Source: Persuasion
by Sam Kahn
“This month’s election was not just a defeat for the Democrats. It was the end of the Democratic Party as we know it. The one conclusion that everybody seems to share in common is that the Democrats, to reconstitute themselves, need to make some bold moves. But almost nobody has any idea what those bold moves are.” (11/20/24)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/democrats-must-discover-their-unique
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“A U.S.-armed government is openly starving millions of people to death, and the official reaction in Washington is a shrug.” (11/20/24)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/gaza-is-still-being-deliberately
Source: Reason
by Eric Boehm
“Donald Trump has tabbed Howard Lutnick to be the next secretary of the Department of Commerce. He should also be the last.” (11/20/24)
https://reason.com/2024/11/20/abolish-the-commerce-department/
Source: EconLog
by Jon Murphy
“While science can be used to influence policy outcomes in a potentially helpful way (eg, a carbon tax can be used to reduce CO2 emissions and fight global warming), the tail can come to wag the dog, too. Policies can be asserted and scientific justifications sought after the fact. Consequently, this can lead to a game of ‘whack-a-mole’ where a rotating list of (often contradictory) justifications are floated and discarded as situations warrant. In turn, actual policy discussions go nowhere because goal posts are constantly shifting. In short, expert opinion becomes about justifying a preferred policy rather than policy attempting to solve a given problem and seeing expert opinion to help.” (11/20/24)
Source: Town Hall
by Larry Elder
“Of the television commentators who routinely disparaged, attacked, demeaned, and mocked former President Donald Trump and his supporters, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, co-hosts of MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’, belong to the ‘A’ team. Yet, after Trump’s extraordinary victory two weeks ago, including a sweep of all seven swing states and becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years, Scarborough and Brzezinski visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the election, spending a reported 90 minutes with the president-elect. As for why they made the trek, Brzezinski said: ‘For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn’t we?’ … the most likely reason: ratings. Since Trump’s victory, which several MSNBC hosts predicted would not happen, the channel’s primetime viewership is down a whopping 53%. By contrast, Fox’s ratings are up 38%.” (11/21/24)
https://townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2024/11/21/trump-from-fascist-to-lets-do-lunch-n2648075
Source: Quillette
by Maco Visscher
“When ‘nuclear-loving greens’ demand innovation, they imply something is wrong with current reactors, and slow down climate policy. This needs to stop.” [editor’s note: That’s an easy trade to make. Let the current reactor operators give up their massive government (Price-Anderson) insurance subsidy and the market will establish who’s right – TLK] (11/20/24)
https://quillette.com/2024/11/20/nuclear-power-is-already-great-greens-environmentalism/
Source: Bet On It
by Matthew Gagnon
“Flashing back twenty years ago, I was a fairly typical self-described libertarian, and as such I used to describe myself as broadly ‘Austrian’ in philosophy. My attraction to Austrian economics had little to do with actually understanding it, but instead related to my perception of what Austrians represented in the broad debates about economic policy. In my mind, they were the rebellious champions of free markets and individual liberty doing battle against the mindless orthodoxy of Keynesian interventionist thought in economics and government. They were the challengers of conventional wisdom, and didn’t play nice in the sandbox with others. A perfect fit for my youthful non-conformism. In actuality, though, my grasp of economic theory was quite superficial.” (11/20/24)
Source: Semafor
by David Weigel
“Democrats are hitting every pressure point in their post-election analysis — every decision Harris should have made but didn’t, every policy choice she should have clarified before Republicans could define her. I’ve been struck by how little they’ve cited Gaza, and the demand that Harris break with her administration to end arms shipments to Israel. The anti-war left wanted a change in policy; failing that, it wanted Democrats to look over the 2024 wreckage and realize that it could have been prevented had they forced an end to the war. That is not the lesson Democrats took away, and Trump’s first foreign policy hires — Marco Rubio at State, Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel — emboldened angry liberals who wanted to tell protest voters that Trump had duped them.” (11/20/24)
Source: Beat The Press
by Dean Baker
“Eduardo Porter joined the chorus of people telling us that the inequality of the last four decades was just the result of the free market in his Washington Post column. As Porter puts it: ‘A paper last year by economists from Princeton and Columbia argues that Democrats started losing the working class back in the 1970s, when they bought into the notion that the government should let market forces rip, dropping the New Deal approach of improving workers’ lot via strong unions, job guarantees, minimum wages and protectionism — and instead assisting the economy’s losers via taxes and transfers.’ He then argues that this is the source of the rise in working class support for authoritarianism. The problem with this line is that we did not let market forces rip. Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies are not the f**king market.” (11/20/24)
Source: The UnPopulist
by Andy Craig
“It can simply stay in session and fulfill its constitutional obligations without feeling obliged to rubber stamp his ridiculous picks.” (11/20/24)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-senate-can-thwart-trumps-power