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Get Ready For The Californication Of America.

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Joe Biden promised Georgians a $2,000 check if they elected his party’s Senate candidates in the state’s runoff elections, and his bribery worked, with Democrats winning both, handing them control of the White House and Congress again.

But while Biden made the election all about battling COVID-19 and “healing the nation,” that is not what the far left that controls the Democratic Party cares about. It has bigger plans — namely, to turn the nation into a California-style one-party state.

By all rights, the 2020 elections should be a warning to extremists on the left. Biden eked out a victory with extremely narrow – and often questionable – victories in a handful of states after promising voters only that he would be a non-Trumpian nice guy.

Meanwhile, Democrats lost ground in the House, with the edge in their majority dropping from 36 seats to 10. And with the two Georgia wins, Democrats managed only a tie in the Senate, which is now split 50-50. (With Biden in the White House, Democrats can control the Senate because Kamala Harris will serve as the tie-breaking vote.)

Biden keeps talking about the need to “heal” the nation, which seems to fit the precarious position his party is in at the moment. Even if he believes that, his party doesn’t. And Democrats have been clear about the priorities they will pursue should they get control of the White House and Congress again.

No, we’re not talking about things like huge tax hikes or Obamacare, which is what they imposed the last two times they controlled both branches.

The stated goal today is to ensure a permanent Democratic majority so they can finally get their far-left agenda enacted.

In other words, they want to replicate what Democrats have already achieved in California.

This isn’t some right-wing conspiracy. This is what Democratic leaders have already stated as their plans or have already approved in the House.

For example, the very first thing Democrats did in the House this year, after seeing their lead shrink dramatically, was to approve a set of rules designed to neutralize Republicans as much as possible. Among others is a rule that will allow the House to pass massive new spending bills – a la the Green New Deal – without having to show how they’d be paid for. There’s a reason that socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is celebrating these new rules.

Republicans said the changes are intended to muzzle their party. “It is all designed to take away the voice of 48% of this House chamber,” said Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer made it clear last year that ditching the filibuster is on the table should Democrats get control of the Senate and Biden win the White House. He is certain to act on that as soon as Republicans attempt to use the filibuster to thwart Biden’s ambitions. Democrats will then have free rein to get even the most radical proposals to Biden’s desk.

As we’ve noted in this space before, Democrats have also promised to pack the Supreme Court so they can have a rubber stamp for their expansionist, Constitution-bending promises. They’ve also openly talked about packing the Senate by adding two new states to the union that will elect Democrats: Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

Democrats are also certain to pass legislation that will make it easier for them to win future elections, whether legitimately or not. In fact, the first bill the Democratic-controlled House introduced in 2019 was the “For the People Act,” which was designed to make election fraud easier on a national scale.

Had it become law, it would have forced states to implement policies such as early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting. It would have required states to count ballots cast by voters outside of their assigned precincts and crippled state voter ID laws. And, it would have put onerous restrictions on campaign speech that would have hampered Republican candidates most.

Californians are witnessing the fruits of the Democrats’ relentless determination to control government. After having successfully shoved Republicans off to the fringes, the state has imposed a seemingly endless series of tax hikes, intrusive environmental regulations, and costly mandates on businesses.

Californians at least have the ability to pick up and move to another less politically monolithic state – as they have been doing in droves over the past few years. But where are Americans supposed to flee should Democrats succeed in expanding California policies across the rest of the country?

What can stop this from happening? Biden could stand up to the far left in his party and try to find common ground with Republicans.

Or the few moderate Democrats who remain in the House and Senate could take a stand against their own party’s socialist leanings, either by siding with Republicans or switching parties.

We hope those happen, but we’re not overly optimistic. The next best thing is that Biden and his fellow Democrats try to do too much too fast, alienate voters with their leftist ambitions, and lose their congressional majorities in the mid-term elections.

But by that time, it might be too late to fix whatever damage they manage to inflict in those two years. History has made clear that once Democrats get a law on the books, it stays on the books. Anyone notice that Obamacare is still the law of the land?

In the meantime, it will be up to the public to do everything in its power to stop Democrats from making good on their plan to turn this country into the United States of California.

How Has The American Political Process Produced An Openly Anti-American Political Party?

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Only time will tell if the Democrat insiders will be able to stop Sanders this time around. Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. But in either case, it is now clear that Obama succeeded in fundamentally transforming America’s two-party system. We now have an openly anti-American party and an openly pro-American party.

The outcome of 2020 is not yet settled, obviously, but these two presidential election contests taken together already tell an amazing story.

The Democrat-Republican establishment had 2016 all planned out. According to the plan, 2016 would be another Clinton-Bush election, this time Jeb(!) versus Hillary. Hillary would win of course, and politics would return to normal. The majority party Democrats would keep pushing for bigger and more unaffordable government, the minority party Republicans would continue their project of steadily losing the fight, and the establishmentarians on both sides would continue feathering their nests.

But back to normal was not to be. Obama changed the game in ways the political establishment did not quite understand. What Obama did was the American political equivalent of walking on water; he had quite openly rejected America, and yet he was rewarded with a two-term presidency! As a result, it was not clear that politics in America was ever going to return to normal—and in any case, there was no chance 2016 was going to be a return to normal.

In 2016, the Republican party leadership looked on in disbelief as their voters stuck them with a candidate who had an excellent claim not to be a Republican. Meanwhile, the Democrats had a close call; their voters very nearly stuck them with a candidate who was not and had never been a Democrat. Republican voters rejected “their” party, and Democrat voters came close to rejecting “their” party, and they might have succeeded except for behind the scenes efforts by the party professionals to rig the system.

These were astonishing developments, but we need look no further than Barack Obama for the explanation.

For more than a century before the advent of Obama, the Left had adhered to a stealth strategy. They maintained a remarkable degree of party discipline over that long period, believing stealth was necessary and that it was the secret of their phenomenal success in overthrowing the Constitution incrementally, progressively. Instead of openly rejecting the Constitution, they had carefully installed in their voters a belief in what they called “the living Constitution.” A living Constitution is, of course, no Constitution at all; it is really a dying Constitution, a Constitution in the process of being murdered by a thousand cuts.

