Mailbag: Condescending to the wine moms

Plus, serious manufacturing policy, underpaying state legislators, and VAT confusion

It’s been incredibly hard to do editorial planning for next week’s newsletters given the wild gyrations in trade policy.

The good news is that while this is annoying and difficult to deal with from the standpoint of a small family newsletter publishing business, we’re not talking about eight-figure fixed investments that are supposed to pay off on a 10+ year time horizon.

I’m trying to imagine what it must be like to contemplate investing in a manufacturing business under circumstances that even I find awkward to deal with as a business owner. Suppose you think the 125 percent rate on Chinese goods presents an opportunity to expand production in the United States. What’s your level of confidence that the rate will be the same in six months? Suppose you want to use something imported from Brazil or India or Vietnam as an input into your process — will that stuff be available? Will it be possible to export to the European Union or will they be retaliating?

And now, today’s mailbag questions.

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Daniel: Going through this insanity, I vascillate between blinding rage at Trump, and blinding rage at Biden/Dems for making so many unforced errors that led to Trump winning. How do you personally process your emotions about this? Or, on perhaps a more constructive level, how do you manage feelings of rage and lack of control when staring at the abyss that Trump might very well drive us into?

I bore various people in various group chats with my intemperate rants and then try to maintain a level head when writing Slow Boring.

Richard Mulhouse III: Will we ever have a British monarch with a sense of history and has the cajones to name their male heir Alfred, Aethelstan, Cnut or Harold?

Of these four, what would be your preferred British king name and why?

Cnut’s name wasn’t re-used because he’s seen as a Danish conquerer more than a British king. And Harold fell into disuse, I assume, because it was Harold II who got beat by William the Conquerer and nobody wanted to call back to that. Aethelstan is just too weird and Old English-y. But Alfred is a totally normal name, and it seems like he was a reasonably effective king. So, yeah, Alfred II.

KN: How much of the disdain for “resistance liberalism” is due to it feeling “cringe” and female-coded rather than perceived effectiveness?

I think that this sort of gets cause and effect backwards.