Election Priorities

Inclusive economic institutions rely on the existence of political institutions characterized by power-sharing and wide distribution of decision-making among the elites, businesses, civil society, and, ultimately, individuals. The elite are, in a word, constrained. Unconstrained decision-making, in contrast, centralizes power in the hands of a small elite or, in extreme cases, in one individual. The former fosters competition, coalition building, and accountability. The latter fosters elite predation.--Tupy

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An investigation by CBS News Colorado reveals how state attorneys general, including Colorado AG Phil Weiser, are attending lavish events funded, in part, by companies they’re suing and investigating.

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Half a million jobs would be at risk under EU plans to effectively ban combustion-engine cars by 2035, according to European auto suppliers.

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This year six relevant insurance companies went insolvent, and for Florida underwriting losses have run more than $1 billion for each of the last two years. Not surprisingly, insurers have been cutting back their coverage in the state or leaving altogether. The end result is that homeowners are finding it much harder to get coverage and finding it much more expensive when they do.

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Election Priorities

"The danger to America is not Joe Biden, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of a Biden presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Biden, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Biden, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president." (Don sent this quote from a Czech newspaper.)

This alarming idea should make one wonder how important the coming election really is. Are people angry over the price of gas or the ideology that encouraged its rise? Is bias in the legal system tolerable in a socially approved cause? Are the failures of the Border and Education really failures of imagination and efficiency? Are the conflicts between the individual and the state resolvable without tyranny?

It is not that these problems are overwhelming, it is they are not considered. Instead, price controls on gas are seen as a solution superior to drilling to get more of it. 

The U.S. needs an intellectual rebirth far more than an electoral tsunami.

Wood on 1619

Mandates are concerning for two reasons. First, it is not clear they are ethical. The standard rule in medicine is simple: We do not intrude upon individual autonomy unless that intervention provides sufficient benefit to third parties. This means there must be a large benefit to others— enough so the loss of autonomy is acceptable. Given that the Covid-19 vaccine does not halt virus transmission, the prerequisite is not met.--Prasad

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Warming is said to be bad for the economy but Florida, on average 26 degrees warmer than Michigan, has grown faster.

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Interesting article in the WSJ on the Durham case that discusses the FBI and, more importantly, the Press and the management of the Trump fiascoes. One line: the Columbia Journalism Review criticized MSNBC not for opposing Mr. Trump reflexively but for doing so stupidly—in ways that strengthened him.

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If Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests.

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Wood on 1619

A letter to the NYT by historian Gordon Wood on the growingly farcical 1619 Project:

I have read your response to our letter concerning the 1619 Project. I have no quarrel with the idea behind the project. Demonstrating the importance of slavery in the history of our country is essential and commendable. But that necessary and worthy goal will be seriously harmed if the facts in the project turn out to be wrong and the interpretations of events are deemed to be perverse and distorted. In the long run the Project will lose its credibility, standing, and persuasiveness with the nation as a whole. I fear that it will eventually hurt the cause rather than help it. We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.

I have spent my career studying the American Revolution and cannot accept the view that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776. If southerners were concerned about losing their slaves, why didn’t they make efforts to ally with the slaveholding planters in the British West Indies? Perhaps some southern slaveholders were alarmed by news of the Somerset decision, but we don’t have any evidence of that. Besides, that decision was not known in the colonies until the fall of 1772 and by that date the colonists were well along in their drive to independence. Remember, it all started in 1765 with the Stamp Act. The same is true of Dunmore’s proclamation of 1775. It may have tipped the scales for some hesitant Virginia planters, but by then the revolutionary movement was already well along in Virginia.

There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1619 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so. But even if either were the case, ending the Atlantic slave trade would have been welcomed by the Virginia planters, who already had more slaves than they needed. Indeed, the Virginians in the years following independence took the lead in moving to abolish the despicable international slave trade.