A few years ago, Encounter Books published a book of mine on the Constitution. Since then I have had many opportunities to be spoken to about the Constitution by Democrat voters. When they hear I have written on the Constitution, they unfailingly tell me right away that the important thing to understand is that we have “a living Constitution.” In general, that is all they “know” about the Constitution and all they want to know. The more outspoken ones insist that I agree with them that the Constitution changes constantly and must change constantly because of changing circumstances.

But Obama broke with tradition. To those paying attention on the Left, he did not hide his disdain for the Constitution, for America, or even for the flag—and the Left went wild. For the Left, Obama’s success meant the galling necessity for stealth was over, that they could let it all hang out because America was ready for a leftist revolution.  Many Democrat voters agreed. They were no longer willing to put up with a Democrat candidate mouthing platitudes neither they nor the candidate believed so that candidate could be elected.

Comes the hour, comes the man. Sanders was almost completely untainted by the strategy of stealth. Not only was he not a Democrat, but he had also honeymooned in the Soviet Union. In 2011, he wrote an op-ed in which he declared that the American dream is “more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina” than in the United States. At the Democratic candidates’ forum in New Hampshire on Friday night, he said America is “a racist society from top to bottom.”

As for Trump, we can say of him what Lincoln said of Grant: “he fights.” Trump’s voters wanted a fighter, someone who would not be rolled by the biparty establishment.

Many Democrat voters were as eager to rally around a candidate from beyond their party as Republican voters were eager to rally around one from beyond their party. Sanders’ enthusiastic crowds are the perfect counterpoint to Trump’s crowds chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.” The anti-Americanism of Sanders and his voters is matched by Trump and his voters’ unabashed love for America. Sanders and Trump and their voters have this in common: they reject the old agreement according to which the majority party pretends to respect the Constitution while taking it apart and the minority party somehow never manages to mount a successful defense of it. Win or lose, we are in a new game now.

Only time will tell if the Democrat insiders will be able to stop Sanders this time around. Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. But in either case, it is now clear that Obama succeeded in fundamentally transforming America’s two-party system. We now have an openly anti-American party and an openly pro-American party.

Obama promised to bring about a fundamental transformation of America, and in this fundamental transformation of America’s political parties, he can legitimately claim he succeeded.

Robert Curry serves on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea

What Young People Want From Politicians Are Proposals To Drive The Private Economy, Not Schemes For More Government Spending.

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By this point, many readers have struggled to help children or grandchildren assemble impossible puzzles or intricate Lego contraptions. In this spirit, we invite you to puzzle through the pieces of Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment project. Our list includes clues to the final picture.

Dec. 5: Speaker Pelosi announces the Democrats will draft articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.

Seven days later, Prime Minister Boris Johnson defeats Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. general elections. It is the Conservative Party’s greatest margin of victory since Margaret Thatcher’s third win, in 1987, and Labour’s biggest defeat since 1935.

Dec. 12-15: Mr. Trump’s approval ratings begin to rise.

Dec. 18: The House votes to impeach Mr. Trump, with no Republican support.

The next day, seven Democratic presidential candidates debate in Los Angeles. Virtually all approve the impeachment, denounce wealth and offer agendas of increased public spending.

The day after that, the British Parliament votes overwhelmingly to support Mr. Johnson’s intent to pull out of the European Union.

I think we have enough pieces to see the shape of things to come.

After Mr. Johnson walloped Mr. Corbyn, some Democrats and American progressives asserted that the U.K. result had little relevance to the U.S. They said it was Mr. Corbyn’s personal failure, not a repudiation of Labour’s agenda. Which sounds similar to the notion that the Democrats’ loss in 2016 was Hillary Clinton’s fault, not theirs.

Still, the British result got me wondering about the point of Mrs. Pelosi approving the construction of a Potemkin impeachment—a grand facade to hide the reality of weakness inside her party.

Socialism is in the air these days, at least in the U.S., and the U.K. has long experience with socialism. The stark fact of the British election is that thousands of longtime Labour voters turned away from the party despite Mr. Corbyn’s promise of large-scale public spending.

Mr. Johnson’s victory may have been mainly about Brexit, but the result exposes what looks to be a tipping point for left-leaning liberalism in the U.S.: The Democratic Party has a big problem with the vision thing. It’s possible that government today, which is to say government that is everywhere all the time, has become a big bore to the voting public.

Like Britain, the U.S. has lived for most of the past century with high levels of public spending for an infinity of public programs. The population should be content and the left should be happy. They aren’t.

The average voter listens to an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders promise vastly expanded public spending—and shrugs. The top Democratic vote-getter is Joe Biden, a party war horse in harness for 50 years.

The “average” Democratic voters supporting Mr. Biden are black, Hispanic or white baby boomers. What remains beyond these more-traditional Democrats are the party’s millennial utopians. They sound angry, but the truth is, they’re bored.

Instead of the political vibrancy of the 1960s, young progressives see their world in the grip of political stasis. They weren’t around for the hard work of building the Great Society, brick by brick, amendment by legislative amendment, the way their elders did, such as—just to pick a name— Rep. John Dingell.

No wonder Mrs. Pelosi was agog at the aggression from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and the rest of the progressive “Squad.” They act as if none of this hard work ever happened and barely acknowledge its legacy exists.

Older leftists and liberals revere the alphabet soup of assistance programs and rotely support all of it. The New New Left treats all this pre-existing government as virtually an abstraction.

Note how Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 37, routinely waves off the achievements of Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s generation: “If you’re my age or younger . . .” The pedestrian dailiness of “government” has become a liability for traditional Democrats, despite all they’ve done. Dismissing U.S. history in general, progressive activists and gentry liberals want their own Great Society program. (For a reality check on the original version, read Amity Shlaes’s “Great Society: A New History.”)

But the left has a problem: The liberal legacy—extraordinarily big government (this year’s spending bill is more than 2,000 pages)—has sucked all the revenue out of the system. Elizabeth Warren’s multiple “plans” financed by beating taxes out of billionaires—like Jeremy Corbyn’s 21st century nationalizations—are the reductio ad absurdum.

