Testifying before the US House Oversight Committee on July 31, Devon Archer allegedly claimed that his former business partner, Hunter Biden, trafficked in the “illusion of access” to his father, then vice-president Joe Biden.

Republicans took a victory lap on Archer’s testimony,  saying it proves the “Biden brand” played a key role in various corrupt dealings, up to and including multi-million dollar bribes to the “Biden crime family.”

Democrats took a slightly less convincing triumphal tone, claiming the testimony establishes that, as White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said last week, Joe Biden “was never in business with his son.” The “brand” was Hunter Biden’s own. Any exploitation of Joe’s position presumably occurred without his direct knowledge, let alone any “10% for the big guy” type arrangements.

As I wrote when the “Hunter Biden laptop” story broke the month before the 2020 presidential election:

“Everyone who might care one way or another knew years ago that Biden the younger got a sweetheart job with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, because Biden the elder was vice-president ….  Everyone who might care one way or another also knew years ago the Joe Biden used his position as vice-president to intervene in Ukraine’s internal affairs, pressuring Kiev to fire a prosecutor who had investigated Burisma, because Biden bragged about doing so on camera.”

Trump’s voters didn’t care about his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels when they voted in 2016, or about his first impeachment when they voted in 2020. Nor do they care about his growing stack of criminal indictments now.

Biden’s voters didn’t care about his influence-peddling when they voted in 2020. Nor is their discomfort level visibly increasing at the moment.

Per William James, “a difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”

We may be headed for the third presidential impeachment (and likely third Senate acquittal) in four years and, as with the first two, this one is less about any alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors” than it is about trying to ride a scandal to victory in the next presidential election.

But in the post-Nixon era, no amount of scandal ever seems to move the needle very much for either party when it comes to election results.

And why should it? Behind their pomp, pageantry, and demagoguery, those who rule us have ALWAYS been the moral equivalents of organized crime bosses and street-gang shot-callers. Acknowledging the banality of their evil strikes me as … progress!

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“‘Generative AI’ cannot generate anything at all without first being trained on massive troves of data it then recombines,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt writes at the Washington Post. “Who produces that training data? People do. And those people deserve residuals.”

I disagree.

In the sense that Gordon-Levitt — an excellent and well-known actor, writer, and director — uses the term, “residuals” are the payments actors, writers, and directors receive when productions they act in, write, or direct get re-used as television re-runs, streamed media, DVD releases, etc.

Even in that very specific context, residuals only go so far. They’re a specific benefit negotiated between unions (on behalf of their members) and entertainment production firms, not a general principle with obvious applicability to anything and everything one person (or entity, like an AI “large language model”) might happen to learn from another.

Most of the things we do every day are “residual” in the sense that they rely on the “residue” of a large body of knowledge developed over thousands of years by others.

Fortunately, we don’t have to mail a penny to the estate of whoever invented the wheel — circa 4500 BC — each time we jump in our cars or on our bicycles to go somewhere, or to the descendants of Shakespeare every time we suggest that someone doth protest too much (Hollywood screenwriters would pay through their noses if Shakespeare’s estate got residuals — almost any modern production works as “which of The Bard’s plays are they cribbing from?” fodder).

Nor, even stipulating to the idea of “intellectual property” as a valid concept, is the debt we owe those we learn from something that we traditionally pay “residuals” on.

How many teachers, friends, and loved ones helped make Joseph Gordon-Levitt the man — and the actor, writer, and director — he is? How many people did he learn from? Quite a few, I suspect … and because he seems like a good guy, I’d be surprised if he hasn’t thanked them for it as best he can, in both speech and in action. But 99.9% of them are likely not collecting, nor are they owed, residuals on Inception, Looper, and Snowden.

In terms of  inherent financial obligation, what’s the difference between Joseph Gordon-Levitt learning his chops from reading great writing and watching great performances, or an AI  learning its chops from reading great writing and watching great performances?

In my opinion, there’s neither any difference nor any payment due.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

“According to respected polls,” Ira Shapiro writes at The Hill, “public approval of the Supreme Court has dropped precipitously to the lowest level in the 50 years that it has been measured.”

And not, he cautions, not just to recent revelations concerning the less than ethical (those are my polite words for “bribe-accepting”) behavior on the part of at least two, and likely more, justices, but because “America has found itself in the grip of an extreme court majority, which shows no respect for the law, precedent, constitutional rights and personal freedom, or the other branches of government.”

Personally, I find the current Court a mixed bag on all the metrics Shapiro mentions, but even assuming that it’s really as awful as he believes it is, his proposed solution — term limits, with Chief Justice John Roberts setting the example by retiring now, after 18 years — doesn’t seem likely to fix either the “corruption problem” or the “extremism problem.”

Usually when I argue with my libertarian friends who support term limits, the same rosy predictions abound — it will end political careerism, reduce the time corrupt officials have to monetize their offices, and encourage “citizen legislators” (or, in this case, judges) whose incentives will tend toward “do a good job, then return to private life.”

I don’t have anything AGAINST term limits, mind you, but they’re no panacea. We’ve had time to see how term limits work at the state level, and they work like this:

A politician maxes out his or her terms in a particular office, then runs for a higher office while working to get a spouse or child or protege installed in the office being vacated. Instead of an “in then out” set of doorways, it becomes an “in then up, dragging a crony onto the now-empty lower step” escalator.

Far from discouraging corruption as such, term limits simply encourage a more carefully planned version of the already familiar phenomenon of building political “machines” and “dynasties.” Does the name “Kennedy” ring any bells? How about “Bush?”

And even assuming that an elected or appointed official doesn’t game the system that way, the incentive for corruption doesn’t disappear. It simply becomes a matter of making hay while the sun shines — knocking down the biggest bribes possible in the shortest time possible instead of counting on decades in which to amass a fortune.

Might term limits help at the margins, encouraging “citizen politicians” and “respected jurists” to engage in “public service” as an interlude rather than a career? Maybe, but so far performance versus that expectation seems very spotty.

The problem with “limiting” political power in any way is that those who seek such power will always find ways around the limits.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY