PETE BUTTIGIEG’S HIGH CLASS PROBLEMS:
It’s time for Pete Buttigieg to truck off down the road from the Department of Transportation — if, that is, he turns up for work again and can find a driver. It’s shameful even by the standards of the federal government for the head of a department to disappear during an emergency. It’s ludicrous for a technocratic Democrat in a technocratic administration.
The smart set are explaining away the supply-chain fiasco as middle-class false consciousness. ‘Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems,’ says Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff.
That’s right, Ron: if the peasants can’t find vegetables on the shelves, let them eat the rich. Because only the rich worry about commodity prices rising faster than at any time since 2008. Only the rich notice when the price of gasoline, vegetables and baby formula rises and rises. And only the rich — or at least the expensively-educated, which tends to mean the same thing these days — are literate enough to worry about the increasingly probable knock-on effect on inflation.
Everything’s fine though: Jen Psaki Defends Rising Prices: ‘Good Thing’ Because it Means ‘More People are Buying Goods.’
Welcome Back, Carter (and LBJ). As Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society, “What the 1960s experiment and its 1970s results suggest is that social democratic compromise comes close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy…In the pain of the 1970s and early 1980s, many Americans came to recognize that the ultimate executive-led expert-driven social project of the 1960s, the White House application of Keynesian economic doctrine, was also the ultimate domestic failure. In retrospect, citizens finally saw Keynesianism for what it was, mere window dressing for political expedience. The popular expression of these new insights was the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.”
This administration has of course, forgotten those lessons: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.
Related: Buttigieg Pressed by Fox News Anchor Over Supply Chain Chaos: Not surprisingly for somebody with apparently zero experience in the transportation sector being tapped by Biden, “Buttigieg seemed as or more interested in discussing the “comprehensive infrastructure bill” in Congress, health care, weather patterns, and child care than the two vital ports he admitted represent 40 percent of the country’s incoming container traffic.