Elizabeth Warren, senior senator from Massachusetts, academic, lawyer, and possibly of slight Native American heritage, set both ends of the left-right spectrum astir with a recent speech in which she list eleven commandments of progressivism. Many adore her and see in her the next great hope of true progressivism. Those are the folks who, either secretly or in quiet chatter among their like-minded friends, are disappointed in Obama’s failure to bring about a glorious new age of Progressive America. Many are incensed by her and her unabashed statism. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, though, you must admit she’s a headline grabber, an energizer (pro or con) and someone to be watched.
When I first heard of the declaration of these eleven commandments, I laughed it off as just another statist laying claim to the fruit of others’ labors. People do love a good list, though, which could give this stack of nonsense some traction. On top of that, the sheer chutzpah it takes to do Moses one better brought me back around to giving the list a closer look. And, as some of my regular readers know, I do love a good point-by-point rebuttal.
So, without further ado, Senator Warren’s dream society:
- “We believe that Wall Street needs stronger rules and tougher enforcement, and we’re willing to fight for it.”
This is standard populist pap that hides the fact that Wall Street and DC are very, very close friends. There’s a case to be made that the prolonged cheap money the Fed’s been putting out is the prime cause of the stock market’s run-up, and that when that cheap money goes away, we’ll witness yet another bubble burst. Until then, Wall Street’s making oodles of money with Government’s helping hand.
Government has been “policing” Wall Street for decades, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from those decades, it is that only the most heinous transgressions actually end up policed. Meanwhile, too-big-to-fail remains a little-spoken-of reality, taxpayers are implicitly on the hook for poor and overly-risky decisions by those on Wall Street she decries, and while every liberal-leaning politician has said the same things about Wall Street, little ever changes.
Warren supports a 21st century version of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banks from investment banks. Here she has a point, insofar as the banking industry has taxpayer insurance against losses. If you borrow money to buy a house, the lender (correctly) has an interest in seeing that you follow a bunch of rules regarding the house that it has lent you money for. Similarly, if you receive insurance for money you have on hand, the insurer (the FDIC and therefore the government) should be able to set rules on what yo do with the money it’s insuring.
Still, the Glass-Steagall bit is only one small part. The statement is chum, intended to divide and vilify the successful. Yes, there are scumbags in Wall Street, and they’re hatable. If you want really hatable, though, visit DC.
- “We believe in science, and that means that we have a responsibility to protect this Earth.”
First, the statement is a logical fallacy. Belief in science makes absolutely no implication or mandate regarding action. Second, this is part of a continuing effort by the Left to conflate skepticism regarding anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with belief in creationism and denial of evolution. This conflation, if it’s not viewed as nakedly political and calculating, is ironically a strong demonstration of a lack of scientific understanding. Evolution is, from a scientific perspective, pretty unchallengeable. Not every detail is filled in yet, but we don’t need every detail to know that it is a strongly validated working theory. AGW, on the other hand, is full of holes and remains unvalidated by empirical observation.
As far as sound-bite usefulness goes, though, it’s more chum. By her commandment, you must not only accept AGW as gospel, you must demand action.
- “We believe that the Internet shouldn’t be rigged to benefit big corporations, and that means real net neutrality.”
Why this is a commandment is a bit puzzling. Net neutrality isn’t something I’d put high on the list of nationally pressing matters. It is, however, a declaration that the Internet is something that government should regulate, and once government has established regulation of something, has given itself the tools to manage something, what it does after that falls out of citizens’ control. Look at the FDA, the EPA and a long list of other agencies. They’ve been given tools, they use them as they see fit, and if they exceed their original charter, well, it takes years or decades to rein them back.
- “We believe that no one should work full-time and still live in poverty, and that means raising the minimum wage.”
There’s a neat trick here, in that the government gets to define when you go from “poverty” to “not-poverty.” Unaddressed in this statement are the questions of where the money for that higher wage will come from and where the minimum wage jobs will be after the higher minimum wage prompts employers to cut back staffing and/or automate. This is the typical shallow thinking of emotional idealists – they “know” how things should be, want laws written to make those things so, but don’t bother considering the side effects of those laws.
