Tag Archives: political parties

Capitalism

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William McGurn had a piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal about Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) attitude toward capitalism, centered on Sanders’ view that every economically successful person is necessarily selfishly greedy, and by extension, that that person’s success is from the fundamental zero-sum nature of capitalism.

Sanders is wrong.

At the bottom of capitalism is an entirely voluntary exchange between two people, each seeing to his own interest. At the end of the exchange, each has satisfied his own interest: each is better off from the exchange than he was before it because each has gained something that he wanted and didn’t have.

And: each, with that exchange, has made the other better off, too.

It scales up. Businesses prosper by making their customers better off, and by giving those businesses their custom, customers make those businesses better off. The better each does—at satisfying both themselves and the others—the better the other does, too.

Both of these are lost on folks like Sanders, and Joe Biden. They don’t even conceive the notion.

Their blinders notwithstanding, though, it’s hard to find a more moral economic system. It’s also hard to find a less zero-sum economic system.

A Progressive-Democrat Governor’s View

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…of the intelligence and responsibility of American citizens, including particularly Kentucky citizens.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear (D) has said he’s going to identify, track, and isolate Kentucky citizens who dare go to their church’s Easter services. His excuse—and that’s all it is, a cynical rationalization—for his government’s surveillance of a broad swath of citizens is the present Wuhan Virus situation.

It’s for the greater good, you see.

I hear people say, “It’s my choice”. Well, it’s not the person next to you’s choice….

That’s plainly not true. It was the person next to you’s clear choice to be there, also, knowing full well the nature and the proximity of the company both of those individuals, and it was the clear choice of all of the rest of the congregation.

Neither is there anything in either the Free Exercise Clause or the Establishment Clause that says “except for when a State governor thinks better.” This is simply a confluence of two Progressive-Democrat ideologies: American citizens are too grindingly stupid to make their own decisions or to act intelligently (here, to govern their own post-service behavior), and religious freedom is just a phrase that’s gone out of vogue because, after all, the Constitution isn’t binding on anything.

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) is on the right track:

Taking license plates at church? Quarantining someone for being Christian on Easter Sunday? Someone needs to take a step back here[.]

The Progressive-Democrat Beshear has no faith in the citizens of Kentucky or their ability to act intelligently, he wants Government to identify and surveil them and then control them, and he has no respect for Law.

Kentuckians might want to remember this at the next election for Governor, in three more years.

Progressive-Democrat Extortion

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The Progressive-Democrats in Congress held up the last Wuhan Virus Federal aid program for four critical days, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Pelosi (D, NY). These persons tried to force inclusion in the aid an array of programs irrelevant to it but central to the Progressive-Democrats’ ideology and platform.

They’re at it again. The new aid effort, currently under way in the Senate, is centered on small businesses and their employees: an additional $250 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program

Two top [Progressive-]Democrats—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—in a statement on Wednesday morning said they want the additional $250 billion for PPP to get packaged with other provisions, such as $100 billion for health-care institutions, $150 billion for state and local governments and extra help for food-stamp recipients.

These two, and their cronies in both houses of Congress, are holding up the aid while they try to force inclusion of $100 billion for health-care institutions, $150 billion for state and local governments and extra help for food-stamp recipients.

This is just naked extortion. Nice aid program you have there. You need to pay some protection fees for it.

Never mind that additional funding—from some source, not necessarily on the taxpayers’ backs, but maybe so—for hospitals, et al., for state and local governments who’ve a long history of fiscal irresponsibility, for those on food stamps could easily be discussed and debated in a separate bill or three.

Never mind, too, that not a single red penny of the $150 billion already appropriated for health care and medical-related stockpiles has been spent. Piling more money behind that bottleneck serves no purpose beyond virtue-signaling.

No. Small businesses and their employees can just go hang unless Progressive-Democrats get their demands met. As The Wall Street Journal put it, [t]ens of thousands of small businesses are heading for bankruptcy without short-term liquidity from the feds. That’s OK, though, if Party can’t get its demands met.

Again, no. Paying the vig, paying the ransom—paying the Danegeld just gets the payer stuck with the Dane forever.

The Coming Wuhan Virus War

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Daniel Henninger worries about the next Wuhan Virus war (he refers to it with the more press’ saccharine, more politically correct label, “coronavirus” war).  This is a political war between the American Left and the rest of our American nation.

In the course of his piece, though, he had a couple of remarks that I’m not sure he really understood.

A federally led policy is appropriate in a national crisis like this.

Indeed, but federally led, not centrally led.

But once it passes, the issue will be whether to revert to the freest private economy we had in a generation or whether deeper, explicit social direction and economic protections by the national government are justified.

This depends entirely on whether Americans in general understand the difference between “federal government” and “central government.” That’s a distinction Progressives, Progressive-Democrats, and their “education” divisions of teachers unions have been working so hard for so long to muddy.

We’ll need to turn out in force in the coming election to prevent Progressive-Democrat destruction. Yes, that’s part of the war which worries Henninger—but the answer to Progressive-Democrats’ divisiveness and destruction cannot be, at this crossroads for our nation, simply to turn the other cheek or otherwise ignore attacks on our freedoms and our personal responsibilities.

State Governments and Socialism

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A current government move to control the means of production—classic socialism when the controls are widespread—is this, involving what’s left of our nation’s insurance industry, at the State level.

In at least three states, lawmakers have proposed legislation to force insurers to pay billions of dollars for business losses tied to government-ordered shutdowns.

Never mind what already agreed policies say. To Hell with signed contracts. Government men Know Better, and being above petty commitments themselves, can’t conceive the idea that commitments actually matter in a free society, in a free market economy.

Some regulators have declared moratoriums on cancellations and nonrenewals of policies.

This is Government assuming control of the insurance companies and dictating what they will produce.

Here is the blatantness of the power grab made manifest:

In Massachusetts, state Senator James [Jamie] Eldridge (d) said that the depth of the coronavirus pandemic has made bold legislative action a necessity. A bill he has proposed would require insurers to pay so-called business-interruption claims to small businesses even if policies contain virus exclusions.

Insurers get reimbursed later? No, they’ll have to apply to Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democratic government-appointed insurance commissioner for that, and the commissioner would be authorized to bill those same insurers, “possibly over years,” to cover the payouts. I am altering the deal; pray I don’t alter it any further.

Of course, all of this is for the best of reasons and soundest of motives. For some politicians, that’s actually true, too, regardless of the misguided nature of their actions.

For most, though, this is just another implementation of Progressive-Democrats’ mantra of never letting a crisis go to waste; they’re just too useful for expanding government power.