Higher Minimum Wage Is Well-intentioned But Problematic

Jonah Goldberg | Apr 20, 2016

http://townhall.com/



Protest in Chicago in 2014 (Michael Courier)

Much has been written about the ignorance, impracticality and offensiveness of many of the Republican front-runners' policy proposals. Not nearly enough has been written about the ignorance, impracticality and offensiveness of the policy proposals emanating from the Democratic side, some of which, unlike Donald Trump's Mexican-financed wall and Muslim ban, could actually become law.

Consider the race to hike the minimum wage. Bernie Sanders wants it to get to $15 as soon as possible. Hillary Clinton wants to get there almost as soon as possible.

In last week's Democratic debate, Sanders denounced Clinton for her insufficient ardor in racing to $15. Clinton took umbrage, and the shouting match that ensued led CNN's Wolf Blitzer to admonish them both: "If you're both screaming at each other, the viewers won't be able to hear either of you."

With the exception of some very cynical labor unions that support a higher minimum wage because it amounts to an indirect subsidy of their members' earnings and some politicians who know it is bad economics, the Fight for 15 movement is entirely well-intentioned. But good intentions do not automatically translate into good policy.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that California's recent decision to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2022 is already having nasty consequences, accelerating the demise of the local apparel industry. "I used to pay $5 to get this sewn, and now it costs $6.50," Felix Seo, the owner of L.A.-based Joompy told the Times, holding up a patterned dress. "But my customer doesn't want to pay that, so I can't sell it anymore."

To stay in business, Joompy will probably have to start importing its clothes. "It will be impossible to make clothes in Los Angeles," Seo said.

This is an old story. My grandmother was a seamstress in New York's garment district. Those jobs left for the South almost 100 years ago, as costs in New York became prohibitive. They started leaving the South for Asia shortly thereafter.

Businesses don't have to send their work to low-wage countries. They can simply hire robots. Already, many restaurants facing mandated wage hikes are moving to replace human cooks and servers with machines and iPads.

The Times article had a great little infographic breaking down "Who Gets a Raise" under the minimum-wage hike by age and race. Latinos got the biggest share, with 54 percent. Unfortunately, there wasn't a companion chart showing how many of those Latinos will simply lose their jobs, resulting in the real minimum wage: zero.

Ironically, one of the original arguments for the minimum wage was that it would push nonwhites -- and women -- out of the labor market. Stanford sociologist E.A. Ross defended the minimum wage on the grounds that "the coolie [i.e., Chinese laborers], though he cannot outdo the American, can underlive him." Some argued that employers should be required to pay immigrants twice the wage of American-born worker so that no firm would hire them.

Simply put, a minimum wage is no different from a tax on firms that use low-wage and unskilled labor. And if there's anything that economists agree upon, it's that if you tax something you get less of it.

Even California Gov. Jerry Brown understands this. He just doesn't care. When he signed the new minimum-wage law, he proclaimed, "Economically, minimum wages may not make sense. But morally, socially and politically, they make every sense because it binds the community together to make sure parents can take care of their kids."

This amounts to grotesque cowardice. If Brown understands that his policy doesn't work economically, he understands that the moral benefits will not materialize (though he'll reap political benefits from those aforementioned unions).

Assuming it's in everyone's interest to raise the wages of low-income workers, then the government can subsidize those wages without penalizing businesses that give jobs to those most in need of work and work experience. We could, for instance, boost the Earned Income Tax Credit or pay businesses to bump up their payrolls. These approaches have drawbacks too, but they stand a better chance of achieving the moral goals that Brown, Sanders and Clinton have in mind.

• Topics:
• JOBS AND ECONOMY
• MINIMUM WAGE

Prayers for Shooting Victims Prompt a Dubious Front Page

By Jonah Goldberg — December 4, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Dear New York Daily News,

You’re doing it wrong.

Long before the blood was mopped up, before police issued the all-clear, before the motives of the shooters were known and the names of the dead were released, before you had any idea how the murderers in San Bernardino obtained their guns — or their bombs — you knew exactly what this story had to be about: gun control.

In this, of course, you weren’t alone. Countless media outlets and pundits lunged for their security blankets. As of this writing, the day after the slaughter, CNN and MSNBC are still making this all about gun control, as best they can. President Obama, who always slow-walks any admission that Islamic terrorism is involved in an Islamic terrorist attack, once again leapt into the breach to make this about gun control, even as bullets were still flying.

