Republicans Are Killing Capitalism
“If you live long enough” the expression goes, you may see things that you never would believe.
One of the things I would never have believed was that Republican Party governance would mimic the old planned economic policies of the Soviet Union. While Ronald Reagan is credited with political and military policies that sped up the demise of the Soviet Union, the Communist regime fell because their economic system did not deliver benefits to the Russian people. When the government tries to infringe and manipulate economies, the usual result is to make people poorer.
In the states the Republicans are in control today, they want to limit the free market from operating. Reagan believed in limited government and allowing individuals to make decisions. He would no more go to war with private companies or organizations that disagreed with him or his policies than he would believe it was the government’s right to tell business how to operate. These are two principles that the modern Republicans do not adhere to.
Ron, Don, and the Republicans want to use the coercive power of the state to pick which investments are acceptable to the state politburos. In some cases, their edicts are as cockamamie as requiring pension funds to invest in old technologies such as oil and gas and saying no to wind and solar. The latter technologies employ ten times more people than the former. It is politics not economics. It would be akin to investing in buggy builders over the car manufacturers in the early 20th century.
Some of the greatest “Centralized Republican Economic Planning” edicts are refusing to have ESG anywhere in the mix of investment criteria. If a fund manager wants to target investments using a broad range of criteria including ESG, then why the political dictate? The only thing that state pension funds or any state investment should consider is return on investment…not some political ideology. The state tying investments to political ideas instead of returns will only make the nation poorer.
The same can be said for retaliating against a business when it disagrees with the state’s policy. The minute DeSantis punished a private company for not adhering to the state’s mandate, he lost my vote. I am not talking about his current fiasco with Disney and not the cruise industry during COVID which employs thousands of Floridians. It was his dictator-liked edicts against the small mom and pop businesses that couldn’t enforce their own policy regarding masks or other COVID protocols.
At first during the pandemic, the government did take extraordinary measures to protect society. Ron DeSantis did as well as every state government and the Federal government. Florida was one of the first states to open back up. Instead of just saying that Florida was open for business and the state would not mandate any closures, DeSantis forbade private businesses from making their own rules. The market would have quickly sorted the problem out instead of the heavy hand of a repressive state being used.
Free markets made America a rich country. When other nations adhered to more statist beliefs, they squandered their economic strength. Regulation should be to protect business from being monopolies and killing competition not as policy to protect favorite companies or political ideas.
My eighth decade of life has ushered in a new brand of socialism. I always thought the Democrats would be the ones that gave us a planned economy. One that told the private business community what to do. Perhaps if Bernie Sanders had become president, that may have come to pass. But it is the Republicans in the name of populist rhetoric and nihilistic belief in holding power which has ushered in this phase.
Our collapse may very well be found in the subversion of our traditional beliefs. In today’s red map, ideas should be censored to conform to the state. History needs to be altered to please the majority regardless of the truth and the minority. Dissent needs to be silenced so the party can govern. Sounds to me like the old Soviet Union and their Communist Party. Who ever thought the United States and the Republican Party would mimic that trite nonsense?