She’s hardly alone. One listens in vain to the Democratic presidential debaters, including Mr. Biden and Ms. Klobuchar, for proposals to drive growth in the private economy. Instead, they all promise to keep shoveling more coal into the spending furnace.

The promise of more public spending is no longer an animating political philosophy for most people. It’s just there, a dull humming noise. Britain proved that. America, while it watches the Pelosi impeachment revels, may follow.

This article first appeared at wsj.com.

Adhering To The Law Is No Longer Obligatory For The Democrats’ Favored Groups.

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Our Founders created a nation in which the rule of law would prevail and be applied equally to citizens from all walks of life and also would act as a restraint on the power of our leaders.  The tradition also includes the assumed duty of all Americans, including our political leaders, to live within the established and agreed upon laws of society.

The Democratic Party’s increasingly progressive, left-leaning, radical political agenda contests this fundamental and longstanding American tradition of the law applying equally to all our citizens.  Whether I am walking on the streets of my city or viewing the news, I am witnessing on a daily basis increasingly uncivil, lawless, and visibly politically corrupt conduct being tolerated by our country.

Democratic Party policies today support the idea that adhering to the rule of law is no longer obligatory for several designated and politically favored groups selected by them.  Progressive politics is attempting to move Americans to accept and adopt a multi-tier justice system based on the unequal application of the law, whereby treatment by the system is increasingly dependent on subjective political considerations.

On a local level in many cities and communities, Democrats in power are by their actions undermining the rule of law.  For example, expected compliance with the law in several of our leading cities run by Democratic Party leaders, including most notably New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, is now often based on a person’s economic and immigration status, race, sex, sexual orientation, and increasingly an indication of a person’s political and religious affiliations.  The reason for these exemptions being granted is based on the dual ideologies of identity politics and social justice.

The creation of an implied multi-tier justice system expressly violates our fundamental value of the law applying equally to citizens from all walks of life and most importantly results in the increasingly intolerable and dangerous conditions existing on the streets of these cities and an overall perception of communities in decline.  It has led to environments where ordinary people feel increasingly unsafe due to a lack of enforcement of quality-of-life crimes such as rampart homelessness and loitering, open drug use, and the willing accommodation of numerous illegal aliens performing criminal acts.

Their policies absolve individuals belonging to their politically favored groups of their responsibilities to adhere to our agreed upon laws and act in civil ways.  They contend that challenging social and economic conditions are responsible for criminal and antisocial behavior rather than the individual person acting in a negative way.  Progressive leaders in these locations are resisting enforcing the law, especially against quality-of-life violations, because they label these actions as the criminalization of poverty and accuse the police of the ongoing use of racist tactics.

Thirty years ago, America’s urban centers faced similar issues, leading New York City to adopt under the combined leadership of Republican Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton, strict law enforcement policies that became to be known as “broken windows’ policing.  These policies were based on the lifelong and collaborative work of criminologist George L. Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson, who became best known for publishing an essay in The Atlantic in 1982, called “Broken Windows.”

It emphasized community policing, proactive enforcement of the law, and maintaining order in public places by either arresting or dealing with people for even minor crimes such as drunkenness; vagrancy; prostitution; and, in NYC at that time, subway turnstile–jumpers and the infamous squeegee men.  All of these minor crimes were being overlooked, inviting even greater criminality.

The effect of implementing “broken windows” policies by the police in New York City and, soon afterward, across many other cities starting in the 1990s resulted in a dramatic decline in crime, including, most importantly, a significant drop in homicides committed.  This crime-fighting approach was fundamental to altering the quality of life of many of our cities and significantly contributed to many of them becoming highly desirable places to live.

The current deterioration of living conditions in many of our cities and communities led by Democratic Party leaders and their progressive policies can be directly attributed to their moving away from the proactive community policing that was previously so effective and created environments that discouraged criminality.  Many of these locales are starting to lose population.

In addition, apparently included as one of the favored groups permitted to operate outside the acceptable bounds of civility and the law are Democratic leaders themselves in their ongoing and unrelenting pursuit of power.  In Washington, the Democrats are attempting to subvert the will of the majority of the American people, as expressed by the election results in 2016, by executing and plotting orchestrated campaigns to remove President Trump from office before the next election.  These efforts range from the recently unsuccessfully perpetrated Russia collusion hoax, which is now being followed up by an illegitimate impeachment drive by the House.

These operations also revealed the mostly clandestine activities of a permanent and extensive Deep State, also labeled “the swamp,” actively working with the Democrats to subvert President Trump.  A broken environment exists in Washington that contributes to the perception that too many of our elected officials feel free to participate in and to tolerate corruption without being held accountable for their actions.  It is highly discouraging for many Americans that up to this point, there have been no legal consequences or viable restraints in place to curb these types of actions that are so fundamentally dangerous to the very foundations of our country.

As a nation, we can look back at the great success the implementation of broken windows enforcement policies and practices as a potential guide to current-day challenges of maintaining a just and civil society both in Washington and across our nation.  The crucial and pragmatic next steps in re-creating a proper environment of deterrence in our country against lawless conduct, including misconduct by government officials, will be the impending actions of Attorney General William Barr and U.S. attorney John Durham.

The key question is whether their lengthy investigations of improper activities associated with attempts to remove President Trump from office will lead to the suitable punishment of all the players responsible without exception.  If these efforts are unsuccessful, the Deep State wins, and all our freedoms are at risk.  A lack of decisive action against these participants will signal to many in government that they are free to operate outside the rule of law with impunity in their pursuit of political power.  At risk is our Founders’ design for an enduring nation, in which the rule of law would prevail and be applied equally to citizens from all walks of life — and also would act as an ongoing restraint on the power of our government.

 

Democrats’ 2020 Candidates Portray America As Racist, Greedy And Corrupt – The Worst Country In The World.

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‘We need to be an America that dreams big,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts declares, in her familiar presidential campaign riff. But on this day set aside to show appreciation for our military veterans, Americans know they live in a country that has been dreaming big, working hard – and when politicians get out of the way – succeeding spectacularly for 243 years. An America so very many have found to be worth sacrificing lives and limbs for.