How could slavery be worth preserving for someone like John Adams, who hated slavery and owned no slaves? If anyone in the Continental Congress was responsible for the Declaration of Independence, it was Adams. And much of our countrymen now know that from seeing the film of the musical “1776.” Ignoring his and other northerners’ roles in the decision for independence can only undermine the credibility of your project with the general public. Far from preserving slavery the North saw the Revolution as an opportunity to abolish the institution. The first anti-slave movements in the history of the world, supported by whites as well as blacks, took place in the northern states in the years immediately following 1776.

I could go on with many more objections, some of which I mentioned in my interview with the World Socialist Web Site. But for now this may be enough to justify some correction and modification of the project. Again, let me emphasize my wholehearted support of the goal of the project to demonstrate accurately and truthfully to all Americans the importance of slavery in our history. 

 

A Dystopia of the Mind

Hundreds have died in Florida.

Oz continues to poll behind Fetterman.

Denmark believes “deliberate actions” caused big leaks in two natural gas pipelines running under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, and seismologists said powerful explosions preceded the leaks.
Who benefits from this?

The pursuit of accurate knowledge and the pursuit of ideological satisfaction are inherently conflicting goals, whether in American universities today or in universities in other times and places.--Sowell

                A Dystopia of the Mind

This is a good little summary from Baker on the current dangerous state of affairs in the U.S.:

"If I had to pick the most worrying characteristic of our current dystopia, I would choose the unsettling disconnect between the seriousness of the challenges we face and the public discourse that is supposed to be addressing them.

We are used to politicians bending facts and logic to fit their aims, but the problem goes well beyond political rhetoric. Our larger discourse is dominated by cultural authorities who want us to believe things that the human mind rebels against—that there is no such thing as biological sex, that the way to fight past discrimination is with present discrimination, that not punishing crime is the way to prevent crime, that words can mean whatever they tell us they mean."

These are short examples of a remarkably long list that also includes Iran policy, energy policy, inflation, and immigration. And, importantly, loss of common sense, the inability of the political culture to recoil from illogic and foolishness. 

The wealth of the country has always allowed a certain forgiveness of nonsense. But our self-imposed vulnerabilities, like the mad self-punishing flagellation of the engine of the West's growth over the last two hundred years and the apparent embarrassment over the basic principles that allowed that growth to occur, have foundation-shaking implications for the U.S. and those who depend upon it.

The Danger of Food

 The Danger of Food

We are dangerously close to reducing our national and international discussions to farce.

The Netherlands is said to be the largest exporter of meat in Europe and the second largest exporter of food overall after the United States, a remarkable feat for a nation half the size of Indiana

Dutch agriculture and horticulture account for 10% of the national economy and 17.5% of exports (€65 billion annually).

The government is demanding a cut in nitrogen pollution of 50% by 2030. That amount would require a livestock reduction of one-third or more and thus bankrupt many farmers.

Data show ammonia pollution from manure has already declined by nearly 70% since 1990.

Since the early 1960s, the Netherlands has doubled its yields while using the same amount of fertilizer.

Some 40,000 farmers gathered last week in the central Netherlands’ agricultural heartland to protest the government’s plans. Many arrived by tractor, snarling traffic around the country.

Politico (July 6):: Dutch police fired shots at tractor-riding farmers who were protesting against plans to cut nitrogen emissions on Tuesday evening in northern Netherlands.

Neighboring Belgium, which has the third-highest EU livestock concentration and a major nitrogen problem as well, is watching the Netherlands closely. The government of the Dutch-speaking region, Flanders, wants to reduce the number of pigs 30% by 2030 and is offering farmers €150 euros per pig and €855 euros per sow to buy them out.

New Zealand has unveiled a plan to tax sheep and cattle burps in a bid to tackle one of the country’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases.

It would make it the first nation to charge farmers for the methane emissions from the animals they keep.

New Zealand is home to just over five million people, along with around 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep.

Almost half the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, mainly methane.

Areas of Success

 Areas of  Success

So, a guy going to brunch in N.Y. is shot by a stranger on the subway. Children are attacked and shot by a guy said to be fleeing the Border Police. Abbott has their children's formula plant for what appears to be little reason and is not allowed to start up their plant for months, also for no apparent reason.

