UA Vol. 3, No. 3: Adults Playing Games

And more on reclaiming American citizenship…

From the Department of Too Much of a Good Thing:

On one hand, we enjoyed this story about two Brits attempting to play Campaign for North Africa, the World War II game released in 1979 with “board game so detailed, complex and cumbersome to play that it is thought that no one has ever actually finished it (including its creator).” We salute anyone striving to achieve great things!

On the other hand, this would seem to speak to a rather more serious issue: “Toy sales among adult-only households have now outpaced households with children for toy sales, growing 16% through June, according to market research group Circana, equivalent to 55% of total toy industry receipts.” A similar phenomenon finds childless adults now accounting for a sizeable share, perhaps even a majority, of Disney World guests. What’s going on here? Of course, NBC has an “experts say…” piece and, well:

Experts say it is part of a broader cultural shift some are calling “kidulting.” Simply put, this trend revolves around the embrace of play, whimsy and childhood comforts well into adulthood, often as an antidote to the stress of modern life.

It’s worth considering what this means not only for adults, but also for kids: As adults and their own preferences and demands dominate spaces once designed for children, and become the most profitable opportunities for a sector that once catered to children, what will be left for the kids? We spend a lot of time worrying about the brave new digital world that kids encounter, but the old-fashioned real world matters too.

AS FOR THAT DIGITAL WORLD, Meredith Meroney asks, what does the Constitution say about limits on protecting kids?

Americans are starting to see long-overdue wins protecting kids from Big Tech. Meta agreed to a $17 billion settlement and committed to stronger protections for minors using its platforms. Fifteen states, including Florida and California, have now enacted laws to address social media’s harmful effects on children and teens.

One potential obstacle to continued progress is an overbroad reading of the Constitution that would use the First Amendment’s protection of free speech as a bar to protecting kids. There is a “massive void” on the question today, explains Clare Morell in Social Media, Kids, and the Constitution. Morell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones, highlights key strategies for protecting kids without infringing on genuine rights, including content-neutral laws that focus on “addictive design features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications.” The good news is that “American law already has a … framework for how we treat minors’ access to activities and products” that can be applied to new technologies.

Bonus link: To go deeper, check out Morell’s National Affairs article, which she co-authored with Georgetown University professor Meg Leta Jones.

HARD TO DO WORSE THAN THIS, notes Drew Holden, taking a look at Gallup’s latest finding on corruption:

Nearly 90% of Americans see the government as corrupt, according to a Gallup poll published last month. Forget about the middle of last century, that’s a 30-point spike since the halcyon days of 2006 when scandal brought down figures such as Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Rep. Duke Cunningham, and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Or, look at it this way: since 2006, the share of Americans thinking our government is not corrupt fell by three-quarters.

Republicans, Democrats, and Independents are united in their distrust, which is far higher in the United States than in other developed nations. Four weeks out from Election Day, voter anger toward and distrust of the political establishment has never been higher.

But what does “corrupt” really mean? Gallup doesn’t provide much in the way of an explanation, and I found my mind drifting back to a fascinating 2022 New York Times article about “threats to democracy.” While pundits and news outlets obsess over things like the reflecting pool on the National Mall or the ever-looming specter of fascism, the Times found that voters’ top concern was a corrupt system where over two-thirds of registered voters “said the government ‘mainly works to benefit powerful elites’ rather than ‘ordinary people.’” The refusal of elites in either party to dispel that notion may help explain why voters continue to reject the party in power at every opportunity.

DID SOMEONE SAY CORRUPTION? Chris Griswold bursts through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man:

The Trump administration recently began running a taxpayer-funded series of ads, reportedly at the president’s personal insistence, highlighting its key arguments and accomplishments. Critics, including some Republican senators, suggest this use of public funds for campaign-style ads is out of bounds; the administration says these ads are educational and patriotic Public Service Announcements.

The PSA defense is hard to credit. Some of the ads are lightly edited campaign videos from 2024, with the campaign website dropped and “Paid for by the U.S. Government” added. The timing of the ad push, a few weeks before a midterm election, is also suggestive. The case was compelling enough that President Trump—not known for swift concessions on such matters—backed down on Monday, and declared that the ad campaign will now be paid for by MAGA Inc, the Trump-affiliated super PAC. About $10 million of public funds were spent prior to his announcement.