What Warren wants is private industry and its employees financing Big Government’s dreams instead of their own – to the tune of $43 trillion over the course of a decade.

The “Change” Barack Obama ran on in 2008 has now putrefied into the call for full-scale revolution. The precept at the heart of the candidacies of all the leading Democrats running for president in 2020 is that this country is morally bankrupt, socially dysfunctional, economically oppressive, and has racial bigotry weaved into the very fabric of its national soul. It must be dumped and replaced with a New, Improved “America.” Nothing but the name, the flag, and a Constitution whose words are ignored or twisted by federal judges will remain.

It’s as if Travis Bickle, the violently disturbed Robert DeNiro character in “Taxi Driver,” whose cinematic exploits inspired John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, had it right when he told fictional presidential candidate Sen. Charles Palantine it was “like an open sewer. It’s full of filth and scum,” and the next president “should flush it down the toilet.”

As recently as 1988, a Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, a Democratic presidential nominee further to the left than all who came before him except George McGovern in 1972, was distancing himself from his party’s radicalism with the catchphrase, “This election isn’t about ideology; it’s about competence.”

A breath later, Dukakis, boasting a rock-bottom state unemployment rate thanks to a high-tech boom, told the convention delegates who had nominated him, “it’s about creating jobs in middle America … it’s about creating opportunity on Main Street … And just as we Democrats believe that there are no limits to what each citizen can do, so we believe that there are no limits to what America can do.”

Dukakis’ idea of dreaming big was a little different from that of fellow Bay Stater Warren. Dukakis said, “we are the party that believes in the American Dream. A dream so powerful that no distance of ground, no expanse of ocean, no barrier of language, no distinction of race or creed or color can weaken its hold on the human heart. And I know because, my friends, I’m a product of that dream and I’m proud of it.”

No accusations of racism against the opposing party are to be found in Dukakis’ speech, or in his debate with George H.W. Bush. Nor any complaints about income inequality, as Americans reveled in an extended Reagan economic recovery.

Racist, Greedy, Corrupt America

What a contrast to Warren, who in the last Democratic debate raged about “three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society. That is a moral and economic outrage. And the truth is, we cannot afford to continue this level of income and wealth inequality.”

Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates, up there with those richest three Americans but far from an economic conservative, was openly skeptical of Warren, saying during a New York Times conference Wednesday, “I’m not sure how open-minded she is or that she’d be willing to sit down with someone who has large amounts of money.” But according to Warren (who reacted by welcoming a meeting with Gates), “we cannot afford a billionaire class, whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years.”

Forty-five years. That goes back to the mid-1970s. Apparently the senator’s own party’s presidential nominee 31 years ago, from her own bluer-than-blue (even then) state of Massachusetts, was unaware of this national civil war between the tycoons and the toilers.

We have to enact a wealth tax, according to Warren, “so we can create a nation and a government that works for all of us.” In other words, the country Michael Dukakis, son of immigrants, was so proud of, and the American Dream he attained, are all a silly capitalist delusion.

Contrast Dukakis to the rhetoric and governmental social engineering designs of the rival snapping at Warren’s heels, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who, outlandishly, may ultimately be chosen by Democrat voters as a less extreme, more electable alternative to Warren. America is plagued by “systemic racism,” Buttigieg said on night two of NBC’s June debate, by “a wall of mistrust put up one racist act at a time, not just from what’s happened in the past, but from what’s happening around the country in the present.”

Buttigieg’s “Douglass Plan” would spend tens of billions opening wide the gates of high-security prisons – with most of the future victims of those who would be released certain to be non-whites – and having Washington dictatorially politicize the teaching of slavery in public schools, plus hyper-regulating banks’ loan practices toward non-whites. Because the U.S. is an evil, racist country that incarcerates innocent multitudes, peddles lies in the classroom about its past, and denies mortgages to families of the wrong color.

Joe Biden may not use Warren and Buttigieg’s inflammatory language, but he knows that to have a chance of securing the nomination of today’s Democratic Party, he must accept their precepts. “We do have enormous income inequality,” Biden said during the June debate. “White folks are the reason we have institutional racism,” he said in August. “There has always been racism in America. White supremacists have always existed. They still exist.”

On the contrary, the Manhattan Institute’s Jason Riley recently cited in the Wall Street Journal some of the evidence of how racial discrimination long ago ceased being the greatest barrier to black economic advancement, noting the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson and his 1978 book “The Declining Significance of Race.”

Don’t expect the likelihood of the field of Democrats being joined by ex-Big Apple mayor Mike Bloomberg, a.k.a. The Ego That Ate New York, to improve anything. On top of racism and greed, America is guilty of the additional sin of being fat, according to Bloomberg. “Obesity is a nationwide problem, and all over the United States public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’” Bloomberg declared in 2012 as he tried to ban the sale of Big Gulps and other large sodas, before a court stopped him.

This Isn’t Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party

The comparison with Dukakis is one thing, but Warren, Buttigieg and even Biden are much further removed from the Democrats’ first full two-term president after FDR, Bill Clinton. It is unimaginable that a Democrat today would allow himself to be heard expressing the kind of skepticism of government solutions and faith in the private sector that Clinton did as he accepted re-nomination at the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

“The welfare reform law I signed” provides “a new social bargain with the poor … requiring able-bodied parents to work” said Clinton, sounding like an invited speaker at a CPAC conference. He added, “we have a moral obligation to make sure the people who are being required to work have the opportunity to work. We must make sure the jobs are there” – and President Clinton made it clear he meant private sector jobs.

How to do it? Not a wealth tax like Warren’s, or any other kind of new tax, but tax relief. Clinton proposed “to give businesses a tax credit for every person hired off welfare and kept employed. I propose to offer private job placement firms a bonus for every welfare recipient they place in a job who stays in it.”

Granted, this was the all-too-typical Democrat way of cutting taxes, demanding that taxpayers jump through government’s preferred hoops to be given the cuts, but even this concept is anathema to the Democrats today who most excite the party’s base, not only Warren and Bernie Sanders but The Squad’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and their ilk.

