From the right: Growing Foreign Cyberthreats
“Critical infrastructure in the US contains industrial control systems that are known to be easy targets for cyber attackers,” warns Gordon G. Chang at The Hill. “On Nov. 25, an Iran-linked hacker group . . . took control of a part of the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, in western Pennsylvania . . . with little effort.” “At one time, hackers were focused on espionage and data theft. Now, however, there is another objective: disruption of critical infrastructure.” “Chinese hackers have had their way with American infrastructure networks” and “in May 2021, a Russian group hit the Colonial Pipeline network, creating gas shortages.” This year’s seen “317 publicly reported ransomware attacks against healthcare facilities.” Beware: “Attacks on infrastructure can be expected in the early stages of a war,” yet “America has left itself vulnerable.”
Econ watch: Recession’s Around the Corner
“Substantial changes in the money supply” make “the real economy and prices, with lags, go up and down,” note Steve H. Hanke & John Greenwood at National Review. Based on this “well-known and robust quantity theory of money,” the two predicted “inflation would surge” to 9% after “the Fed hit its monetary accelerator” post-COVID, driving the annual money-supply growth rate to an “unprecedented” 26.7% — and inflation “peaked at 9.1 percent per year in June 2022.” Yet now the Fed has “flipped the switch on its printing presses” for the greatest “contractionary episode” since “the Great Depression.” So “buckle your seatbelts” — with a lag, all such major money-supply contractions have “produced a recession.”
Conservative: How Dads Reduce Crime
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason L. Riley cheers a long-ago NYC ad campaign targeting teen pregnancy: “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.” The simple three-step advice “success sequence” won many admirers — and it works “to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law.” But: “Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of babies in the U.S. born to unwed mothers grew from 5% to almost 50%” — leaving many neighborhoods “vulnerable to higher rates of crime, especially violent crime.” When it comes to “root causes” of crime, “family instability may be the biggest factor of all,” but “it’s not receiving the attention it deserves.”
Campus beat: Abolish Speech Codes
“Critics are correct to note the hypocrisy of university leaders” answering Rep. Elise Stefanik’s questions last week by embracing “a version of free speech absolutism that tolerates calls for Jewish genocide after years of punishing far less objectionable speech deemed offensive to other minority groups,” argues James Kirchik at The New York Times, but if the problem “is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry, the solution” is “to abolish speech codes entirely.” Punish students for violence, real threats and disrupting classes or others’ speech, but not “for speech protected by the First Amendment — even something as odious as a call for genocide.” Beware “giving educational institutions even greater power to enforce regulations barring ‘hate speech,’ ” because “we are all at risk of falling afoul of them.”
Libertarian: Spending Is Off the Rails
The Biden Department of Transportation just “hyped” an $8.2 billion grant for high-speed rail projects, including billions for California’s hopeless LA-to-San Francisco “boondoggle,” even as “the federal government racked up a $383 billion deficit in just the first two months of FY 2024,” with interest payments soaring 65% year-over-year, gasps David Ditch at Reason. The rail funding was “part of an unprecedented $7.5 trillion spending spree from 2020 to 2022” that fueled inflation and, in turn, interest rates. The “government’s finances pose a tremendous threat to the country’s economic prospects. One small step in the right direction” would be to quit spending on “rail projects that might never be completed, let alone come close to being worth the cost.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board