Concerns over the use of taxpayer funds for self-aggrandizement are legitimate. One ad consists entirely of a black-and-white shot of the president walking down a corridor, with audio of Trump delivering a speech listing the internal enemies he will defeat. Another planned ad, which argues that “God Made Trump” because He needed a “shepherd to mankind,” originally ran in 2024, then again at the 2026 GOP midterm convention. As Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told Face the Nation last Sunday, “I don’t think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves.” His proposal to ban such uses of funds, and also to ban politicians from naming buildings for themselves while still alive, are very good ideas.

But we should also be concerned that these ads are the ones an administration should want to run and expect to be successful. It is a sign of cultural and democratic exhaustion when a politician’s primary referent is himself rather than the fears and aspirations of the public. The premise of our Republic has always been that sovereignty inheres not in a ruler, but in the public generally, which exercises that sovereignty by picking the leaders it wants. Our leaders seem to have a hard time remembering this, which helps explain why the public keeps reminding them, kicking the incumbent out of the White House every four years. The conflation of the president with the country violates the public’s sense of its own prerogatives; as a political strategy, L’État, c’est moi is unlikely to work.

PUBLIC CORRUPTION, PRIVATE CORRUPTION, WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? There’s a reason most people see little difference between the two, writes Oren Cass:

I’ve become fascinated by attitudes toward taxation among various segments of our elite. Of course, anyone who has spent much time in American politics has encountered the complaint from antisocial libertarians that “taxation is theft.” But in more serious circles, there seems to be a widespread commitment to the notion that paying taxes is an inconvenience to be avoided whenever possible; really, something for the little people to do.

The most obvious recent example comes from the surge of nearly $200 billion into “tax-aware long-short” hedge funds that seek to shield the wealthiest Americans from paying any taxes on their capital gains and even, in some cases, on their ordinary income. I wrote about this last week in the Financial Times, observing: “The extraordinary wealth that these individuals and their money managers had already accumulated wasn’t enough, nor was the favourable tax treatment afforded to their capital gains, which in effect meant they might be able to pay a lower share of their income in taxes than their secretaries did. They had to avoid paying taxes altogether, and then claim this as the righteous course.”

And indeed, they really do seem to think that this behavior is neither immoral nor even amoral, but genuinely the moral course. “The moral issue,” says Cliff Asness, head of AQR (the leading purveyor of this garbage), “is that of working in your clients interests.” Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, amplifies this view and adds that Asness “runs his life and his business with the highest standards of integrity. … Cliff is following the law and serving his clients.”

But following the law and serving clients is the absolute minimum, not “the highest standards of integrity.” Indeed, it was Strain himself arguing just a couple of months ago that “the challenge for liberals is to live liberty well” and that “liberty is not the same as licence. To let your passions — or market incentives — determine your choices is to be enslaved.” This is correct, but for it to have any meaning, it must be applied. If the moral society is to be the check on the corrosive power of the market, supporters of the market must be willing to uphold their own moral principles.

AQR sells its “tax aware” products this way: “Taxes can create a gap between how your investments perform and how your wealth grows. Our tax-aware capabilities are designed to help close this gap.” What an absurd euphemism. In plain English, “a functioning society requires its citizens to pay a share of their gains to support public services. With our scheme, you keep the gains for yourself and free-ride on the suckers.” There is no value created here, simply a reallocation of the nation’s tax burden off of its most fortunate citizens onto everyone else.

As we observe in Reclaiming American Citizenship, “American elites have treated the basic norms and behaviors of ordered liberty as a game, undermining the rule of law and normalizing a culture of taking whatever you can get.” If we are going to preserve (or, at this point, rebuild) support for capitalism, we need to stop defending these perversions of it, which only strengthens the case that it is irredeemable.

YOUR CONCLUDING THOUGHT FROM RECLAIMING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP:

The corporate elites blame politics and the political elites blame business, but to most Americans they are one indistinguishable and fundamentally corrupt clique whose members enjoy absurd privileges even as they forsake their obligation to the common good. Believing their positions earned through superior merit, they feel entitled to rule. Perhaps too insulated to even understand the consequences of their actions, they have mortgaged structures they did not build, sold off assets they did not own, and devalued the basic currency of citizenship.