A TAX DAY REFRESHER COURSE.

In the course of a meditation on assorted attempts by the Democrats to further attenuate the power of the states, and of the public, John Hinderaker makes a point that merits further discussion.  "The United States is just that, a union of states, not of atomized individuals. The states are important. Under the Constitution, all powers not delegated by the states to the federal government remain with the states and their subdivisions, local government units."

You read it here first.  "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

He goes on to note that ever since the self-styled progressives sought to substitute Governance by Wise Experts for emergence, that Constitution has become an impediment to what they perceive as progress.  "Liberals have long disliked federalism and would like to erode the powers of the states, which often stand in the way of their grand schemes. Ideally, for liberals, the states would cease to exist except as administrative units of the central government."

I suspect that's the logic behind complaints, ever since Congress capped the deduction for state and local taxes on federal taxes, constituting "double taxation."  The intent of setting up a United States with a division of federal, state, and local governments with enumerated, and, in the case of the federal government, limited powers, is that local governments would collect taxes to pay for local services, state governments in like manner collecting taxes to pay for the services provided under their powers, and the federal government would collect taxes to pay for the services the Constitution authorized.

But if you look on state and local governments as simply operating units of the national government, then perhaps if one operating unit collects more taxes, another operating unit ought not collect as much.  That's what a coalition of rent-seekers sailing under the Americans Against Double Taxation banner would like to have you believe.  They don't call themselves rent-seekers.  "Americans Against Double Taxation is a coalition of state and local government organizations, service providers and other stakeholders dedicated to protecting the state and local tax deduction."  Scroll down, though, and it's rent seekers everywhere you look.

The Tax Foundation notes that there are, indeed, enumerated, separated, and limited powers at work.

In a federal system, moreover, individuals receive services from federal, state, and municipal governments. Each layer of government can be viewed as providing its own package of services, which one would expect to be “priced” separately. When two taxes levied by a single government, or similar types of governments (for instance, multiple states), fall disproportionately upon the same income or economic activity, this represents a clear case of double taxation. When different levels of governments levy taxes for discrete sets of services, the rationale for a deduction for taxes paid is far weaker.

The elaboration is here, should you wish.  Note:  "Six states—California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, and Pennsylvania—claim more than half of the value of the deduction."  That is, tax hells that chase productive people away.

The economist in me says there's no reason to put "price" in scare quotes.  Taxes are the price we pay for the failure to civilize our society.  We don't have to rely on government to do that.  The Framers trusted us.  "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Finish filing your taxes, then brace yourself to your duties, and Secure the Blefsings of Liberty to Yourfelf and Your Posterity.

THE FIRST AMENDMENT CONFERS AN ABSOLUTE RIGHT TO CRITICIZE POLITICIANS.

If novice Member of Congress Ilhan Omar (Ingrate - Minn.) did not want to become the public face of jihad in Congress, she should not have run for office.

But she did, and she chose to spout off, and she got called out for it.  "I applaud the New York Post for this massive verbal slap."  Her fan club doesn't like it.  "Since the president's tweet—and the right-wing media's smears against Omar that preceded it—progressives have urged Democratic leaders and 2020 presidential candidates to stand up for the Minnesota congresswoman."

Reason's Robby Soave attempts to be the voice of, um, reason.  "Omar’s comments may sound flippant when taken out of context, but they were nowhere near as offensive as the right made them out to be—and Trump’s tweet, though thoughtless and unfair, did not represent any kind of violent threat. Everybody who got worked up about Omar was stoking unfounded outrage. And they were doing it hypocritically, since this is the kind of thing each side tends to hate when the other side does it."

That might be so, but, again, one of the occupational hazards of engaging in politics is being criticized by members of the public.  It has long been the refuge of politicians to whinge about journalists who "attack" them by quoting them accurately.  It has also long been the nature of politicians to demagogue and rouse the rabble.

Omar’s remarks did not merit this level of denunciation. But as a sitting congresswoman, she’s in the political fray; she should not be immune from criticism, wrongheaded though it sometimes may be. Some of that criticism crossed a clear line: Omar has claimed that she received death threats in the wake of Trump’s tweet. No one should be threatened for expressing their opinions, and the government should take whatever action is necessary to make sure Omar is safe.

