Restoring Virginia’s lost longleaf pine trees, one seed at a time
What is really breaking America? Two drinking fountains for $375,000.: Stop the Machine. Measure success by results delivered, not tax dollars spent. - "The mainstream center-left — liberals, centrist wonks, heterodox independents — needs to be better at getting mad. They have every right to be as fed up with the status quo as the populists are. But their anger needs to be constructive, directed at what’s actually broken rather than convenient villains. The populist right and the populist left know how to name adversaries and tell compelling stories. However good the center-left may be at policy and analysis, it hasn’t learned to explain what went wrong and how to fix it in a way that resonates with the disenchanted voters who have every reason to be skeptical of establishment promises.
"Here’s how I’d explain it: The thing breaking America isn’t a person, a party or a conspiracy. It’s a self-perpetuating system, built over decades by well-meaning people making individually rational decisions that added up to something no one would build on purpose. Call it the Machine. People may run its individual components, but no one operates or entirely understands its full scope."
A Sweeping Theory of Everything Is Revolutionizing the Democratic Party: Democrats are in thrall to the idea that corporate consolidation is America’s biggest, and maybe only, problem. - "Moss, a former head of the American Antitrust Institute, told me the neo-Brandeisians' error is to view antitrust policy 'not as law enforcement but as a broad policy tool for fixing a lot of problems-economic, political, and social.' Antitrust enforcement isn't that powerful, for the simple reason that corporate concentration is not the root cause of every problem.
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"The reason their unimpressive record in power under Biden left the neo-Brandeisians' confidence utterly unshaken is that their belief system is more like a religion than an economic theory.
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"Warren's position aligned with Lynn's neo-Brandeisian dogma, which maintains that bringing down the price of housing cannot be achieved by enabling the construction of more private homes, as most housing analysts believe. The solution, somehow, is instead to prevent private firms from entering the single-family market. Nearly any economist would say that if your goal is to make housing more affordable, banning firms from building rental houses makes no sense. But since neo-Brandeisian thought rejects economics as a pseudo-science that rationalizes the desires of capital owners, that objection carries little weight.
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"The abundance agenda does not cover all issues, and it is perfectly compatible with stringent antitrust enforcement. (Part of the abundance housing agenda is to break open neighborhood cartels that prevent new entrants into the housing market, a very anti-monopolistic concept.) But since Lynn's theory purports to explain everything, it regards all other diagnoses of America's problems as challenges, and therefore, by definition, as corporate plots. This has seriously compromised the Democratic Party's ability to formulate creative and practical solutions to real-world problems, not all of which can be solved by attacking corporate power."
The Great Depopulation: Why is the birth rate declining in every country on Earth?
Putin Can No Longer Hide His Catastrophe: The Russian dictator has lost control of the narrative.
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