Two defining characteristics of progressivism are: the goal of minimizing the market’s role by maximizing government’s role in allocating society’s resources and opportunities. And confidence that the world is plastic to progressive government’s touch, and the future is transparent to progressives’ gaze.
Having unleashed the worst inflation in 40 years, Biden is banning (through a 100 percent tariff) Chinese electric vehicles. This will keep U.S.-made EVs prohibitively expensive for most consumers, giving Biden a reason to continue subsidizing purchasers. Protected U.S. vehicle manufacturers will raise prices, enabling Biden to call this “reindustrialization.” This artificial (because government-subsidized) manufacturing “revival” will stop if the subsidies do, so they won’t.
Progressives focus on jobs protected or provided by government, especially since the 2000-2015 “China shock,” although the Economist calls this supposed shock “insignificant”: “A plausible upper limit for American jobs lost … is around 2m. That is a small fraction of the size of the workforce (130m in 2000). Over that period people left jobs about 900m times … The vast majority found work again quickly … ‘Despite some localised hardships, the China shock is really a rounding error for the US workforce overall,’ says Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute.”
The “shock” is the gift that keeps giving progressives an excuse to socialize the economy through government “partnerships.” While denouncing “tax breaks” for “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil,” Biden (notes the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards) favors trillions of dollars for “Big Semiconductor, Big Wind, Big Solar, Big Battery, Big Automaker, Big Utility.”
Automakers are now public utilities, whose future investments and product decisions are dictated by government. Twenty-first-century progressives preserve the shell of the (formerly) private sector as government’s appendage, but any vestiges of private autonomy are subordinated to the “existential” urgency of decarbonizing, which makes everything the government’s concern.
Jake Sullivan — technically, Biden’s national security adviser; actually, a roving savant-without-borders — says government dispensing trillions of dollars is “not picking winners and losers,” it is merely picking “sectors vital to our national well-being.” This is a distinction without a difference because “well-being” encompasses everything.
Biden says, more earnestly than grammatically, “Every American willing to work hard should be able to get a job no matter where they are … and keep their roots where they grew up.” So, government planning will render geographic mobility, hitherto a source of national vitality and modernity, optional: Stasis is an entitlement. Already Americans are only half as likely to move between states as they were in 1980.
Writing in the Financial Times, Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller International, says: “Something has been changing in the culture. Just as the American ‘revolution in pain management,’ which insisted on treating even moderate injuries with powerful opiates, was hooking the nation on OxyContin, its approach to economic pain management was addicting the system to a drip feed of government support.”
In the 2008 recession, Washington “scattered relief like rain: unsolicited offers of help for companies large and small, distressed or not, hundreds of billions in cash to more than half the country, 170mn Americans, jobless or not,” Sharma says. A substantial portion to people earning more than $100,000.
Republicans, whose leader calls himself “Tariff Man,” are complicit. After the 1987 stock market crash, the Federal Reserve under Republican Alan Greenspan promised to support financial markets, and joined what Sharma calls “the constant stimulus project.” And “the pre-Depression instinct to ‘liquidate’ weak companies in a crisis gave way to the opposite excess: ‘liquefy, liquefy, liquefy.’ Why not rescue everyone, all the time, when governments can borrow for free?”
During the past three decades, Sharma says, the federal government, under both parties, eliminated a total of just 20 rules, while adding about 3,000 a year. Biden 2.0 would make matters even worse than would Trump 2.0, but it sometimes takes an ideological micrometer to measure the difference between today’s competing statisms.
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