Precisely. We remove incompetent public officials from office by voting them out. (Not only that, the representative is a useful asset to the insurgency. Every time she opens her mouth fence-sitting Normals become militant.)

It is our duty to call them out when they deserve it.  "In general, don’t criticize a politician because some people might take it too far and threaten her would be a bad rule, one that would make it more difficult to hold politicians accountable when they really have earned a good lambasting."

We'll let Victory Girl Nina Bookout deliver the civics lesson.  "Thankfully for all of us, our Founders knew what they were doing when they wrote the First Amendment. So Ilhan, you go right ahead with your speaking. We’ll go right on ahead with quoting you. That’s how this works."

BILL CLINTON GETS NO RESPECT FROM DEMOCRATS.

No, not another discussion of whether the woman claiming to be his wife neglected to campaign in Wisconsin.

Rather, it's Power Line's Steven Hayward setting the Wayback Machine to early 1980.  Jimmy Carter committed yet another reason for the voters to fire him, and an Arkansas governor is collateral damage.

Fidel Castro declared that anyone who wanted to emigrate to the United States was free to do so within a narrow window of time. Within days, 125,000 Cubans were en route to the U.S. Just where did that rickety fleet come from on such short notice? No one seemed to be curious about that, though even slow learners eventually figured out that Castro used this “humanitarian” gesture to offload a lot of criminals, mentally ill persons, and other Cubans he wanted very much to be rid of. Which means the Cuban government was organized in advance for this “spontaneous” moment.

No, Governor Clinton did not suggest that Castro was sending us "drug dealers and rapists, and maybe a few good people," although he was not pleased that Washington wanted to warehouse the refugees, until their asylum claims could be adjudicated, at Federal installations on the mainland, including Fort Chaffee in Arkansas.

He had a suggestion.

First, Clinton suggested the refugees be screened on an aircraft carrier off of the Florida coast. Eidenburg said that didn’t make sense, because there was no place to put those refugees the United States wouldn’t accept.

“Sure there is,” Clinton replied, as recounted in his memoir “My Life.” “We still have a base at Guantanamo, don’t we? And there must be a gate in the fence that divides it from Cuba. Take them to Guantanamo, open the door, and march them back into Cuba.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. rejected its future occupant’s Guantanamo plan.

Evidently, Our President is currently taking advice from Jimmy Carter, but Mr Hayward sees another trolling opportunity. "I think Trump should come out and say he’s decided to take advice on this matter from Bill Clinton. And then pass the popcorn."

AARON RODGERS IS STILL QUARTERBACK.

Some of his more vocal detractors are long gone from the Packers. “This was a smear attack by a writer looking to advanced his career talking with mostly irrelevant, bitter players who all have an agenda whether they’re advancing their own careers or just trying to stir old stuff up.”

A Milwaukee radio interview of presidential import gave the quarterback an opportunity to sound like the voice of reason.

Packer fans, remember this, especially those of you who live in Green Bay: [former coach] Mike [McCarthy] lives here. Mike has young kids here. So Mike has to be here. Think about how difficult it is for him. My favor that I would ask of you, strongly, is if you see Mike, shake his hand. Tell him thanks for the memories. Tell him thanks for the coaching job that he did. Tell him how much you appreciate him being a part of what we built here. Things change from ‘06 to ‘18. We came off of a bad season in ‘05 and we built something special and had sustained success, so instead of trashing this guy on the way out — last year was tough, no doubt about it — but let’s honor him and his legacy as the second-winningest coach in Packers history. If you see him, please, just show him the respect that he deserves. Not only does he have to live in Green Bay, he wants to. He loves it here. He’s going to be here. So, if you see him, do him that favor and show him the respect that he deserves.

The Packers recently completed their first set of organized team activities not including practice (a pox on the process-worshippers) and the transition to the new coach and the free agency and upcoming player draft activities are likely to be overshadowed, but not eclipsed, by the Milwaukee Bucks in the playoffs and the Milwaukee Brewers attempting to secure more wins in hand against division rivals.

For the Packers, the standard is still five championships in six championship games in eight seasons.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE SUMMER?

Crystal Beach Amusement Park, in Ontario, has gone the way of many an amusement park, particularly one sitting on prime lakefront property.

Years ago, though, the new Canadian domestic content laws required that commercials for food sold in Canada had to be produced in Canada.

