RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/23/the-rise-of-market-originalism/

Republicans have more than ample cause for celebration at the moment. Their victory in this month’s election was sweeping, and the new president and Congress will take office with a true mandate for change.

At the same time, President Trump finds himself in an awkward position, having promised to improve the nation’s economic trajectory while, at the same time, restraining sticky and discomfiting inflation. As I have noted elsewhere, in many ways, the president’s hands are tied. The condition of the nation’s fisc is perilous, and the reinvigorated Bond Vigilantes stand ready to ensure that the situation does not deteriorate further, exacerbated by either increased spending or reduced revenues. President Trump has promised to restore the nation’s economic vitality, but even his party’s largest donors have warned him that the traditional conservative policy to promote economic growth—income tax cuts—is economically risky under current conditions.

Given all of this, President Trump and his economic advisors will have to be resourceful and creative to find ways to nurture economic growth. They will have to think thoroughly about the existing barriers to widespread economic growth and will have to be thoughtful yet aggressive in dismantling those barriers to “make America great again.”

Fittingly, the answers Trump’s economic brain trust should seek are those that focus on the last of the four words in this longstanding catchphrase: again. In short, the formula for economic growth and prosperity can, in part, be found buried in the nation’s past. We, as a nation, can and should focus on making America economically great by employing that formula again.

At the risk of falling prey to “the Golden Age Myth,” I believe it’s important to understand that the nation’s greatest period of economic growth and expansion took place before the economic and political centralization that accompanied (and defined) the “modern era.” One of the keys to restoring the nation’s economic potential, therefore, is recognizing what originally made the American experiment so politically and economically potent.

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5003334-elon-musk-artificial-intelligence

The political left already hates Elon Musk. But its anger toward the disruptive billionaire, Tesla founder and now Donald Trump bestie is only going to get worse.   

Musk’s likely success in artificial intelligence poses a long-term threat to liberals who hope to dominate not only how we look backward — that is, how our history is written — but also the political climate in which we move forward. Just as Musk’s purchase of Twitter crushed liberals’ stranglehold on social media, his growing presence in AI promises to dilute the left’s control of the emerging technology.   

The Democratic establishment, led by the Biden-Harris White House, is not taking Musk’s political realignment lying down.  

The New York Times reports that Musk’s multiple businesses “have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets.” Many of these attacks are idiotic, including the FAA’s delay weeks ago of a rocket test because a similar launch had disturbed birds’ nests nearby. Never mind that the U.S. is in a critical race against China to get men to the moon, and that the rocket in question has been commissioned by the U.S. government to get the job done. 

More craziness against Musk’s firms came from the Justice Department, which claims SpaceX has illegally discriminated “against asylees and refugees in hiring.” In other words, SpaceX, a company engaged in top secret undertakings for our government, is being sued for only hiring U.S. citizens or green card holders. 

You can’t make this up.  

The left is furious that the Tesla founder set out to restore free speech by buying Twitter (now X) and then published the infamous Twitter files, exposing efforts by federal officials to censor conservative voices. Amazingly, they hate him for putting electric vehicles on the map — actually enabling their climate change ambitions — because he used non-union labor to do it.  

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-the-old-world-is-not-coming-back?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

On November 12th, I spoke to the General Assembly in Washington D.C., which is an annual conference of the Jewish Federations—the largest Jewish organization in North America. There was a lot to talk about this year. 

When did you know? 

Looking back, now that we are on the far side, I wonder: When did you realize that things had changed? 

When did you know that the things we had taken for granted were suddenly out of our reach? That the norms that felt as certain as gravity had disappeared? That the institutions that had launched our grandparents had turned hostile to our children? 

When did you notice that what had once been steady was now shaky ground? Did you look down to see if your own knees were trembling?

When did you realize that we were not immune from history, but living inside of it? 

When did you see that our world was actually the world of yesterday—and a new one, one with far fewer certainties, one where everything seems up for grabs, was coming into being? 

Maybe it was September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans. Maybe you noticed, as my friend Jonathan Rosen did, that “an explosion of Jew hatred seemed to have ridden in on the contrails of the airplanes that jihadists had turned into weapons of mass destruction and aimed at the heart of American civilization.” 

Maybe it was the second intifada, in which everyday places—Mike’s Place and Sbarro and Café Moment and the Dolphinarium—became synonyms for slaughterhouses, even as few of our would-be allies said their names.

Or maybe it was on February 1, 2002, when al-Qaeda beheaded the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan as he spoke his final words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Or maybe it wasn’t until the Shabbat morning of October 27, 2018, when a neo-Nazi gunned down 11 Jews at Tree of Life while shouting, “All Jews must die!” 

Or maybe it was the shooting, six months later, at the Chabad of Poway. For Hannah Kaye, who witnessed the murder of her mother, Lori Gilbert Kaye, it surely was. Or maybe it was in January of 2022, when a gunman held the congregants of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, hostage.