Living the Hunger Games

Glenn Reynolds observes that America is increasingly tracking the script from the Hunger Games - a rich and flourishing capital feeding off the flesh of the 'provinces'.  They're not states anymore, because states had autonomy and via the Senate, constitutional power.  Today, the states are simply satrapies of an all powerful central government who buys their acquiescence with (for a little while longer) an infinite 'magic money machine'.  Federalism is dead.  Long live Panem D.C.!

Observations from the New York Times - even the trendy lefties are noticing:

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.

Although mostly they avert their gaze until they alight in Washington to worship at the altar of power, money and glory.

The NYT Progs are finally noticing that Wall Street worships at this altar too:.

A few remarkable books by professors at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business argue that a primary source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 to 20 years could be what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the economy.

In a world where politics picks winners and losers, those with political power win.  Always.  And the young and the poor?  Well they're just props, you see - we'll bring 'em back out of storage at the next election.