In Michigan, we'd call it orange "pop," but, whatever. Lots of mid-1980s pop-culture in that commercial.

ADAM SMITH BUILDS THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the Pacific Railroad, which began to take shape during the Civil War with Union Pacific building west from Omaha and Central Pacific, shipping all the components around the Horn to California.

It was about this time in 1869 that a Central Pacific crew installed ten miles of new track in a day (the historical marker reads "laid in a day" but in reality there was ten miles of new rail in place if not properly surfaced, aligned and ballasted yet).  One might suspect that the track-laying accomplishment was an artifact of geography, it being easier to lay a relatively straight track across relatively flat ground in Utah, rather than tackling the curves and grades in the Sierra.

A recent Trains article explains there was more at work.

In the beginning, Central Pacific were essentially assembling panels of snap track (to use a model railroading term) in place and finishing each panel before moving on to the next panel.  Each panel was held in alignment with adjacent panels by a large rail joiner called a chair spiked to a tie with a special notch deep enough for the chair.  Thus the two rails had joints opposite each other.  It's something the British still do, on lightly-used lines, and bouncing along them in a nodding donkey is quite the experience.  North American railroads went to staggered rail joints many years ago, after they discovered that having both ends of a heavily-loaded axle going over rail joints at the same time beat up the tracks.

To move rail's end on the Central Pacific forward involved hammering a chair onto the outer end of each of two rails, placing the notched cross-tie, placing the intermediate ties, hammering the inner end of each rail into the chair at the previous rail end, then spiking the chair into place and the rail to the intermediate tie.  On curves, they'd pre-bend each section of rail (the inside and the outside) and cut the inside section so as to keep the joints square.  Then repeat the procedure.  It's a whole lot easier to open up a box of snap track; the factory has done this work for you.

A model railroader who works with flex-track has probably encountered the notched tie phenomenon.  The tie strip on a piece of flex-track is supposed to hold the rail in place.  There isn't room for a rail joiner, which means the builder has to substitute wood ties and spike at the joint.

After about seventy miles of struggling with chairs and curves, Central Pacific adopted a different method of joining rails at the end, with splice bars, and they kept a stock of rails six inches shorter than standard on hand, such that when the inside rail on a curve got six inches ahead of the outside, they'd attach a shorter rail at the next splice and press onward.  But they were still building the track one panel at a time.

On Union Pacific, Jack Casement was getting several miles of track laid each day.  Central Pacific management contemplated sending a spy to observe, but they didn't have to when an itinerant track hand working his way to California showed up just before the 1868 construction season began, looking for work.

Author Wendell W. Huffman explains what the track hand described at his job interview.

Casement achieved speed in tracklaying by involving more men, divided into specialized teams.  While the traditional method involved a few men pitching in on every task in the limited area in front of the tracklaying car, Casement stretched the work space as long as possible.  Ties were distributed from wagons well ahead of the rail laying, and the tracklaying car was rolled ahead on loose rails, allowing splicing and spiking to be done behind the car.  Tie setters only set ties.  Rail layers only laid rails.  Splicers spliced and spikers spiked.  Everyone gained proficiency.

The tracklaying car is a small four-wheeled trolley that can be manhandled off the track when empty to make way for the next load coming to track's end.  It had extra wide wheel treads in order to stay on rails that were not fully secured to all ties.  The splicers and spikers are doing their work out of each other's way, behind the advancing tracks.

THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF TITLE NINE.

Last week Notre Dame women's basketball coach Muffet McGraw made the news with comments on the decreasing proportion of women coaching in college sports compared to 1972, when Title Nine of the Civil Rights Act took effect.

FREDERIC BASTIAT OBSERVES A WILD PITCH.

The Wisconsin branch of Pella Windows prepared potential customers for the upcoming home improvement season with a series of advertisement including Packer radio announcer Wayne Larrivee, the most recent of which had some fun with Mr Larrivee's extended participation in the advertisement.  With all the uncertainty surrounding the team's recent coaching change and roster moves, he mentioned the importance of having something to fall back on.

The latest advertisement, which I just heard, alludes to Mr Larrivee not being present.  This being baseball season, though, company voice Gina Della from Pella (she's a real person: whether she affects an exaggerated northwoods accent for the commercials is a secret) chucks a baseball at a passer-by.

Why?