And to be fair, everybody on both sides of the aisle is susceptible to the social-media-fueled compulsion to chime in before the facts are known. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. We all try to resist the race to be wrong first, but sometimes we fall short.

And sometimes journalists get so caught up in the groupthink frenzy on Twitter that we fail to realize how things seem outside our own echo chambers. And that, I suspect, is where you went wrong.

On Wednesday, even as the atrocity unfolded, thousands — perhaps millions — of people offered their “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families.

A handful of smug liberal ghouls, hungry to turn the shooting into a partisan feast, decided that the Republican politicians offering their thoughts and prayers were liars. The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten declared on Twitter: “Dear ‘thoughts and prayers’ people: Please shut up and slink away. You are the problem, and everyone knows it.”

Everyone?

Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress spent the evening insinuating that any Republican offering thoughts and prayers was bought off by the National Rifle Association.

And you got caught up in this frenzy of sneering sanctimony and condescension. So you ran the front-page headline “God Isn’t Fixing This,” alongside statements from House Speaker Paul Ryan and various Republican presidential hopefuls offering their prayers.

The supposed news story attached to the cover began, “Prayers aren’t working.” It then celebrated Democratic presidential candidates who “called for stricter gun laws” while deriding Republicans for merely “preaching about prayer.”

I’m sure you thought this was all so terribly clever.

Wrong. It was disgusting and sophomoric — and journalistically dubious. You literally had no idea whether the gun-control policies you prefer would have prevented this attack. Such laws clearly wouldn’t have prevented the numerous pipe bombs the attackers had prepared. You had no clue if this was a jihadist attack, which would diminish the relevance of gun control. (Paris has very strict gun laws. As does California, by the way — and even stricter pipe bomb laws.)

GOP hopefuls weren’t “preaching about prayer.” They were offering their prayers (just like President Obama did the next day). If this had been an earthquake, would you reject prayers while survivors were still being plucked from the rubble? Would you denounce anyone who refrained from touting their preferred building code legislation?

It is no great insight to point out that prayerful statements can be platitudinous. So what? Most of us aren’t really expecting a serious answer when we greet someone with “How are you?”

Just because good manners can be trite doesn’t mean they’re not good manners.

Good manners are a sign of respect. And offering one’s prayers to those suffering is a far more meaningful sign of respect than saying “How are you?”

More important: For some people — a great many people, in fact — those prayers were sincere. You would be among the first to denounce a Republican for questioning the religious sincerity of, say, President Obama. But you preen in self-congratulation disparaging the faith of politicians simply because they disagree with you. Worse, you make it less likely they will listen to your arguments. So what was the point? To get high-fives from people who already agree with you? How courageous.

We hear so much editorializing these days about the coarsening of our culture and the excesses of political polarization. I think that’s overdone. But you should probably hold off joining that conversation for a while, given that you politicized respectful prayers for the dead just to score some cheap points.

— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. He can be reached by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

RELATED: The Media’s Inflated ‘Mass Shootings’ Count Is Wildly Misleading

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There’s a Whole Arsenal of Smoking Guns in the Clinton E-mail Scandal

The very existence of her illicit server means she broke the rules.

By Jonah Goldberg — September 4, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Every time the State Department pulls out a new fistful of Hillary Clinton e-mails like Richard Dreyfuss yanking a license plate out of a shark’s belly in Jaws, someone declares that there’s “no smoking gun!”

I’ve written before about how shouting “There’s no smoking gun!” is a non-denial denial. Ask a cop. When a murder suspect immediately exclaims, “You have no indisputable evidence I murdered my boss!” instead of, “I didn’t do it!” it’s a good sign that the suspect thinks he covered his tracks, not that he’s innocent.

Fellas, if your wife asks if you’re having an affair, respond by saying, “You have no proof!” See if she takes that for a denial.

But here’s the thing. There is a smoking gun. In fact, there’s a whole smoking arsenal. The problem is that the standards for what counts as a smoking gun keep changing.

Nearly everything Clinton has said in her defense regarding her secret server has been a lie. Among the minor lies: her claim that she set up the server so she could use a single device. (She had two.) Her claim that the State Department was saving her e-mails to staff. (It wasn’t until 2010.) Her claim that she erased tens of thousands of e-mails because they included, among other things, her e-mail correspondence with her husband. (Bill Clinton doesn’t use e-mail.)

