I want to draw your attention to a post at Axios from Stef Kight. The post largely consists of a large infographic depicting the Axios-Google news cycle findings for the past year consisting of the volume of interest in 52 different issues over the period. I won’t reproduce it here—cruise on over to the link to see it.

Four issues show sustained high levels of interest: crime, inflation, the border, and audit. I have no idea what “audit” means. Here’s Ms. Kight’s interpretation:

There was relatively high and sustained interest in topics like crime and the border this year — favored midterm talking points by the GOP. However, it was largely in line with interest over the last five years.

Mine is somewhat different: it’s still the economy, stupid. These are the issues that people care about. “Cult of personality” issues, the weather, daily headlines, and niche issues like abortion. critical race theory, and voting rights are not the issues people care about. The media (whether legacy or social) can gin up interest in one or the other of those peripheral issues for short periods but that doesn’t make them the issues people care about which, yes, are pretty constant.

Any political party can do worse than devote attention to the issues people care about.

In a piece at RealClearMarkets Walter Block paints a rather rosy picture of what the United States would be like if free markets actually prevailed:

Government regulation and taxes, if they existed at all, would be very minimal. There would of course still be laws against murder, rape, theft, assault and battery, fraud, and upholding contractual rights, but that would just about be it. Most people would be as aware of who the president is as much as they now know the names of the dog catcher, the chief librarian, or the parks commissioner in their town. That is, they would be blissfully unaware of their identities. There would either be no crime at all, or muggers would be so cowed by the few necessary policemen that they would for all intents and purposes cease and desist. They would still have criminal impulses; “libertarian man” would be pretty much as he is now, but greatly constrained.

As a result, we would be roughly four times richer than we are now. Calculation? The state at present seizes some half of our incomes; absent that, we would be twice as wealthy. But don’t the bureaucrats give us value in return? Not really; GDP statistics would be far more accurate if instead of adding the government sector expenses to what is produced in the market, we subtracted the former from the latter. What do the revenooers do with their 50% of our productivity? They vastly reduce our productive capacities with their inefficient and stultifying regulations. Without that, we arrive at our second doubling: 2×2=4.

I don’t believe that things would be quite as lovely as he thinks. Let’s take him quite literally at his word and make a list of how things would be different.

There would be no patents, copyrights, or other intellectual property. The limitation on enforcement in those lines would be what was in your contracts and they would last as long as the contracts. That would greatly reduce the incentives to produce new inventions.

Caveat emptor would prevail.

There would be no public highways, bridges, ports, airports, sewer systems, air traffic control, etc. All of those would be private to the extent they existed at all. All roads would be toll roads and the number of tolls extracted on a trip across the country would be enormous. I notice that torts are not included in his list. If a bridge collapsed or you were injured by using a tool you had purchased, you would have no legal recourse.

There would be no inspections or regulations of food or pharmaceuticals. A lot of the food and drugs sold would be unsuitable for consumption. Unless you could prove intent you would have no legal recourse.

There would be no licensing or certification of lawyers, physicians, or engineers and, consequently, there would be far fewer of them. There would be no restrictions on the pharmaceuticals that could be sold or any guarantees of effectiveness that weren’t made by the manufacturers themselves. If they were clever enough they could avoid claims of fraud.

There would be no public schools. All students would either be homeschooled or attend private schools. The children of the poor would receive little or no education.

There would be no public fire departments. Insurance companies might have have their own fire departments and, if your house caught fire and you didn’t carry the insurance of the company with the closest fire department, it might well burn to the ground.

Refusing business to someone due to their race, ethnicity, or religion would be completely legal.

If your bank became insolvent, you’d just be out of luck.

There would be no public parks or green spaces.

I could go on and one with this list but I’ll stop there. And I haven’t even gotten to the military. It would be impossible to fund a standing modern military in the low government footprint world he envisions. How do I know these things are what would happen? That’s exactly what things were like in the late 19th century, before the reforms that led to the expansion of government to manage free markets.

That may sound idyllic to Mr. Block or to you but it does not to me.

It could reasonably be claimed that’s not what Mr. Block intended. I suspect it was not but as you fill in the blanks he has left, the scope and cost of government increases.

I am not Panglossian enough to argue that we are living in the best of all possible worlds but I will claim that things could be worse and one of the ways of making them worse is to follow Mr. Block’s guidance blindly.

