PARTY REALIGNMENT
So much for Biden’s line about the election being a battle “between Scranton and Park Avenue.” The lucrative wars don’t seem to be ending any time soon either. Biden is appointing liberal hawks like Blinken to critical positions (more than a third of his Defense agency review team come from arms manufacturers or have worked at think tanks funded by them). And defense contractors like Raytheon are cheerful about the election outcome, optimistically looking forward to years of generous defense spending. The private sector no longer wants the government to leave them alone... It wants the government to be involved in business affairs to have leverage... Big businesses like regulations because, while they can weather a few extra taxes or protocols, their smaller competitors can’t. One argument for why this is happening is that the private sector no longer wants the government to leave them alone... It wants the government to be involved in business affairs to have leverage. Tim Carney convincingly argued that big businesses like regulations because, while they can weather a few extra taxes or protocols, their smaller competitors can’t. By teaming up with bureaucracies to implement revenue-
market forces while garnering highly profitable and recurring contracts with the government, whether in defense, health, or tech. The faster one conceives of the difference between the market and corporations, the faster he will understand the current situation. The dynamic market contrasts wildly to the corporation, as the latter thrives on monopoly and immobility. The top 9.9% of the wealth distribution, the professional class, likewise votes for politicians representing big government and big business because they work in industries where these worlds overlap, such as consulting and lobbying. The elites don’t usually start businesses of their own, unlike lesser-educated adults hoping to remain the core of what’s left of the middle class. And so the top 10% really don’t really care if the formerly fluid social mobility of America, conditioned on fluctuating per a free market, hardens into a caste system. Counties composed of college-degree- credentialed, high-earning professionals have been increasingly swapping from Republican to Democratic candidates since 1980. According to an analysis of Census data by the Wall Street Journal , the 100 counties with the highest median incomes voted for Biden over Trump by 57%. The 100 counties with the largest share of college degrees in the country voted for Biden 84%. According to Brookings, Trump won 83% of the nation’s counties, but those counties only accounted for 30% of the national GDP. Biden, on the other hand, won only 17% of counties, but those accounted for 71% of the GDP.
killing measures, corporations can artificially shield themselves from
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January 2021
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