Part of the push to help the oppressed and save the plant is push to decrease the birthrate both in the developed and undeveloped world. Putting of childbirth is supposed to lead to a more meaningful life, while academic excellence is considered meaningful. Child-raising is considered male oppression of women, while writing mediocre poetry is, we’re told elevating, it’s finding your voice. It’s the new mood, at least in the developed world.
In the undeveloped world, political activism and wealth accumulation are presented as more meaningful, and fewer children is presented as a responsible route to wealth and happiness (see Indian advertisement below). My sense is otherwise, that children bring happiness and long term wealth. My sense is that the best two ways to change the world for the better is to work on yourself and to raise good children. And these Idas are connected; children are little mirrors, sometimes showing hidden flaws, sometimes revealing enthusiasm and greatnesses.
This month’s cover article of National Geographic includes economic justifications for fewer children and ecological justifications. Apparently we’re making life difficult for the polar bears. The assumption is that the bears like it cold, and their opinion is more important than that of animals that like it warm, like most humans.
There is also an assumption that there will be more jobs and better food if we have fewer children, or that people will be happier. Who are the “we” who are better off. I personally would not trade a billion randomly selected lives to lower the earth’s temperature 1 degree, or for the supposed happiness benefit of 1 million empty-nest households.
In July, eitght years ago, Detroit filed for bankruptcy protection. The US was well into an economic expansion, but the expansion had largely bypassed Detroit. The Detroit area unemployment rate was 9.7%, and the Detroit city rate was 17%, among the highest in the nation. Tax income was not sufficient to pay retirement or current employees. The city was riven by corruption and crime, and attendance in school was dismal, less that 25% in some districts, about 55% as an overall average. Kids no longer saw a value in education. After bankruptcy, things started to improve dramatically.
Detroit area unemployment rate, 2005 to 2021.
The largest cause of the problem, and of the solution, in my opinion, was a high Detroit minimum wage that applied before bankruptcy and that was voided by bankruptcy. It was called a “living wage”. In 2013 it was $16/ hour and applied to any business that dealt with the city and did not offer health insurance (see more on the specifics here).The stated purpose was to insure that all workers could support a family of four in some middle-class standard, by one wage-earner working 40 hours per week. It was a view of Detroit family life and economic need that didn’t match Detroit reality. In practice most of Detroit were not 4 person, one wage-earner households. It meant that most Detroiters could not find jobs, since most companies worked in some way with the city. The only workers who could find jobs were those with special skills or political connections. The alternative was criminal business including drug sales, prostitution and burglary. The unemployment rate was 70% among Detroit’s teenagers.
The high minimum wage bought loyalty for Detroit’s political bosses; they gave out jobs for kickbacks, and some went to jail, including the mayor. Most Detroiters could not find jobs, though, and this especially hurt those looking for their first job: the job that would demonstrate that math and spelling were important; that you had to show up on time, dressed clean, and that you were not to insult the customers. High unemployment meant low tax revenue, made worse by high city employment costs for basic services: janitors, secretaries, and mail room personnel. The city was a mess.
When Detroit went bankrupt, among the first changes was to eliminate the $!6/hour living wage for employees and others doing business with the city. This helped bring the city budget into balance, and it brought in residents, businesses, and developers. By January 2020 Detroit’s unemployment rate had fallen to 6%, and Detroit metro unemployment had fallen to 4.2%, the lowest rates on record. Employment gives a motivation to stay in Detroit and to stay in school: there are jobs to be had for those who could add and spell. I covered these improvements here.
Seattle are unemployment rate 2015 to 2021. Seattle’s unemployment rate is now higher than Detroit’s.
Meanwhile, Seattle voted to raise their minimum wage to $15, with the change law taking effect in stages. The law fully came into effect three months ago, in January, 2021. New York voted for similar changes more recently. It is hard to be sure of the effect of the high minimum wage but already it seems to have hit employment. By the latest data, Seattle’s unemployment rate has risen to 6.9%. That’s higher than in Detroit, a real reversal. While unemployment in New York City has yet to rise much, they have seen a drop in rent rates while Detroit has seen a rise. New York’s are also moving to be more out of balance, something that leads to corruption and bankruptcy. We’ll see how this works out.
