Saturday, February 28, 2015

Elizabeth Warren, Baal Capitalist


78987.

Elizabeth Warren, Baal Capitalist

Sounds like she WOULD be a continuation of Barack Obama:


Warren is the dashboard saint of left-wing populism these days, denouncing big business and Wall Street at every turn.

The woman best known for demonizing big businesses nevertheless wants to maintain an outlandishly generous subsidy package for them.

I’m not so sure there’s a contradiction here. Rather, I think we’re seeing why there will never really be a bipartisan Left–Right alliance against crony capitalism and corporate welfare.

The Right’s “libertarian populism” wants to separate big business and big government. That means no more “too big to fail” and no more of government picking winners and losers.

The Left’s anti-big-business populism is very different. It doesn’t want to cut the government’s incestuous relationship with big business; it simply wants to bring business to heel. Big business should do what Washington tells it to do, and when it does, it will get treats. When it doesn’t, it will get the newspaper to the nose. But big business will never be let off its leash, if the Left has its way.

“Warren doesn’t have a problem with big banks or corporations.  She has a problem with banks and corporations that make profits in ways that she finds morally intolerable. She is an opponent of dynamism, not cronyism.”

This has always been the central idea behind progressive economics. Bureaucrats and other planners need — or at least want — ever more power to decide how economic resources are arranged and allocated. That doesn’t mean they’re socialists, it just means that corporations need to follow their lead. Indeed, good “corporate citizenship” means acquiescing to the priorities of progressive state planners and whatever their latest idea of “public–private partnerships” might be. The one constant in such partnerships is that business is always the junior partner.

This was the vision behind Woodrow Wilson’s “war socialism,” FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, Bill Clinton’s “Third Way,” and virtually all of Barack Obama’s economic policies. What is Obamacare but an attempt to turn the entire health-care industry into Washington’s well-fed lapdog?

What’s amazing is that people are still capable of shock when it turns out that a policy of treating businesses like dependent lapdogs yields businesses that try to have the government’s lap all to themselves.

Warren is famous for believing that businesses didn’t build their own success (echoing — or inspiring — Obama’s notorious “You didn’t build that” remark). According to her, businesses depend on government the way a lapdog depends on its master. Asking her to oppose the Export-Import Bank is like asking her to punish a dog for rolling over. 

No comments:

Post a Comment