The Felony Hidden in the COVID Bailout, Biden Voters Buying Guns, The Economic Debate in the Plot of Dickens' A Christmas Carol (The Five For 12/21/20)

Hey,

This is a quick one. I didn’t have time to pull a lot of links on the COVID bill, which is insanely complex, so you’ll have to dive into that one with your own research.

Probably gonna drop one more newsletter this week, FYI, as there are still a couple of important stories I want to cover before the holiday break.

Here’s The Five.

[one]

If you haven’t noticed, pretty much nobody is happy with this spending bill. For one, it hands out a fair bit of foreign aid, including money to Pakistan for “gender programs” while cutting the direct payment to individuals from the initial stimulus back in the spring/summer. The bill also makes changes to U.S. copyright law (huh?) in it’s mammoth 6,000 pages.

Somewhere in there is a new law that could target people who stream video games on Twitch, YouTube etc (and stream other content too) as felons, according to The Hollywood Reporter:

Providing relief via direct assistance and loans to struggling individuals and businesses hit hard by COVID-19 has been a priority for federal lawmakers this past month. But a gigantic spending bill has also become the opportunity to smuggle in some other line items, including those of special interest to the entertainment community.

Perhaps most surprising, according to the text of the bill (a combination of COVID relief and annual government spending), illegal streaming for commercial profit could become a felony.

Let me propose the very best law in the whole world, that nobody should argue with:

No bill should exceed 10 pages in length. And every bill must be read aloud, in it’s entirety, in Congress.

Our lawmakers don’t even have time to read what’s in the bills they vote on.

If you’re not familiar with the Greek phrase “Molon Labe,” it’s the response of King Leonidas to Xerxes of Persia when the latter asked him to lay down his arms and surrender Sparta to an invading army. It translates to “come and take it.”

Never imagined I’d need to say that about my laptop.

As an addendum to that story, could this eight year old become a felon by streaming? The youngest esports (video game competition) player ever just inked a deal with a $33,000 signing bonus. (Keep in mind…this kid is in THIRD GRADE).

On one hand, invested, that money easily pays for college.

On the other, child stars tend to OD on heroine and die.

As a parent, I have no interest in childhood fame. My view is to let kids be kids…there’s plenty of adulthood in their future. That being said, it’s a fascinating story about the changing world of tech.

[two]

Interesting juxtaposition happening in Maryland, the home state of Joe Biden, who really wants to ban a lot of guns (more on that later in the week, hopefully). According to the Baltimore Sun, most locals buying a gun for the first time are Democrat minorities and women who likely voted for Biden.

There are some who can’t understand why anyone, much less a Marylander, would choose to exercise their right to keep and bear arms. Even in this deep blue Democratic state, where Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, by more than 30%, gun sales have soared.

It’s important to put this into perspective. In Maryland, more than a quarter million of our neighbors legally purchased a firearm. They filled out the background check forms and completed the required safety course. They acquired the necessary permits, submitting their information to the state authorities and the FBI to verify they are law-abiding citizens who can be trusted to exercise their rights.

Astonishingly, 40% of those buying guns today are buying one for the first time in their lives. Before 2020, these individuals never owned a gun. Across the nation, that equates to nearly 7.7 million people. Here in Maryland that’s over 109,000 of us.

One of the big stories of the next four years will be the split in the Democratic party, pitting classical liberals (like Tulsi Gabbard and Joe Manchin) against the AOC led (kinda) justice Democrats.

The former are certainly moving closer to the middle on gun rights, as the latter want a European style gun ban.

[three]

During the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan this fall, an Armenian church was bombed. Some of the casualties included children.

Say what you want about foreign policy, George W. Bush was extremely careful to avoid damage to mosques. Azerbaijan, which is backed by Turkey, isn’t so humane when it comes to religious locations.

Unfortunately, Armenia is receiving weapons and aid from Russia, which makes this a hot war between two empires, neither of which is friendly to the U.S. For the time being, fighting has ceded. I don’t expect that to last.

I don’t have a solution, but I did want to share a beautiful video of an Armenian man playing the cello in his bombed out church.

If you’re safe, warm, fed and not in imminent danger this holiday season, be thankful.

[four]

I re-discovered this article from Forbes about Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol about how the author was rebutting the idea that…well, poor people should die so they didn’t mess up the economy.

What was Dickens really doing when he wrote A Christmas Carol? Answer: He was weighing in on one of the central economic debates of his time, the one that raged between Thomas Malthus and one of the disciples of Adam Smith.

Malthus famously argued that in a world in which economies grew arithmetically and population grew geometrically, mass want would be inevitable. His Essay on Population created a school of thought which continues to this day under the banners of Zero Population Growth and Sustainability. The threat of a “population bomb” under which my generation lived was Paul Ehrlich’s modern rehashing of the Malthusian argument about the inability of productivity to keep pace with, let alone exceed, population growth.

Jean Baptiste Say, Smith’s most influential disciple, argued on the other hand, as had his mentor, that the gains from global population growth, spread over vast expanses of trading, trigger gains from a division of labor which exceed those ever thought possible before the rise of the market order.

Guess whose ideas Charles Dickens put into the mouth of his antagonist Ebenezer Scrooge.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation? … If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

There are one bajillion versions of A Christmas Carol out there…if you watch one, I hope you grab onto the deeper argument in the story.

[five]

I’m out of time, so just a quick pop culture recommendation. If you haven’t seen Yellowstone, it’s easily my favorite show this year…and a top 5 of all time on my list.

The story follows a family trying to hang onto one of the last old-school cattle ranches outside Bozeman, MT as a pleathora of economic and political forces try to rip it from their hands. Creator/showrunner Taylor Sheridan (Sons of Anarchy, Wind River, Hell or High Water) is one of the only creators in Hollywood trying to tell stories of the American heartland, and he does a bang up job on this one.

You can stream all three seasons on Peacock.

Until the next one,

-sth