Politics

America has only a limited feudal past, the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the enormous class chasms of the Gilded Age being pretty much our only examples. Yet today—after decades of social mobility, a digital revolution that was supposed to empower individuals everywhere, and the construction of a vigorous anti-discrimination apparatus that putatively ensures equal rights and status—a rigid new social order with feudal elements has come into view.  read more »

Throughout the long and drawn-out negotiations over Joe Biden's ambitious Build Back Better Act, two senators have emerged as punching bags for Democrats anxious to get the bill passed: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The two moderates have been clear about their refusal to support the more ambitious items in the bill, and it's brought them in for censure and even some online abuse from fellow Democrats, who believe that their cratering poll numbers need Build Back Better to help them survive the midterms.  read more »

If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.  read more »

Our institutions created centibillionaires and are now trying to contain them.

In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, a group of high-achieving industrialists have had enough with being exploited (in their view) by “parasitic” collectivists and “second-handers”. They withdraw to a perfect community Galt’s Gulch aka Atlantis where they can live in peace and prosperity with each other, far away from the do-nothing (in their view) populace and according to their own laws and beliefs.  read more »

When we think of oppressive regimes, we immediately think of the Stalinist model portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the heavy-handed thought control associated with Hitler’s Reich or Mao’s China. But where the old propaganda was loud, crude and often lethal, the contemporary style of thought control takes the form of a gentle nudging towards orthodoxy – a gentle push that gradually closes off one’s critical faculties and leads one to comply with gently given directives. Governments around the world, including in the UK, notes the Guardian, have been embracing this approach with growing enthusiasm.  read more »

From the ancient world to modern times, the class of small property owners have constituted the sine qua non of democratic self-government. But today this class is under attack by what Aristotle described as an oligarchia, an unelected power elite that controls the political economy for its own purposes.  read more »

My latest column is now online at Governing. It is a recapitulation of my analysis in my American Affairs piece on Indiana  read more »

Two of the fossil fuels, coal, and natural gas, are used to generate continuous uninterruptible electricity, but crude oil, the third fossil fuel, is seldom ever used for electricity, but primarily used to manufacture oil derivatives that thousands of products are based upon, and the fuels for the various transportation infrastructures.  read more »

My latest article is in the Winter edition of American Affairs Journal. It's a detailed examination of Indiana under 16 years of Republican rule.   read more »

Clobbered from all sides by the pandemic, climate change and disruptions in virtually every industry by the rise of artificial intelligence, the capitalist dream is dying — and a new, mutant form of socialism is growing in its place.  read more »