In the last presidential election, the largest billionaires in the US were vocal Democrats, and two billionaires, Yang and Bloomberg were candidates. Bloomberg had been an anticrime Republican when he ran for mayor but in 2020 he spent $!B of his own money on anti Republican ads, and paid the debts of thousands of Florida felons who he thought would vote his way. It’s a strange new world.
Other vocal Democrats include: Jeff Bezios, majority owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Bill Gates, founder and largest owner of Microsoft (just today blasting the Republicans over global warming — Is that logical — is cold better?), and Warren Buffett who likes to note that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary does (IMHO that’s because he games the tax system and pays no social security tax). Meanwhile union workers and white middle class folks were mostly Republicans in 2020.
Union leadership are still Democrats, but the last few elections saw union workers voting R. These were called “The basket of deplorables, unredeemables” by candidate Clinton. R support among black people is less than 50%, but growing too. it’s quite a lot higher than two decades ago. Many showed up at MAGA rallies, you’ll see plenty in videos at “the insurrection”. The only person shot and killed at the insurrection was a white woman, unarmed, shot in the face by Capital police — no charges filed, but the liberal press, who usually hate such things, was silent. Almost to the man, they sided with the police over the mob.
I notice that the Black Lives Matter rallies are populated with the well off and the well educated. A Princeton lawyer was photographed driving around with a box of Molotov cocktails, and his co-worker, another lawyer tossed a lit fire bomb into a police car. It used to be that Princeton lawyers didn’t do that, at least not in person.
Portrait of a Democrat. From the New Yorker.
It’s not like the platforms have reversed. The Democratic party was always for high taxes, high regulation, and for soft money that they could give away. They still are. In 1900 the call was for “free silver“, now it’s “stimulus money.” It used to be that rich people didn’t like this. They would point of that printing money didn’t add to wealth, but just redistributed it from those who had savings to those who did not. Now they uniformly blast anyone who doubted the wisdom of printing 1.9 trillion in new money ($6000 per person, of which $1400 is given to you), and going on to blast anyone who doesn’t like additional oversight to prevent the systemic racism they see in the less-well-off.
One reason these richest billionaires are no longer Republicans is that they are no longer involved industrial manufacturing in the US. Thus the regulations they favor don’t apply to them. In the olden days, rich people made steel or cars. Regulations were annoying. Rich industrialists had money in US banks. For them inflation was theft. Now rich people own intangible industries that largely operate outside of the country. What money they earn is earned off-shore, tax free. As individuals, they live on US debt, and possess little or no hard cash. Inflation helps them pay off their debt, and high taxes don’t hurt them. Buffett can be down-home and pro environment. He flies private jet to meetings on global warming while investing in overseas petroleum.
Elon Musk seemed like a Republican during the Trump administration, but not so much now. He still makes stuff in America, but has moved to manufacture abroad. In January, he said he was fired up for Biden. He has put a significant chunk of his wealth into bitcoins. Its a protection from the inflation caused by printing money, and it’s a bet that’s paid off handsomely. I expect that we’ll have billionaire Democrats and union Republicans for the foreseeable future.
Robert Buxbaum, March 14, 2021. It’s pie day. Eat a pie at 1:59:27. (Edited Apr. 28, 2021)
Jack Ma, disappeared billionaire owner of Alibaba.
Every 25 years or so, for the past 1500 years China gets a new dictator who rounds up the rich and famous for loyalty trials, imprisonment. and worse. This was true of Li Ping following Tianamin Square, and Mao Zedong who killed some 75 million as part of his 10,000 flowers, great leap purges. The current dictator, Jenping Xi. Like, has been rounding up anyone he worries about, and that’s basically anyone he might worry about. The latest is Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, China’s version of e-bay and Amazon. Until his disappearance, he was the richest person in China.
Ma had not been seen in public since October 2020, when he and two top lieutenants of Alibaba were called to meet with regulators. He reappeared months later in a 40 second video (some say a hostage video) to say he is more rested now, and that he is positive that China’s regulators do not stifle innovation. As typical for China, there is no information about his whereabouts. What’s novel is that US media companies are involved helping Xi to trace potential opposition and keep questions out of the press. This includes Google, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as US media outlets.
