About our Increasingly Visible Political Realignment.

Matt Taibbi has such a way with words. This is an excerpt from his most recent article, "Campaign 2024: Not Left Versus Right, But Aflluent Versus Everyone Else: The realignment of major parties away from blue against red and toward a rich versus poor dynamic is America's most undercovered political story."

"People like to say nothing matters anymore,” Greenberg said. “But the conversation that you’re not having actually does matter.” Try saying that one three times fast.

A lot of coverage of Campaign 2024 is going to be like this, in which aides, pundits, and pollsters speak like fridge-magnet haikus or Alan Greenspan pressers. There are now so many taboo subjects in American politics that even data journalists, whose job is to give us the cold hard facts, are forced to communicate in allusions and metaphors, because what’s happening can’t be discussed.

American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won. That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income. As the middle class vanishes the replacement endgame emerges. A small pocket of very wealthy and very educated, for whom elections have until now mostly been ceremonial and to whom more fraught realities of the current situation are an annoyance, will move to one side. That’s your “15% strongly approve” group, the Marie Antoinettes who’ll go to the razor pledging loyalty to the regent, even if he’s a loon in a periwig, or Joe Biden.

The inevitable other constituency is just everyone else, which should be a larger demographic. The only reason polls are at 43-43 (or perhaps slightly in Biden’s disfavor) is because the other actor is Donald Trump. If Democrats should be panicking because they’re not trouncing an opponent whose biggest campaign events have been arraignments, it’s just as bad for Trump that he polls even with a man who’s a threat to walk into a propeller or carry a child into a forest every time he walks outside. Still, the abject horror Trump inspires among the Georgetown set may be his greatest political asset, and a reason the realignment seems to be proceeding even with him around."

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A Chart that Challenges Uni-causal Arguments on Income Disparity

p> It's trendy to argue that "racism" is the necessary and sufficient explanation for the lack of earnings of groups at the bottom of this chart of household income. Anti-racists reject the need for multivariate analyses. If so, what would it be that accounts for the groups at the top of the chart? That Americans especially like members of those groups? This is an inconvenient chart for those who promote DEI dogma.

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Milton Friedman Points to the Lack of Viable Alternatives to Capitalism

Milton Friedman schools Phil Donahue on the lack of alternatives to capitalism:

The full interview:

This interview occurred in 1979, when people often sat down to talk with people even when they had disagreements.

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The Challenges of Using Money to “Solve” Hunger

Michael Shellenberger comments in "Why $6 Billion Won't Solve World Hunger: Elon Musk was right to question United Nations World Food Program Claims."

In 2002, Michael Maren, a former food aid monitor for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Somalia published a book called “The Road to Hell,” documenting how food aid prolonged that nation’s civil war in three ways.

First, much of the food aid was stolen and sold to buy arms, furthering the conflict.

Second, the food aid helped destroy the centuries-old credit system that allowed pastoral farmers to borrow money during droughts to pay for food, which they repaid later during good times. By undermining the credit system, foreign food aid had helped undermine the social ties that had kept the nation together.

And third, the food aid undermined the very incentive to farm.

. . . .

We have known for more than two centuries that almost every nation escapes hunger and famine in the same way. First, there is sufficient stability to allow farmers to produce and transport their crops to the cities, and for businesses in the cities to operate without being bombed or shelled. The ugly truth is that such stability is often won the hard way, after years or decades of war and even genocide.

Stability allows farmers to become more productive, and cities to develop new industries, such as manufacturing. Rising farm productivity means fewer people are required to work in farms, and many of them move to the city for work in factories and other industries. In the cities, the workers spend their money buying food, clothing and other consumer products and services, resulting in a workforce and society that is wealthier and engaged in a greater variety of jobs.

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