Food For Thought February 21, 2022February 21, 2022 Funny that the ONLY plank in the Republican platform Trump changed was the one on Ukraine. To make it more Russia-friendly. Not a single other plank. Just Ukraine. Think about that. Does anyone know Joe Rogan? Send him Tom Friedman’s column. It is spot on. Conservative political satirist P.J. O’Rourke died last week. Among his scores of quotable observations: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crab grass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.” Just now seeing this, by Ezra Klein: The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting. The left needs to think as much about supply as it does about demand. But look closely and you can see something new and overdue emerging in American politics: supply-side progressivism. . . . . . . [P]rogressives are often uninterested in the creation of the goods and services they want everyone to have. This creates a problem and misses an opportunity. The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit. That requires a movement that takes innovation as seriously as it takes affordability. . . . . . . Supply-side progressivism shouldn’t just fix the problems of the present; it should hasten the advances of the future. A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant- and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a postwork, postscarcity vision. “What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?” . . . [W]hat Bastani sees clearly is that the world we should want requires more than redistribution. It requires inventions and advances that render old problems obsolete and new possibilities manifold. Like his piece last week, this one is worth reading in full. (Thanks, esteemed big brother!) Happy Birthday, Abe (Feb 12) and George (Feb 22). Far from tearing your statues down, we should shine them up . . . and judge you in the context of your times.