Imagine the boos a Democrat would endure repeating Clinton’s insistence that “the Government can only do so much. The private sector has to provide most of these jobs … I want to build a bridge to the 21st century that ends the permanent underclass, that lifts up the poor and ends their isolation, their exile.”

It ended up being a bridge too far for the left. The next Democratic president, Barack Obama, would dismantle much of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, a milestone that greatly helped in his 1996 re-election, confounding GOP attempts to portray Clinton as a radical.

Of all the many untruths the 42nd president uttered, the biggest may be his declaration in his 1996 State of the Union address that “The era of big government is over.” Elizabeth Warren asks Americans to let her spend tens of trillions of dollars of their money, and Pete Buttigieg proposes a transformation of what he declares to be an American society that is, and always was, sinister to its very core.

The era of Big Government, far from being over, hasn’t even really begun as far as today’s Democrats are concerned. Because it will take a state bigger and more intrusive than any ever known to flush the U.S.A. down the toilet.

This article first appeared at Issues and Insights, written by Thomas McArdle.

Flying Taxis Are Coming – If the Libs Will Let The Billionaires Keep Enough Money To Invest In Them.

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t’s always funny to hear economists and pundits obsess on television shows about what the Federal Reserve will do next. Implicit in their excitement is that the economy’s ability to grow is a consequence of Fed expertise with interest rates. Back to reality, the Fed cannot increase the supply of tangible resources that businesses seek when they borrow money, it can’t increase the human capital that is the source of all economic progress, and it also can’t increase time.

Thoughts of time’s finite nature came up while reading a recent New York Times piece on “The High-Wire Act to Build the World’s First Flying Taxi.” Such a machine would potentially increase the productivity of individuals by virtue of increasing the amount of time they can dedicate to productive work.

About this, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills has made the point that as humans, there are limits to the productive work hours we’ll be able to expend over a lifetime. As a result, Mills properly cheers rising automation, robots, AI, and all other things related to extra “hands” entering the marketplace. He’s wise on the matter. The more that human exertion can be automated, the more that humans can specialize their work output. And the more we humans are specialized in what we do, the more we can productively utilize our unique gifts.

Flying taxis will plainly enable more robust output. Think about it. The island of Manhattan is arguably populated by some of the most enterprising individuals on earth, but whether billionaire or newly minted working stiff, getting around the island is nightmarish thanks to traffic. Arguably the typical worker willing to utilize New York’s subway system can get around more quickly than the chauffeured billionaire, though presumably some of Manhattan’s richest of the rich utilize helicopters.

Which brings us to flying taxis. The Times’ Adam Satariano reports that at least twenty companies are in the market to produce these transportation machines. Satariano cites a Morgan Stanley study which says flying taxis will drive an $850 billion market by 2040, which means the obscure luxury that is taxi transport will soon enough be made available to the masses. Such is the genius of capitalism. Wealth earned in such a system is a consequence of the mass production of former luxuries.

Assuming a market as large as the one Morgan Stanley projects, one can guess that many more than twenty companies will enter what has the potential to be a highly lucrative space; one that will expand the productive use of time for it substantially limiting time wasted getting from point A to point B. Here’s hoping flying taxis, or something much more advanced than a flying taxi, soon enough become the norm. How very exciting, and life enhancing if so. Transportation advances like this can’t arrive soon enough.

That flying taxis aren’t yet viable is a reminder of the crucial role investment plays when it comes to progress. This truth exposes much of modern left-wing orthodoxy as anti-progress.

Consider excitement on the left about a “wealth tax.” Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the New York Times, and other pillars of the left proudly support cutting billionaires down to size, but such policy logically runs counter to transportation advance.

As Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas put it to Satariano, the path toward accessible flying taxis “is going to be a test of staying power – an ability to lose money, an ability to ride out failure.” Translated, of the companies today pursuing this innovative mode of transport, most will lose copious sums of money before failing.

Lefties like to say the superrich have “more money than they know what to do with.” They unwittingly explain why wealth taxes suffocate advance. The richest of the rich have money they can lose on the ideas of tomorrow that, while promising, have high odds of failure. Flying taxis won’t be immediate, there will be endlessly expensive experimentation with them, so the more that the rich have “more money than they know what to do with,” the more that intrepid investment will find flying taxis, along with all sorts of other presently unimaginable services. A wealth tax will shrink the amount of “crazy” wealth aggressively pulling the future into the present, all so politicians can fail in flamboyant fashion when it comes to improving the lives of others.

One of the flying taxi companies of some prominence is Lilium. According to Satariano Lilium has 300 employees, a very expensive “research and development budget,” and is “years away from making money.” Funny, one of Hillary Clinton’s issues when she ran for president was that we in the U.S. practice too much “quarterly capitalism.” Clinton’s laughable point was that investors are so greedy and now focused that U.S. companies can’t develop the ideas of the future. It seems Clinton never listened during visits to Silicon Valley where over 9 out of 10 start-ups die, plus she was plainly never made aware of flying tax concept. Investors are backing all sorts of companies that, assuming they ever make money, are years away from it. Contrary to what Clinton presumes, investors in American ingenuity are among some of the most patient individuals on earth.

All of which leads to government spending. In considering it, think again about what Jonas said regarding the eventual success of the flying taxi industry: this “is going to be a test of staying power – an ability to lose money, an ability to ride out failure.” Many on the left reject the notion that high tax rates exist as a barrier to entrepreneurial innovation, and they may have a point. It’s hard to imagine Steve Jobs sat up nights thinking about tax rates, and it’s hard to imagine Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg do now. Fair enough, it’s arguable they would feverishly innovate regardless of individual tax rates. But as the Jonas quote makes plain, the big barrier to huge transport leaps will be availability of capital. Tax rates may not deter Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the enterprising of tomorrow, but limited capital will.

Stating the obvious, there are no entrepreneurs without capital. No economic school can get around this truth, yet government spending consumes what’s precious. The left view spending cuts as austerity, many supply siders on the right do too, but it’s not said enough that government spending itself is austerity when it’s remembered that advancement is always and everywhere a consequence of investment.