China’s biggest starlet, Fan Bingbing, vanished from sight and the internet for months. She may have said something critical, but has reappeared and recanted it.
In the past the news and social media would have been full of negative comments about China, and Ma’s detention , both from within and without. Now there is hardly anything and what little there is, is mildly positive about Xi. For three months there have been no e-mail or published tweets or Facebook posts from Ma or his lieutenants. Similarly, there is no room for negative speculation within China, and little within the US. The company’s planned IPO was cancelled, one that could have been the richest in history, but this fact got virtually no press, not in China, not in the US. Regulators cancelled it just two days before the start of trading. You’d expect screams from inside and outside China; instead, the story has been covered only briefly by CNN and the Financial Times, generally putting a pro-China spin on it. They stress the importance of regulations and avoiding monopolies, and don’t mention that Alibaba competes with Amazon, e-bay and Walmart. The expectation is that Ma and his higher-ups will be found guilty of monopoly trading and abuse of power. Under Xi, these crimes that have sent corporate leaders to prison for 12 to 20 years.
Ren Zhiqiang, missing billionaire, sentenced to 18 years.
Consider the fate of Ren Zhiqiang, the 69 year old chairman of Huayuan property conglomerate. It was one of the largest property groups in China, but Ren vanished in March 2020 after being heard to have complained about how the government was handling COVID-19. He was expelled from the communist party, and in September 2020 sentenced to 18 years in jail for “taking bribes and abuses of power.” There was hardly a trial, and as with Jack Ma, Facebook and Twitter helped the party silence Ren and his supporters. The result is that he had no recourse to the court of public opinion. About a month later, Facebook and Twitter did the same to Donald Trump, banning him for life from Facebook, Twitter. All other platforms joined, these included Snap and Reddit. As in China they also banned his main lieutenants and his main supporters, including the my-pillow man. The internet services also closed (deplatformed) Parler, the only competing web-service that allowed Trump and his supporters to post.
It can help to have public outcry, as Xi found after he disappeared China’s most popular movie starlet, Fan Bingbing in July 2018. Fan is a star of Chinese TV and movies and appears in Iron Man II and X-Men. As with Ma and Ren, Facebook and Twitter removed all posts, comments, questions, and complaints about Fan, releasing only the official statement that she was under investigation and taking a break. Unlike Ren, Fan reappeared a year later, April 2019 with no official charges filed. Nor has there been any official report. She has apologized for misdoings. and is supposed to have paid some $150 million, but she’s free. My guess is that the pressure of 100 million Chinese fans is what helped Ms Fan to un-vanish.
Had Wu Xiaohui, former chairman of Anbang Insurance Group, and owner to the Waldorf Astoria.
A less positive outcome is when there is no outcry. When Wu Xiaohui, chairman of the Anbang Insurance Group, and the owner of New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel vanished for two years. When he reappeared, he faced a quiet trial that sentenced him to 18 years in prison. The usual charges: fraud and abuse of power. Wu’s mother claimed she had no access to her son for those two years. Anbang, once one of the largest insurers in China, was taken over by its insurance regulator who has applied to liquidate the company. Why liquidate? Probably because it’s the easiest way to remove potential Wu loyalists.
In the US, there are some claims that Facebook, Twitter, Reditt and a few other companies have too much control of public discourse. Others claim that these companies exercise too little control. These companies claim the right to silence opinion they consider untrue, or inflammatory, and they have been allowed to deplatform their competition. Congress is moving to be in charge of who they silence. I’ve found they don’t like pro-Israel sentiments. While they don’t put words in my mouth, I don’t like it that they take words out of my mouth. As a result, I’ve cut back on my use of these platforms.
Jack Ma reappeared after 3 months in this 40 second video, shot from an unknown location. To me, it looks like a hostage video, “I’m well and being well treated …” Biden has argued that now is the time to move closer to China.
As I write this, Trump is impeached for the second time. The charge is inflammatory speech. Like with abuse of power, there is no way to prove you didn’t do it, especially after the internet giants silence you and anyone stupid enough to support you. Among Biden’s first acts is to undo Trump dictates that kept China from providing the technology underlying the US power and water system. Clearly Biden feels it is important that China should have a hand in this. I surely am not going to suggest that the bribes Biden is supposed to have received from China played any role. I will say that, when I ran for water commission, one of my goals was to help make the water system more resistant to cyber attack.
Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum. February 8, 2021. As an update, I see that Jimmy Li was arrested. He’s the founder of Hong-Kong’s most popular newspaper, Apple daily. No comment in the US, or from the Vatican. Li is Catholic, and the Vatican used to chime in when prominent Catholics were arrested.
Rents in New York and San Francisco are far less expensive than before the pandemic. It’s been a boon for the suburbs, the south and the midwest, one that’s likely to continue unless Biden steps in. Before the pandemic, rent in San Francisco for a one bedroom apartment averaged over $3700 per month. New York rent was similar. People paid it because these cities offered robust business and entertainment, the best restaurants and bars, the best salons and clubs, the best music, museums, universities, and theater. New York was Wall Street, Madison Avenue and Broadway; San Francisco was Silicon valley and Hollywood. These cities were the place to be, and then the pandemic hit.
Post COVID-19, the benefits of big city life are gone, and replaced by negatives. The great restaurants are mostly gone; the museums, theaters, and salons, shut along with Hollywood. Wall Street and Madison Ave have gone on-line, as have the universities. If you can work and study from anywhere, why do it from an expensive hotbed of Corona.
People of means left the big cities with the first lockdowns. Wall Street moved on line, with offices in New Jersey, and many followed, along with college students, and hotel and restaurant workers. New York’s unemployment rate increased from 4-5% to over 9.5% today, among the highest rates in the nation, 9.5%. It would be higher if not for the departures. Crime spiked; the murder rate doubled. To keep people from leaving, landlords have lowered rents and many will now forgive a month or two of rent to keep apartments full with some rent coming in and an illusion of exclusivity. This is good for tenants, but tough on landlords.
Detroit rent history, 2014 to January 2021. Rents fell a lot on election day, maybe because of Biden, or because we think the pandemic is over.
As things stand, the suburbs and smaller cities are the beneficiaries of the exodus. Among the cities benefiting the most are cities in the south and mid-west: states that are more open and are relatively low cost: Phoenix, Oakland, Cleveland, St. Petersburg, and even Detroit. Detroit’s rents were already moving up as auto manufacturing returned from Mexico, see chart. Between early 2017 and October 2020, they went from $500/month to $1250/month for a 1 bedroom apartment, according to Zumper. Detroit rents fell after election day, but are still up 20% on the year. The influx of wealthier working folk to Detroit is welcome to some, unwelcome to tenants who find their rents are raised. I think it’s is a sign of a healthy economy that people follow life-quality, and that rents follow people. Our landlords are happy, but there are a lot of Detroit renters who are not
Joe Biden has promised to step in to make things right for everyone. He promised to have the government pay people’s rent so they don’t get evicted. I presume that means paying about double to people in NY and SF as to those in Detroit. He claims he will shutter smokestack industries too, and create the good jobs of the future in computers and high tech. It’s a nice claim. I suspect it’s a bailout of big city landlords, but what would I know. I suspect that the US would be better off if Joe just sat back and let New York rents fall, while allowing Detroit to gentrify. Detroiters need not worry about rents getting too pricy here. We’ve1500 shootings per year, that 15 times more than NYC, per capita. Unless that ratio changes, Detroit will continue to be the lower rent city.
There are two remarkable things about shootings in Detroit. One is how many there are. About 1500 Detroiters last year, about 0.2% of the city’s population. The other remarkable tidbit is that only about 1/5 of them died. More specifically, there were 1173 non fatal shootings. There were also 327 criminal homicides, but many shooting deaths in Detroit are non-criminal, as in self-defense, or police interventions, and there are also many criminal homicides that are done with knives or poison. Put this together and it seems that only about 1/5 or those shot, perhaps 327 out of 1500 total. The headline from June 21, 2020 reads: 1 fatal, 11 non-fatal shootings in Detroit overnight. You almost feel like getting these guys marksmanship lessons, but there seems to be more at play.
Even in photography, a fair percentage of shooters miss simple head shots.
