Ira Stoll at Reason: ‘Barack Obama vs. Elizabeth Warren on Trade‘

‘As Obama himself observed, part of the reason this is so raw for the left and labor is that they still haven’t gotten over Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s support, more than 20 years ago, of the North America Free Trade Agreement. If Obama succeeds in getting fast-track authorization from Congress for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and then succeeds in getting a deal passed, it could be a similarly significant achievement.’

In seeking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the President is getting out-activated and out-progressed by Warren as she stirs up the base in populist fashion.  Will Bernie Sanders and Bill De Blasio jump into the fray?  Surely we can find the nearest guy wearing a Che shirt and ask him?

====================

From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘Capitalism vs The Climate:‘

‘The key point for Ridley is that capitalism allows for the bottom-up spontaneous generation of innovation through the evolution of specialization and the division of labor.  In such an evolving spontaneous order, we cannot predict the future, because we cannot know what new ideas and new inventions might be discovered by the human mind.  So we cannot know how human beings will solve their problems in the future, including the problem of global warming.

This is what Klein calls “magical thinking”–the assumption that capitalist markets will always create unimaginable technological solutions to our problems.  Her alternative is to argue that the only solution to a problem like global warming is a top-down, centrally-planned policy for slowing down economic production and consumption and investing over 10 percent of the world’s yearly economic output to build renewable sources of energy to replace high-carbon sources.’

Do you recall that Naomi Klein book?:

‘“Democratic socialism, meaning not only socialist parties brought to power through elections but also democratically run workplaces and landholdings,” was “never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were [these ideas] voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures,” she argues.’

Oh boy.

====================

Passed along by a reader, one of the best classical guitarists out there, David Russell, playing a Celtic piece ‘Spatter The Dew’

Such a ridiculously good guitarist: