#’Buy local’ is just nonsense and other commentary

Econ desk: ‘Buy Local’ Is Just Nonsense

The holiday-shopping injunction to “buy local or buy from small businesses . . . is pure nonsense,” opines Kevin D. Williamson at National ­Review. The idea is that if you patronize, “say, your locally owned coffee shop over Starbucks, then the money you spend there will somehow stay in the community.” But that isn’t “how money works: Most businesses spend most of what they take in and then put the rest in the bank, where it becomes global capital.” Nor do local businesses themselves spend ­locally: His own coffee shop “does not buy its coffee locally, because I do not live in Colombia or Brazil or Vietnam, and it doesn’t buy its to-go cups from a local maker, since it is not in the shadow of a paper-goods factory.”

Iconoclast: Goodbye, Lefty Dreams

So much for the dream of a truly progressive Joe Biden administration, sneers The Week’s Matthew Walther: “We’re getting a fluent French speaker whose band has songs on Spotify [incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken], a supporter of the Iraq War and architect of our disastrous intervention in Libya [incoming Defense Secretary Michèle Flournoy] and even John Kerry again.” More “good” news for the left: “McKinsey and Facebook and Goldman Sachs in charge of economic policy again. The likely return of pseudo-academic diversity training to the federal workforce, a much-deserved stimulus to one of the only growing sectors of the economy. A return to the good old days when Iran got paid to build nukes instead of having to fund this vital project all on its own.” Should the left care? “If you believe, as I do, that most of the talk from the left about workers and the environment is a lot of guff and that their only real priorities are abortion and making life better for the upwardly mobile white professionals . . . the answer is no.”

From the right: Why Beijing Is Delighted

Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping must be “feeling pretty good right now,” warn the editors of the Washington Examiner. The president-elect and the people tapped to staff his administration, after all, have a “flaccid” record when it comes to “standing up for our interests” against Beijing and its clients, most notably Tehran. “Worse, Biden is evidently ­reluctant even to identify China for what it is — a Communist dictatorship that seeks to displace” Washington as the preeminent global power.

Russiagate watch: Flynn Deserved a Pardon

“Every American deserves the same protections under the law — even those who work for Donald Trump,” declares Bloomberg Opinion’s Eli Lake. And that’s why “Trump was right to pardon Michael Flynn.” Just “read the Justice Department’s summary of its interview with FBI agent William Barnett on Sept. 17, 2020.” Barnett, the “case agent on the Flynn investigation,” wanted to drop the case in December 2016, convinced “that Flynn did not collude or conspire with Russia” during the campaign. “But his efforts were stymied, first by the FBI’s leadership and later by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller.” Barnett says he was “deliberately excluded” from the FBI interview of Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017, initiated by James Comey. Flynn eventually “pleaded guilty to making false statements in that interview,” though the FBI agents “did not think the interview with Flynn was incriminating.” Mueller threatened Flynn to get his cooperation on a “collusion” probe that went nowhere.

Conservative: Stop the Holocaust Comparisons

Melissa Langsam Braunstein at First Things has had enough of careless Holocaust comparisons: “Whatever problems one sees in 2020 America, we’re not living in Nazi Germany.” Anti-vaccination protesters have equated masks to the Jews’ yellow stars, and Trump detractors have ­labeled the outgoing president a new Hitler. But “resurgent anti-Semitism” is a real problem, and “insult is added to injury when people use Jewish suffering to cement their own victim status.” It’s all the more galling that those casting themselves as victims of a new Nazism “are typically MIA when living Jews are stigmatized, harassed or murdered.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board