The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End Violently Truth, consequences and pain are on their way. And to the best of what I can tell, no one is prepared psychologically. Quoth the Raven For the better part of the last couple years, I have wondered whether financial markets are permanently broken . Not simply overvalued or temporarily irrational, but actually broken at the mechanical level and permanently distorted. I’ve written about it . The basic process that is supposed to make capitalism work goes like this. Capital flows toward good ole’ fashioned productive uses (like the George Foreman Grill™) and away from flashy hot-shit stupid ones (like the Apple Vision Pro ). Good businesses eventually outperform bad ones. Fraud eventually gets exposed. Making money is the point of a business. Price is a rationing mechanism and is determined by free markets. This system appears to have been dead for the last 10 years, at least. Nowadays, we function under a derivative of capitalism (...

  Abstracted Wealth Is Social Poison Aristocracy, Plutocracy, and Social Woes The American Tribune I recently had the opportunity to speak with The Black Horse on his podcast to promote my show The Old World, and one very interesting thing that came up is wealth in the context of virtue. What was it about the Old World and the sorts who characterized it in its heyday, whether  the gentry of Virginia  or  Sir James Brooke-type explorer-adventurers , that kept them from falling into a pit of torpor, degeneracy, and inconsequence that their lives could have been, given the leisure their wealth allowed? A few bad sorts were, of course. The Dukes of Manchester have always been disasters, and the present one is a criminal, for example. Still, there were remarkably few scoundrels and wastrels compared to the wealthy of our day. It used to be seen as remarkable and a shame if a gentleman turned into a ne’er-do-well. Now it is expected that trust fund kids will be walking dis...