Because ... there's a special offer on the baseball offering early-season price breaks on window replacements.

The advert ends with the passer-by chucking the baseball through one of his windows, so as to have a reason to take advantage of the bargain.

Then Ms Della chucks another baseball through a window that turns out to be at a neighbor's house.  "They'll want new windows too when they look at the ball ..."

I don't know ...

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING.

In January, I offered an extended discussion of Randal O'Toole's Romance of the Rails.  That post extended a review I was invited to write for The Independent Review.

The Independent Review version of the review is now available.  Enjoy.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

It's been a productive winter building the State of Maine Northern.  There's enough track in place that it's now possible to model the New Haven delivering interchange cars.

The track where the State of Maine Northern leaves cars for interchange to the New Haven will occupy space in the background.

In addition, the steel mill trackage on the lower level is in place (the high line to the blast furnace is quite a project) and for Open Days during the March Meet visitors were able to switch out the steel mill.

There has to be an idler car between the locomotive and any bottle car.  The outward New Haven interchange train is in the background.  I still have plans to include smoke in those smokestacks.

Once the March Meet ended, construction resumed.

Left to right: the High Car route (a way for trains to get from staging to the north side of Salem, Mass.); the inward and outward tracks of the Saugus Branch, here tacked down as the glue sets up; the inward and outward tracks of the Eastern Route Main Line of the State of Maine Northern; the interchange tracks between Midvale Maritime Steel and the State of Maine Northern.

Speaking of Midvale Steel, an improvised large tank car for transporting coal tar.

That's just after I finished lettering it.  Work tables are sometimes cluttered.

Recently, O Scale Resource visited the railroad.  Their write-up is in the March-April 2019 issue.  This link might get you directly to the write-up.  Enjoy.

THE HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE IS COMING.

It's up to my one-time colleague, former Wisconsin-Milwaukee chancellor Carlos Santiago, to implement a retrenchment plan for higher education in Massachusetts.

Within months, Massachusetts officials went from monitoring the effect of market forces on their higher education industry to actively playing a role in mitigating future risks.

In response, Santiago and state lawmakers convened a working group that quickly prepared a report detailing the emergency and outlining eight specific recommendations to ensure that the state – along with students and the campus community, more importantly – isn't caught off guard again.

Apparently Mount Ida College, in Newton, is the canary in the coal mine, playing the same role in New England higher education that the Rutland Railroad did in New England transportation.

Santiago is quick to note that what happened at Mount Ida, where administrators kept its flailing financials largely secret and did little to ensure a smooth transfer process for students, is an exception. Other schools have navigated much more responsible paths, he says.

That is, the Rutland doesn't connect to the Boston and Maine and the New Haven, yet ...

In Massachusetts' case, Santiago says, the vast majority of colleges are doing OK. But many of them, especially the small, private liberal arts schools, have been operating similarly to how someone might live paycheck to paycheck, some having survived that way for 20 years or more at this point.

The new monitoring strategy, which Santiago describes as part science, part art, will allow the state better oversight of those slipping into the red.

"We will have metrics and we will have indicators, but until you have a conversation with the individual institution, you're really not going to know," he says. "What makes this different from what we've done in the past, is that in the past we've been really reactive. We want to be more proactive."

While most of the closures are impacting smaller private schools, which are more dependent on tuition, larger research universities and schools with major endowments are also taking note and positioning themselves strategically.

The Massachusetts economy relies heavily on higher education, well outside sighting distance of the Old North Church.  But some of the strategies higher education is trying, including combining weak universities with stronger ones, remind me of the merger activity among railroads in the years following the Rutland's collapse.

STEEL TARIFFS ARE THE WRONG REMEDY FOR EXCESS CAPACITY.

It's impossible to protect inefficiency, and it's impossible to stop national governments from investing in prestige projects.  "Steel Capacity Continues to Outpace Need."  That's dumb economics: the use of steel likely depends on the price of steel, which Our President and most of the domestic steel sector would like to keep high.  Unfortunately, when everybody and Joe Stalin's brother continues to see steel as a prestige sector, "Many new investments continue to take place around the world and others are in the planning stages, including in regions where excess capacity is most prevalent."

For the moment, the tariff barriers are holding.  "Steel trade continues to decline amidst increasing trade actions in the global steel market."

