Liberals, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton, love to tell us two things:
1. Free Markets had their day and are not coming back. We are the most socialist we have ever been and are going bravely forward toward more government control over every aspect of the economy and our lives.
2. Our economy is benefitting a smaller and ever shrinking percentile of the population. The 99%, and especially the middle class, is being left behind.
One would think the typical voter would be smart enough to figure out that #1 is causing #2, but sadly a large and growing percentage of Americans think the solution to an overly controlling government is even more socialism and even more state control.
We are told that a free market system in which free people freely interact with others and in which each individual owns their own labor, and are allowed to do with their skills and abilities as they wish, with equal protection under the law – that this kind of a system is inherently racist. No shred of evidence has been asked for nor given for this other than the simple fact that different economic outcomes for different ethnic groups exists (and have always existed everywhere). The truth is that Asian Americans and Indian Americans (from India) are the two groups making the most money per capita, rather than white Americans, and most other minorities, including Hispanic Americans and Muslim Americans, historically achieve economic parity with the white majority within two generations of immigrating over. This would seem to point to cultural differences rather than racism as the primary driving force between economic outcomes. Also interesting is that African Americans and white Americans raised in the same neighborhoods and in the same schools have no difference in economic outcomes (other races generally have higher economic outcomes). That again points to cultural attitudes and beliefs rather than racism as the dominant factor.
We are told that free market failures caused the Great Depression and Great Recession, in spite of the fact that Federal Reserve policies in the 1920s caused a stock market bubble in which people borrowed money to invest it, and used their earnings to pay the interest on their debt. Once the market topped out and people had to sell more than growth to make their loan payments, we got a very predictable stock market panic, and the crash of 1929. Furthermore, by June of 1930, unemployment, which topped 9% a month after the crash, was back down under 6%. The recession was over.
In the meantime, 1/3 of all banks had closed, their customers not being able to pay their loans as the stock market crashed, and by 1933 our M2 money supply had shrunk by 1/3.
The Fed’s ONE job is to maintain a stable money supply. The Fed failed in that one role, and the resulting crash in the supply of money was the primary cause of the Great Depression. Most Americans blame free markets even though the markets that failed were not free in any sense of the word. The Great Depression was a government failure – not a market failure.
There were two other causes of the Great Depression: the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, and the dust bowl. The tariffs were a government reaction to the recession of 1930, imposed, ironically, after the recession had ended. 85% of everything America produced at the time was sold overseas, and the trade war our tariffs started was not good for our economy. Of all the causes of the depression, the dust bowl was the only cause that was not a government mistake, and the dust bowl by itself would only have caused a regional depression.
We are told that a market failure caused the Great Recession. This is in spite of the fact that Bill Clinton had a stated government policy of doing everything possible to boost housing ownership for all Americans, including those who could not afford to pay back mortgages. Alan Greenspan and later Ben Bernanke worked with housing lenders to create ever more complex ‘mortgage backed securities’ to spin the risk of mortgage failure into pools that were to be considered ‘safe’ even when the mortgages contained within were not. For a while this worked, but then in 2001 Paul Krugman (a liberal economic political writer) wrote a very influential editorial asking the government to inflate the housing bubble, and someone listened. The term ‘wealth effects’ was born, Krugman got his bubble, and in 2008 we got the Great Recession.
We are told market failures caused The Great Recession in spite of the fact that the market that failed was anything but free – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both government entities, underwriting the vast majority of all mortgage loans both before the crash. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac underwrite the vast majority of mortgage loans today as well.
We are told that government learns from its mistakes, and yet we are in the middle of another housing bubble, and there is a larger percentage of leveraged money in the stock market than there was in 1929, right before the crash. Government learns nothing. Unlike private businesses, that go out of business if they make too many mistakes, government has no incentive to learn.
We are told that politicians have the solutions, and yet the two ‘jobs’ politicians actually have are 1) to get elected, and 2) to get re-elected. Anything else is very much further down on the list. And how do politicians get elected and re-elected? By taking campaign contributions, almost entirely from special interests who need to pay our politicians to get them to do things that run exactly counter to the interests of the people. The more counter to the interests of the people a particular bill goes, the more profitable it is for politicians to support it. The result is that Congress does not care what the public wants.