Political philosophy aside, aren't these safety factors basic areas of government responsibility? If the government can't guarantee a modicum of public safety, what would be considered a government strong point? (Don't say 'war' without first thinking 'Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and, as a transgenerational bonus, Korea.') 

Maybe being ahead of the curve by funding early COVID research.

The Bureau of Truth

The Bureau of Truth

The Bureau of Truth and Jankowicz are testing whether idiocy can be a threat to basic virtues.
This is from an article in the National Review.

"Jankowicz’s social-media history suggests that, while she is certainly interested in disinformation, her passion is dressing up as Liza Minnelli. In one video, Jankowicz adapts the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to convey that “Information laundering is really quite ferocious / It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious.” In another, she offers up that pornographic twist on the Harry Potter books for which we’ve all been clamoring. “I helped him solve the mystery of the egg,” she warbles. “But I’d like to solve the mystery between his legs.” Her canon is limited in scope, but what I’ve seen of it is enough to test even the most committed civil libertarian in his opposition to casual waterboarding.

...

All told, it will be tough to find a more perfect example of Modern American Progressivism than this for a good while. It exhibits an entirely undeserved epistemological self-confidence. It is driven by a niche moral panic that begins and ends online. It is unabashedly authoritarian in concept and in tone. It involves the addition to the public payroll of one of the silliest people in all the land. And, like so much that the contemporary Left ends up doing, it has pushed the vast majority of psychologically normal voters into paroxysms of derisive laughter. One of the most remarkable features of our age is that the more het up about an issue the American Left seems to be, the less serious its saviors seem to become. David Harsanyi is correct to argue that the very idea of “the state putting an imprimatur on ‘truth’” is both “dangerous to freedom” and “laughable,” but I wonder if he is perhaps overestimating the extent to which the Democratic Party and its chums will ever be able to control America’s national conversation. We are told that we are in the midst of a chronic “information crisis,” and yet the best progressives can do to fight it is promote Brian Stelter, Taylor Lorenz, Jen Psaki, and Nina Jankowicz." 

Outrunning Satire

Outrunning Satire

University of Rhode Island and Director of Graduate Studies of History Erik Loomis states that “Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist.” Others have agreed with that view, including denouncing math as racist or a “tool of whiteness.” Now, as part of its “decolonization” efforts, Durham University is calling on professors in the math department to ask themselves if they’re citing work from “mostly white or male” mathematicians.

According to the Telegraph and The College Fix, a guide instructs faculty that “decolonising the mathematical curriculum means considering the cultural origins of the mathematical concepts, focusses, and notation we most commonly use.” It adds:

“[T]he question of whether we have allowed Western mathematicians to dominate in our discipline is no less relevant than whether we have allowed western authors to dominate the field of literature. It may even be more important, if only because mathematics is rather more central to the advancement of science than is literature.”

In the Telegraph article, Exeter University Social Science Professor Doug Stokes explains that “[t]he idea behind decolonising maths is that because everyone should be regarded as equal, the status of their beliefs must also be equal.”

The Symptoms of the Dreaded Whiteness

 

The Symptoms of the Dreaded Whiteness

Warning. Some may find very stupid content offensive.

Objectivity, a strong work ethic, individualism, respect for the written word, perfectionism, and promptness: would any society discourage such virtues? Would every parent encourage the development of these traits in their children? Do such characteristics facilitate success or, at least, survival In this hostile world?

Your first response would be wrong.

These characteristics are among the “white norms” that diversity and social-justice theory seek to deconstruct. These are appearing as targets to attack in schools and workshops as these malignant qualities are being run to ground.

The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, and more.

From The Smithsonian Institute:

 

Does Capitalism Have a Philosophy?

Does Capitalism Have a Philosophy?

I heard an interview with a guy pushing his book on the intermingling of woke and business. I can't verify this --and I have not read the book--but these points are fascinating.

