Category Archives: politics

That’s the Point

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Recall that one of New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goal was a plethora of city government-run grocery stores to sell groceries at “affordable prices”—which, for Mamdani, meant “cheaper than what existing grocery stores were selling.” He could mean only that, else he’d be conceding that those prices already were affordable.

The outcome of such a move is laid out in the subheadline:

His socialist supermarkets could put New York’s little grocers out of business.

That’s the point.

Like any good socialist, Mamdani wants government to control the producers. Especially if it’s the particular socialist’s government. Getting rid of the little businesses demonstrates to the larger stores and the chains—whose individual stores generally are franchises run by moms and pops or collections of them run by small- or mid-sized businesses—that they’d better kowtow to the socialist government or leave. In either case, that would increase government’s control over the remains.

An Upstart Election Win

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Andy Burnham, a deep back bencher in the UK’s Labour Party, won the special district election held in the dinky little district in northern England, defeating his closest competitor, a Reform candidate, by 55%-34%. This puts him in line to overtly push his challenge to the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and at least get Starmer tossed as PM. Starmer has been insisting all along, in the face of his collapsing support and popularity, that he won’t go quietly.

Labour has long been the strongly dominant party in Makerfield, so the Reform candidate had no real chance. The Conservative candidate, who would have been the traditional strongest challenger, might as well have not bothered: he got all of 2% of the vote.

This raises a question in my pea brain. Is Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, Machiavellian enough to get the Makerfield Reform candidate to tank the election in order to bump up Burnham’s numbers in order strengthen Burnham’s effort to get Starmer tossed in order to longer-term benefit Reform in the ensuing national election?

Inquiring minds are curious.

A Reformed Fed

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David Malpass, Undersecretary of the Treasury during Trump I and World Bank President during the reign of ex-President Joe Biden (D), correctly noted that the Federal Reserve Bank as currently constituted is using the wrong economic models and, as a result, has been a singular failure in controlling inflation and that it has been a failure all of this century.

He proposed some remedies.

  • Current models…need to be replaced with economic models that welcome strong investment, innovation, and job growth and recognize dollar stability as a prerequisite for price stability.
  • shrink its balance sheet to allow private-sector liquidity markets to rebuild
  • reduce staff and buildings
  • include the dollar in its inflation models
  • disentangle the Fed from fiscal policy
  • extract itself from the climate regulatory morass
  • allow regulatory innovations in banking and liquidity markets

A capitalist Federal Reserve Bank—what a concept.

There’s another reform, though, that’s an even more critical Critical Item, but this one is firmly on us citizens; it’s the responsibility of We the People. That is to reform Congress by firing those Representatives and Senators who disdain or are indifferent to the imperatives—and the intrinsic morality—of capitalism, and replace them with those who actively support capitalism.

As a man once said, that’s what elections are for. We the People are the electors.

A Partial Truism

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Willian Galston, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, has it mostly right in his discussion of the meaning of created equal as acknowledged in our Declaration of Independence.

There has always been a gap between America’s promise and its performance. This was true in the revolutionary era, and it remains so today. This doesn’t make the equality proclaimed in the Declaration false or hypocritical. It means that there is a difference between moral truth and empirical reality. Politics at its best works to narrow the gap between them….

That’s completely true, as far as it goes. But it’s necessary for us to take the next, long, critical step. Politics at its best works is far more than just politicians doing politics in the nooks and crannies and in the hallways and on the floor of our government buildings. The critical factor here is us. Us American citizens, We the People, we who are the sovereign of our nation are—or should be—the driving force, the primary political actors, of our government and of our nation.

As a great American philosopher once said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Gestating Parent Governor

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New York’s Progressive-Democratic governor, Nancy Hochul, styles herself as her State’s “mom governor.” Maybe not anymore.

Under the bill that passed in Albany last week, the word mother would be replaced by “gestating parent” and father would become “non-gestating parent.”
The bill says that proceedings to establish “parentage” (the new word for paternity) can be started by “the gestating parent or alleged non-gestating parent.” The argument made for this rewrite is that current law doesn’t reflect the diversity of family life in the 21st century, which includes same-sex couples and surrogacy arrangements.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party—the party of misogyny, now extending to ignoring what it is that makes a woman a woman—her biology. Now it’s up to Hochul: if she signs the legislation, she’ll be insulting millions of New York’s citizens while pandering to Party’s central and left wings. If she vetoes it, she’ll likely be harassed by Party for the rest of her term. If she neither signs nor vetoes, but merely allows it to become law without her signature, she’ll be showing herself a coward, afraid to take a stand.