As the new capacity comes onstream, though, the rational thing for any mill manager to do is recover the avoidable costs of pouring steel, never mind the capital costs that are sunk.

LOSE AND THE GRIPING COMES THROUGH LOUD AND CLEAR.

Tyler Dunne files a Bleacher Report on the slow-motion train wreck that has been the Green Bay Packers.  "[General manager Ted] Thompson wanted the Packers to stay young. In the process, he gutted the team of its heart and soul. "  He was fired over a year ago; the article suggests he had checked out long before.

Apparently the problem with draft-and-develop is that at any time there are too many inexperienced players and too few of the football equivalent of senior non-coms to keep star players from getting too full of themselves.

The article is a long article, and it will probably generate more content in the Wisconsin sports world than the Mueller report, if there ever is one, is provoking.

In Green Bay, the standard is still five championships in six championship games in eight seasons.  Whether, as some players are asserting, and some fans will no doubt believe, the Packers fumbled an opportunity to match that standard resonates throughout the article.

RUNNING EXTRA.  Here is the Cliff Notes version, if you will, summarized as ten points.

A controversy of Washington-scandal proportions over the accuracy of the story and all other things Packers is in progress in Wisconsin sports radio.

CAN ANYBODY HERE CARRY WATER FOR A PATTERNMAKER?

In City Journal, Oren Cass asserts, "Vocational education is the better option for a substantial portion of students who will never earn bachelor’s degrees."  Read through the article: although he's pointing out a number of failings in the common schools, he's clearly not of the put-the-burnouts-in-shop-class school.

The virtues of a reliable pathway from high school to a stable job and a middle-class life remain appealing in theory, but always, it seems, for someone else’s constituents and, ultimately, someone else’s kids. What we’re left with is a public education system that stands among the nation’s most regressive institutions.

Those other people’s kids, it turns out, are most people’s kids. For every 100 American students who begin the ninth grade, 18 will fail to graduate high school on time, 25 will earn a diploma but not enroll in college, and 29 will enroll in college but fail to complete a degree. Even among the 28 percent who graduate from college in a timely fashion, 12 will end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees anyway. Only 16 out of the 100—call them the Fortunate Fifth (and it’s more like a sixth)—will move smoothly through the high-school-to-college-to-career pipeline that we pretend should be everyone’s goal.

Indeed, and the "college" part of the pipeline is clogged with Distressed Material.  "[M]assive investment in remediation for underprepared students has failed to stanch the flood of [college] dropouts."

NO PARADOX OF CHOICE HERE.

In Strong Towns, Austin Maitland asserts, "Housing Markets Should Be More Like Supermarkets."  Refreshing.

There is no centralized entity coordinating the incredibly complex system of food production, distribution, and pricing that puts our favorite bread on the shelf at prices we can afford. Rather, the system is an example of an emergent order comprised of millions of voluntary transactions between private individuals and entities in the market.

We enjoy a similar level of choice and accessibility in other parts of our lives. When buying a phone, we can choose between various sizes, cameras, screen qualities, and operating systems. We can spend $80 on a basic Android phone or over $1,000 on the latest iPhone. The same is true for cars. Some of us are happy with a $15,000 Hyundai Elantra while others are willing to drop $80,000 on an Escalade. An amazing aspect of free markets in America is that whether you are buying groceries, phones, or cars, people in essentially all developed parts of the country have access to a plethora of choices.

There is, however, one giant omission in this realm of overwhelming choice and abundance: housing. In stark contrast to the cornucopia of products displayed at the supermarket, the American housing market is surprisingly homogenous.

There are those who consider themselves Our Intellectual Betters who are dismayed at the variety of breads or deodorants or what have you.  Paternalism, however, gives us boring neighborhoods.  "Unlike the grocery store, where the product selection is dynamically adjusted to meet consumer preferences, the housing options available to us are largely dictated by zoning regulations."

The old "Best of the Web" feature in The Wall Street Journal used to ask, frequently, "What Would We Ever Do Without Experts?"

In the neighborhoods, it might be, live better.

WHY IT MATTERS.

Inside Higher Ed's Paul Fain files a report.  "More than half of low-income students at comprehensive public universities reach the top half of the nation's income earners by their 30s, according to a new analysis from the American Enterprise Institute."

