Dana Blankenhorn

The Crisis is Over

This is the time in the political season when negative sentiments get all the coverage.

Taking power away from an incumbent party requires negativity. You have to convince people things aren’t that good, that you’re the guys to fix things. To even make an intra-party insurgency work, you have to convince people within that party that things are wrong somehow.

But outside politics, things are actually pretty good.

The dollar is on a roll it hasn’t seen since the 1990s. 

The currencies of China and the European Union, meanwhile, are falling in value. The yen is in freefall, you can buy 123 of them for $1. Deflation has replaced inflation as the economic buzzkill, with oil leading commodities down. What we need to buy is getting cheaper, and what we have to buy it with is worth more than it has been for over a decade.

The Troll Decade

From online trolls at Reddit to political trolls like Donald Trump, to ultimate trolls like ISIS, this decade had been marked by a rejection of societal norms by people – mainly men – who confuse liberty with license.

I have been dealing with online trolls for 30 years and when I confront one now I always ask the same question, whether they understand the difference between the ordered liberty of the Constitution and the mere license of “I want what I want,” the essential role of government in guaranteeing that liberty is extended to all.

Sure, the Declaration of Independence held the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be self-evident, but it went immediately to how those rights were to be established:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  

Why China Will Not Win

One thing we do routinely, here in the 21^st century, is underestimate the achievements of the 20^th.

Before the 20^th century America was a nation with a creed we did nothing to live up to. We treated women, blacks, gays, Jews, and many, many others as second class citizens. We failed to take advantage of their talents. Our economy suffered greatly for that. We also had no social safety net, none. When crops failed, when factories closed, people starved, women and children.

Barack Obama often says “my story would have been impossible any place else,” and that is one measure of the distance we have come. But it’s only one. There are millions of other examples, all around us. Immigrants like Elon Musk. Women like Janet Yellen. People with handicaps, both mental and physical. We recognize and reward talent, we import it an nurture it, in ways that we just didn’t 100 years ago.

What made all this possible happened in the 20^th century. Technological change, sure. But also changes in our economy, in our system of government, in the laws and attitudes governing our relations with one another. The growth of our university systems, our highway systems, our communication systems, and our business systems all contributed.  

TV’s Last Stand

Michael Wolff and I have been covering the Web for about the same time, which is since it was spun in 1994.

The difference is he’s famous and I am not. This is fine by me. I have a great life, and anonymity is a precious commodity, as anyone who is really famous will tell you.

Fame can also turn your head. You see yourself on TV often enough and you start to think that’s more real than life. It isn’t. It’s less so. TV isn’t real at all. It’s just another file format, one that over time is becoming cheaper-and-cheaper to move around.

Tourism is a Mug’s Game

I love to travel. I dream of doing what my father-in-law did, retiring to a life of seeing the world.

But after spending my working lifetime as a business reporter I also know one thing for certain. Tourism, as an economic activity, is a mug’s game.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the business of being a gracious host. There just aren’t many high-paying jobs in it. Most jobs in tourism are things like taking tickets, waiting tables, cleaning hotel rooms, maybe acting as a docent or guide. These are not jobs that can feed a family in modern America.

Tourism is the original “gig economy,”  a game rigged by the undeserving rich aimed at creating a poor, and complacent lower class by the mid-21^st century in place of the middle class that built America in the mid-20^th century.