I remain an agnostic on whether it would be better for the United Kingdom to be inside or outside the European Union. I find some of the economic arguments for “Remain” Chicken-Little-ish, but who am I to say whether a major decision like that could have dire economic consequences? I am also no expert on British politics, but I do have a sense from afar of what the vote could mean for the Labour Party. And it’s not good.
I have watched interviews with Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and read articles about his position favoring “Remain,” and what strikes me is that in being unwilling to acknowledge that supporters of “Leave” might have a genuine case, he is further distancing the Labour Party from its traditional working class base. In Britain, as in the United States, many of these voters are up in arms about immigration and about runaway shops; and in Britain, contrary to what Corbyn says, the EU is implicated in these issues.
Today we’re publishing part two of our series on privatization. I think you will really like it. It’s about the so-called “corrections industry”. But what it shows is that the corrections industry is about way, way more than just prisons. To use the jargon of industry, the corrections industry has managed to scoop up business along the whole supply line, from the moment of arrest to the last check-in with the parole officer. Read this. You’ll find it very eye-opening.
Before the results are in, I just wanted to say a few words on Brexit, Britain’s proposed exit from the EU. This is an issue for the British. But it is an issue that I think everyone has some right to chime in on since it will have a real effect on the whole global economy, and real effects in the US since Britain and the EU are among the United States’ largest trading partners. In short, the idea strikes me as simply crazy.
Here’s why.
As you know, I’ve been piecing together what we know about Donald Trump’s Potemkin $10 billion real estate, tie and steak empire. Mark Cuban is an actual billionaire and friend or frenemy of Trump’s. And he’s been increasingly public in his suspicions about Trump’s wealth too. Cuban and I had an email exchange sharing notes and trying to figure out why Trump seems so hard up for cash. Here’s the exchange.
If you’ve read my editors’ blog posts over the years, you likely know that I am at heart a small-c conservative and instinctive institutionalist. There are up and down sides to that way of approaching the world. But it’s a posture that colors my reactions to most things. On that front, last night’s events in the UK fill me with no little foreboding. Sure, the pound was in free fall over night. The British equities market is getting hammered. Those are likely transitory events – at least the instability, if not the absolute values. But look a bit further down the road.
Look at the map.
One source of comic relief this morning is watching American conservatives take a Brexit victory lap. They feel and sometimes say explicitly that leaving the EU is Britain ticket to reemerging as a great power. As I noted below, it’s far more likely that Brexit is Britain’s ticket to reemerging as England. But that’s another matter.
We are told we are entering a period of economic nationalism and right wing populism. We see it in the UK with Brexit, in the USA with Trumpism and in other nations and regions with their own unique inflections. From others we hear this is simply a tantrum or irrationality, perhaps a generalized breakdown of trust in elites. These are each true to a degree. But I think they are each also quite misleading. I see a very different or much more specific pattern in the country whose politics I know best, the USA, and the demographics and the voting parallels seem evident enough in Britain as well.
I hadn’t taken Obama’s statement that a post-EU UK would have to go ‘to the back of the line’ for trade negotiations that seriously. I’d seen it as more a nudge to ward off any expectation that trade relations with the US would be instantly restored on some crash course negotiation. But the possibility of the break-up of the UK itself (which seems like a very real possibility to me over the 4 to 5 year time horizon) hadn’t occurred to me as a drag on potential negotiations.
Overall, I liked your post about Brexit. I will have to say though that I’m doubtful the US will make a deal with the UK outside the EU a priority.
Today’s Supreme Court decision on abortion suddenly puts abortion restrictions in a bunch of other states in potential legal jeopardy. Here’s the rundown.
Perhaps I’m late to this story, what with so much else going on. But apparently just recently Donald Trump accept Jesus as his savior and is now a born-again Christian.
This is what Dr. James Dobson is telling fellow evangelicals. And it is apparently what Trump told him. Dobson even knows the businessman who recently led Trump to Christ. And it all came out at that big evangelical shindig Trump held a week ago in New York City.
Said Dobson:
He did accept a relationship with Christ. I know the person who led him to Christ. That’s fairly recent.