By I & I Editorial Board, Issues & Insights | October 09, 2024
Maybe the primary complaint against Kamala Harris is that voters don’t know who she is nor where she stands on issues, given her flip-flopping-for-votes campaign. But we can be sure that her instincts are to bridle the economy rather than unleash it.
Not many weeks ago, we argued that Harris’ Marxist roots, from both her mother and father, inform her economic positions. It should be kept in mind whenever looking at her economic proposals.
Without giving her economic positions a label, Harris, who has spoken appreciatively of the impact her parents had on her, is definitively, though not necessarily nominally, a Marxist. She insists that public policy objectives have ‘to be about’ ensuring that everybody ends ‘up in the same place.’ She favors ‘equitable distribution’ and ‘giving resources based on equity.’
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How is this different than the socialist creed ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ that Karl Marx popularized?
This is the opposite of letting the U.S. economy, the most powerful force on Earth when not bound by ideological chains, roll freely.
It is not a radical position to support a free market economy. The moral and material benefits of an open economy are enormous. No other system can match its dynamism and positive outcomes. (We must emphasize that the free market, or capitalism, as not a system but instead the natural human interaction.)
Free markets secure private property and allow it to be applied to its most productive uses. In a Harris economy, property is a good that the government can direct, squeeze and distort at its whim for political gain.
Free markets increase the wealth for all, not just those favored by whoever happens to control the government at any given time. They promote choice, independence and cooperation, as well as political freedom and freedom of expression. When the government is involved in the economy to even the smallest degree, cronyism and corruption thrive.
Free markets set prices – which Harris wants to fix using the power of government. But prices set by free markets help ensure competition, keeping prices in tune with supply and demand, and prevent shortages. The profit incentive, discouraged and often blocked by government meddling, in an open economy benefits across the board.
We are not blind “market fundamentalists” but believers in the power of liberty, in some since for the simple sake of liberty but also for its power to lift multitudes out of poverty. No “system” devised by lazy malcontents such as Karl Marx and implemented by mass murderers such as Vladimir Lenin, nor managed by “democratic” central planners in capital cities, will ever benefit humanity the way a free and open economy will.
It’s both sad and tragic that a mere three decades after the collapse of communism, which utterly repudiated the idea of top-down socialist “economic planning,” we should still be debating this failed scheme today.
But we are. Or, at least, one major political party is. There must be some sickness among those who so desperately want to restrain the freedom of others through economic manipulations.
As is often the case, Milton Friedman said it best decades ago: “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” That’s a worthy epitaph for all socialist thought.
We won’t pretend that Donald Trump will strictly follow the guidance of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. His trade tariff position gives us pause. But domestically, he can be counted on to pursue tax cuts and deregulation. Harris can be counted on to do just the opposite.
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