite who has had associations with members of the Proud Boys and far-right groups such as Patriot Prayer. Aside from claiming that Israel misled Trump, he also claims that Israel was behind the 2003 Iraq war as well as, bizarrely, the rise of ISIS. These nonsensical charges have been debunked widely. Clinging onto such claims, however, is the mark of someone deranged by conspiratorial thinking, and as is now boringly predictable, conspiracy theorists always end up in the same place. Though your correspondent is unable to confirm this definitively, we understand that when Kent recently burnt his tongue on some hot coffee, it was, of course, the fault of … you know … THE JEWS..Read more:.TCS: US midterms could reshape South Africa’s Washington strategy.Instead of concerning ourselves with why Kent resigned, we should be asking what he was doing in the Trump Administration to begin with.Economic Worries, the War, and the MidtermsMeanwhile, hotter-than-expected inflation numbers have meant the Federal Reserve held its key interest rate steady. Even though this was expected, the US stock markets tumbled once again, addicted as the market has become to easier money. Higher oil prices and general economic uncertainty have investors spooked, but of course overall the market is up around 16% since Trump’s re-election. Not that a higher S&P 500 will help the Republicans much in the run-up to the November midterms.Kevin Hassett, Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, perhaps the administration’s most important economic advisory body, claimed confidently the economy would grow by around three percent per annum. So far, the economy is growing at just around two percent, job growth has been slow, and sometimes negative, and with inflation proving to be sticky, Americans do not feel as well off as they expected to be. If, as has been theorised, happiness is the difference between expectation and reality, Americans are pretty unhappy. According to Real Clear’s average of polls, the number of Americans who feel the country is on the right track has fallen from around 43% to 35% since Trump launched his global trade war.Trump’s mercurial, and after the recent Supreme Court ruling, illegal, tariff regime has dampened investment, job creation, and growth. What kind of a business could feel comfortable hiring and expanding production when the price of inputs might jump up by 10 or 20 or 30% at a moment’s notice? How do they factor in the possibility of retaliatory tariffs from overseas markets? Hassett and other economists discarded centuries of economic evidence and trade theory and evidence to convince themselves that higher import taxes were a good thing. David Ricardo and Adam Smith are having the last laugh.The Republican political losses in November are likely to be widespread and significant, leaving Trump’s legislative agenda dead in the water. We might get a swift victory against Iran and lower oil prices, but without a 180-degree reversal on tariffs and an abandonment of Trump’s turn towards dirigisme, I doubt we will see the kind of growth the Republicans would need to limit their losses.Hooray for HumansWhen Betty Davis learned that her Hollywood rival Joan Crawford, whom she loathed, had died, she is reported to have said: “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good … Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”Betty Davis’s words rang in my head when I heard of the death of Paul Ehlich, the biologist and environmentalist. It would of course be poor form to speak ill of the man now that he cannot defend himself, but I certainly will criticize his heinous ideas that did great harm to the world and to humanity. Ehrlich, in the vein of the 18th-century cleric and economist Robert Malthus, believed that humanity was headed towards starvation and the world to ecological catastrophe because of population growth. In 1968 he published The Population Bomb, arguing not only for a sharp decline in the human birth rate, but an increase in the human death rate as the only way to avert widespread famines and environmental disaster. As my co-author Don Roberts and I discuss in our book about the use of DDT in malaria control, The Excellent Powder, Ehrlich and his Zero Population Growth colleagues advocated against efforts to control malaria because saving lives would lead to more mouths to feed and that, they believed, would be a bad thing. Malaria control, funded generously after the end of the Second World War, was having dramatic successes all around the globe. Ehrlich advocated against such lifesaving, heroic programmes.Tragically, donor nations and the UN’s World Health Organization paid attention. There was a shift in the 1970s from funding malaria control programmes to funding population control. Countries such as India took their focus off malaria control and under Indira Ghandi’s government started implementing forced sterilisation. China, most famously, implemented the one-child policy that resulted in forced abortions and the deaths of millions of babies, mostly girls. And in Africa, the continent most at risk from the deadliest form of malaria, the disease spread so that by the early 2000s more than a million children were dying from malaria every year.Ehrlich’s darkly sinister ideas were wrong. Not just a little wrong, but dramatically, epically, spectacularly, and phenomenally wrong. Wrong in every way. The problem with his almost demonic world view was that he viewed human beings simply as consumers, devourers of the earth’s resources, and not as producers, as problem-solvers, as creative beings capable of innovating and fixing things. Ehrlich saw people just as one might view antelope or locusts rather than creatures capable of building Notre Dame, composing great symphonies, inventing vaccines, and flying to the moon. And most importantly, he didn’t think that someone like Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug could solve the problem of hunger. Borlaug, one of the most remarkable and heroic individuals to ever live, birthed the green revolution by hybridising wheat, increasing yields, and making famines a thing of the past.Notwithstanding the human toll caused by the defunding of malaria control and the forced abortions and sterilisations, humanity has progressed. Since the time Ehrlich wrote The PopulationBomb, the world’s population increased from 3.5 billion to more thaneight billion, and over that time our intake of calories globally has increased from around 2 400 calories to around 3 000 calories. Human populations have more than doubled and we have more food for everyone. Readers who want to understand more about just why Ehrlich was so dramatically wrong should read Superabundance by Marian Tupy and Gail Pooley or explore these ideas on HumanProgress.org. We are dramatically better off now not in spite of population growth but because of it. Not only are we able to feed more people, but we are also able to do so on less land and with a cleaner environment. More humans equal more problem-solvers and innovators. Hooray for humanity. The problem most advanced nations now face is declining and aging populations. We will never know how many people are not alive and around to make our lives better, richer, and more interesting thanks to Ehrlich’s vile ideology.Ehrlich and his horrible ideas should be relegated to the dustbin of history. We should, instead be remembering and revering the great economist Julian Simon, who directly opposed Ehrlich’s misanthropy and challenged him to a famous bet that resources would become more abundant, not less. Simon won. Ehrlich lost.Unfortunately, it will not be easy to forget Ehrlich. As is now boringly predictable, the leftist media continues to venerate him as though he was some kind of sage. Disgracefully TheNew York Times wrote: “His best-selling 1968 book, whichforecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Premature!? Why can’t they bring themselves to write WRONG? But what can you expect from the outlet that brought you Walter Duranty, who aided and abetted Stalin’s Ukrainian Holodomor?The Big Apple’s Rotten ChoiceSpeaking of horrible people, the wife of New York City’s mayor Zohan Mamdani, Rama Duwaji, liked social media posts celebrating Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attacks, even denying the well-documented rapes, sexual torture, and mutilation. The Israeli psychologist Dr Orli Peter has a terrific response to the terrorist-loving, rape and murder apologist First Lady of the Big Apple on X. As the Washington Free Beacon has exposed, however, Duwaji’s admiration for terrorism and abiding hatred for the Jews and for the West started long before Hamas launched its war. It turns out she not only expressed her admiration for the female terrorists Leila Khaled and Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, but she worked as an illustrator for Susah Abdulhawa. The latter described Jewish Israelis as “rootless soulless ghouls”..Read more:.The Economist: Trump tariffs take US trade policy back to the 19th century.More Jews live in New York City than anywhere outside Israel and many leftist Jewish New Yorkers campaigned for and voted for Mamdani. One can only speculate about how they feel now knowing that the residents of Gracie Mansion delight in the torture and murder of their co-religionists and brethren. The comic Lyle Culpepper, who has become indispensable since October 7th, gives the Mayor a bit of much-needed help on X..This article was first published by The Common Sense and is republished with permission.

TCS: Richard Tren's dispatch from Washington

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