Looking ahead, the dreamers of today are presently working tirelessly to make our abundant present seem primitive relative to the future. The future will arrive more quickly the sooner the talented are matched with capital. Readers should remember this the next time politicians promise to create good times by fleecing the rich. They’re lying, and worse, they’re robbing you of a much better tomorrow.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, and Director of the Center for Economic Freedom at FreedomWorks. AP Photo Marcio Jose Sanchez.

Climate Activist Mayor Gets On The Wrong Side Of The City’s Own Workers.

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Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto has faced a fierce backlash since he announced at last week’s Climate Action Summit that he opposes any new petrochemical companies coming to Western Pennsylvania. Labor unions, civic leaders and even the mayor’s closest political ally have taken him to task.

“When you make a comment that can clearly hurt the advancement of a region and their ability to feed their family and have a better life, that’s when it becomes an issue for us,” said Darrin Kelly, the city firefighter who heads the Allegheny County Labor Council. “I’m going to be very vocal on behalf of the working men and women to protect them, OK? . . . If they’re attacking our way of life, I’m going to come after them.”

The battle is a microcosm of what is happening nationally: Big-city Democratic mayors are aligning themselves with leftist local officials and environmental activists to renounce disfavored industries. It also exposes the Democrats’ deep challenges with blue-collar voters. In both Western Pennsylvania and the Scranton area, the shale industry is opening up prosperity not seen for two generations—and inflaming climate zealots. “A Democrat cannot win Pennsylvania without voter support from those two regions,” said Mike Mikus, a strategist who consulted for Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s re-election campaign last year. “And you can’t win the presidency as a Democrat if you lose Pennsylvania.”

The oddity of the latest dustup is that there are no petrochemical plants in Pittsburgh. The build-out in the area is in Beaver County, to the northwest, where the massive $6 billion Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex is under construction and where Exxon may build another nearby. Building the Shell plant is expected to create 6,000 jobs in construction, engineering, chemistry, information technology and geology. Once it opens, industry analysts expect it to employ 600 people permanently and to support twice that number of jobs elsewhere in the local economy. The governor calls it a “game changer” for the region.

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, Mr. Peduto’s closest ally, is flabbergasted by the mayor’s opposition. He bristles at the suggestion that one can’t favor fracking and mitigating climate change. “I believe in climate change,” he says. “I think it is absolutely real. Anybody who denies that I think is not looking at the science. What natural gas has done has been one of those great additions to lower our carbon footprint.” Natural gas emits 30% less carbon than oil and 45% less than coal.

“No city in America has benefited more from the shale revolution in the last dozen years than Pittsburgh,” Mr. Fitzgerald continues. “We were one of the only regions in the country that did not experience the Great Recession back in 2008, because that’s when we discovered the Marcellus Shale.” He says of Mr. Peduto: “I also think it gets very tricky when somebody who represents one-eighth of the metro region to try to speak for the 2½ million people that represent the 10-county metro region.”

Pittsburgh International Airport last month announced a first-in-the-country microgrid that will power the entire airport using natural gas, drilled on-site by CNX Resources, as well as solar generation. Nick Deluliis, CEO of CNX, says the mayor’s approach to energy would make such a project impossible: “I think people need to understand what the mayor is saying represents a very small minority of people in this region and oftentimes he is operating in a bit of an echo chamber. So his views I don’t think are the working man’s view. It’s not the building trades’ view, it’s not manufacturing’s view, and it’s really not a rational fact-based view.”

Pittsburgh mayors have usually been Democratic pragmatists, concerned above all with making sure the streets are safe, the snow gets plowed and garbage picked up, and civic leaders are able to develop the city. Last week a sinkhole in a city street swallowed a bus as it idled at a red light. A passenger was treated for minor injuries, but the mayor’s reputation was also bruised. The moment became a local metaphor for Mr. Peduto’s emphasis on ideology at the expense of the unpretentious problems of governing.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” President Trump said in 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Mr. Peduto balked at the comparison, yet many locals see him acting as if he were the mayor of Paris and not Pittsburgh.

Mr. Kelly said that since he took on the mayor, he’s been overwhelmed by calls of support from labor. “We are not backing down.”

Ms. Zito is a reporter for the Washington Examiner, a columnist for the New York Post and a co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.”

The Democrats’ Wealth Tax – Outright Theft Disguised As Taxation – Violates The Fifth Amendment Of The Constitution.

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Tuesday night’s CNN/New York Times debate of the Democratic presidential candidates was filled with propositions to radicalize American society, from confiscation of law-abiding citizens’ guns to adopting Canada’s single-payer health system but somehow “we’re going to do better than the Canadians do,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders promised without extrapolating, to imprisoning executives of companies that pioneer life-saving medicines.

But, astonishingly, it also showcased casual discussion of the federal government adopting policies that would stab the Constitution of the United States in the heart – in particular those of Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“Understand,” she said. “Taxing income is not going to get you where you need to be the way taxing wealth does.”

Warren once again would not answer whether or not her version of Medicare For All, likely to cost at least $32 trillion – with a T – over a decade, would require middle class tax increases. Yet at the same time, she isn’t shy about proposing an entirely new frontier in taxation: the government going after not just your paycheck but your bank account and nest egg.

According to Marx, “communism is the positive expression of annulled private property” – annulled because of what Marxists believe property to be: “Private property is the result of alienated labor. Private property is also the means by which labor is alienated.”

“The rich are not like you and me,” Warren said. “The really, really billionaires are making their money off their accumulated wealth, and it just keeps growing. We need a wealth tax in order to make investments in the next generation” – “investments” being a euphemism for lots more government spending. Warren would swipe 2% annually out of fortunes exceeding $50 million, plus 1% on wealth over $1 billion.

Many of her rivals were little better. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said, “I’m all for a wealth tax.” Billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer bragged, “I was one of the first people on this stage to propose a wealth tax.” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said, “It could work. I am open to it.”

