From The Fields

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. The establishment commentariat is having a really hard time figuring out how Donald J Trump managed to get elected President. Twice. The second time as a convicted felon with well documented sexual peccadilloes and a record as a businessman that was littered with bankruptcies. And against a black woman that had much less personal baggage. Other than using Willie Brown to gain entry into the halls of power and disposing of him unceremoniously after he was no longer useful, that is.

Let me put forth an explanation that I have not heard elsewhere. Affirmative action. Women and people of color, who have been beneficiaries of affirmative action since the 1960s hated Trump and voted overwhelmingly for Harris. Men, particularly white men, who have been effectively discriminated against by those affirmative action policies for the last 60 years, voted for the candidate who made it clear that he detested the concept of affirmative action and the accompanying Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, DEI, programs.

Trump, ever the transactional politician, immediately rewarded his male base by issuing Executive Orders that seek to root out affirmative action and DEI entirely. Affirmative action and DEI were largely created by executive order in the first place, by JFK in 1961 mandating federal contractors take affirmative action to insure equal employment opportunities without regard to race, creed, color or national origin. LBJ followed up with another Executive Order which prohibited discrimination on those bases. Discrimination based on sex was added shortly after.

From a libertarian perspective, there is no morally defensible reason to defend discrimination on any of those factors. But discrimination based on ability and the willingness to work hard is eminently defensible. The U.S. had a long history of legally discriminating against racial groups and women. Pretty much like every other political jurisdiction in the world at that time. It needed to end. But ending it by changing who was discriminated against, that would be white men, is not morally defensible. And that is the perception that smart hardworking men have been sensing for decades now. They don't like it. That's why they voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And Trump delivered. In the words of his Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, "Promises made, promises kept...President Trump campaigned on ending the scourge of DEI from our Federal government and returning America to a merit based society where people are hired on their skills, not for the color of their skin."

On this issue, it's hard to make a moral argument against Trump. On immigration and tariffs and a myriad of other issues, it's easy. We will be sure to point those out in future issues of "Reports From the Fields". I'm Richard Fields. See you next week.

The weekend before last ,a Chinese hedge fund, High Flyer Capital Management, released a new Artificial Intelligence large language model, DeepSeek-R-1 which appears to be equivalently functional to Silicon Valley created ChatGBT. And they claim it only cost $6 million, a fraction of the cost of its Silicon Valley competitors. Moreover, it's claimed that it was built with older pre-embargo Nvidia chips.

Of course, I decided to put it to the test. Predictably, the site was incredibly busy. It took me a couple of days to establish an account. Then I asked my standard test question for AI: "Would modern civilization be possible without the use of fossil fuel?" It gave the samed hedged answer that I've received from the U.S. based AI sites, "Yes, but history would have looked much different...yada, yada, yada." I tried to ask it to give me a history of Tiananmen Square but it was too busy to respond. Hmmm.

OpenAI is already complaining about copyright infringement. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The real lesson to be learned is a demonstration of the law of unintended consequences. The U.S. has banned export of Nvidia's latest generation high end chips to China. Can't have the ChiComs using any of our vaunted technology, right? So the clever Chinese evidently found a low cost way to produce a product that appears scary enough to spook the stock-trading algorithms to tank Nvidia stock 17% in one day.

Ultimately, Nvidia probably has nothing to be afraid of. More companies producing more AI machines will just feed an insatiable demand for machine written term papers and the like. And there may be some actual productivity gains coming from AI in the real world. It sure reduces the research time to write these Reports. And that's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. The establishment commentariat is having a really hard time figuring out how Donald J Trump managed to get elected President. Twice. The second time as a convicted felon with well documented sexual peccadilloes and a record as a businessman that was littered with bankruptcies. And against a black woman that had much less personal baggage. Other than using Willie Brown to gain entry into the halls of power and disposing of him unceremoniously after he was no longer useful, that is.

Let me put forth an explanation that I have not heard elsewhere. Affirmative action. Women and people of color, who have been beneficiaries of affirmative action since the 1960s hated Trump and voted overwhelmingly for Harris. Men, particularly white men, who have been effectively discriminated against by those affirmative action policies for the last 60 years, voted for the candidate who made it clear that he detested the concept of affirmative action and the accompanying Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, DEI, programs.

Trump, ever the transactional politician, immediately rewarded his male base by issuing Executive Orders that seek to root out affirmative action and DEI entirely. Affirmative action and DEI were largely created by executive order in the first place, by JFK in 1961 mandating federal contractors take affirmative action to insure equal employment opportunities without regard to race, creed, color or national origin. LBJ followed up with another Executive Order which prohibited discrimination on those bases. Discrimination based on sex was added shortly after.