The number of shootings are way up this year, and drugs – alcohol is to blame, here and in other cities. People have lost their jobs to COVID and globalization, more in Detroit than in most cities, but the government has offered checks that are used for alcohol and drugs. Most Detroit shootings begin as arguments that turn violent. There is also some gang shooting, enhanced by a bout of prison releases, because of COVID.
Drugs and alcohol help explain the low death rate. It’s hard to shoot straight when you’re drunk or stoned, and hard even if you’re not, as Alexander Hamilton found. In Detroit, many of these hit were hit in non-vital areas (I tell folks to avoid those areas :). But another part of the low death rate is lower caliber bullets. Military caliber bullets were in short supply this year, and as best as I was able to tell, a fair number of shootings were with 22 and 25 instead of the military cartridges, 9mm and bigger that were popular years ago. A 9mm cartridge is shown as the center picture below, between a 22lr and a 45. Big bullets make for big holes and high death rates.
Per capita, the Detroit shooting rate is about 15 times that of New York City. New York saw roughly the same number of shootings as Detroit, 1,531 in a city 15 times bigger, and 462 criminal homicides The cause does not appear economic. but social. When Detroit’s unemployment rate fell, the murder rate did not. Thanks to COVID, Detroit’s unemployment rate is lower than New York’s. My only thought is that the culture is the difference, that the culture in New York is such that arguments do not turn violent as regularly.
Size comparison; 22, 9mm, 45. Big bullets leave big holes.
Stricter gun laws will not help, I think. Michigan’s gun laws make it hard to own pistols with barrels less than 16″ long. The net result is that most crime in the city is done with illegal guns. In general, countries with strict gun laws have more violent crime, not less. I would like to encourage private citizens to choose smaller bullets for self defense though, 22 or 32, and not military grade, 9mm. As a private citizen, you have to bring in the criminal, or storm a building. Your only goal is to get the criminal to stop without harming yourself. A 22 will get the criminal to stop. It will killl too, just less often. A 22 caliber bullet killed Bobby Kennedy, and Reagan was nearly killed with one. A small caliber bullet is less likely to kill you in an accident, or to kill people standing behind the target. This year, some 11 police forces came to a consensus report on use of the minimum of force necessary; read it here. For a private citizen, that’s a 22. Besides, speaking from my own limited experience, I find it easier to aim a small bullet.
Part of the mandate to the 2020 election was to join with Europe and the rest of the western world in agreeing to stop the use of coal. It’s a low cost way to generate energy. Of course we still like to buy things, and we’ve largely turned to China, a country that still burns coal, and thus makes things cheap. The net result of this shift to Chinese goods is that China keeps building coal-fired plants while we shut ours. As it happens, China is worse than the US in terms of CO2 per output, but at least when China pollutes, we don’t see the smoke directly, and we don’t see their new coal plants at all. So we feel better buying things from China than from the US. Besides, slave labor is cheap.
From th eEconomist, December 2020.
Buying Chinese goods is good for the importers, and for the non-manufacturing consumer, at least in the short term. It has the effect of exporting jobs though, and eventually we have to support the displaced workers. It also means we don’t keep up our manufacturing technology. Long term, that affects innovation, and that starts to displace other industries. Antibiotic production has already left the US and along with it semiconductors. Still, we feel good about it since the Chinese don’t let us see the slave labor camps. We do get to see the haze of the pollution.
The Chinese expect this pattern to continue. China is building new coal-fired plants at a furious rate. Presently China has most of the world’s coal-fired power plants. Mostly these are only 4 to 12 years old, far younger than our forty year old plants China plans to build more, and keeps encouraging us to shut down ours. Even 10 years ago, China lead the world in CO2 output. And their fraction of the CO2 keeps climbing.
China is popular with the press. In part, I expect, that’s because they pay the international experts. lAlso, writers and editors are consumers industrial products, but not manufacturers. Consumers benefit from slave labor, or maybe not, but displaced American workers certainly suffer. Also, of course, the news requires pictures and personal stories to keep viewer interest. If you can’t get pictures of young protesters, like Grey Thunberg, you can get an interesting story. Our Chinese pollution is out of sight, and not in the press.
