David Boaz is rightly rankled by presidential rankings. A slice:
Presidential scholars love presidents who expand the size, scope and power of the federal government. Thus they put the Roosevelts at the top of the list. And for a long time (in a different poll, from Siena College) they rated Woodrow Wilson—the anti‐Madisonian president who gave us the entirely unnecessary World War I, which led to communism, National Socialism, World War II, and the Cold War—6th. Recently he’s fallen to 13th, presumably because of the increased publicity about his racism. In this survey he fell from 10th in 2015 to 15th this year. Not far enough, by a long shot.
Ronald Reagan, who did not resegregate the federal workforce or turn a European war into World War I, fell from 7th in 2018 to 16th this year. President Biden, after three years of vastly expanding the scope and cost of the federal government, is rated 14th. John F. Kennedy, a charismatic guy whose greatest substantive accomplishment was the launch of the Vietnam War, climbed into 10th place. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never relinquished his claim on power, moved to no. 2, passing George Washington, who twice gave up power, ensuring that the new United States would be a republic. Lincoln is ranked first.
Mr. Biden is lucky that the AI revolution accelerated under his watch, just as Barack Obama was fortunate with the shale fracking boom. But AI advances are happening despite government, not because of it. Mr. Biden’s executive order last autumn has created new uncertainty about whether and how regulators will permit AI.
Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator is instructing founders in health care to “take the conservative approach” and “document everything, and know [evolving regulations are] a risk, and anyone who invests in you should know it’s a risk,” as StatNews reported this week. Regulatory risk is something ebullient Nvidia investors might keep in mind too.
Some Democrats are already threatening to suffocate AI with—what else?—climate regulation. Democratic Senators this month introduced a bill that would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology to recommend administrative actions to mitigate AI’s environmental impact. Will ChatGPT soon need an Environmental Protection Agency permit?
It isn’t hard to see how this system, despite creating some work incentives at first, discourages people from pursuing better long-term paths for their families. This is a big deal. Increased employment among low-income parents as a result of work requirements has driven much of the long-term decline in child poverty, as we learned during the welfare reform of the 1990s. We need stronger incentives to move up the income ladder rather than incentives that perpetuate systemic poverty. And this expansion of the credit isn’t going to cut it.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Kristi Kendall about filmmaking.
George Will draws a lesson from Benn Steil’s new book.
Is another government shutdown coming?
John O. McGinnis writes about Carl Schmitt. A slice:
Schmitt’s theories have been rightly seen as deeply critical of liberal democracy and inclined toward dictatorship or worse. Nevertheless, they brilliantly illuminate the dangers against which classical liberalism must guard. Indeed, a flourishing liberal society must be the opposite of the one that Schmitt envisions as both necessary and desirable. It must defuse a politics of perpetual enmity, preserve social spheres apart from politics, and constrain executive power, particularly in domestic affairs. In short, Schmitt provides value by being the greatest negative exemplar for liberalism in the modern era. Treating Schmitt as providing a negative credo is more important than ever, because many on both the left and right would take steps to create a world where Schmitt’s dreams and liberalism’s nightmares are more likely to come true. Some academics have irresponsibly cheered them on.
When the history books are written about the Biden presidency, Jen Psaki — if she is mentioned at all outside a footnote — will be remembered for her role in facilitating the Biden censorship industrial complex, which a federal judge called an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”
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