Kamala, Getty Images
“Time,
there will be time… time for a hundred visions and revisions that time will
soon erase – T.S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
“In her first policy speech in North Carolina later this week
and then next week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” Fox News reports, “Harris plans to present
to Americans who she is and how she will govern essentially for the first time
since [President Joe] Biden backed out of the race and endorsed her
presidential campaign. In recent weeks, Harris has shifted on at least five
major policy stances: mandatory assault rifle buybacks, fracking, immigration,
health care and a federal jobs guarantee.”
Astute political watchers will have noticed that, in addition
to Harris’ reversal being a revision that time will soon erase, the revision is
a revision of valiantly defended positions taken when Harris was President Joe
Biden’s Vice president for four years. They will have noticed as well that
Biden, for five decades an elusively moderate Democrat, quickly threw in his
lot with neo-progressives as soon as he became president, a rather dramatic
reversal for him and the nation.
Harris’ presidential campaign moves in the opposite direction
– from progressivism to moderation. Cynics will say moderation is old hat; John
F. Kennedy was a moderate, liberal Democrat. Progressivism is a horse of a
different color. No one has yet suggested that Harris wishes to turn the clock
back to 1963, the year Kennedy was removed from office through assassination.
Neo-progressives are not happy with the switcheroo. They feel
betrayed, but the feeling, some cynics suppose, may be no more than a temporary
spinal tickle. For someone willing to change faces at the drop of an
electioneering hat, Harris’ most recent change may be at best an election year
head fake.
There are signs Biden endorsement of Harris is beginning to
chafe. Biden is not happy to have been so quickly and unceremoniously knocked
out of office by former true believes such as former Speaker of the U.S. House
Nancy Pelosi, the too-clever-by-half former President Barack Obama, and the
wily leader of the U.S. Senate Chuck Schumer. Truth seekers are anxiously
awaiting Biden’s tell-all memoir.
Most Americans who have grown up politically now realize that
campaigning is not governing. Indeed, in Biden’s case, it was the opposite of
governing. Biden campaigned as a moderate, liberal candidate for president but,
as soon as he arrived at the White House, he quickly morphed, in Victor Davis Hanson’s memorable phrase, into “the most
radical president since Franklin Roosevelt” or, satirists might insist, Leon
Trotsky.
So then, when we ask what positions Harris is prepared to
execute as president, we should first seek to discover which Harris we are
talking about.
During her four year stint as Biden’s second in command
Harris proposed a gun buy-back program – no longer. U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal
and Chris Murphy, both gun-control enthusiasts, will be disappointed. Fracking
-- which produced massive quantities of relatively clean and environmentally
friendly natural gas – is back on the table. Immigration must be more tightly
controlled says Biden’s “border czar.” Health care yes, but we don’t want to
put private insurance companies out of business, the undeclared endpoint of
Obama’s health care thrust. And a federal jobs guarantee? Not now in the midst
of a transformative Democrat campaign.
What should we do about high grocery prices?
Every indication is that Harris plans to bring down the high
price of groceries through price controls. Her strategy indicates a profound
ignorance of the basic laws of supply and demand. Prices spike when supply is
insufficient to satisfy demand, and the devaluation of the currency affects
both supply and demand. In Venezuela – where the command economy in the person
of Nicolás Maduro is king. And when Maduro’s
predecessor Hugo Chávez decapitalized the oil industry through the state
seizure of the industry, Venezuela found it could no longer pull oil out of the
ground – because the state is far less competent than private industry in
setting prices to satisfy national and international demand. We all know “How Venezuela went from a rich democracy to a
dictatorship on the brink of collapse.”
Here in the United States, price controls have failed every
time they were instituted by grasping politicians who think a state controlled
economy will be more productive than a state controlled economy.
Harris, a neo-progressive, is set to unveil her economic
proposals today as this is being written, Thursday, August 16. Despite all the
campaign head fakes, Harris, if elected, will choose neo-progressivism over
real progress and false statist solutions over the liberties of a free market.
She will increase the national debt. “U.S. National Debt Tops $35 Trillion for First Time,” the New
York Times tells us.
Neo-progressivism is a kinder, gentler variant of socialism.
We’ve seen the socialist future, and it does not work.
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