President Biden and his congressional allies say that they’re “building back” the weakened American economy with their huge spending bills. The notion that having Washington ladle money into “the economy” to strengthen it is foolish enough, but little of what happens in the spending splurge is about that. As Nikolai Wenzel argues in this Law & Liberty essay, the objective is to transform the nation’s economy.
Here’s a key passage:
Over the past year, we have seen a bipartisan assault on constitutional and fiscal floodgates. But the reality is even worse than appearances. Indeed, ARPA is a Trojan Horse that is smuggling in tools that will be used for further power grabs—ones that would not be tolerated save for the pretext of fighting a pandemic and a recession. The educational union machine has not yet spent the manna received under the CARES Act, but ARPA is showering it with a further $130 billion—to be spent over seven years. This has nothing to do with stimulus, but is explicitly a slush fund. ARPA is smuggling in support for health insurance premiums, including for some recipients who are not unemployed and do have sufficient resources. Since traditional legislation can’t be secured, ARPA is slowly laying the foundations for single-payer healthcare. ARPA is even quietly making a shift towards Universal Basic Income by providing a monthly child credit to most parents.
Wenzel is right. The Democrats want an economy subject to their control. That is much better for them since they can extract support far more readily from a crony-capitalist economy than one based on economic freedom. And as we have recently seen, many big business leaders are happy to play along.
The fact that a managed economy inevitably wastes lots of resources, drives away ambitious people, and leads to ever increasing political bickering over the declining GDP doesn’t matter to these scoundrels. They want to enjoy power now.