Hillary Clinton said she never solicited e-mail from her lugubrious political hatchet man, Sidney Blumenthal. The latest e-mails show that she was in near-constant contact with him, encouraging him to keep his various reports coming. Blumenthal was barred from getting a job at the White House, so Clinton set him up at her charity–cum–super PAC, the Clinton Foundation.

The more important lie: She said she never received or sent classified information. “I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material.”

Note: This was not an off-the-cuff statement. She said this while reading from notes, after consulting with her campaign team and her lawyers, in a ballyhooed press conference in March at the United Nations.

And it was a lie. When the inspectors general of the State Department and the Intelligence Community confirmed in July that she had sent classified material, Clinton “clarified” her carefully prepared lie by saying that what she meant was none of the e-mails she sent or received were marked classified at the time.

#share#This left out the fact that the whole point of the secret server was that it was hidden from the officials whose job is to designate documents as classified (and to keep it all hidden from Freedom of Information Act requests and congressional oversight). It’s like setting up an illegal still and then claiming none of the moonshine you sold was marked “illegal.”

But the deceit goes deeper. Most people can be forgiven for not understanding the difference between classified documents and classified information. A classified document is marked “Top Secret” or some such. But people who work in government understand that lots of information is classified simply by virtue of the kind of information it is.

My National Review colleague Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has been setting his head on fire trying to get the mainstream media to take note of this fact. He points out that according to an executive order issued by President Obama, all “foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security” and is therefore presumed classified. Clinton routinely ignored this rule. That’s not just my opinion. A study by Reuters found that “Clinton and her senior staff routinely” ignored these rules.

“Here’s my personal e-mail,” Clinton told Middle East envoy George Mitchell, who then proceeded to convey numerous private conversations he had with foreign leaders.

The Washington Times reports that Clinton’s unsecured e-mails contained spy-satellite information about North Korea’s movement of its nuclear assets. This sort of information is universally recognized as top secret and is normally subjected to draconian safeguards. There is no way Clinton didn’t know this.

All of these — and many other — facts would have counted as “smoking guns” if they had been divulged immediately after Clinton’s U.N. press conference. But Clinton, with the help of her praetorian defenders in the media, keeps moving the goalposts.

Still, all of this ignores the biggest smoking gun of them all: her illicit server. It’s sitting in plain view, its smoke visible to anyone with eyes to see.

— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. He can be reached by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

RELATED: What Will the Public Make of Hillary’s Former IT Staffer’s Decision to Take the Fifth?

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EDITORIAL: As the FBI Seizes Clinton’s Server, Her E-mail Scandal Enters a More Serious Phase

Contra Media Spin, It’s Hillary Who’s Being Investigated, Not Her Server

By Jonah Goldberg — August 14, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during an event in Chicago, Illinois June 11, 2014.

 

REUTERS

It happened sooner than even the doomsayers predicted. The era of artificial intelligence is here. A computer has become self-aware, a moral agent responsible for its own actions.

This breakthrough didn’t happen in Silicon Valley or at MIT. It happened, of all places, in Chappaqua, New York. And the person responsible isn’t even a computer scientist, but a lawyer and politician: Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s critics say a lot of things about her, but who would’ve believed she was Skynet’s mother?

A little background. Clinton was forced to turn over her “home-brewed” e-mail server to the FBI this week, along with a flash drive unlawfully stored at her lawyer’s office. The server and the drive are tangible evidence of Clinton’s decision to circumvent laws and procedures designed to preserve government records and keep classified information secret. She says she never knowingly sent classified information, but Clinton leaves out that the whole reason federal officials are barred from using private servers is that such systems are invisible to the classification process.

The Clinton team claims it handed over the server voluntarily — a classic example of Clinton’s penchant for half-truths. For months, they insisted they’d never turn it over. They caved because they had to. The decision was about as voluntary as a bank robber relinquishing his sack of cash to the cops at gunpoint.

Revealingly, many media reports say “the campaign” handed over the server. But the campaign wasn’t in charge of the server — if it was, that’d be a whole other scandal. It was Clinton’s server, full stop. To say otherwise is to protect Clinton, the author of a book called Hard Choices, from her own hard choices.

Which brings us to that evil server.

The first rule of Clintonism is that someone else is always to blame.

The first rule of Clintonism is that someone else is always to blame. That’s why the first iteration of Clinton’s defense was that evil Republicans were simply smearing her. When that didn’t stick, Team Clinton expanded the indictment to include the partisan witch hunt by that famously right-wing organ the New York Times and two independent inspectors general (one at the State Department, the other for the intelligence community).

The reason the intelligence community’s IG referred the case to the Justice Department stems from the apparent fact that Clinton mishandled classified information, which she denied.

An investigation into a random sample of just 40 e-mails from a batch of more than 30,000 revealed that four contained classified information and at least two were “top secret.”

So now that the FBI and the Justice Department, both run by Obama appointees, are on the case, attacking the motives of inconvenient people no longer works. So the Clinton campaign has invoked a little-known codicil to the first rule of Clintonism: Blame an inanimate object.

The amazing thing is that this spin isn’t coming directly from the campaign but from the reporters covering it. National Public Radio’s Tamara Keith reported Wednesday morning that the inquiry “isn’t targeted directly at [Clinton]” and is simply intended to determine whether the server was secure. Business Insider reported that “Clinton’s private server is under investigation by the FBI, though Clinton is not a target of the investigation.” Even the conservative Washington Free Beacon has fallen into using this locution, referring to the “private email server being investigated by the FBI.”

McClatchy’s Anita Kumar, who helped break the story that two of the e-mails were top secret, felt compelled to step on her own scoop. She said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “there are several investigations into her conduct, not into her, but into her use of personal e-mail and a personal server.” Go ahead and try parsing the difference between an “investigation into her conduct” and an investigation “into her.”

Clinton, in violation of State Department rules, guidelines from the White House, and all common sense, used her own unsecured stealth server. She sent classified material on it. But it’s the server that’s being investigated?

Hopefully the server will one day be able to testify on its own behalf: “I was just following orders.”

In fairness to the press, even the FBI is publicly toeing this line, saying that the investigation isn’t into Clinton. But on background, federal officials sing a different tune. “It’s definitely a criminal probe,” a government source told the New York Post. “I’m not sure why they’re not calling it a criminal probe.”

I’ve talked to several lawyers who assure me that the FBI doesn’t conduct criminal probes into anthropomorphized IT equipment. The bureau does investigate criminal abuses of them — by people.

— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review. He can be reached by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. (C) 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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The Conversation Obama Doesn’t Want to Have

The White House seems to think its denial of radical Islam will stop people from believing the obvious. 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

January 16, 2015

Could this argument be any dumber?

The Obama administration has forced America and much of the world into a debate no one wanted or needed. Namely, does Islamic terrorism have anything to do with Islam?

This debate is different than the much-coveted “national conversation on race” that politicians so often call for (usually as a way to duck having it), because that is a conversation at least some people want. The White House doesn’t want a conversation about Islam and terrorism.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest says, “We have chosen not to use that label [of radical Islam] because it doesn’t seem to accurately describe what happened.”

What happened was the slaughter last week at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The sound of the terrorists’ gunfire was punctuated by shouts of “Allahu akbar!” and “We have avenged the prophet Mohammed!”

Since no one questions the sincerity of these declarations, that alone should settle the issue of whether Islam had anything to do with the attack. And for normal people it would.

The problem is that the White House’s position is categorical denial. It is not that the role of Islam in such attacks is exaggerated. Nor is it that these attacks should not be used to disparage more than a billion peaceful Muslims around the world. These are mainstream and defensible positions.

But, again, that’s not what the White House is saying. It is saying that one should not associate these attacks with the word “Islamic,” no matter what adjective you hang on it — radical, extreme, perverted, etc. — even when the murderers release videos attesting to their faith and their association with Islamist terror groups. By taking this radical and extremist rhetorical approach, the Obama administration invites people to talk about Islam more, not less.

Think of it this way. A bird waddles into the room. It walks like a duck, it talks like a duck, it gives off every indication of duckness. If Josh Earnest says, “That’s not a mallard,” well, okay. You can have a reasonable conversation about which species the bird might be. But if Earnest says, “That is not a duck. It has no relation or similarity to anatine fowl in any way, shape or form, and any talk of ducks is illegitimate. . . . ”

Well, now we have a problem.