For every politician of conscience, like Rand Paul, or Bernie Sanders (who is absolutely lost on economic matters but who does seem to legitimately believe what he says), you have hundreds who would sell not only their own soul, but those of their constituents, for re-election. And we are told by the left that we can trust these people with our lives and livelihoods. Based on past experience, we shouldn’t trust Congress farther than we can throw it.
We are told that in the name of ‘sustainability’ we need to allow an enlightened few to manage our economy, and our lives, under the banner of central planning, and yet these intellectual elites have no way of knowing any of the myriad of buying decisions the needs and wants of every day Americans will drive them to make. Though our collective knowledge may be far more mundane than is that of the intellectual elite, in aggregate we have vastly more knowledge than intellectual elites could ever dream of having. Furthermore the intellectual elites make no pretense about wanting to fulfill our needs and wants. Rather they tell us that THEY know what we need more than we do, and that by DENYING us what we want, they can see to the needs of more people. The intellectual elite create purely subjective happiness indexes and tell us that, if we submit to their iron-rule, we will be happier. Do you trust Congress to make you happy? What gives Congress the right to define what that word means for 330 million people? The only person who might know better than I do what makes me happy is my wife, and she is not in Congress.
This country was founded on the notion of true liberalism, which is the concept that it is the individual who is sovereign over their life, and that each individual has the right to live their life as they see fit, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others to do the same. Modern day liberals turn true liberalism on its head, telling us that we should return to a world where feudal lords provide us only with what they decide we might need. We are told that a people left free will oppress one another through the market place, and that only thorough oppression can there be equality. Oppression thus becomes the new definition for ‘freedom,’ even though it is also the old definition of ‘tyranny’. Did we throw off the yoke of tyranny 237 years ago, only to vote it back into existence today? Perhaps there are those who do not wish to believe that freedom made America great, but it undeniably made us rich and powerful. Do we wish to go back to a world where 90% of the public is but one bad harvest from starvation, as Thomas Malthus noted in 1800 – just as our economy was starting to change that metric?
Definitions are being spun on their heads all over the place. Making one race superior to others in the eyes of the law used to be called ‘racism’ and now is called ‘equality’. Those who call for actual equality, as in ‘equal treatment under the law,’ are now called ‘racists’. ‘Freedom’ is achieved not by leaving people alone but by taxing them as heavily as possible to fund whatever projects government says we should want, and by throwing people in jail, or in mandatory ‘education programs’ if they object, or if they profess to want other things than what government gives them.
‘Liberalism’ is not the desire for liberty in today’s world, but the denial of it. How is it that people no longer notice that the two words, ‘liberal,’ and ‘liberty,’ have the same root?
The Freedom of Religion has become the Freedom FROM Religion. The Freedom of Speech has become the Freedom FROM Speech. The way the left spins the second amendment, the Right of the People to Bear Arms against Tyranny has become the Right of the Tyrant to Bear Arms against the people.
The right to due process did not become anything at all. It just kind of died. Not only did due process die, but the public’s expectation of due process died. Today, to be accused is to be guilty. We have been investigating Donald Trump for two years – not because a crime was committed and we want to see what his involvement may have been, but to see if we can find a crime to pin on him.
We are told that the decline of our nation is ‘progress,’ because it is a part of the ‘Progressive Agenda’, but the word ‘progress’ implies direction rather than benefit. What is this new direction and who does it benefit?
If we look at the economic results of liberal policies, they benefit the very groups these policies are being created supposedly to control – the rich and powerful among us. The more power we give government, and by extension those who control government (the rich and powerful), the richer the rich and powerful get. Does the public wise-up and demand less government? No. We are too gullible to be wise, so we ask for more government. Currently, six corporations control more than 90% of our media. Guess who controls the media? The same people who control our government – and if you really believe we are a democracy, re-read the study that shows how congress does not care what we think.
Liberals, including both Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton, love to tell us two things:
1. Free Markets had their day and are not coming back. We are the most socialist we have ever been and are going bravely forward toward more government control over every aspect of the economy and our lives.
2. Our economy is benefitting a smaller and ever shrinking percentile of the population. The 99%, and especially the middle class, is being left behind.
Whether liberals are lying, or just wrong, one thing we can clearly see is that neither of the things liberals love to tell us are true.