The Unlikely Friendship Between Jamie Raskin and Lauren Boebert

Plus, Army’s $1 billion ad budget; San Francisco tries forcing grocers not to close

Conservative Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert is a “good friend” of progressive Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, rabbi and author Shai Held told a Harvard audience.

Held stopped by Harvard Hillel on Thursday night to discuss his new book, “Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.” He told the crowd about a book launch event he did with Raskin at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

“Jamie shared something that really, really touched me very deeply and that has been sitting with me ever since,” Rabbi Held said. “When we got to talking about love of enemies, Jamie said, ‘I want to say something here at B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan. Lauren Boebert is a good friend of mine. And let me tell you why. I disagree with Lauren Boebert about everything, but when I was diagnosed with cancer, more than almost anyone else in Congress, Lauren Boebert was totally there, physically there with me. And I said to her, you know, Lauren, you’re wrong about everything, but it means so much that you’re here.’”

Said Held: “I think that what Jamie’s story points to is that you can disagree with someone about everything and still insistently look for the ways in which they are a human being capable of love.”

San Francisco grocery closures: San Francisco Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin have introduced legislation requiring “large supermarkets to provide six months notice to their customers and the City before permanently closing,” Reason reports.

In the Reason piece, Christian Britschgi notes that back in 1984, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein vetoed a similar ordinance as “an unnecessary intrusion of governmental regulatory authority." On X, Clifford Asness notes that the parallel to a law preventing businesses from closing their doors, a plot element in Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” part of an attempt by characters in that story to stop the economy’s slide by freezing it in the status quo.

Maybe instead of passing laws trying to ban businesses from closing, the California politicians would be better off focusing on creating conditions in which businesses are making so much money they don’t want to close? Or just accepting that online shopping has changed the economics of the grocery store business, like that of many other retailers, enough so that in some cases it may make more sense for the free market to reallocate the space to other uses?

“Limitarianism”: When Ingrid Robeyns wrote a Nation article back in January headlined “The Case for Capping Wealth at $10 Million,” I wrote it up with the comment “One helpful thing about the extreme left is that it actually announces its goals publicly in advance.” I noted:

It’s all so misguided that it's hard to know where to begin in rebutting these claims (other than with the assumption of property rights that is embedded in the biblical commandments against theft and envy, or with the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment). But imagine how difficult it would be to start a new company that makes or does something useful if the moment an entrepreneur’s stake in it reached a value of $10 million, any “surplus” value above that level were immediately confiscated. Apple, Amazon, Moderna, Tesla—you could forget about all of them. An economic system that prevents wealth creation is one that also constrains value creation of the sort that benefits customers, employees, and vendors. It also empowers government, taking power out of the private hands that check tyranny and instead giving more power to government officials.

It’s tempting to dismiss these views as so extreme as to be irrelevant, but a lot of ideas begin that way and spread if they are unchallenged. When the left says it wants “$10 million as a hard cap on personal wealth,” believe them. The word “hard” means the use of force—police with guns, or mobs with pitchforks—to take property away from people who own it.

Now the Atlantic has taken a bite at the Robeyns story under the headline “What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible?” It floats lower caps: “As an ethical guide, individuals should limit themselves to 1 million (perhaps $5 million in the less secure United States, where one mistimed hospital bill could be enough to thrust a household into bankruptcy).” The Atlantic’s Christine Emba calls the idea “compelling” but doesn’t explore what it might mean for the Atlantic itself. That magazine has been kept alive by a series of wealthy individuals—Mortimer Zuckerman, David Bradley, Laurene Powell Jobs—whose fortunes could never have been amassed if the “compelling” idea of a wealth cap had been implemented.

Army ads: The Army spends about $1 billion a year on marketing and advertising but in 2022 and 2023 fell short “by a staggering 25%” of its active-duty recruiting goal, unlike the Marines, Space Force, Navy and Air Force.

Two Army officers, Leah Foodman and Kevin Shinnick, have an article up with idea of how to revise the Army ads to be more effective. “Americans are still joining the military, just not the Army,” they write, “The Army’s failure is therefore not an issue of ineligibility, but of identity: By advertising soldiering as a nine-to-five job with benefits, the Army has distanced itself from traditional calls to service, adventure, and growth.”

“The Army must not lose sight of its mission: to fight and win our nation’s wars,” they write, calling for a recommitment to “traditional Army values” including “standards of excellence” and “patriotic unity.”

The Army ad agency is reportedly DDB Chicago, which won a $4 billion five-year contract, with possible extension to ten years, in 2020 after a two-year process. The firm hired a former Army major to help with the work.

Recent work: “Biden, Not Bibi, Is the Problem in the War Against, Among Others, Hamas,” is the headline over my latest column for the New York Sun. The subheadline is: “What do Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza have in common? Not Benjamin Netanyahu.”

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What’s the significance of $1,118? When I set the price, that was in the neighborhood of what the New York Times was charging for a seven-day-a week print subscription (it’s since gone up, I think, to $20 a week, or $1,040). I’m hoping readers come away from The Editors with a more trustworthy understanding of what’s going on in the world than they’d get if they relied on the Times.

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