Those of you who are wondering how the decennial redistricting is proceeding should find this amusing. Here’s how the Princeton Gerrymandering Project assesses the State of Illinois’s efforts:

and here’s how they assess the State of Florida’s:

Although both efforts are graded F, obviously Florida’s Republicans could use a few tips if they are to achieve the levels of unfairness and lack of democracy that Illinois has achieved. And note Illinois’s gerrymandered districts!

When you zoom into the area around Chicago, truly the proposed 5th Congressional District is a thing of beauty.

No use in taking any chances is there? Not only have they preserved the absurdly gerrymandered Illinois 4th District, they’ve actually improved on it.

What prompted my previous post were these remarks at The Hill by libertarian Kristin Tate:

As President Biden’s approval ratings have tanked with nonwhite voters, the Democratic Party increasingly has become dominated by liberal white women who virtue-signal with suburban lawn signs and then henpeck people in supermarkets to pull their face masks up over their noses. Or, put more simply, the Democratic Party is at risk of becoming a party of “Karens.” Recent polling suggests that Hispanic and Black voters are abandoning the party — many of these individuals are being harmed by the surging inflation, anti-business COVID measures, and exploding crime rates in urban areas brought about by a year of left-wing measures.

For more than a decade, Democrats worked to build a voting base composed of minorities and unmarried women. After Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, it would appear the mission was being accomplished. White voters dropped from 81 percent of the electorate in 2000 to just 67 percent two decades later. Meanwhile, Biden carried a whopping 63 percent of single women in 2020.

However, poor public policy over the past year is already casting the idea of a continuing Democratic majority in doubt. Recent polling suggests that Hispanic and Black Americans are more likely to vote as individuals than as aggrieved racial blocs.

The challenge about which I’m concerned for the Democrats is that they’re being placed in the situation in which they must pick and choose among different constituencies and the strategies to which they have become accustomed will no longer work.

The infographic above is the best explanation I’ve found for how people spend money at different income levels, courtesy of FlowingData. In this post I’m going to use the term “inflation” to describe increases in prices.

People at or below median income tend to spend half or more of their incomes on just three categories: housing, food, and transportation. Over the last year housing prices have increased by almost 18%, food prices increased almost 4% (meat by around 15%), gas prices have increased nearly 60%, and used car prices have risen 25%.

As your income rises, you tend to spend more of your money on services. Services, unlike housing, food, and transportation have increased in price considerably less.

In recent elections Democrats have received most of the vote among college educated people in the top 20% of income earners while they have seen their previous leads in lower income groups decline. Frankly put, there just aren’t enough people in the former category to make up for losses in the latter category.

If Democrats don’t want the mid-term elections to be a complete disaster for them, they’d darned well better pay attention to inflation. Being or seeming tone deaf on the subject will not be a good look for them.

You might be interested in Karl Rove’s predictions for 2022, published in the Wall Street Journal:

Now my bets for 2022. Republicans take the House, picking up slightly fewer seats than the post-World War II midterm average of 30—but only because they got a head start by gaining 13 seats in 2020. The Senate becomes Republican by a seat or two.

Democrats gain governor’s offices but lose ground in state legislative races. Republican secretary of state candidates lose in at least three of these states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. Mr. Biden’s approval rating at year’s end is 45% or below. Today, about 30% of Americans say our country is on the right track while 62% say it’s going in the wrong direction. That improves but is still upside down at year’s end.

Inflation falls slightly from today’s 6.8% yet rises faster than wages. Growth softens from 2021’s 5.6%. Unemployment ends 2022 slightly lower than the current 4.2%. Covid persists with more variants, but will be a dramatically less significant issue by year’s end. Public-school enrollment won’t reach pre-pandemic levels.

The Supreme Court will significantly weaken Roe v. Wade but not overturn it outright; states will be allowed to define more of their abortion policies. “Abortion rights” becomes the left’s rallying cry but is only a minor electoral advantage.

The Jan. 6 Committee finds that groups deliberately planned violence for that day and the Willard Hotel Trump command center knew in advance there would be violence. Hundreds of defendants plead guilty or are convicted; few are acquitted. The Supreme Court slaps down Mr. Trump’s attempt to hide documents.

