Historian Sean Wilentz made clear the thinking of those who wear the label “progressive”. They harbor the hope that one day, perhaps through some catastrophic event, American capitalism will indeed be replaced by socialism – a discredited system of public property and social ownership. For many, if not all, progressives, that “catastrophic event” is happening right now.
The problem yet again is that politicians on all levels panicked, and having panicked, they foisted cruel, one-size-fits-all solutions on their constituents that resulted in sick-inducing job loss and bankruptcy. In the process, they robbed millions of what gives them daily meaning and happiness.
Many states, cities and counties are about to, suddenly, run out of money. Wages won’t be paid. Services won’t be delivered. Institutions will shut down abruptly. Many state colleges may fold.
The Fed no longer pursues any identifiable public policy other than sheer political expediency. Fed governors do not follow “rules” or targets or models. They answer to no legislature or executive, except when cravenly collaborating with both to offload consequences onto future generations.
What we need is the laissez-faire spirit of the California Gold Rush to revive risk-taking, investment and as many individual opportunities as possible. The goal should be to clear all identifiable impediments to the restoration of old jobs and the creation of new jobs that didn’t exist two months ago.
Because of entrepreneurs, the resources that we need in order to live, and innovate with, will become increasingly plentiful at costs that increasingly drop. No doubt growth would be greater minus all the government waste, but politicians exist to spend. Entrepreneurs will endure them, all the while accessing the resources necessary to innovate around them.
Practical wisdom might warn that one does not erode the Constitution because of a mysterious virus, even though Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci believe their expertise leads them to think it may be a good idea.
The left could have chosen to be the political side that would rigorously interrogate whether governments have a reasonable base of evidence on which to halt entire economies, and that would demand lighter and shorter interventions. Instead, the virus disaster has crystallized the divide that has opened between blue-collar and lower-paid workers on one side and urban progressives on the other.
By striving to “flatten” the world into a single, borderless entity in pursuit of nothing but profit and prosperity, this worldview has created huge blind spots. It failed to predict that China would build on its early advantage in sheer numbers of low-skilled workers to lock in a dominant and increasingly powerful position for itself.
Those individuals who obtain and retain positions of power in government tend to be those who are most interested in possessing and exercising such power. For each crisis, then, the likelihood is that the ideology of the holders of power prompts them, not to keep their power in check, but to expand it.
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