- “We believe that fast-food workers deserve a livable wage, and that means that when they take to the picket line, we are proud to fight alongside them.”
For a long list of reasons, private sector unions are falling by the wayside. Things have changed dramatically labor-wise. The basic and important improvements that unions helped usher in are “givens” now, with no need for unions to ensure they remain in place. Without that raison d’tre, the unions have become about protectionism, seeking more money for less work for their members, protecting the worst of them from termination, and restricting access to jobs. And, as the public increasingly sees union workers as receiving compensation they consider excessive in comparison to their own, sympathy for union workers fades. Big Labor knows this, and has increasingly shifted efforts towards the public side (there’s a book’s worth of wrongs there), but as the public starts seeing how well those public workers are being compensated that’s starting to face backlash as well. With the nation increasingly shifting to a service economy, with fewer and fewer entry-level jobs in manufacturing and trades (thanks, unions and big government, for that), Big Labor needs a new source of workers and dues. Chain restaurants are popping up like mushrooms, all over the country, and with them lots of minimum wage jobs. Why not organize them? Lots of members, lots of votes, lots of dues.
Of course, the same questions and issues arise as with the minimum wage. Where’s the money going to come from? If labor costs get too high, restaurants will have to either pass them on in the form of higher prices, cut back staffing or close entirely. And, given that the patrons who frequent fast food restaurants are often the very same people who work in them and earn those minimum wages, those higher prices will take a bite out of those increased wages.
There’s also the repeated theme here that business is the Bad Guy, since a picket line implies the business doesn’t want unionization or to pay a higher wage. Rank populism – without business, there are no jobs – but it works.
- “We believe that students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.”
There’s a strong link between increased levels of available financial assistance and student loans and increased college tuition. Market equilibrium suggests that college tuitions will settle in at a level where the money students can afford matches the tuition being asked for. Adding outside money into the mix doesn’t simply offset that paid by students. The schools know that the money students can pay doesn’t change, so it can simply soak up all the free and borrowed money by raising tuition. With a society that insists that tertiary education is necessary to one’s future and a disdain for manual trade jobs, the deck is stacked in the universities’ favor.
But rather than address this problem created by government’s helping hand and a wrong-headed message to the nation’s young, Warren implies that government should give away even more “free money,” presumably by either forgiving student loans or by keeping them artificially cheap. I can’t imagine she’s suggesting that tuitions be regulated – I’ve never heard a liberal say such a thing, and her pals at Harvard might disown her if she did.
So, where’s the money going to come from, Ms. Warren? Would you have the Fed simply print some more? Or do you think you can simply tax a few rich people to balance those books?
Moreover, what happens when the schools get the message that they can demand even higher tuitions, knowing that the students know the debts will be forgiven? More shallow thinking.
- “We believe that after a lifetime of work, people are entitled to retire with dignity, and that means protecting Social Security, Medicare, and pensions.”
How? These unfunded liabilities, left unchecked and uncorrected, will bankrupt the nation. It is not a question of whether those who say the entitlements are doomed to failures are right or wrong, it is simply a matter of “when.”
I recently read a analysis that indicates government spending, driven primarily by entitlements, will grow to 36% of GDP in a decade or two. Tax revenues have held at a steady long-term average of 18% since WWII, no matter what the tax rules and rates are. We can interpret the 18% figure one of two ways – either 18% is what the people of the nation are willing to concede to the government and change their collective behavior and response to tax code changes to get back to that number, or the government hasn’t dropped a heavy enough taxation system to overcome people’s behavior. In order for this nation to fulfill its promises regarding entitlements – promises that have no weight, by the way, they can be changed by Congress – the government is going to have to hit the citizens with massive new taxes. Those taxes will have to include the middle and lower classes, probably via a national sales tax or VAT. This means that those entitlements will simply be taken back via taxation.
“Dignity” as an entitlement is a neat thing. It’s like “fairness” in that it’s undefinable in any sort of rational fashion. This means it’s up to whoever writes the rules to decide what it means. Sounds great, makes for great soundbite, but it’s a meaningless promise.
The sentiment of this declaration plays well, but its lack of any detail makes it hollow. Or are the details irrelevant?
- “We believe – I can’t believe I have to say this in 2014 – we believe in equal pay for equal work.”
Oh, yes, that’s what we need – bureaucrats deciding whether Job A is “equal” to Job B. They wouldn’t think of injecting personal bias into those decisions, would they? They wouldn’t think of making political hay of them, would they? They wouldn’t think of using biased and cherry picked studies, would they? Just more anti-business chum.
- “We believe that equal means equal, and that’s true in marriage, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in all of America.”
Readers of this page know my stance on gay marriage i.e. government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage contract at all, but until it removes itself, equal treatment under the law demands that gays have access to the same government benefits, legal principles and burdens that heterosexuals do when it comes to that contract.
That said, having access to the same rules isn’t the same thing as government stepping into an employer-employee relationship and decreeing the rules of whatever agreement they’ve made, or otherwise forcing equality of outcome on everyone. Gay marriage is about equality of opportunity – a bedrock principle of a free society. Warren’s rhetoric is a flowery way of trotting out the equality of outcome goal that wrecks societies.
- “We believe that immigration has made this country strong and vibrant, and that means reform.”
Agreed, but what sort of reform? What’s going on right now is heinous, and I say this as an open-borders advocate. A nation that doesn’t control its borders isn’t a nation, and there’s a world of difference in inviting immigrants who want to come here to work and throwing the doors open to anyone who wants to dump their kids here with the expectation that the government will see to them, raise them and make citizens of them. Robust immigration has benefited and will benefit this nation, but what’s going on now is just a tragic mess born out of the abdication of responsibility by the administration.
As always, details, please, Ms. Warren. How I feel about your declaration depends on those details.
- “And we believe that corporations are not people, that women have a right to their bodies. We will overturn Hobby Lobby and we will fight for it. We will fight for it!”
This is idiocy multiplied.
Corporations are agglomerations of people, a “corporation” that does not consist of people cannot speak, think or act. A corporation is nothing more than a legal structure that people have established. It is the people therein that have rights, and the legal structure they put themselves in does not obviate or abridge their rights.
If we are to believe that “women have a right to their bodies,” we should presume that they also have a right to what they eat, drink or otherwise put into their bodies, that they have a right to do with their bodies as they wish, that they have a right to move their bodies about as they wish, and that they have a right to keep the fruits of the labor they perform with those bodies. None of these are true in today’s America.
The most relevant lie is the implied one – that the Hobby Lobby decision somehow infringes upon women’s rights to their bodies. Nonsense. All Hobby Lobby did was establish that, under very narrow circumstances, an employer need not obey a government mandate regarding certain elements of the compensation it offers to those who freely enter into jobs offered by that employer. NOTHING in Hobby Lobby infringes upon what a woman can do with her body. The government, on the other hand, has infringed massively in that regard. The foods you eat, the beverages you drink, the chemicals you ingest, all regulated, with access to many prohibited. Want to receive money in exchange for certain physical acts? Not allowed – unless someone records it visually for profit. Want to travel? Papers please. Want to work at a job that pays below minimum wage, or work for free in exchange for the training you’ll receive? Nuh-uh. Want to keep what you earn? That’s funny.
Then there’s the “we will fight for it.” Rabble rousing, worthy of Marx. She stopped just short of screaming Workers of the world, unite!
Chum, chum, chum. As commandments go, they’re not exactly on the level of those that Moses brought down from Sinai. Mostly, they’re a combination of a list of demands for further government involvement in our lives and sound-bite populism intended for pep rallies. The darling of today’s progressivism (who, incidentally, was a champion debater in school) certainly knows how to crank up an audience of true believers. She’s also demonstrated a knack for infuriating those who don’t agree with her. But, as far as substance goes?
Chum isn’t known for its quality of content.
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