Russia doesn’t subjugate Ukraine but keeps applying enormous pressure on Kyiv and the West, since Vladimir Putin views the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as an existential threat and convenient villain to rally support at home. China and North Korea perceive American weakness and increase hostile actions in the far Pacific. Taiwan becomes a flashpoint. The left-wing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins the Brazilian presidency.

Statistically, it’s likely the Republicans will gain majorities in both houses of Congress. I think his predictions on inflation, R v. W, and Russia are about right.

Continuing in the vein of a discussion going on in comments, in the Wall Street Journal Allysia Finlay reports on a relatively inexpensive drug that’s been approved by the FDA for another purpose for quite a while that has shown some promise in treating COVID-19:

Yet a promising alternative isn’t getting its due: fluvoxamine, a pill the FDA approved in 1994 to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders. Doctors often prescribe it off-label for anxiety, depression and panic attacks. Studies show that fluvoxamine is highly effective at preventing hospitalization in Covid-infected patients, and it’s unlikely to be blunted by Omicron.

Doctors hypothesize that fluvoxamine can trigger a cascade of reactions in cells that modulate inflammation and interfere with virus functions. It could thus prevent an overreactive immune response to pathogens—what’s known as a cytokine storm—that can lead to organ failure and death. It also increases nighttime levels of melatonin—the hormone that makes you sleepy—which evidence suggests can also mitigate inflammation.

[…]

A small randomized control trial last year by psychiatrists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis was a spectacular success: None of the 80 participants who started fluvoxamine within seven days of developing symptoms deteriorated. In the placebo group, six of the 72 patients got worse, and four were hospitalized. The results were published in November 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association and inspired a real-world experiment.

Soon after the study was published, there was a Covid outbreak among employees at the Golden Gate Fields horse racing track in Berkeley, Calif. The physician at the track offered fluvoxamine to workers. After 14 days, none of the 65 patients who took it were hospitalized or still had symptoms. Of the 48 who didn’t take the drug, six, or 12.5%, were hospitalized and one died. Twenty-nine had lingering symptoms, which might have resulted from inflammatory damage to their organs. Those who took the placebo were more likely to be asymptomatic when they tested positive, so they would have been expected to fare better.

The studies drew the attention of Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “A big need right now is for a drug that you could take by mouth, that you could be offered as soon as you had a positive test, and that would reduce the likelihood that the virus is going to make you really sick,” he said in an interview with “60 Minutes” in March. “Fluvoxamine could certainly be something you want to put in the tool chest,” Dr. Collins added. “It looks as if it has the promise to reduce the likelihood of severe illness.”

Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, last winter launched a large clinical trial in Brazil. The results from their trial, published in the Lancet in October, were stunning: Fluvoxamine reduced the odds of hospitalization or emergency care by 66% and death by 90% among unvaccinated high-risk patients who mostly followed the treatment regimen—comparable to monoclonal antibodies. There was no difference in adverse effects between the fluvoxamine and placebo groups.

I have a certain amount of sympathy with the NIH and FDA on this one. I do wonder, however, how you reconcile patience in using a drug that’s been approved for quite and while and, consequently, reasonably well-known with the hurried emergency use authorizations being given to various vaccines and much more expensive pharmaceuticals used for treating the disease. Could its patent having elapsed a year and a half ago have anything to do with it?

At the New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert provides her take on how our politics became so polarized. Her take seems to be that dividing ourselves into warring tribes is natural and inevitable, citing an anecdote from more than 60 years ago. She concludes:

Americans today seem to be divided into two cabins: the Donkeys and the Elephants. According to a YouGov survey, sixty per cent of Democrats regard the opposing party as “a serious threat to the United States.” For Republicans, that figure approaches seventy per cent. A Pew survey found that more than half of all Republicans and nearly half of all Democrats believe their political opponents to be “immoral.” Another Pew survey, taken a few months before the 2020 election, found that seven out of ten Democrats who were looking for a relationship wouldn’t date a Donald Trump voter, and almost five out of ten Republicans wouldn’t date someone who supported Hillary Clinton.

Even infectious diseases are now subject to partisan conflict. In a Marquette University Law School poll from November, seventy per cent of Democrats said that they considered COVID a “serious problem” in their state, compared with only thirty per cent of Republicans. The day after the World Health Organization declared Omicron a “variant of concern,” Representative Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, labelled the newly detected strain a Democratic trick to justify absentee voting. “Here comes the MEV—the Midterm Election Variant,” Jackson, who served as Physician to the President under Trump and also under Barack Obama, tweeted.

