Demonic Dollar Store

"Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?" On Glenn Greenwald's System Update Rumble show, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson issued a scathing indictment of what he calls "libertarian economics" over the weekend.

"Libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending," Carlson told Greenwald.

"So they created this whole intellectual framework to justify the private equity culture that's hollowed out the country," said Carlson. "A smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results."

"I think you need to ask: 'Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?'" said Carlson. "And if it does, it's not a system that you want, because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society. And anything that increases ugliness is evil….So if it's such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores?"

Carlson is indicting not just cheaply, readily available consumer goods, but also something deeper, he claimed.

"And the Dollar Store itself is a sort of symbol…for your total lack of control over where you live, and over the imposition of aggressively in-your-face ugly structures that send one message to you, which is, 'You mean nothing. You are a consumer, not a human being or a citizen.'"

On so many counts, Carlson is wrong. Life in the U.S. has gotten better since 1969, when he was born, in clear and measurable ways—life expectancy, child mortality rates, average income per person, liberal democratic scores of countries around the world, and much more. The "lack of control over where you live" is a total fable—though housing supply crunch is real (and government-created). If he's describing a sense that something is wrong within the American spirit, he should come right out and say so, but I'd expect the causes of these maladies—deaths of despair trending upward, for example, or American males falling behind their female counterparts on educational achievement—are deeper than "cheaply available consumer goods have proliferated."

Accidental hostage killing: On Friday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitted to accidentally killing three Israeli hostages who had been taken by Hamas.

Three men—Yotam Haim and Alon Shamriz, both of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and Samer Talalka, of Kibbutz Nir Am—"had emerged shirtless from a building and were carrying a makeshift white flag," in Shejaiye, an area of Gaza City where Israel and Hamas forces had been fighting, per The New York Times. They had reportedly taken off their shirts to make clear that they were unarmed and not wearing any explosives and were approaching IDF soldiers, speaking in Hebrew.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its "soldiers were on high alert for attempts by Hamas to ambush Israeli forces, possibly in civilian clothes, as they patrolled the area," per a Times account.

Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military's chief of staff, said that IDF policy is to arrest people who lay down their weapons, not shoot, and that so far more than a thousand people have been taken into military custody this way. "It is forbidden to shoot at those who raise a white flag and seek to surrender," said Halevi. Nonetheless, Israeli soldiers made a profound mistake, which is being criticized by both Israelis and the rest of the world.

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Scenes from New York: New York City recently passed a law banning size and height discrimination when hiring dancers, which follows in the footsteps of similar legislation passed by San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

"The law includes an exemption for when height or weight may interfere with the essential requirements of a job," reported The New York Times. "But what are 'essential requirements' in the highly subjective world of dance?"

To put an even more cynical gloss on it: It seems highly unlikely that the government meddling in this way will make a difference, even sidestepping the question of whether this is an appropriate thing for policy makers to be spending time on.

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QUICK HITS

• Inside Apple's 2024 strategy.
• An Intelligencer investigation helped to uncover a massive COVID-19 testing scam.
• "The Transportation Department is slapping Southwest Airlines with the largest consumer protection penalty in the agency's history, a response for last year's days-long meltdown that stranded thousands of travelers and aircrew nationwide," reported Politico. Southwest will be forced to pay a $140 million fine.
• A congressional staffer working for Sen. Ben Cardin (D–Md.) was fired after being linked to a gay sex tape filmed in a Senate hearing room. "It appears to be unprotected sex," reported The Daily Caller.
• Canada just announced that, by 2035, it will require all new vehicles sold in the country to be zero-emissions.
• I am not sure President Joe Biden understands the meaning of the word capitalism. No central planner gets to decide what "reasonable profits" look like, nor would I imply that voluntary commercial relationships are exploitative:

I'm a capitalist.

I have no problem with companies making reasonable profits.

But not on the backs of seniors and working families.

— President Biden (@POTUS) December 16, 2023

• Yes:

This is like the third David Alder tweet about Milei I've seen go viral, and every single one of them is full of outright lies. https://t.co/UZLqPVgkrg

— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits) December 15, 2023

• Didn't the TV show Archer already invent this, years ago?

Excited to announce v(1.0) of Digi, the future of AI Romantic Companionship, for IOS and Android ????

Site: https://t.co/q420GR4jJ4
Twitter: @digiaiapp

A quick thread on features, and where we go from here (1/13) pic.twitter.com/9KZoorEoA0

— Andrew (@andyohlbaum) December 15, 2023