Urban Wonk: How To Benefit From Those Closing Malls
Online retail continues to eat into its brick-and-mortar competitors to such an extent that “store closings are running at a rate higher than during the Great Recession,” notes Joel Kotkin at the Orange County Register. But there’s an upside: all that new space. In California, for example, “misguided state policy has created a raft of poor outcomes — rising prices, low inventory, declining affordability, the second-lowest homeownership rate in the nation.” So the new space can be used to inject more supply to finally meet the demand for housing. Plus, if done the right way, Kotkin argues, it would ease fears of overcrowding: “Attached townhomes or detached townhouses” would help first-time homebuyers while producing “fewer cars than even a poor-performing mall.”
Asia Expert: Is North Korea Getting More Dangerous?
Two incidents on Otto Warmbier’s trip — during which he was arrested and imprisoned and died last week of his injuries — raise questions about whether tour companies are getting dangerously careless. Tour guides would drink heavily at night, participants told Politico’s Isaac Stone Fish, and on New Year’s Eve they temporarily lost Warmbier’s roommate when he ran off from Kim Il-sung Square in Pyongyang. On the return train trip back into China, tour guides hid one man’s passport, leading him to be interrogated by North Korean border guards. Fish says certain tours are becoming less careful, and the North Korean regime may be signaling a crackdown: “I believe North Korea remains a safe place for adventurous, but cautious American travelers. It’s unclear, however, if Warmbier’s tragic death was an aberration or the start of a new, more dangerous normal.”
Centrist: Defense Policy Needs Political Support
Defense Secretary James Mattis has been a reassuring presence to our allies abroad, writes Anne Applebaum at The Washington Post. But the “Mattis in charge” mantra is dangerous: “A foreign policy, like an economic policy, can succeed only if it has political backing.” Military experts at the Pentagon are well-suited to make decisions about troop levels in Afghanistan. But that’s not all there is to the process: “If we decide to send more soldiers to Kabul, who will take on the task of explaining the larger purpose of that war? . . . If soldiers die in Afghanistan, who will explain to their families why their sacrifice was justified?” That shouldn’t fall to the defense secretary, Applebaum argues. “Those are tasks for elected officials, men and women who have been chosen by a democratic political process exactly for that purpose.”
Band Leader: Why We Fought for Our ‘Offensive’ Name
Government bureaucrats don’t understand the idea of a racial or ethnic minority “reappropriating” a slur to drain it of its poison. That’s what Simon Tam, founder of the band The Slants, and his bandmates were doing when they chose their name, he writes in The New York Times. A group of Asian-Americans, The Slants didn’t want to empower bigotry, they wanted to own it — literally. The feds wouldn’t let them trademark the name, ruling that it was offensive, but the Supreme Court recently ruled in The Slants’ favor. Notes Tam: “Every scientific study confirms that the stigma of derogatory terms like ‘queer’ and ‘bitch’ are mediated by perceived power when the referenced groups own them. The role of the government shouldn’t include deciding how members of a group define themselves. That right should belong to the community itself.”
From the Right: Republicans’ Poor Health-Care Sales Job
Are Republicans capable of selling the public on health-care reform? Michael Brendan Dougherty doubts it. At the National Review, he diagnoses the problem: “Republicans have thought about ObamaCare almost exclusively in fiscal terms. That’s almost understandable; the law greatly increases voters’ tax burden, its exchanges don’t work without an endless infusion of federal cash, and its thicket of regulations is nightmarish.” But they seem to have no response — or even no desire for a response — to the public anxiety about health coverage, which is what drives so much opposition to upending the system. “The overall level of punishment for Republicans will be directly related to the number of people whose health-care arrangements are thrown into doubt.” If they can’t put minds at ease, they can’t sell this bill.
Compiled by Seth Mandel
