U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts is, according to some, the darling of the leftmost “progressives” and a hoped for successor to Barack Obama as President. Apparently, to some in his party, Obama has not been expansionist enough in his approach to the role of government in everyone’s daily life.
Comments by Warren at a recent speech in West Virginia (reported at CNN.com, 7/16/14) illustrate just how off the mark “progressivism” actually is.
Says Warren: ““The way I see this, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, all those other guys on Wall Street, they’ve got plenty of folks in the United States Senate willing to work on their side,” she said, jabbing her hands into the air to make her points. “We need more people in the U.S. Senate willing to work on the side of America’s families.”
It’s not “us” versus “them.” It’s not “banks” versus “families.”
If banks didn’t exist, to take risks and invest on behalf of what remains of private enterprise, millions of jobs would be lost, millions of economic opportunities would be missed, and the economy, even as we know it, would be largely moribund. People raised in America, which has been at least semi-capitalist for many generations, cannot conceive that it would be any other way; most have no concept that the more we socialize and nationalize our economy, the more we’ll start to look like other countries where none of us would ever prefer to live.
Banks, acting self-responsibly in a private marketplace (with no government bailouts or impediments), are actually everyone’s friend. It’s true that when government intervenes, incentivizing or even coercing banks and lenders to do things they otherwise would not do in a free marketplace (e.g., provide loans to people who can’t afford houses because government thinks they should), then real estate bubbles and other similar disasters will occur. But this isn’t because banks are evil; it’s because government thwarted and perverted their basic rational purpose.
Senator Warren doesn’t seem to understand this. She appears to view banks, and others who make profit, as inherently evil creatures. To her and progressives like her, the only solution is to take away more of their profits and squander them on inept, unjust and politically manipulative government programs. If banks are evil, and profit should be outlawed, then it seems the only solution is to outright nationalize them, and require government to have total control over the process of lending and the investment of money. In effect, this would be literal Communism. Even Obama has not gone quite that far. Is this where progressives want Warren to take us? It’s certainly where the logic and premises of their attitudes about profit and private ownership of wealth will take us.
Warren goes on: “The Republicans say no to raising the minimum wage, they say no to equal pay for equal work, they say we have to cut Social Security in order to make our budget balanced, they say no to those pension promises,” Warren said sternly. “They say it’s more important to stand up for Wall Street than it is to stand up for families across this county. Well I tell you what. They can say it, but they are going to lose.”
It’s not clear what Republicans as a party actually think or believe, because once in power they almost always follow the bidding and basic premises of their opponents, if only in watered-down form. Given my opposition to virtually all of Obama’s policies, people ask me if I’m a Republican. The only way I know how to answer this question is with another question: “What’s a Republican?”
Social Security is a mess because of two things. One, government should not be in the retirement insurance business. Two, coercion is wrong and never practical over the long-run.
Old-age insurance should be left up to individuals who can take responsibility for their own savings by investing in the private marketplace. Even our greatly hampered marketplace would deliver better retirement investment returns — recessions and all — than the minimally helpful Social Security provides the average retiree.
Warren, and other progressives like her, fail to mention that Social Security is unsustainably bankrupt, as is Medicare. On such a footing, a private insurance company would have been seized by the government by now for charges of fraud and incompetence. Instead of facing the fact that the only solution for these programs is to admit defeat, and phase them out over the long-run since they’re going to disappear anyway, she wallows in denial and blames it on her hapless opponents, most of whom want to preserve these desperately floundering programs as much as she does.
As for the minimum wage, it’s the practice of outlawing jobs below a certain worth. If you forbid employers from paying what a job is worth, then they simply won’t hire for that job. This is morally wrong, because it’s coercive; and it’s economically stupid, because it means less economic growth than there would have been. Progressives would rather see a citizen get government welfare than work for a job they consider beneath their dignity. How is living off others more dignified? The only way a minimum wage makes sense is if you’re against work, on principle, for people in a certain income bracket. Those in favor of the minimum wage should be forced to come clean, if that’s their real motive, and let’s debate what the issue actually is.
It’s incredible to think that the Democratic Party could move any further to the left, economically and policy-wise, than it already has. If we’ve reached a point where Barack Obama is now considered a moderate, and Hillary Clinton a conservative, as Elizabeth Warren supporters imply, then the country may be hopelessly and irreversibly off track. How are we ever to restore American economic growth and take care of our disastrous national debt and federal deficit without facing the hard facts of our leaders’ many errors and evasions? If Obama’s polices represented suicide by time-release poison, a President Elizabeth Warren would be the equivalent of simply pulling the trigger against the temple, getting it over with once and for all.
Obama, Clinton and most of the Republicans as we have known them are all, to varying degrees, on the same team. They all define “progress” the same way, only to varying degrees, and with differing attitudes about “social issues” such as gay marriage and abortion. To them all, “progress” means keeping government intensely involved in nearly all areas of our lives, and expanding it all the time.
The only meaningful alternative would be a candidate, activated by a philosophical point-of-view, who says: “Wrong direction, America, for a century now. Get government out of people’s lives, except for force and fraud. Phase out Medicare and Social Security, and accept the reality they’re not going to last anyway. End coercion, separate economics and state (along with church and state), and leave people alone. Bring on the free market — open up the market, and let economic freedom reign.”
Progressives like Elizabeth Warren will continue to assert that there’s an inherent and inevitable conflict-of-interest among people, and only the coercion and active manipulation of government can save us from ourselves. Quite the contrary. In a free market, where only force is against the law, you’d no longer have concerns about one special interest group (including a wealthy corporation) pulling strings against another, or extracting favors from a government who should never have been involved in the private sector in the first place.
Warren and progressives like her see themselves as enlightened, benevolent spirits rich in wisdom and compassion. What their views actually reveal are a dark and malevolent view of reality where human beings are inherently evil, where reality is by nature irrational and only authoritarian (if not communistic) control by central authorities can lead to anything worthwhile on earth. Their ideological positions say more about their own psychological state and personal problems than the nature of reality. This malevolent universe is, indeed, the world they have created in the pressure group warfare of D.C. and what we saw on a more consistent scale in nations under Communism or fascism. “Progressives” stand for progress all right — the same kind of progress a malignant tumor makes in destroying the life force on which it feeds. In their make-believe world of pseudo-sophistication, they refuse to see that in all such cases of injustice (real or perceived), it’s government who’s the problem. Incredibly, they take a government-created problem and demand more government as the solution, kind of like a heroin or crack cocaine addict demanding more of the same of what created the problem in the first place.
The greatest absurdity isn’t that so-called progressives keep winning most of the elections, and always end up controlling the agenda, in the end. Their ideas and policies appeal to fear, envy and small-mindedness. They also appear to unearned and hopelessly neurotic guilt, qualities which the leaders in the Republican Party embody all too well. These are strong emotional elements in too many people, enough to make these ultimately destructive Progressive policies carry the day despite their inherent injustice and awesome ineptitude.
What’s truly incredible is that we don’t — yet — see even one alternative rise to national credibility as a leader. A principled and vigorous stand — an Elizabeth Warren of the other side — would at least get it across to people that there’s a completely different course we could go on. If you believe polls, a majority seem to believe we’re totally on the wrong track. Yet we keep voting in the same basic ideas, expecting different results.
How on earth could someone like Elizabeth Warren not intensify the problems we already face?
Be sure to “friend” Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Rehoboth Beach DE). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest.