She's Krazy

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Elizabeth Warren’s Batty Plan to Nationalize . . . Everything

By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren with Sen. Bernie Sanders at a Capitol Hill press conference introducing Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan, September 13, 2017. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters) Wholesale seizure and control of private property? With 2020 in her sights, Warren woos the hard Left.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has one-upped socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She proposes to nationalize every major business in the United States of America. If successful, it would constitute the largest seizure of private property in human history.

Warren’s proposal is dishonestly called the “Accountable Capitalism Act.” Accountable to whom? you might ask. That’s a reasonable question. The answer is — as it always is — accountable to politicians, who desire to put the assets and productivity of private businesses under political discipline for their own selfish ends. It is remarkable that people who are most keenly attuned to the self-interest of CEOs and shareholders and the ways in which that self-interest influences their decisions apparently believe that members of the House, senators, presidents, regulators, Cabinet secretaries, and agency chiefs somehow are liberated from self-interest when they take office through some kind of miracle of transcendence.

Under Senator Warren’s proposal, no business with more than $1 billion in revenue would be permitted to legally operate without permission from the federal government. The federal government would then dictate to these businesses the composition of their boards, the details of internal corporate governance, compensation practices, personnel policies, and much more. Naturally, their political activities would be restricted, too. Senator Warren’s proposal entails the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States, and nothing less. It is unconstitutional, unethical, immoral, irresponsible, and — not to put too fine a point on it — utterly bonkers.

It is also cynical. Senator Warren is many things: a crass opportunist, intellectually bankrupt, personally vapid, a peddler of witless self-help books, etc. But she is not stupid. She knows that this is a go-nowhere proposition, that she will be spared by the Republican legislative majority from the ignominy that would ensue from the wholehearted pursuit of this daft program. It is in reality only a means of staking out for purely strategic reasons the most radical corner for her 2020 run at the Democratic presidential nomination. The Democratic party in 2018, like the Republican primary electorate in 2016, is out for blood and desirous of confrontation. So Senator Warren is running this red flag up the flagpole to see who salutes.

To propose such a thing for sincere reasons would be ghastly stupidity. To propose this program for narrowly self-serving political reasons is the sort of thing that would end a political career in a sane and self-respecting state, which Massachusetts plainly is not and has not been for some time.

When the owners of Apple wish to hold on to their own after-tax earnings, they are denounced as greedy. When Elizabeth Warren wants to seize those earnings for her own use, what is that? It is covetousness, which is what you get when you have greed compounded with envy.

To those on the left who look at Senator Warren’s proposal and think that giving the government a stronger whip hand over American businesses is just the ticket, I would like to present four questions: Who is the president of these United States? Who is the majority leader in the Senate? Who is the speaker of the House? How would you evaluate the composition of the Supreme Court, either as it stands or after President Donald Trump has the opportunity to nominate another justice or two? The power you give the federal government will be there during Republican administrations, too. Any future populist demagogue who finds his way into the White House will have access to the same power. No one should be trusted with that kind of power.

And nobody who seeks that kind of power should be trusted with any power at all.

It is worth keeping in mind that the fabulous goose was slaughtered not in spite of the golden eggs but because of them. Politicians are covetous. When the owners of Apple wish to hold on to their own after-tax earnings, they are denounced as greedy. (Apple’s shareholders are corporately the largest taxpayer in the world.) When Elizabeth Warren wants to seize those earnings for her own use, what is that? It is covetousness, which is what you get when you have greed compounded with envy. Senator Warren, a former Sunday-school teacher, apparently has a keen appreciation for the vices that lurk in the human heart, and she intends to leverage them to her benefit.

Another thing about these kinds of proposals: They are, at heart, acts of cowardice. There are politicians who wish to provide benefits to certain constituents and who would like those benefits to be paid for by other parties who are politically disfavored. There is an easy way to do that: Tax x to subsidize y. The problem with doing that is embarrassment. Politicians such as Senator Warren lack the courage to go to the American electorate and say: “We wish to provide these benefits, and they will cost an extra $3 trillion a year, which we will pay for by doubling taxes.” Why spend the money to subsidize, say, health insurance, when you can just pass rules that make businesses do the subsidizing for you? It’s a way to spend money without putting the expenditures on a budget line. It treats the productive capacity of the United States as a herd of dairy cows to be milked by Senator Warren et al. at their convenience. And, of course, Senator Warren and her colleagues get to decide how the milk gets distributed, too.

One wonders why American businesses put up with it.

 

 

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[Guest]

So, what does she want to do with people that own farms, ranches, etc.??? 

How much acreage does she want to take?

Fuck, if this shit keeps up, or ever passes, we are gonna' see some serious bad shit happening in this country.

There was a guy in Colebrook, NH that went on a shooting spree years ago, because he felt the town was fucking him over on his land. 

Carl Drega...killed a State Trooper and one other. 

 

[Stephen Hawking]

That story is a twisted up version of what she actually proposed, not that I like her one bit myself.

[Angry ginger]

she's a fucking loon

[Skidude600]

Not going to happen.