Such rhetorical extremism almost forces people into an argument about what a duck is. Likewise, by denying the role of radical Islam, they invite sane people everywhere to focus more, not less, on Islam.

There are, of course, many problems with this analogy. The most important one is that ducks cannot talk. They cannot say, “Look, I am a duck.”

Terrorists can talk. And they do. They also form organizations with magazines and websites and Twitter accounts. They issue manifestos. They recruit in mosques. When we capture them alive, they demand Qurans and pray five times a day, bowing toward Mecca.

You know who else can talk? Non-extremist Muslims. And millions of them routinely refer to the bad guys as radical Islamists and the like.

I could go on, but you get the point — if you don’t work at this White House.

The Obama administration seems to believe that the wonder-working power of their words can get everyone to stop believing their lying eyes and ears. It’s tempting to ask, “How stupid do they think we are?” But the more relevant question is, “How stupid do they think the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are?” 

Whatever appeal the Islamic State may or may not have in the larger Muslim world, Barack Obama insisting “it is not Islamic” surely makes no difference whatsoever. And as for the jihadists, it’s not like his words speak louder than his drone strikes.

It’s true that the Obama administration has had remarkable success playing word games. They “created or saved” millions of jobs — as if that was a real economic metric. (For what it’s worth, I do or save 500 pushups every morning). They decimated “core al-Qaeda,” with the tautological definition of “core al-Qaeda” being “the parts of al-Qaeda that we have decimated.”

But this is different. Those distortions were political buzzphrases intended for domestic consumption and a re-election campaign. This is a much bigger deal. The threat of Islamic extremism transcends Obama’s theological hubris and lexicological shenanigans. All that Obama’s insipid rhetorical gamesmanship does is send the signal to friend and foe alike that he can’t or won’t see the problem for what it is.

— Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Islam Reformer Being Ignored

Before Paris attack, Egypt's president called on religious leaders to lead.

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.usatoday.com/

January 6, 2015

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi speaks next to Coptic Pope Tawadros II. (photo credit:REUTERS)

The slaughter in Paris Wednesday shocks the conscience but hardly shocks the intellect. In other words, no one is surprised that Muslim extremists are capable of doing this sort of thing. And nearly everyone expected in the early moments of this story that the culprits would be revealed to be Islamic extremists.

It is a sad commentary that the more shocking and, arguably more significant, event came a week earlier in Cairo. Egyptian President (and strongman) Abdel Fattah al-Sisi delivered a possibly epochal speech at Al-Azhar University on New Year's Day. More than a thousand years old, Al-Azhar is considered by many to be the epicenter of scholarly Islam.

Addressing the assemblage of imams in the room, al-Sisi called for a "religious revolution" in which Muslim clerics take the lead in rethinking the direction Islam has taken recently. An excerpt (as translated by Raymon Ibrahim's website):

USA TODAY

Paris slaughter can't silence free expression: Our view

"I am referring here to the religious clerics. … It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

"That thinking — I am not saying 'religion' but 'thinking' — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world! ... All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

"I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands."

USA TODAY

Paris and jihad-in-place: Column

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Words are cheap, particularly in a region where the currency is measured in blood. But al-Sisi has also backed up his words with deeds. On Tuesday, al-Sisi attended a Coptic Christian Christmas Mass, the first time anything like that has been done by an Egyptian president. He spoke of his love of Christian Egyptians and the need to see "all Egyptians" as part of "one hand."

Is al-Sisi the "Muslim Martin Luther" people have been waiting for? Almost surely not, for the simple reason that the Muslim Martin Luther was always a Western idea ill-suited to Muslim realities (which is why some of us have argued Islam needs a pope more than a Luther). Al-Sisi, a military man, not a cleric, could be more like an Egyptian Atatürk — the Turkish strongman who modernized and secularized Turkey a century ago (and whose work is currently being dismantled by the soft-Islamist regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan).

Or maybe we're just in uncharted territory? Who knows? What is clear, however, is that this is a big deal. Al-Sisi is doing exactly what Westerners have been crying out for since at least Sept. 11, 2001, if not before that. And yet his speech has been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream new media. The commentators and analysts at PJ Media have been all over the story, but there's been silence from The New York Times, Washington Post, the news networks and other major outlets.

