Category: party politics

party politics

The lesson of the 2008 American Presidential election

You win elections from the base, not the center.  Obama appealed to the Democrat base, the Democrat wing of the Democrat party, and the lunatic wing of the Democrat of the Democrat party,  Just as Reagan appealed to the Republican party base. McCain tried to appeal to the wobbly Democrat wing of the Democrat pary – mainly by spitting on the Republican party base. McCain followed in the path of …

global warming

Vote Cthulhu for US president

Or if not Cthulhu, Obama. When I started writing this, McCain had the the most violently anticapitalist program of any presidential candidate, his cap and trade policy. Obama, having started out at lunatic left in the primaries, is heading rightwards at high speed, and his “cap and trade” policy had become a mere pigovian carbon tax, making him considerably less anti capitalist than McCain. McCain, finding himself outflanked, quietly dropped …

party politics

Caplan bets Europe will survive

Bryan Caplan has bet $300 that Europe, and every state of Europe, will survive to 2020. I don’t make these kind of bets, because outcomes tend to be ill defined. What constitutes surviving? But I expect that around 2040, people will look back to around 2020, and say that some substantial portion of Europe, fell back then. The nation state derives its cohesion from the nation, and the nation is …