Doug Bandow for the Cato Institute: North Korea appears headed for a fifth nuclear test. The U.S. joined South Korea and Japan in warning Pyongyang against violating its international obligations, just as the three governments have done for the last quarter century.
Alas, they cannot stop North Korea from moving forward with its nuclear program, at least at reasonable cost. Washington should learn the value of saying nothing.
The U.S. stands apart from the rest of the world. American officials circle the globe lecturing other nations. Yet other governments rarely heed Washington. It doesn’t matter whether they are friends or foes. Other states act in their, not America’s, interest. …
For a quarter century, U.S. presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama — insisted that the North cannot, must not, dare not, develop nuclear weapons. The North proceeded to accumulate nuclear materials, test nuclear weapons, miniaturize warheads and expand missile development. Which led Washington to … insist, yet again, that Pyongyang comply with its demands.
U.S. officials should stop making demands they are unwilling to enforce. An occasional bluff might pay dividends, but they will retain credibility only if they exercise restraint and reserve threats for issues of serious interest to America.
As I wrote in the Conservative Review: “The world always will be unmanageable and messy, well beyond America’s control. After all, the U.S. was created by a few angry, determined colonists who took on the world’s greatest power. It should not surprise their descendants that governments and peoples elsewhere are willing to similarly defy the world’s current greatest power.”
In most cases, the U.S. should say nothing and work behind the scenes to achieve its goals. Rather than highlight its impotence, Washington should demonstrate humility and prudence, virtues too often missing in U.S. foreign policy.
Millions for coaches, dollars for postdocs
Ross Eisenbrey for the Economic Policy Institute: Colleges and universities have made the indefensible argument that they can’t afford to pay their low-level salaried employees for their overtime under the Department of Labor’s new overtime rule.
Universities have singled out postdoctoral researchers, many of whom spend 60 hours a week or more running the labs that turn out the nation’s most important scientific advances, as a group of employees that would cost too much if they had to be paid for the extra hours they work each week.
Analyzed on their own, these postdocs — who are among the best-educated and most valuable employees in the nation, on whom our future health and prosperity partly depend — deserve to be paid for their overtime hours. After all, at a salary of $42,000 a year, they are being paid about $13.50 an hour — less than fast food workers are demanding.
When juxtaposed against the inflated salaries of university administrators with less stellar academic credentials making $200,000-$3 million a year, the case for overtime compensation is only stronger. The comparison that really drives home how unfairly universities are treating their postdocs, however, is with the universities’ football coaches. …
The priorities of our top universities, which routinely pay more than a million dollars to a football coach while starving the best-educated scientists in the world, are clearly wrong. They should be ashamed to be fighting a rule that will provide modest compensation for their employees’ long hours.
Post office’s new challenge: dope by mail
Kevin Kosar for the R Street Institute: The U.S Postal Service’s financial challenges are regularly in the news. Less well-known is its illicit drug problem.
Thanks to the Internet, anyone can now become a drug dealer … Technology means any schlub can order synthetic drugs online and peddle them. Supply sources can be found in the dark corners of the web, with deals sometimes done through anonymous routers and bitcoin.
Crazily enough, the mules can be decidedly low-tech: unwitting mail carriers. Overseas pharmacies disguise containers of fentanyl, flakka and other nasty drugs and drop the small parcels into their government-run posts. Our Postal Service brings them to customers’ doors and post office boxes. One study of 29 illicit foreign drug shops found that all of them delivered via the mail rather than a private shipper. …
Why bad drugs are coming to America via the postman is straightforward: Foreign pharmacies and dealers find government posts ask fewer questions.
Private delivery companies, such as DHL and UPS, demand foreign shippers provide all sorts of data each time they send something. Foreign government posts do not have such high standards. As a result, the Postal Service and law-enforcement authorities lack data that could be used to identify foreign drug mills. …
What would happen if the USPS simply refused to accept parcels from nations (e.g., China) that have low parcel-security-acceptance standards? Certainly, the revenue hit would be tiny. The USPS received $2.8 billion in international revenues in 2015, which is only about 4 percent of its total cash haul for the year. And a good chunk of those revenues were for delivering letters, not packages.
It’s an impolitic question to ask. But with Americans dying daily from synthetic drugs, it’s worth putting out there.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports by various think tanks.