Large chunks of Michigan shut down for the prime days of hunting season, from the middle of October to early November. About 8% of the state gets a hunting license each year, some 800,000 people, all trying to “Bag a buck.” Michigan is an open carry state for rifles and holstered pistols, something seen recently in the state capitol, I’d say this was an illegal example since there is also a brandishing law, but it gives a sense of things here. About 29% of the state owns at least one gun, and usually more. There are about as many guns as people. Getting bullets, on the other hand, is near impossible, both for handguns and for most rifles, shotguns excluded.
A lot of the attraction of hunting is that you get to eat what you kill. Mot people do this or donate it to a food back. Hunting is also cheaper than golf. Rural farmers also hunt to protect their crops from crows, squirrels, rabbits, rats, snakes, and raccoons. This is legitimate hunting, in my opinion, even though you typically don’t eat crow. Some people do hunt bear, but that’s a different story (I like to be dressed). It’s possible that the bullet shortage is just a hiccup in the supply chain, “supply and demand” but it’s been going on for 12 years now so I suspect it’s here to stay.
Michigan, was once a Republican, pro-gun stronghold. It has swung Democrat and anti-gun for the last few years. Bulletes have been scare for about that long, at least since the Obama election or the Sandy Hook shooting. Behind this is a general trend of urbanization and class-action law suits. At this point, few sporting stores carry guns or bullets, and those that do, tend to hide them in a back room. Amazon carries neither bullets nor guns, and the same holds at e-bay, Craig’s list, and Walmart on line. Dunhams still sells guns but the only bullets, when I visited today were, 17 caliber, 227 and duck-hunting, shotgun shells. Gone were normal handgun calibers: 22, 25, 32, 38, 45, 357, and 9mm. The press seems OK with duck or moose hunting; not so OK with anything else.
The salesman at Dunham’s said that he had moved to bow hunting, something that’s becoming common, but it’s incredibly difficult even with modern bows. I can rarely hit a non-moving target at 50 feet on the first arrow, and I can only imagine the frustration of trying to hit a moving target after sitting in a cold blind for days waiting for one to appear whose distance and placement is unknown, and that might disappear at any moment, or attack me then disappear.
Part of the problem is that arrows travel at only about 250 ft/s, or about 1/6 the speed of a bullet. Thus, an arrow fired from 50 yards takes about 0.6 seconds to hit. In that time it drops about 6 feet and must be aimed 6 feet above the deer if you hope to hit it. A riffle bullet falls only about 2 inches, about 1/36 as much. Whaat’s more, though an arrow is about three times heavier than a hunting bullet, its slow speed means it hits with only about 1/10 the kinetic energy, about the same as hunting with a 22 from a handgun.
There are those who say the bullet shortage will go away on its own because of supply and demand. That’s true until the government steps in in the name of public safety. Though recreational marijuana and moonshine are both legal, government regulation means that prices are high and supply is limited, with a grey market of people buying high and selling higher. I’m seeing the same with ammunition; there is tight supply, a grey market, and a fair number of people trying to reload spent ammunition using match-tips for primers. Talk about white lightning.
Philip Schuyler as a Major General in the Revolution. His statue was removed.
What most folks know about Alexander Hamilton’s father in law, Philip Schuyler, is that he was “loaded”, that he had three daughters, and that he quickly took to young Alexander. But an important fact varnished over is that Schuyler made his money in the slave trade, a trade that Hamilton was likely in when he met the young Schuyler daughters. Schuyler was also a slave owner, owning 13 slaves, by his record, and perhaps another 17 indentured servants working at two mansions. So far, only the Philip Schyler statue has been taken down. It seems possible that many monuments to Hamilton may follow.
Statue of Alexander Hamilton, proudly stands in front of Columbia University. The ten dollar founding father.