The financial advisors of BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard control investment funds amounting to about $20 Trillion. (The GDP of the U.S. in 2020 was about $20 Trillion, the debt a bit more.) These three companies, using American investor dollars, have begun to espouse positions--and make demands on companies they influence to support those positions--that look to be in opposition to the best interests of both their clients and the nation.

Climate activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 recently waged a proxy war to put insurgent directors on Exxon’s board. Reuters described it as “the first major shareholder contest to make climate change the leading issue for choosing directors.” Engine No. 1 was supported by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors, which voted their combined 21% of Exxon’s shares in favor of two insurgent directors who won election to Exxon’s board. BlackRock supported a third insurgent who was also elected.

These new members demanded--and got--a decrease in oil drilling and refining--and Exxon's output dropped. The leases they surrendered were picked up by.....PetroChina. a BlackRock client.

Big Governments Play Bad Hands Badly

 

Big Governments Play Bad Hands Badly

(I read about this recently in a British article and thought it frightening. Then I heard Clinton opine she thought the Ukraine mess was purposeful, an attempt to pull in and drown the Russians in a Ukraine swamp of nationalism and ferocity. She called it the Afghanistan "Model." So the government wasn't stupid, it was evil. Politicians talk but that made me take this a bit more seriously.)

A historian, Robert John Service, implies an incredible American misreading of Russia, Putin, and Europe led to the Ukrainian disaster. If true, this would make a nice bookend with the Afghanistan withdrawal. With their energy policies, these people would be wrong more often than dictated by chance.

According to him, the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted from two immense strategic blunders. Robert Service says the first came on Nov. 10, when the U.S. and Ukraine signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership, which asserted America’s support for Kyiv’s right to pursue membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The pact made it likelier than ever that Ukraine would eventually join NATO—an intolerable prospect for Vladimir Putin. “It was the last straw,” Mr. Service says. Preparations immediately began for Russia’s so-called special military operation in Ukraine.

The second was Putin's underestimating the West's resolve.

Mr. Service, 74, is a veteran historian of Russia, a professor emeritus at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. This is an awful idea, a terrible error. But, if purposeful as Clinton suggested,  it does get the government off the hook for being total morons all the time. It would just make them soulless.

Evolution?

Strange State of Union where the main concern is the state of the President's mind. I thought he did reasonably well. But there was nothing except platitudes and the weird Progressive mindset. Fight inflation by dropping prices? That is simply unserious and that is the essence of the speech. 

But he didn't fall down.

Evolution?

Putin originally was a secret police KGB enforcer for a homicidal international philosophy who, in the time it took to reload, became an enforcer for a nationalist Slavophile organization. He has variously attacked independent countries using weapons classified as war crimes, used assassination and torture to discourage resistance, used vacuum and cluster bombs on civilian populations, blew up an occupied Moscow apartment building to justify an assault on Chechnya, murdered a young woman reporter who exposed it on her front steps--again blaming the Chechnyans, and poisoned a political opponent on the streets of London. At no time were there any consequences. Not from any of the Western so-called leaders.

Now, what line did he cross in Ukraine that would make anyone think he was having some pathological change in personality?

Revelation

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has been removed from Amazon’s charity platform for its failure to disclose where tens of millions of dollars in donations it received nearly two years ago have gone.

The special counsel John Durham said in a new court filing that "members of the media" may have "misinterpreted" claims that he made in a previous filing. This may be a signal that Hilary has no exposure to this serious crime.

                                   Revelation

 "There is segregation in America. Xenophobia exists in America. Antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, all exist." Chinese propaganda? The Russian response to America's efforts in Eastern Europe? ISIS?

No. This is a statement put out in Farsi on an American government website. You might think this anti-American propaganda was the result of a Chinese or Russian hack. It was not. The source of this international anti-American smear is the American Vice-President. Kamala Harris said this.

You could ruminate on this for a long while. How could a public official be so stupid? Where are the people who are supposed to provide her guide rails? Is she ill, crazy or does she really believe this is true and that she should proclaim it to the world for use by our enemies? How could such a person rise in the ranks of American political leadership?