From a libertarian perspective, there is no morally defensible reason to defend discrimination on any of those factors. But discrimination based on ability and the willingness to work hard is eminently defensible. The U.S. had a long history of legally discriminating against racial groups and women. Pretty much like every other political jurisdiction in the world at that time. It needed to end. But ending it by changing who was discriminated against, that would be white men, is not morally defensible. And that is the perception that smart hardworking men have been sensing for decades now. They don't like it. That's why they voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And Trump delivered. In the words of his Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, "Promises made, promises kept...President Trump campaigned on ending the scourge of DEI from our Federal government and returning America to a merit based society where people are hired on their skills, not for the color of their skin."

On this issue, it's hard to make a moral argument against Trump. On immigration and tariffs and a myriad of other issues, it's easy. We will be sure to point those out in future issues of "Reports From the Fields". I'm Richard Fields. See you next week.

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. Angela McCardle, the Chair of the Libertarian National Committee is doing victory laps. She claims that Donald J Trump has fulfilled the promises he made to Libertarians at their national convention last spring by appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and by pardoning Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road website.

Not so fast. RFK Jr. demonstrated that he can talk the libertarian talk when he spoke to last spring's LP convention. But, walk the walk? Not so much. He spent most of his adult life as an activist lawyer pursuing ultra-green environmental goals which are sometimes antithetical to property rights and other libertarian priorities. And it's one thing to call out as unwarranted a government mandate on an experimental vaccine. It's another, and potentially dangerous to your health, thing to call out all vaccines as bad things. I, for one, am glad to have taken my childhood polio shots.

And, while most libertarians would agree that a pardon of the Dread Pirate Roberts should occur, his worthiness to be pardoned pales in comparison to, say Edward Snowden. Ulbricht's website facilitated the sale of illegal narcotics and services. Drugs and services between willing buyers and sellers should not be illegal. Changing the laws that make them illegal seems to me to have better optics than thumbing your nose at those bad laws. It kind of reinforces the cynical criticism of libertarians as just conservatives who like to get high.

Edward Snowden, on the other hand, single handedly, and at great personal risk, exposed massive lawbreaking on the part of our national intelligence apparatus and their subcontractors. It is because of Snowden's whistle-blowing that we know of the massive data vacuum of personal information, that our nation's intelligence agencies have the ability to focus on any one of us. When Snowden saw the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie under oath to Congress he decided to release what he knew, to trustworthy journalists. He escaped to Russia of all places and ultimately was given asylum and eventually citizenship there. He's the guy that the Libertarian Party should have suggested Trump pardon.

It's not too late. Trump has hinted that he is open to brokering an end of hostilities between Ukraine and Russia. It's not inconceivable that a pardon for Snowden could be part of that negotiation. Ulbricht was a website operator who facilitated dealing in narcotics. Like all drug dealers and other criminals who have no unwilling victims, he should be pardoned. Snowden laid bare that our own government has been, and continues, to illegally spy on American citizens without warrant or cause. He's a national hero. He should not only be pardoned but also awarded the Medal of Freedom.I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

Hi, I'm Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. Nothing says that Republicans learned nothing from their November wins like GOP Speaker Mike Johnson pushing through a massive budget reconciliation bill at the end of the year that keeps the government open until March.

The bill suspends the debt limit, a Trump demand. It authorizes $110 billion in farm and disaster aid and more submarines for the Navy. Money the government doesn't have. Which means the cost will be passed on to the public in the form of inflation instead of taxes. Amounting to an average of over $320 per person. At 118 pages, it's a marginal improvement over the original Mike Johnson negotiated reconciliation bill which had more than 1500 pages of pork including huge pay raises for Congresscritters.

Johnson, the Republican Speaker had to rely on near unanimous Democratic support and the votes of 34 RINOs. And that demonstrates that in spite of the voter message that elected a Republican House, switched the Senate to GOP control and elected a GOP President, Republicans still are not responding to the desire of the voters for less government spending. Not the same old pushing the ever-increasing debt can down the road.

It's a stark contrast to Argentina where voters elected a President, Javier Milei, who promised to reduce spending and inflation and then actually did so.

In a just world the costs of disasters would be borne by private insurance paid for by those suffering the losses, not by the taxpayers. Likewise, lobbying groups like big Ad and the military/industrial complex would not be bailed out whenever they say please gimmee.

Unfortunately passage of the Reconciliation Bill which increases spending and cuts nothing, when we're already running record red ink under a Republican majority, bodes poorly for any significant change in government overspending. DOGE has its work cut out for it. It doesn't look very optimistic. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.