The play “Hamilton” proclaims Hamilton’s genius and exceptional work ethic, mentioning that, at the young age of 14 (more likely 16) he was left in charge of a trading company. This was for 5 months in 1771, while the owner was over seas doing business. Hamilton knew the business well; he’d been hired as a clerk at 11 at Beekman and Cruger, a similar import-export trading firm. What items did these firms trade — cotton, sugar, rum, and most profitable slaves. This likely was the business that kept the owner overseas for 5 months while Alexander ran the shop. There are at least two notifications of slave ships entering the harbor with human good for sale. Among Hamilton’s likely jobs would have been fattening and oiling the goods for sale. Hamilton himself seems to have owned a slave-boy named Ajax who he inherited (briefly) from his mother, Rachel. His mother is listed on the tax records as white. She owned five saves at one time, suggesting she was not entirely impoverished. Hamilton’s father, though a failed businessman, was a Scottish Laird (a Lord). As for the court-mandated transfer of Ajax from Alexander, it was to his half-brother James because James was “Legitimate.”
I base Hamilton’s age on the Nevis-St Kitts record of his birth, January 11, 1755.”[1] The play takes as a fact Hamilton’s claim to have been born two years later, January 11, 1757. I trust the written records here, and imagine Hamilton wanted to present himself as a young genius, rather than as a bright, but older fellow. In 1772, at at age 17, Hamilton wrote a “fire and brimstone” description of a deadly hurricane, describing it as “divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity.”[2] Between this, and his skill at trading, the community leaders collected money to send him to New York, but unlike the play’s description, it was not only for further education. The deal was that he continue trading for the firm,[3] and this is likely how he met his future father in law. “[4]
In New York, Hamilton met Schuyler and his daughters. It seems likely that he met the father first, likely as possible customer for the slave trade from the Caribbean, or perhaps as a customer for rum and sugar. A 1772 letter in Hamilton’s handwriting [4] asks for the purchase of “two or three poor boys” for plantation work, “bound in the most reasonable manner you can.” As in the play, Hamilton was friends with John Laurens, an abolitionist, and among his first lodgings was with Hercules Mulligan, a tailor’s apprentice. Hercules is presented as black in the play, but he was quite white (see picture) with a black slave, Cato. Cato ran most of the messages. According to the play, “I’m joining the rebellion cuz I know it’s my chance To socially advance, Instead of sewin’ some pants, I’m taking my shot. No, Hercules was socially advanced ,married into the British Admiralty, even. He was a true believer in freedom and a slave-holder. His older brother, Hugh Mulligan, was one of the traders that Hamilton was supposed to work with.[5] As for Laurens and his anti-slavery organization, most of those in the organization owned slaves, and though they opposed slavery, they could never decide on when or how to end it. There is no evidence that Cato was ever set free.
The appointment to Washingtons staff was not likely a coincidence. The elder Schuyler was one of the four top generals appointed in 1775 to serve directly under Washington. Phillip oversaw, at a distance, the disastrous attack on Quebec and the victory at Saratoga– both, Burr served admirably. Phillip’s main role was as a quartermaster/supplier, and this is not a small role. Phillip Schuyler had been a quarter-master in the French and Indian war. It’s likely that it was Schuyler who got Hamilton his appointment to Washington’s staff.
Once on Washington’s staff, Hamilton served admirably. Originally serving as a secretary, Hamilton wrote many of Washington’s dispatches. Then, according to tradition, as a cannon commander, he took particular pleasure in the attack on Princeton University. He then served well as secretary of the Treasury, and as head of the Bank of The United States, the only major US bank until Burr opened the Bank of the Manhattan company. Despite his aversion to slavery, Hamilton also continued to deal in slaves. A 1796 cash book entry records Hamilton’s payment of $250 to his father-in-law for “2 Negro servants purchased by him for me.” This is only 3 years before 1799, when New York began to end slavery in the state with the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. Children of slaves born after July 4, 1799, were to be legally free, but required indentured servitude: to age 28 for males and 25 for females. Those born before July 4, 1799 became free in 1817. There is no evidence that Hamilton was a leader in any of this, but Burr, another slave-owning abolitionist, was a leader in the NY legislature at the time.
I’m with Burr.He was flawed, a slave-owning abolitionist, but vehimently against the Alien and Sedition Acts, a Hamiltonian horror.