This is beyond mere incompetence or illness. This shows a profound misunderstanding of the nation, its people, and its position in a dangerous world. That any public official would think that this is even remotely reasonable is shocking. And frightening.

Washington--and we--need a rescue.

Sinema

Sinema

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. refused to vote in favor of changing Senate rules to enact 'voting rights' legislation on Wednesday. The openly bisexual senator underwent unprecedented criticism from her base.

Emily’s List — a women’s rights group that supports female Democratic candidates and was the largest contributor to Sinema’s 2018 Senate campaign — and abortion rights group NARAL pulled their support from her. Living United for Change in Arizona and Stand up America, compared her actions to the likes of staunch segregationist George Wallace. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has suggested that he’d support primary challengers against her.

Major LGBTQ advocacy groups — which are normally united on advancing a progressive agenda — have been divided in their response to the openly bisexual senator’s actions this week.

“I’m saddened, I’m heartbroken, I’m frustrated,” said Kierra Johnson, executive director of advocacy group the National LGBTQ Task Force. “Senator Sinema was someone that we grew to love — and grew to trust and experienced as a champion who walked side by side with us — so it feels extra painful to not see her exercise her full power to ensure that queer people and poor people and Black folks have full access to participating in our democracy through the right to vote.”

Amending the Senate’s filibuster rule would have allowed the Democrats to pass legislation without any Republican support. And although the Arizona senator has voiced support for the new voting rights bill, her refusal to change the Senate filibuster rule, along with that of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., effectively killed it.

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, said Sinema’s actions this week “won’t be forgotten.”

“Senator Sinema turned her back on LGBTQ voters and all marginalized people who helped put her in office hoping she’d represent and protect their voices,” she said in an email.

LPAC — a political action group that is dedicated to electing queer women to political office — threatened to follow in the footsteps of Emily’s List and NARAL, stripping Sinema of its endorsement.


The Arizona Democratic Party Saturday formally censured Sen. Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz., for refusing to roll back the Senate filibuster in order to pass major voting rights reforms.
"I want to be clear, the Arizona Democratic Party is a diverse coalition with plenty of room for policy disagreements, however...(nonsense follows)..." Arizona Democratic Party Chair Raquel Terán said in a statement.

Remember by 'voting rights reform,' they mean voting 'rules.' There is no suggestion--even with the confusion of 'rights' with 'rules'--that somewhere in the land there are voting rules aimed at excluding the gay community from voting. Sen. Sinema is being beaten from the fort despite her credentials.

Clearly, the 'identity' component is more narrow than even she thought. There is a deeper nature that the group sees or feels that trumps all those elements she thought were uniting.

So...what does this mean for the future of identity politics? Is lock-step voting actually more integral to the 'identity' than the gender or racial 'identity' is?

Maybe the 'identity' obsession will have as shallow an impact as it is a concept.

Rules Vs. Rights

Rules Vs. Rights

The Voting Rights Bill that Biden so viciously supported in Georgia is really a voting 'rules' bill; it addresses how voting is held, not who is eligible. Who is eligible is written in the Constitution and it would be illegal to deprive those people qualifying of the right to vote. Those people do not need clarification. The question of voting process, as to whether voting is held on a day or a month or with ID or not, seems reasonable to ask. 

As always, the debate's underlying component is sincerity.

There are problems here. The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices, and it came with strings attached. Every CTCL and CEIR grant spelled out in great detail the conditions under which the grant money was to be used. Those are non-partisan election positions flooded with partisan money and ideologues.

What is good for a political party may not be good for the country.

In his presser this week Biden was asked about the Democrats’ new election bill. He said if it was not passed, the 2022 midterm elections “easily could be illegitimate.” This again shows how Trump was not the outlier many claim. This is identical to the disruptive, divisive, undermining that Trump was accused of in the last election. You can count on these politicians to be similar. They are all the same species regardless of appearance or protective coloring. They are all the same.

Do you get the feeling that the concern that the public wants to skewer elections is exactly the obverse and it's the government that wants to? Which is to say, do you think that the government is trying to protect itself from the democratic process?