Taxing Assets Vs. The Bill Of Rights Protecting Property

It could “work” except for one rather large obstacle standing in its way: that document the Framers forged inside Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1787, and its Bill of Rights ratified by the states four years later.

The Constitution protects private property from the greedy hand of government. The Fourth Amendment guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” – i.e. their property – from search not based on reasonable suspicion of a crime. The Fifth Amendment assures that “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”

So when the government builds a highway through your land (because a highway has to go through some unlucky person’s land), it isn’t allowed to steal your land; it has to pay you its fair market value as compensation. Of Warren’s wealth tax, Heritage Foundation research fellow Joel Griffith warns: “seizing this private property without just compensation would clearly violate the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause.”

The Constitution prohibited even an unapportioned direct tax on income until the 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913.

When it was his turn, tech guru Andrew Yang rebutted Warren with the practical point that a wealth tax was “tried in Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, and all those countries ended up repealing it because it had massive implementation problems and did not generate the revenue that they’d projected.”

The Democrats on the Westerville, Ohio, stage complained of “unfettered capitalism” despite a Federal Register exceeding 60,000 pages. Warren calls her Marxist confiscation of private assets “accountable capitalism.”

She can call socialism capitalism as much as she wants. Fortunately for the American people, the Bill of Rights protects property, and as long as we have federal courts left that follow the Constitution as written, a far left president will be prevented from engaging in such outright theft disguised as taxation.

 

By Thomas McArdle at Issues & Insights — a new site launched by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page.

Accountable Capitalism: Corporations Must Do What Elizabeth Warren Tells Them To Do.

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In a Democratic primary field that looks like the cast of a Christopher Guest ensemble mockumentary, three candidates have established an early lead — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Sanders and Warren represent very distinct visions of the party’s left flank, but not in the way many assume.

Sanders, who proudly wears the badge of socialism and just announced a $16 trillion Green New Deal staggering in its scale and scope, is not the radical candidate. At his core Sanders is a redistributor, fighting along the same big-market/big-government axis on which American politics has focused my entire lifetime. To be sure, Sanders is less shy about pushing things much further toward the big-government end of the spectrum than any mainstream Democratic candidate in decades.

Warren presents herself as a tireless, technocratic savior of capitalism, but her plans give the U.S. government far more control over individual firms, households, and markets than anything proposed in recent memory. Warren, a legal scholar by trade, has moved into the complex realm of a modern economy, where a lawyer’s penchant for sweating the details is usually counterproductive and causes considerably more damage along the way.

Go to the section of Warren’s website entitled “Plans” and at the time of this writing you’ll have a choice between a staggering 43 links. Many of the plans could hugely impact our economy, but one stands above the rest in its potential to overhaul our commercia landscape. Warren calls the reforms she envisions to corporate mandates and governance “accountable capitalism.”

Corporations sometimes do bad things, and Warren’s plan might stop some of them. But accountable capitalism does nothing short of rethinking what it means to be a business in the United States and opens the door to negative consequences so severe that ignoring them involves a sort of magical thinking that would make even Warren’s starry-eyed socialist opponent shake his head in disbelief.

The Perils of Warrenism

So just what is accountable capitalism? It was originally a bill proposed by Senator Warren last year. In a fawning write-up in Vox, Matthew Yglesias inadvertently exposed the idea’s flimsy intellectual foundation:

Warren’s plan starts from the premise that corporations that claim the legal rights of personhood should be legally required to accept the moral obligations of personhood.

The morality that comes from “personhood” is not given to us by law, nor is it forced upon us by the government. Morality emerges and evolves as we interact and empathize with one another. Perhaps Warren and Yglesias should start an Adam Smith book club and begin with The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

What will this legally imposed veneer of corporate morality look like? It’s clear from Warren’s campaign materials that it will involve a new and large bureaucracy, but the rules to be enforced are less clear. In short, accountable capitalism means government mandating that corporations do what Elizabeth Warren wants them to do.

Warren’s plan requires corporations valued at over $1 billion to obtain a special federal charter. This charter exposes corporations to regulation from a new Office of United States Corporations that “tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also employees, customers, and the community within which the company operates — when making decisions.”

There are a few specific rules — misguided one-size-fits-all requirements about the number of workers on company boards, how executives can sell stock, and how companies can make political contributions. But it mostly appears to be a means for our elected political leaders to micromanage America’s largest corporations at their own discretion.

Watchful eyes might indeed rein in some amount of corporate excess or wrongdoing. But this abrupt shift in the objective of American corporations would be a potentially cataclysmic shock to the economy, and the means of enforcement would only increase the scope for corporate rent-seeking and cynical politicking that Warren currently condemns on the campaign trail. But her proposals simply wish these fatal flaws away.

Fiddling as Wealth Burns

In Warren’s utopia of technocratic micromanagement, one needn’t worry about the unintended consequences that come with major new government regulations. Accountable capitalism would change the goal of America’s largest corporations from a relatively objective metric, shareholder value, to a subjective balancing of the interests of several stakeholders, with the executive branch peering over management’s shoulders.

This would send shares of the largest companies tumbling overnight. No matter, says Warren, 84 percent of stock is owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans. Under the disturbingly ascendant view that “democracy” sanctifies whatever 51 percent of the population likes, 10 percent isn’t important.

Of course, 73 percent of stocks are owned by Americans 55 and older, meaning the skewed wealth distribution noted by Warren is due in large part to the fact that people at or near retirement have accumulated more savings than younger people. Warren’s vision of capitalism through a funhouse mirror would surely destroy significant amounts of that wealth by diluting corporations’ fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

Next, Warren seems to believe that her Office of United States Corporations will possess a sort of omniscience usually reserved for the realm of fantasy. Large corporations do things we don’t like all the time, but a centralized office with pushback on the level Warren imagines risks doing greater damage. Smith and especially Hayek stress the importance of local knowledge. How will a centralized office take the several hundred largest corporations in the country and order them to increase their payroll or decrease their stock buybacks? By how much?

We don’t need to keep our corporations safe from the meddling of Elizabeth Warren out of some starry-eyed hero capitalism that reveres big business. We need to do so because these corporations are the arteries through which information pumps in our economy. Some workers may have extra time to serve on company boards, as Warren mandates, after they lose their jobs from the overall economic damage wrought by the government’s attempt to legally impose its notion of good citizenship.

