Market forces

 Inauguration Day in America, which the less charitable among us would prefer to call Take Out The Trash Day, and the more hopeful among us would prefer to think of as America Gets Sane Again Day, perhaps naively.

In any event, Joe Biden gets sworn in at noon as our 46th President, and the first woman Vice-President in American history (Kamala Harris) gets sworn in, and the Outgoing goes wherever the hell he'll go to tend to his boundless resentment.

I guess that makes this as good a day as any to talk about economic theory, seeing how the more batshite of the Outgoing's party -- an unnerving percentage, frankly -- thinks America is about to enter some socialist hellscape in which more than just Chipper III and Skippy IV down at the Yacht Club get seconds on pie.

It's been a hard few weeks for some of the latter, certainly. Since the Outgoing invited the batshites to town and then turned them loose on the Capitol in a frightening assault on the workings of democracy, American industry has shown it's not terribly fond of insanity as a business model.

And so Twitter evicted the Outgoing and a lot of the other batshites, and a whole pile of companies severed ties with Crazy Pillow Guy's product, and Crazy Pillow Guy and an assortment of other right-wing knobs commenced squalling about it.

Said free speech was under attack.  Said the radical left was trying to "cancel" them. Said soon Joe Biden would be setting up re-education camps, just like the socialist/commie  threat to America he is.

What none of them will say, of course, is what they can't say: That this is just a free market economy doing what a free market economy does.

In a free market economy, see, nothing compels private companies to do bidness with people they think will cost them bidness. Theoretically, at least, they serve at the pleasure of the consumer (though sometimes they also endanger the consumer to cut costs). So if the Outgoing and his minions want to spout straitjacket lunacies about stolen elections and baby-eating Democratic pedophiles, they're perfectly free to do so. 

But they ain't gonna do it on my company's dime. No, sir.

And so we come to Kelly Loeffler, defeated Republican senator and majority owner of the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA. As one of the Outgoing's wingnut brigade, she got sideways with her own team when she objected to the WNBA's support for Black Lives Matter. Since most of her players are black, and most of them thought well of BLM's stance against racial inequality in law enforcement practices, this did not go over well.

In fact, it went over so un-well that the Dream players -- Loeffler's own employees -- actively campaigned for Rev. Raphael Warnock, her victorious opponent in the Georgia runoff.

And so it comes as little surprise that someone  is about to buy Loeffler out as the Dream's owner. The league won't say who it is, but apparently it's close to a done deal. And that, too, is a free market economy at work.

Which the Outgoing and his minions are foursquare behind when it works in their favor. But when it doesn't ...

Lord. Just listen to the squalling.