Saga and Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

One of the things that we talk about here on the Realignment are the big shifts going

on in American politics and society today. Those shifts have left big openings for the

populist forces of the left and the right to take advantage of declining American institutions.

With the end of the Cold War, the loss of American manufacturing jobs in China, the 2008 financial

crisis, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, you had the upending of the conventional

wisdom of the best solutions to our evolving policy challenges. In this vacuum, socialism

in particular has come back of inventions, in large part due to a new generation of voters

with no memory of the Soviet Union or the failures of North Korea or Cuba.

A few weeks ago, we brought Washington Post-Comb, this Megan McCartle on the show, to make

the case for capitalism and the market. As a quick reminder, let's take a little bit

of a listen to her case.

What markets do is they magically seamlessly allocate resources more efficiently than basically

any other mechanism. If you think about the difference between that and what would happen

in the Soviet Central Planning System where the committee would have to get together and

decide who got the tin, and there would be all of this bureaucratic infighting and it

wouldn't be based on how much people want the end use of the tin. It would be based on

who has pull over the guy in the Nome and Klautura, and so in fact, markets do this one

thing incredibly well. The allocate uses to their highest value to use. Usually when

we are complaining about markets, what we're complaining about is that the people in the

markets don't value the things we think they should value.

You can hear more Megan's case in episode 5 of The Real One.

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