The Red Carpet

Warren has spent much of her career crusading against the harmful and unjust cozy relationships between Wall Street and government, often to her credit. It’s curious that someone with such expertise in the matter doesn’t seem at all concerned that this new “accountability” would multiply the number of meetings, phone calls, and emails between senior regulators and the titans of the private sector.

These billion-dollar corporations already employ armies of lawyers and accountants to navigate regulatory minefields and turn them into weapons against their smaller competitors. Does Warren believe this practice will stop overnight?

If most rent-seeking were a matter of nefarious corporate executives buying off weak or greedy officials, we could just elect better people. The fact that this problem persists over decades is indicative of a more subtle process. Rent-seeking is an inevitable systemic feature in a network with thousands of contact points between business and government.

Unless one ascribes mystical power to Warren’s moral presence, her plan represents a fertile breeding ground for mismanagement and corruption. And then comes the day when the people’s champion leaves the White House.

Candidates with big ideas that increase government power often seem to adopt an implicit fantasy that their election will usher in a golden age where “the people” will no longer make mistakes and elect candidates from the other party. What will happen when the unprecedented power Warren wants to assume over corporations falls into the hands of the next Donald Trump? This alone should give the Left serious pause before supporting game-changing deeply misguided reforms to our system.

Left-Wing Nationalism: Yet Another Threat to Liberty

Elizabeth Warren is smart, tenacious, caring, and catastrophically wrong on a host of issues. She’s running on a left-nationalist platform, where corporations turn away from their natural role serving shareholders and instead serve whatever interest the aspiring president believes is important.

I’ve spent multiple articles and podcasts kvetching about Bernie Sanders’ sky-high taxation and grandiose government programs. Sanders would divert large sums away from a private sector that derives its unique dynamism from the emergent and evolutionary processes that only occur when millions of individuals make decisions using the information they uniquely possess.

I’d take whatever Sanders calls socialism over accountable capitalism any day, because rather than starve the dynamic private sector of resources, Warren’s vision stifles the dynamism itself. One cannot overstate the importance of this point over the next year. Warren has convinced many voters, members of the media, and even herself that she is the Left’s pragmatic option. In this regard, the law professor whose staff is known for their prolific production of white papers is reduced to simply wishing reality away.

Max Gulker is an economist and writer at AIER.org, where this article first appeared.

The Democratic Presidential Candidates Have Abandoned The Idea Of Economic Growth, The Essence Of America.

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During a recent visit to Toledo, Ohio, to speak at a local school, I saw remarkable signs of an improving economy in this Rust Belt city. My taxi driver from the airport boasted that he could leave his position tomorrow and have his pick of other jobs. The hometown law students with whom I lunched had renewed confidence that they could remain in the area because business was better than at any time in the last two decades. I stayed at a hotel that had opened just weeks earlier, and another, across the street, was scheduled to open this fall.

Toledo’s recovering prosperity is emphatically not a story of the rich getting richer. A driver for hire does not make more than the median income, and the law students were young men graduating from a regional school, not highflyers on their way to Wall Street firms. Nor were the benefits of economic growth merely economic: I could hear in the driver’s voice the sense of autonomy and self-worth that comes from knowing that you can quit today and be employed tomorrow. The law students enjoyed having the choice of staying near friends and family. To be sure, Toledo is still relatively economically distressed, but it’s striking that the dynamism of America’s economic recovery is being felt even here.

Being in Toledo reminded me of something that Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, said: “Once you start thinking about economic growth, it is hard to think of anything else.” Economic growth compounds, potentially doubling or tripling incomes over a lifetime. Growth also enables nonmaterial opportunities, from changing jobs to sending one’s children to better schools.

It’s distressing, then, that Democrats have given up on economic growth as a central concern. Bill Clinton ran for president on a platform of economic renewal. “It’s the economy, stupid” was a signal that his policies would aim at promoting growth. And his mantra of rewarding people who played by the rules was a nod to the culture of personal responsibility that undergirds growth.

The recent presidential debates reflect a complete reorientation of the Democratic Party—away from growth. Elizabeth Warren was the only candidate to tout a proposal for increasing economic growth—breaking up big companies, particularly tech companies. That idea certainly doesn’t enjoy consensus support from economists, and few see it as a significant spur to growth, in any case; large tech companies have been responsible for much of the increase in GDP over the last decade. They have also provided services—like the ability to search on Google—whose value cannot be captured by conventional growth measures, because they’re free. A few candidates, like Pete Buttigieg, talk about building infrastructure, which could be growth-enhancing. And a third-tier candidate, John Delaney, argued for free trade, a certain promoter of growth.

But the Democratic field’s overwhelming focus has been asset redistribution—providing free health care to all, forgiving student debt, or giving every adult an annual stipend of $12,000. It’s hard to see how these policies could promote growth. They move America toward the welfare states of continental Europe that have economically underperformed the U.S. for decades—and this difference in performance is understated because other nations ride cost-free on our innovations in technology and medicine.

Leading candidates like Warren and Kamala Harris have even suggested that they’re open to packing the Supreme Court. Buttigieg has a detailed plan to change its membership. These are attacks on the rule of law, crucial to economic growth. Confidence in settled rules affecting property and contract give people the confidence to invest and take risks. While it might seem that our modern Court is largely focused on civil rights, economic issues remain salient. Labor and administrative law are contentious matters that bear on economic production, and the takings and contract clauses remain litigated constitutional provisions. An enlarged Court, with justices dedicated to a progressive, rather than a constitutionalist, agenda could undermine the legal basis for American prosperity.

Coastal elites will fare just fine, no matter who is president. In fact, heavier regulation, like that contemplated by the Green New Deal, will help the cognitive elite by requiring companies to hire them to navigate the obstacle course of swelling government. But the loss of focus on economic growth will be disastrous for the American middle, like my new acquaintances in Toledo.

John O. McGinnis is a contributing editor of City Journal and the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. 

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