A Fraternity Spat

A Fraternity Spat

The FDIC issued a website correction recently: “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) posted on its website a document, purportedly approved by the FDIC, requesting comment on bank mergers. No such document has been approved by the FDIC” and “there was no valid vote by the Board” and no such request for public comment “has been approved by the agency for publication in the Federal Register.”

The CFPB tried to commandeer a function of the FDIC! Conflict in the hierarchy is so revealing.

Kinky Thinking

                     Kinky Thinking

For those of you who admire the growth of protected special groups, there is Good News. The Idiot Politician Olympics has a new contender. AOC's insightful 'wealth is stolen' contribution to economics, U.S. Representative Hank Johnson's 'Guam capsizing' contribution to Nissology, Obama's 'you didn't build that' contribution to magic, and Pelosie's Schrödinger's Bill 'we have to pass so we can see what's in it' contribution to political physics now have a new competitor.

Enter Kamala Harris. Ms. Harris believes that 40 million Americans can not identify themselves--and never will be able to--because they do not live near a Kinko's.

Procrustus' Political Bed

             Procrustus' Political Bed

"No one ever makes a billion dollars," according to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.). "You take a billion dollars."

In other words, capitalists get rich by taking money from others. (The trade portion of this agreement--money for an IPhone, for example--is omitted.)

This brilliance is a classic beggar of questions: where does the wealth the rich are stealing come from originally? Like what preceded the Big Bang?

Instead, the statement immediately jumps to the redistribution solution, as if it had some basis in fact. But it has the philosophical depth of a North Korean ransomware scheme or a Viking raider. The thief is 'redistributing' but even he is honest enough to recognize it's theft.

In fact, the presentation of this shallow assessment is so groundless, it defies patient refutation. And it is no dumber than tipping Guam over with too many Marines or Pelosie's Schrödinger's Bill we have to pass so we can see what's in it.

Stupidity whose only unifying point is politicians. Unless, of course, it is calculated.

Zero Risk

 

                                       

                                Zero Risk

From Purdue University president Mitch Daniels' remarks to that school’s graduating class of 2021.

"This last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership. They let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hoped to accomplish.

Sometimes they let what might be termed the mad pursuit of zero, in this case zero risk of anyone contracting the virus, block out other competing concerns, like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses. Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication. I feel confident your Purdue preparation won’t let you fall prey to it.

But there’s a companion quality you’ll need to be the leaders you can be. That’s the willingness to take risks. Not reckless ones, but the risks that still remain after all the evidence has been considered."

The leadership is seeking zero risk for itself.

True Government

 

                               True Government

Biden would subsidize manufacturing $300 billion, electric vehicles $174 billion, broadband $100 billion, electric power $100 billion, and technology facilities and commercial buildings by tens of billions. These assets are generally owned by corporations. Biden’s proposals are a strange political development because Democratic Party leaders often rail against corporate subsidies. Biden’s approach is doubly strange because he funds his plan by raising corporate taxes, which would reduce investment in the same private infrastructure that he proposes to subsidize. 

Robbing Peter to pay Peter. The ultimate government middleman.

The Emperor Flaunts His New Clothes

 

                                   The Emperor Flaunts His New Clothes

The All-Star Game has been moved from Atlanta to Denver in protest of Georgia's new voting laws, yet Colorado has similar stringent voting rules.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was also scratching his head on this...
"Georgia has 17 days of in-person early voting including two optional Sundays, Colorado has 15... So what I'm being told, they also have a photo ID requirement. So it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me."

Sexton raises a good point (good points not really being appropriate for modern thinking.) "The hypocrisy is pretty thick on this one... If ...[ MLB Commissioner Robert]...Manfred believes relocating the All-Star Game demonstrates MLB's "opposition to U.S. voter restrictions," why just pull one baseball game from Georgia? What about the Atlanta Falcons seasons or all the Braves games?"

Reality abuts against consistency and purity. We can only watch to see what a subculture that ignores diminishing returns will do here.