MAGA Hypocrisy 101

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MAGA Hypocrisy 101:

We Hate Government Regulation Unless We Do It

Why would I provide side-by-side pictures of a once perceived to be moderate Republican – Marco Rubio – with the GOP buffoon-in-chief – Marjorie Taylor Greene? Aside from the fact that they both favor a virtual support of whatever-Donald-wants populism, the dramatic shift from Reagan’s laissez-faire free market mantra (the very basis for GOP policy for decades) to tightly controlled, highly regulated economy, is stunning. And these two Republican members of Congress now walk in lockstep over massive government interference in the business world, only seeming to embrace low taxes for the rich and corporate rich.

It bad enough when the GOP rants about rampant crime while supporting loosing what little gun control there is. It not surprising that they overlook the massive flow of illicit US firearms to points south, enabling narco-wars and gang/cartel ultra violence bordering on civil war… which drives an increasing number of immigrants to our southern border. Or that they struggle with their right to life constituency, the same base that favors the death penalty and the further relaxation of gun control. It begins to be a bit more interesting when the same GOP representatives (the “law and order” party), having lived through the 1/6/21 attack on the Capitol (hiding where they could) where police officers were seriously injured or died from that conflict, refer to the peaceful and “legitimate political discourse” of that violent mob… and call these violent and convicted January 6th violent felons “patriots” and “hostages,” worthy of immediate pardon.

Indeed, the values of personal freedom and keeping government out of citizens’ lives that was once a major plank of the GOP has now splintered and burned. MAGA politicians have learned to embrace “no compromise” extremism as a clear path to being elected. As the August 31, 2023, The Economist puts it, this is a global trend: “Unfortunately, the love of ‘us’ has an ugly cousin: the fear and suspicion of ‘them’, a paranoid nationalism that works against tolerant values such as an openness to unfamiliar people and new ideas. What is more, cynical politicians have come to understand that they can exploit this sort of nationalism, by whipping up mistrust and hatred and harnessing them to benefit themselves and their cronies.” A very good view of the MAGA GOP. It’s no longer “conservatives” vs “liberals,” but “paranoid” and misinformed MAGAns vs “everybody else.”

Nothing brings this home like the personal restraints on normal, acceptable individual choices that we have not seen since prohibition. Whether it is book censorship, whitewashing classroom lessons in primary and secondary school with severe consequences for offending teachers, banning “woke” companies from doing business in some red states (or banning them from government contracts) and the exceptionally unpopular severe restrictions – even outright bans without reasonable exceptions – on those aiding, providing or having abortions, based on Christian beliefs that are often quite different from those of other faiths.

But today, I would like to follow an LA Times April 10th editorial from Jonah Goldberg, who looks at what the MAGA plan would be to rein in corporation in ways that would make Ronald Reagan roll over in his grave: “The changing of the conservative mind in recent years could hardly be captured more pithily than in the headline of a recent op-ed: ‘Why I believe in industrial policy — done right.’ So opined Sen. Marco Rubio for the Washington Post and, at greater length, for National Affairs… What I’m referring to, rather, are the ideas, arguments and principles that once defined conservatism intellectually, among them rejection of the kind of government intervention in the economy that the Florida Republican now apparently favors. [Like Disney vs DeSantis?]

“Modern conservatism — the sort associated with Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, George Will, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan and to some extent Rubio when he arrived in Washington — once regarded central economic planning and everything associated with it, including ‘industrial policy,’ to be dangerous folly… Buckley’s 1955 mission statement for National Review declared: ‘Perhaps the most important and readily demonstrable lesson of history is that freedom goes hand in hand with a state of political decentralization, that remote government is irresponsible government.’ He also noted that the “competitive price system is indispensable to liberty and material progress.”

“This conviction can be traced back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, but it became a defining principle on the American right during the Cold War, against the backdrop of the rise of the Soviet Union as well as the domestic programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society… There are many strands to the conservative argument against state efforts to shape the economy. One is the ‘knowledge problem,’ a phrase adapted from Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek’s brilliant 1945 essay ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society.’… The knowledge problem, simply put, is that society, including the market, is too complex and too dynamic for government experts to reliably direct it from afar. In a free market, prices capture information that even the best data-gatherers can’t. The closer you are to the problem, the closer you are to the solution.

“Public choice theory — what another Nobel laureate economist, James M. Buchanan, called ‘politics without romance’ — adds another layer of reasons to distrust central planning. Government experts and regulators are often ‘captured’ by the industries or activists most affected by their policies. Also, once politicians get involved, policy priorities multiply — extending to boosting employment, expanding diversity, favoring certain states or districts, protecting specific industries and so on — and the government’s stated goals become pretexts for other motives. ‘Crises’ — pandemics, war, unemployment, environmental problems — become excuses to reward favored constituencies.

“Take President Biden’s recent announcement that he would rebuild Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge both ‘as rapidly as humanly possible’ and ‘with union labor and American steel.’ Well, which is it — rapidly or with those restrictions?

“That brings us to Rubio. Take it from a longtime columnist, you can’t always blame writers for the headlines mischievous editors put on our articles. But ‘Why I believe in industrial policy — done right’ perfectly captures the senator’s argument and the trouble with the broader right-wing fad for central planning… Oh, you want to do it right? Well, that changes everything!... I mean, if only someone had told Hayek and Buchanan that their objections could be answered by just ‘doing it right.’

“The change in the conservative mind goes beyond industrial policy. It’s really about the use of state power generally. Too many Republicans no longer have any problem — moral or otherwise — with government imposing its will on society, so long as the ‘right’ people are doing it ‘right.’ The knowledge problem, they seem to believe, is confined to the left wing.” As the MAGA populist GOP (read: virtually all elected Republicans) centralizes corporate control under severe MAGA restrictions, this Trumpist movement looks a whole lot more like Chinese President Xi Jinping’ s re-centralizing his economy than any vision Ronald Reagan ever held for the United States. Oh, and Xi’s economy is faltering.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while I am no fan of Reagan’s failed supply-side (trickle down) economics, Reagan was whole lot more in tune with letting companies make their own business decisions and set their own priorities than are these MAGA economic autocrats.