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.
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