Swirling forces

These days it seems that all the time things are happening so quickly that we cannot process them all. I don't have time to list them all out, but you know what I mean.

Great ironies proliferate. For example, when Trump says something like "maybe kids will have to get by on two dolls rather than thirty" we feel that out of tribal loyalties we must scoff, but if Greta Thunberg or another environmentalist had proposed a high tax on ultra-cheap plastic junk coming out of China's factories to price in the Pigovian externalities of plastic and stem the growth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch we would all heartily endorse it.

Similarly, the left scoffed at and the right embraced Robert Bork's logic which formed the basis of a generation or two's thinking about antitrust law, that consumer benefit should be the primary goal and guiding principle behind antitrust law. When Lina Khan advanced a different model based on the negative impacts of platform power, the left jumped for joy, Biden made her head of the FTC at the tender age of 32 and with de minimis management experience, even portions of the Right buy some of her logic. Meanwhile Bork's view of consumer benefit as guiding principle, which would inveigh strongly against tariffs and in particular the way trade barriers keep things like BYD cars out of the hands of American consumers, is invoked ever more rarely these days. So nowadays it is the Left's turn to gently advocate for consumer benefit. Ultimately I think it's a complex question.

One aside re Bork. He was never an appealing figure, always seemed kind of like a crusty old bastard. But he was an acclaimed jurist. Ultimately, the attack on Bork, led by Chapel Hill's own favorite son Walter Dellinger, marked the ramping up of the politicization of the Supreme Court nomination process. Maybe it was always going to go that way, I don't know. It's a moment in time I think we have to look back on and ponder.

ps. I wrote this before learning of David Souter's passing. He was a fine man, the Jimmy Carter of the high bench. We could use a few more of those.