Dana Blankenhorn

The Battle of Google

Over the last decade attitudes about Google have evolved from “don’t be evil” to “Google is evil” to “let’s kill Google.”

Google has already destroyed more business models than the Great Depression, and it is poised to destroy many more. This latest move on Google was thus inevitable. Google has helped destroy the newspaper business model and it’s going after television. Google has helped destroy millions of middlemen, of all types, around the world.

It is more accurate to say that the Internet, and not Google, has enabled this. But Google remains the target because it’s the dominant player in that business.

Now Google autonomous cars are prepared to destroy millions more jobs.  Jobs driving cars, and jobs selling car insurance. Jobs selling cars, jobs selling car parts, and jobs parking cars.

Google is not prepared for the political pushback it is generating.

Meeting The Unmet Challenge of Capitalism

Free markets are a great way to run an economy, just as free elections are a great way to run a political system and ordered liberty a great way to run a society. These three things are key to a better life, even to economic growth. They are our great hope for saving the planet.

That said, capitalism by itself sucks. As an –ism, rather than just a way of structuring the economy, capitalism has a fatal flaw.

Capitalism has yet to figure out what to do when the game ends. And the game is always ending.

Think about it. Capitalism means competition. There are winners, and there are losers. Over time there are more and more losers, fewer and fewer winners. That’s how games work. Adam Smith wrote that capitalists would be inclined toward the common good, and some are. But others are not. “Rich man want to be king, and a king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything,” as Bruce Springsteen sang in “Badlands.”

The Nervous Breakdown Called 2016

Every once in a great while one of our major political parties has a complete nervous breakdown.

It’s useful. The breakdown is usually followed by the party getting some therapy, owning its past mistakes, and finding a way forward. That happened after Goldwater with Nixon. It happened after McGovern with Carter. It even happened after Mondale, because Dukakis at least made a race of it.

This is not just an American phenomenon. It happens in all democracies. You can’t start back until you hit bottom, apologize sincerely for what you did wrong, get off the ragehol, then create an alternative worldview to the party in power from the ground up, one people find compelling.

Screw The Undeserving Rich

One of the great themes of the last generation was that there was a class of “undeserving poor” out there who really, really needed to be stomped on.

Their identifies shifted, from hippies who were supposedly engaging in smoking pot, listening to rock-and-or-roll, and jumping one another’s bones, to the “welfare queens” of the 1980s who were supposedly having tons of kids just so they could get more welfare. These “bad eggs,” the thinking went, were keeping society from protecting the “deserving poor” – little kids caught in bad situations, hard-working families (supposedly in Appalachia), and women working 40-hour weeks wiping rich old mens’ mothers’ asses.

As political strategy it was brilliant. White, working poor families are now almost uniformly Republican, supporting a party that is really out to screw them, privatizing Social Security and Medicare, killing Obamacare and opposing a minimum wage.

Today, as we approach the validation moment of the Obama Thesis, we need to focus on the “undeserving rich.” And there are a lot of them. Donald Trump is their avatar, a big, lumbering jerk who inherited a fortune from his father and now considers himself the candidate of the “self-made man.”