‘Republicans used to know that giving Washington more control isn’t the solution. It’s the problem,’ the presidential aspirant maintains.
The speech Nikki Haley gave in New Hampshire today, devoted to a thorough denunciation of “Bidenomics,” might seem premature. The former South Carolina governor has a primary or two to win first. But Haley is fortunate insofar as her attacks on Joe Biden’s economic record are perfectly consistent with denunciations of the faddish statist economics to which so many Republicans find themselves attracted.
“Freedom has always been our secret weapon,” Haley began. To the modern Republican ear — given the Right’s newfound envy of the Left’s use of coercive governmental power against political adversaries — such platitudes can ring hollow. But Haley put the claim in context. Freedom and the innovative entrepreneurial spirit it encourages put the Soviet Union in its grave. Chinese Communists are currently wringing their hands in envy as they watch the ongoing implosion of the centrally planned model. Freedom produced the unrivaled prosperity the West enjoys today. And it is under attack by its beneficiaries.
Biden’s economy, she continued, is defined by soaring prices, which are a response to profligate government efforts to sustain a massive welfare state. Forty-two million Americans are on food stamps, she observed in horror. More than 100 million Americans are on welfare. All told, nearly one-third of all Americans survive on government assistance. What’s more — from the “grossly misnamed” Inflation Reduction Act to the American Rescue Act — the Democratic Party under Joe Biden has paired “regular welfare” for American citizens with a regime of corporate welfare for its biggest economic actors.
“Add it all up, and Joe Biden has created a political-subsidy economy,” she said. “That’s what ‘Bidenomics’ really is: the government taking money from the middle class and giving it to everyone else.” That, Haley continued, is “called socialism. And as history shows, socialism killed the middle class.”
“This is the same government that can’t build a bridge or a pipeline in under a decade,” she added. “Do you really think Washington knows how to pick the right winners of the economy? Of course not. It picks losers. And the taxpayer is the one who loses the most.” Amid this thorough denunciation of the “central planners” in Washington, who think “they can run our lives better than we can,” and the “industries that live and die based on the whims of Washington,” Haley pivoted without a pause to denouncing the same idea when the new caste of statist Republicans offers it.
“We hear similar foolishness from some Republicans,” the governor observed. “They want so-called industrial policy that bails out railroad unions or promotes the misnamed ‘stakeholder capitalism.’ That’s little more than socialism lite.”
Haley decried the “insulting” extent to which the “big government” right and left alike express their lack of faith in the American people. They tell mothers to be “dependent” on the beneficence of the state. They tell college kids to take on debt with the understanding that taxpayers will save them from the consequences of their actions. They tell business owners to “chase subsidies” rather than to “do well by doing good.” And their philosophy is destined to fail as it has failed so reliably before. “Republicans used to know that giving Washington more control isn’t the solution. It’s the problem,” she maintained. “Government always breaks more than it fixes.”
Haley’s message is both timely and timeless. Republicans with an ear too close to the internet have convinced themselves that liberty is passé. They insist that small government is out of style. They believe that Republicans can do Democratic economics better than Democrats can, as though true statism has never been tried. It’s a conceit that deserves to be challenged.