Maybe we wouldn’t keep operating this way—pretending like minor trims are major reforms while refusing to tackle demographic and entitlement time bombs ticking beneath our feet—if we stayed focused on the question of what, considering the cost, we’re willing to pay for.
Otherwise, it’s too easy to continue committing a generational injustice toward our children and grandchildren. That’s because all the benefits and subsidies that we’re unwilling to pay for will eventually have to be paid for in the future with higher taxes, inflation, or both. That’s morally and economically reprehensible.
Admitting we have a problem is hard. Fixing it is even harder, especially when politicians obscure costs and fail to recognize the following realities.
As I have argued for years, starting when I sometimes got little policy pieces discussed by Rush Limbaugh, US policy is “DAFT” — Deficits Are Future Taxes. Since we are not cutting spending, a SALT deduction is a tax increase. The SALT deduction increases the deficit; deficits are future taxes, so SALT deductions are straightforward tax increases.
National Review‘s Andrew Stuttaford explains that
central planners, such as those trying to design an industrial policy, are not known for their ability to think everything through. That’s not always their fault. Life is complicated, business is complicated. What is their fault is their belief, let’s call it their fatal conceit, that they can think everything through.
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One of the features, for the political class, of a protectionist regime is the way that it can help in the process of building a clientelist regime by giving it something else to “sell.” Company X asks for special treatment here, Union Y requests a tweak to the rules there. Certain “clients,” however, can be too important to ignore, especially as, say, midterms draw closer, raising interesting questions about who really is setting policy.
Here’s Warren Coats on the U.S.-Japan trade ‘deal.’
Jim Dorn reports on “Yiwu: China’s Free-Market City.”
In 2016 the Labor Department accused Sun Valley Orchards, a fourth generation farm in New Jersey, of breaching an employment agreement on H-2A visas. Labor imposed hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines through an in-house administrative proceeding. The agency requested penalties and then approved them, serving as prosecutor, judge and jury.
Sun Valley’s owners, Joe and Russell Marino, with the help of the Institute for Justice, sued under the Administrative Procedure Act, claiming the Constitution entitles them to a hearing in a regular federal court. A district court dismissed the claim, but on Tuesday the Third Circuit panel ruled unanimously that the Labor Department’s proceedings against Sun Valley must be handled by a federal court, not an administrative tribunal.
John Stossel is correct: “You shouldn’t need a license to talk.”
My sense is that the central dogma of partisan Democrats is that they are the best political party because they are morally and intellectually superior to other Americans. Contemplating otherwise is as difficult for the moderate wing of Klein and Yglesias as it is for the wokest of the woke.
The classic analysis of this core belief is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Sowell argues that people on the left who are politically engaged behave as if they were anointed with wisdom that others lack. This belief is so strongly held that nothing counts as evidence against it. It is an axiom, not an empirically falsifiable proposition.
The anointed see opposition not in terms of a mere difference of opinion. It is illegitimate. Their yard signs that say “We believe” in science, justice, and so on are nothing less than an accusation that you don’t believe in such things unless you are on their team.
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For the anointed, losing the confidence of the public is like falling off a horse. The “abundance movement” is, like the ill-fated Robert F. Kennedy candidacy, a campaign to get the anointed back on to the horse.
The blind spot of the anointed is their inability to see that they do not belong on the horse to begin with. There is no class of Americans that is morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Instead, each of us should be modest about what we claim to be the best way to approach political problems.
You can stir up resentment in America by talking about inequality. You can rail against “oligarchs,” landlords, and grocery stores. Or you can champion “abundance,” meaning the ability of government to build things without its own regulations getting in the way. But if you do so from the standpoint of assuming your own moral and intellectual superiority, you will find your popularity is limited, and deservedly so.