The comprehensive universities are a "a category of institution that fits between public flagship or research universities and community colleges."  In Cold Spring Shops lexicon, those are the land-grants, mid-majors, and regional comprehensives.  That's where you find most of the students and more than a few of the current and future high achievers.

It's an American Enterprise Institute study.  I'd be more comfortable touting the results if it's something I saw in Journal of Economic Perspectives or American Economic Journal:  Applied Microeconomics.  That noted, "Institution spending levels and selectivity are less closely associated with upward mobility" is a stylized fact I'd like to see investigated more carefully.

SETTING THE PACE FOR THE WORLD.

Regular readers know that when it comes to hauling freight on rails, nobody does it better than the North Americans.

Michigan State's Andreas Hoffrichter gets it.

First we issue a bulletin order.  There is a Center for Railway Research and Education at Michigan State.  With Wisconsin teams eliminated, display green and white signals for the Final Four!

On to the railroad reading.

Often there is the perception that the U.S. lags behind other countries when it comes to rail, but in many cases that is not true. The country has, arguably, the best freight rail system in the world, which is owned, operated and financed by private companies. Passenger service in specific corridors is comparable with the European counterparts: for example, in the Northeast. On long-distance routes and in less densely populated areas, however, there are often empty seats on Amtrak trains.

The contrast with Passenger Rail operations in other countries is further complicated by there often being one operator of intercity and regional service, e.g. Germany's Deutsche Bahn, while in the States Amtrak run the intercity and overnight services and a variety of local authorities run the commuter trains, which, themselves, might sometimes be the best in the world at what they do.

It's possible to mix freight and passenger trains on the same track, but you can't run the passenger trains as fast as you could on dedicated tracks.

Running passenger and freight trains on the same lines is possible but poses many challenges, as the characteristics of the two train types are very different; freight trains tend to be long, heavy and comparatively slow, while passenger trains are short, fast and comparatively light. If there are not too many trains on a line, this mixed traffic can be managed, but if there are a lot of trains, then separate infrastructure is the way forward.

In the United States, the separate infrastructure was once hidden in plain sight. Consider the four track main lines on The Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central. Away from the cities, two of the tracks were reserved for the passenger trains, and the platform configurations at a few stations still offer hints as to how that worked.  Or look closely at the Union Pacific map.  Why are there two lines between the Chicago area and Milwaukee?  Once upon a time, the two tracks closest to the lake were primarily for passenger service, the two tracks inland, which bypassed downtown Chicago, were for freight.

Many of these tracks are now gone, and the legal relationship between Amtrak and the freight railroads is not good.  If the freight trains have to be held in order for the passenger trains to stay on schedule, do the railroads not have a case that a regulatory taking is in effect?  Who, then, has the responsibility for providing the additional tracks?  Mr Hoffrichter sees a role for public spending, infrastructure, if you will.  "Dramatically expanding rail use, particularly passenger service, will require government investment in more frequent service on existing lines, starting service to areas that don’t have access to rail currently, reducing journey times and building out a larger passenger rail network."  Whether Our Political Masters will go along remains to be seen.

FORESEEABLE, YET POORLY FORESEEN.

I'm still cleaning out some old copies of magazines and journals and recently found, in the March-April, 1998 issue of The American Enterprise, "Clueless: Why the Elite Media Don't Understand America," by Joel Kotkin and David Friedman.

Back in the day, the magazine (which has since been replaced by a different American Enterprise Institute periodical) provided a compuserve.com electronic mail address for its editor, and evidently none of the magazine's content ever made its way to the Wayback Machine or any other server of the era.

Never mind that, let me transcribe a bit of the article, at good old forty words per minute.

All four national news networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox -- are headquartered within walking distance of each other.  The nations two most dominant papers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, are published within a subway ride of opinion-shaping magazines like Time, Newsweek, Business Week, and Fortune.

More than liberal bias, this conglomeration of media power increasingly reflects a retrograde Northeastern elitism out of sync with the rest of the country.  In response, more and more Americans are tuning out the messages.  The establishment media continue to influence one group heavily, however -- and that is other elites throughout the country.

Messrs. Kotkin and Friedman argue, the influence tends to epistemic closure -- I'm not sure that was even a thing in 1998 -- and not in a good way.

By rights, our national media should be reflecting and explaining the country in all of its far-flung economic, technical, and political hues.  Yet with the notable exception of talk radio and a few journals, they do very poorly on this front.

Because the nation's media elite increasingly resemble an aristocracy, hailing from the same exclusive schools and privileged backgrounds, it's not surprising that surveys show key members share remarkably narrow common views on issues like the environment, abortion, and economics.

We could once upon a time speak of a Washington Consensus or a "vital progressive center," and yet there were cracks showing.

Compared to Main Street, media types marry less, divorce more, are oftener childless, are mostly unchurched, and frequently lack familiarity with normal American suburban life.  One result of all this is that our major press regularly misses, ignores, or scoffs at important trends sweeping the heartland of the nation.  Over the last two decades, this has happened with scores of big stories.

For instance, our major media didn't spot the religious renewal now underway in America until long after it had taken off.  They were completely surprised by the recent flipover to a Republican Congress -- a flummoxed Peter Jennings, remember, called the '94 vote a "temper tantrum."

Perhaps the Normals have their attention now.  Or perhaps it's still OK to be smug and condescending.

So why does [Keith] Olbermann get away with making bigoted stereotypes of hunters and reporters from Mississippi and threaten them on social media? Why are ESPN and Twitter fine with that? Probably because the people who sit in the boardrooms of ESPN and Twitter think Olbermann’s assessment of Mississippians is basically true.

This contempt of our larger institutions are towards the people in the middle of our country is a dangerous illness, and Olbermann is a living symptom of it.

Perhaps so, or perhaps Keith Olbermann is a marginal figure in the Era of Trump. Therapy comedy for the elite, if you will.

STALAG WISCONSIN.

During the War, the Great Lakes states provided temporary home to German and Italian prisoners of war.  There was one such camp near Sycamore.

In Wisconsin, the German-speaking immigrant population was sufficiently assimilated by the outbreak of hostilities and stressed enough by labor shortages that war prisoners became trusted farm workers.

During the war years, one-third of the state’s population was of German descent, with many first- and second-generation families still speaking their native language at home. That was reason enough for U.S. military leaders to look to Wisconsin as a place to hold German POWs — that and a desperate need for help at farms and in canning factories. As the nation's military-age citizens went off to war, the agricultural labor shortage grew severe, especially for fruit and vegetable growers who depended on hired hands.

Wisconsin had three times more POWs working in rural farm fields than neighboring Minnesota. The captured soldiers labored side-by-side with their Wisconsin hosts and were largely credited with saving the crops during the 1944 and 1945 growing seasons, according to Betty Cowley, author of "Stalag Wisconsin: Inside WWII Prisoner-of-War Camps." The Eau Claire-based historian's work features more than 350 interviews, and serves as a comprehensive history of Wisconsin camps.

Take the nationality tag off people, and you have ... common concerns and common hopes. "Despite their countries being at war for vastly different reasons, some in the two groups recognized a common humanity in one another."

Apparently, Wisconsin civilians recognized that a few farmhands on loan from the Wehrmacht weren't going to be much of a security threat.

A Fond du Lac beer manufacturer was reported to have delivered 25 cases of beer shortly after the prisoners arrived and made deliveries every other day during their stay. Another article concerned a POW missing from camp. He was located at a downtown bar, having “a few beers with the local boys.”

Women in the town baked pies and some POWs were treated to sit-down meals by the farmers and their families, despite being sent to work with sack lunches. At times, women competed to serve them the best meal, in hopes of drawing the POWs back to continue their work, Cowley says in her book. These acts could have led to charges of treason, she said.

There's a screen shot of the newspaper reporting the arrest of the bar-hopping escapee.  The article also reports on fraternization of the more traditional form.

After the War, the Geneva Convention required the repatriation of all German war prisoners to Germany.  Thereafter a number of them returned to the United States, more than a few with the sponsorship of their employers.

ASSIMILATION IS A TWO WAY STREET.

Reason's Shikha Dalmia finds little to like in vulgar forms of identity politics.

Both the left and the right are arguably in a darker place, pushing their own form of tribal politics—both of which are a threat to America's liberal democracy, whose core promise is to protect individuals regardless of their tribal affiliation. Liberal democratic institutions have allowed individuals to cooperate and collaborate freely beyond the confines of their tribes, generating what Deirdre McCloskey has dubbed the Great Enrichment and Jonah Goldberg calls the Miracle. Yet now these institutions are under assault from both sides.