USA TODAY

People know the consequences: Opposing view

Why? No doubt part of the explanation is that he gave his speech on New Year's Day, when most journalists are hung over, following football not the foreign press. But another part of the explanation probably has to do with the fact that al-Sisi isn't the kind of authentic Muslim reformer many Westerners wanted.

Indeed, he's too Western for some and clearly too autocratic for many (his treatment of the press is outrageous). They wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to succeed in Egypt, not be brought to heel by an Arab Pinochet. Moreover, al-Sisi sees Israel as a de facto ally in their shared battle against Muslim extremism, and that muddies the narrative that Israel is the cause of Middle East extremism, not the victim of it.

Whatever your own view of the man, and whether you think he's sincere, al-Sisi's efforts to combat Muslim extremism — militarily and rhetorically — deserve closer attention, if not now then after the images from Paris fade.

Jonah Goldberg, American Enterprise Institute fellow and National Review contributing editor, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.

No Superheroes in 'The Interview' Cave-In

Sony should take a lesson from Captain America’s creators, who faced death threats from Hitler’s thugs. 

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 19, 2014

The first issue of Captain America came out on December 20, 1940. It shows Cap slugging Adolph Hitler in the mouth.

Good stuff, but note the date. America wouldn’t enter World War II for about another year. At the time, many Americans wanted to stay out of another European war. And here was an American superhero punching the leader of a sovereign nation in the kisser. Subsequent issues kept pitting Captain America against Hitler and his goons.

The angriest reaction came from the German-American Bund, Hitler’s stooges in the U.S. They harassed Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, with hate mail and telephoned death threats.

“The theme was ‘death to the Jews,’” Simon wrote in his memoir. “At first we were inclined to laugh off their threats, but then, people in the office reported seeing menacing-looking groups of strange men in front of the building on 42nd Street, and some of the employees were fearful of leaving the office for lunch.”

Simon called the cops, and as soon as the police showed up, the phone rang. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia wanted to speak to the creators of Captain America. Simon got on the line. “You boys over there are doing a good job,” the voice squeaked. “The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.’”

That is how it’s supposed to work in a democracy.

Unfortunately, America decided to go a different way with the movie The Interview, a reportedly lowbrow comedy about two low-rent TV guys asked to use their interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as an assassination opportunity.

Computer hackers going by the name “Guardians of the Peace,” but clearly henchmen for the North Korean regime, attacked Sony Pictures Entertainment, spilling the company’s internal e-mails, payroll data, and even scripts and rough cuts of some yet-to-be-released movies onto the Internet.

Then they posted a warning:

Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made.
The world will be full of fear.
Remember the 11th of September 2001.
We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.
(If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.)

New York mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t call the management of Landmark Theaters in New York, where Sony Pictures was slated to premiere The Interview, and say, “The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” He didn’t say much of anything at all.

President Obama did eventually say the public should “go to the movies,” but that’s about it. This at least is progress for an administration whose first response to a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, was to blame an American-made video and, with much fanfare, throw its creator in jail.

When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a call for Salman Rushdie’s assassination, the British government spent millions protecting Rushdie.

During the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was raining scud missiles on Israel, the Israelis refused to bend, even though they reasonably feared that the missiles were tipped with nerve gas.

A long-planned symphony concert went ahead as scheduled. The only accommodation they made to the assault: Everyone in the audience wore gas masks. (ABC News cast this heroic defiance in anti-Semitic terms, reporting that the concert-goers were determined to get their money’s worth.)

Those were credible threats, and democratic leaders stood firm.

In America, when faced with less-credible threats, we flew the white flag.

A theater chain caved. The movie studio caved. As of now, The Interview will never be theatrically released. In theory, Sony could release it online, via on-demand and streaming channels.

The only problem: At least one cable company preemptively surrendered to North Korean intimidation, too, reportedly saying it would not air the film. Now, even if Sony had a backbone transplant, it couldn’t release the movie.

Sony could still dump it on the Internet and let it spread virally. It would lose ticket sales, but the company would strike a defiant blow nonetheless.

Don’t hold your breath. Sony would rather go the way of appeasement. And so would everyone else, it seems.

It’s fine to say Sony never should have green-lighted the movie in the first place. That’s true of so much that Hollywood produces. The point is it did. And America is effectively giving one of the most evil regimes in human history a veto on our First Amendment. Where’s Captain America when you need him?

— Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail atgoldbergcolumn@gmail.com or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Content Agency, LLC