It seems that Robert Morris introduced Hamilton to the importance of tariffs, and to the idea of using debt service as a backing to currency. It’s brilliant idea, but Hamilton understood it and took to it. Hamilton also understood the need for a coast guard to enforce the tariffs. As for Hamilton’s character, or Burr’s. Both, in my understanding, were imperfect people who did great deeds. I’ve already written that Hamilton was likely setting up Burr for murder, perhaps because of Burr’s vehement opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts — That’s why Hamilton wore his glasses and fiddled with the gun so much. Burr was also gaining power through his Manhattan corporation and Tammany organization. both of which got his support among the immigrants.
My intent here is not to knock the image of Hamilton, Schuyler, Laurens and Mulligan, nor to raise that of Burr, but to correct some current fictions in the play “Hamilton”, and to fight a disease of our age, the cancel culture. The cancel culture elevates their heroes (Hamilton, Mulligan) to god-status. They will lie to cover the flaws of their heroes, and will lie also to claim a drop of black blood in them; neither Hamilton nor Mulligan were black and both owned slaves, as did Burr. The other side of the cancel culture is to cancel — to eliminate the validity — of the reactionaries, the non-revolutionary. In the play, these include Samuel Seebury and Aaron Burr. Great building is almost always the work of contradictory people. They need some talent, and a willingness to act, and because building requires a group, they have to work in a group, tolerating flaws of the others in the group. It is just these flawed, contradictory builders that are being cancelled, and I don’t think that’s right or healthy.
The minimum US postage rate to send a 1 oz to 8 oz package across the street is $8.30. This is the price for any size package going in “zone 1”. That is, to a nearby, instate address. It costs more to send a package to nearby states or across the country, zones 2,3,4,5,6,7, 8 You don’t get shipping updates or delivery confirmation unless you pay more. By comparison the US post office charges no more than $1.50 to Chinese companies to deliver packages of up to 4.4 lbs (2 kg) and they get shipping and delivery confirmation thrown in free. The high US rates are, in part, because the post office is losing money to subsidize postage from China.
On the internet folks are amazed at how cheap things are shipped from China (I copied this post from this Forbes article)
US producers can not compete on the sale of small items, in part, because we subsidize the shipping costs. Go to Amazon or e-Bay and you can buy from China packaged items shipped by air for a total price of $1 or so. That includes the price of the item, the shipping cost, and some profit for Amazon or eBay. A US supplier could not sell this cheap even if it were a box of air. The low shipping costs result from a poorly negotiated postage deal of 2011 between us (Obama’s negotiator) and the Chinese. Until 2021, we are committed to deliver a package of 50g or less, (2 oz) for 5 Chinese Yuan, or 70¢ at the current exchange rate of 14¢/NCY. Additional ounces are billed at 35¢ up to 4.4 lbs; use the following table of prices and apply the dollar to CNY conversion. We threw in tracking services and an e-mail confirmation for free, in part because China was poor, and we were rich. Also, the deal was pushed by e-Bay and Amazon, two big supporters of Obama’s presidency.
US suppliers cannot compete.
Adding insult to injury, Obama raised the de minimis amount for billing tariffs from the normal $100 to $800 making almost all purchases from China duty free. Obama made some complaints about unfair trade, and about the counterfeits and knockoffs but no major enforcement. In 2012 and 2014, the Obama administration signed similar postage deals with Korea, Hong Kong, and the EU. The Germans applauded as it allows them to ship goods to the US for far less than the cost of us shipping to Germany. The US post office loses money on this and makes up for it by charging us more for domestic mail.
The Washington Post praised Obama on these deals claiming that they benefitted US customer and promoted democracy. Of course, the Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s main stock holder, Jeff Bezos– someone who benefits very much by the deal. He is among the relatively few people and organizations that own the media outlets. The Post loses money on newspaper sales but benefits the owners by the propaganda value of the stories, a situation also found with Al Jazeera and the emir of Qatar.
Trump has informed China that these special rates will end when the treaty runs out in January 1, 2021. A per-package ship fee will be $3.00 for a one ounce package, with 11¢ per additional once. This is less than the domestic rate, but far higher than the current 35¢ for 1 oz. I’d probably have raised their postage even more, but this is an election year, and Biden may well reverse any deal Trump signs.
Robert Buxbaum, July 14, 2020. Though I’m appalled by this postage deal, I just bought a 50 lb kayak from China, $99.99 including shipping. The prices are too low to pass up.