How did America get this way? Partisans have a simple answer: the other side has gone nuts! Historians and political scientists tend to look for more nuanced explanations. In the past few years, they have produced a veritable Presidential library’s worth of books with titles like “Fault Lines,” “Angry Politics,” “Must Politics Be War?,” and “The Partisan Next Door.”

proceeding on by quoting the work of a political scientist:

Lilliana Mason is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins. In “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” she notes that not so very long ago the two parties were hard to tell apart, both demographically and ideologically. In the early nineteen-fifties, Blacks were split more or less evenly between the two parties, and so were whites. The same held for men, Catholics, and union members. The parties’ platforms, meanwhile, were so similar that the American Political Science Association issued a plea that Democrats and Republicans make more of an effort to distinguish themselves: “Alternatives between the parties are defined so badly that it is often difficult to determine what the election has decided even in broadest terms.”

The fifties, Mason notes, were “not a time of social peace.” Americans fought, often in ugly ways, over, among many other things, Communism, school desegregation, and immigration. The parties were such tangles, though, that these battles didn’t break down along partisan lines. Americans, Mason writes, could “engage in social prejudice and vitriol, but this was decoupled from their political choices.”

Then came what she calls the great “sorting.” In the wake of the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and Roe v. Wade, the G.O.P. became whiter, more churchgoing, and more male than its counterpart. These differences, already significant by the early nineteen-nineties, had become even more pronounced by the twenty-tens.

“We have gone from two parties that are a little bit different in a lot of ways to two parties that are very different in a few powerful ways,” Mason says. As the two parties sorted socially, they also drifted apart ideologically, fulfilling the Political Science Association’s plea. In the past few election cycles, there’s been no mistaking the Republican Party’s platform for the Democrats’.

I have problems with that for all sorts of reasons. For example, the “gender gap” was actually in the opposite direction until the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. And I think she’s exaggerating black support for Republicans during the 1950s.

Let me provide some bullet points in no particular order illustrating what I think about polarization:

• The degree to which we were unified 60 years ago (or ever for that matter) is greatly exaggerated. Much of that is an artifact of the major media outlets being able to control the message as they preferred.
• We have always been politically divided, largely on a local or regional basis. Modern communications reveals how divided we’ve been.
• There is a major divide but it isn’t between the two political parties. It’s between the top 1% of the population and the rest of us.
• There is enough money to be made by stoking up anger that there’s a whole cadre of people who espouse anger as a profession.
• The greater the spending by the federal government (and the higher the taxation) the greater the incentive to a) remain in power and b) stoke anger about the “other guy”.
• The less literate the population, the more agonistic (emotional) the discourse.
• The larger the immigrant population, the greater the political differences will inevitably be. There is a positive feedback effect to that as well.

At Project Syndicate Nina Lvovna Khrushcheva (great-granddaughter of Nikita) provides some sound commentary on the burgeoning crisis in Ukraine:

When Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president, Volodymyr Zelensky, dons fatigues and praises the military, or presses for a firm commitment on the country’s NATO membership, ordinary Russians get the message that there is a security threat on the border – and it is not the Russian troops now found there. Ukrainian politicians only reinforce this impression by proclaiming that the country must prepare to retake Crimea by force.

The US wants to prevent anything like a repeat of the events of 2014 in Ukraine. This seems like the fair thing to do. But geopolitics is a matter of cold calculation, not fairness. And while the “exceptional” US has long been able to act in its own strategic interest without, as one author put it, “the consequences that come with doing so,” the time may have come for it to account for new variables – namely, that Russians, too, view their country as exceptional.

Unless and until that changes, the cycle of crises will continue, with escalating, and potentially catastrophic, risks. “Such is the destructive potential of advanced modern weapons,” Kennan pointed out, “that another great conflict between any of the leading powers could well do irreparable damage to the entire structure of modern civilization.”

I have no idea why Washington pundits do not heed Russian voices like that. Is it that they don’t like bad news?

There’s more at the link which you will find bears a more than passing resemblance to what I’ve been writing here. Possibly the most important is that Russia is not the Soviet Union but it does have security concerns of its own.