The left's excesses and efforts to silence reasonable debate through political correctness arguably helped to spawn the current backlash on the right. But even if that's true, the minority identity politics of the left is not ultimately as dangerous as the majority identity politics—the ethno-nationalism—of the right.

There are two sorts of "right wing" politics in play here. One is the libertarian tradition of bourgeois norms and limited government, which is repressive tolerance in the lexicon of the left. The other is blood-and-soil tribalism, and it's emerging among Americans of European extraction -- white folks, if you will -- as a variation on minority identity politics, backed up by notions of supremacy that originated with the eugenics movement of a century ago.  It's the tribalism that bothers Ms Dalmia, and she finds reason to not reject minority identity politics out of hand.

I agree with conservatives like Goldberg and centrists like Francis Fukuyama that the antidote to the left's mishigas [c.q.] and the right's reactionary turn is a restoration of civic nationalism, a patriotism of liberal democratic principles, that can once again subsume the narrower tribal identities on both sides and bind the country together in a broad creedal identity. But I don't agree that this requires pushing toward a more culturally and socially homogeneous America. That, I'll argue, will only heighten the risk of majoritarian tyranny.

In fact, I think, we need the opposite: a redoubling of a commitment to the pluralistic project—or, in modern parlance, the diversity project—that James Madison said was the most effective bulwark against illiberalism. The right shouldn't treat diversity as a dirty word just because the left has sullied it.

There is no doubt that America has made very great strides in undoing the legacy of slavery and other injustices, as the right points out. It is also true that old biases and arrangements are still baked into existing social norms and power structures, as the left points out. If individuals face discrimination because of their membership in a group, they will band together as a group to demand relief.

Black Lives Matter might have its excesses, but it is hardly wrong when it demands body cameras on police officers to deter rampant harassment. Nor is the #MeToo movement off base in demanding a rethinking of lingering Mad Men–era attitudes in the workplace. Nor is it unreasonable that a diverse America would like Hollywood to reflect diversity and tell diverse stories that may have a broad appeal. There is no reason that a superhero shouldn't be black!

Indeed, it was inevitable that having won basic rights, minorities striving to find their place in mainstream America or women joining the workforce en masse would force a reckoning with old ways. As Fukuyama points out in his last book, identity politics is ultimately a quest for dignity or satisfaction of what the Greeks called thymos—that aspect of the soul that craves recognition. And it comes into play precisely to satiate the need for social recognition that formal liberal equality fuels but doesn't necessarily address. In fact, formal equality makes informal inequalities and injustices seem not less but more galling.

So the left's basic project is understandable. The trouble is its methods. In its eagerness to overcome these inherently intractable problems in one fell swoop, it has convinced itself that liberal democratic principles—free speech, due process, presumption of innocence, the rejection of all notions of collective guilt—are actually white patriarchal inventions that interfere with the quest for justice rather than aiding it. So on college campuses, debate and discussion are being replaced with trigger warnings; Title IX sexual assault rules are replacing due process and individualized findings with blanket judgments and collective guilt.

That way, she notes, will be many entries in the "annals of leftist autophagy" we encounter on Insta Pundit.  It was precisely by relying on the foundations of liberal democratic principles that emancipation and universal suffrage and one water fountain for all pedestrians came about.

So how do we get rid of the identity politics of the left and the right and restore a civic nationalism committed to liberal democratic values?

I don't mean to sound sanguine, but sooner or later minorities, with or without the help of the left, will discover that they need to get over any silly notions that the Constitution is a tool of white patriarchal oppression rather than a great resource for their own protection. This isn't mere speculation. New York Times writer Mustafa Akyol recently pointed out that American Muslims aren't converting America to Islam by preaching sharia. They are converting Islam into liberalism. They are invoking pluralism, tolerance, and religious diversity to maintain a safe space to practice their faith, but in the process they are transforming their faith. As one Muslim activist told Akyol: "Once you invoke diversity as a value," it becomes hard to "deny a place to gay Muslims, Shia Muslims, non-hijabi female Muslims, less-observant-than-you Muslims."

Or, for that matter, to view bratwurst-chomping Christians of German extraction as haram.

Give new arrivals an America to buy into, and an America that buys into the new arrivals, and we'll be OK.