Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter
“Time, there will be time… time for a hundred visions and revisions that time will soon erase – T.S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
“In her first policy speech in North Carolina later this week and then next week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” Fox News reports, “Harris plans to present to Americans who she is and how she will govern essentially for the first time since [President Joe] Biden backed out of the race and endorsed her presidential campaign. In recent weeks, Harris has shifted on at least five major policy stances: mandatory assault rifle buybacks, fracking, immigration, health care and a federal jobs guarantee.”
Astute political watchers will have noticed that, in addition to Harris’ reversal being a revision that time will soon erase, the revision is a revision of valiantly defended positions taken when Harris was President Joe Biden’s Vice president for four years. They will have noticed as well that Biden, for five decades an elusively moderate Democrat, quickly threw in his lot with neo-progressives as soon as he became president, a rather dramatic reversal for him and the nation.
Harris’ presidential campaign moves in the opposite direction – from progressivism to moderation. Cynics will say moderation is old hat; John F. Kennedy was a moderate, liberal Democrat. Progressivism is a horse of a different color. No one has yet suggested that Harris wishes to turn the clock back to 1963, the year Kennedy was removed from office through assassination.
Neo-progressives are not happy with the switcheroo. They feel betrayed, but the feeling, some cynics suppose, may be no more than a temporary spinal tickle. For someone willing to change faces at the drop of an electioneering hat, Harris’ most recent change may be at best an election year head fake.
There are signs Biden endorsement of Harris is beginning to chafe. Biden is not happy to have been so quickly and unceremoniously knocked out of office by former true believes such as former Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, the too-clever-by-half former President Barack Obama, and the wily leader of the U.S. Senate Chuck Schumer. Truth seekers are anxiously awaiting Biden’s tell-all memoir.
Most Americans who have grown up politically now realize that campaigning is not governing. Indeed, in Biden’s case, it was the opposite of governing. Biden campaigned as a moderate, liberal candidate for president but, as soon as he arrived at the White House, he quickly morphed, in Victor Davis Hanson’s memorable phrase, into “the most radical president since Franklin Roosevelt” or, satirists might insist, Leon Trotsky.
So then, when we ask what positions Harris is prepared to execute as president, we should first seek to discover which Harris we are talking about.
During her four year stint as Biden’s second in command Harris proposed a gun buy-back program – no longer. U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both gun-control enthusiasts, will be disappointed. Fracking -- which produced massive quantities of relatively clean and environmentally friendly natural gas – is back on the table. Immigration must be more tightly controlled says Biden’s “border czar.” Health care yes, but we don’t want to put private insurance companies out of business, the undeclared endpoint of Obama’s health care thrust. And a federal jobs guarantee? Not now in the midst of a transformative Democrat campaign.
What should we do about high grocery prices?
Every indication is that Harris plans to bring down the high price of groceries through price controls. Her strategy indicates a profound ignorance of the basic laws of supply and demand. Prices spike when supply is insufficient to satisfy demand, and the devaluation of the currency affects both supply and demand. In Venezuela – where the command economy in the person of Nicolás Maduro is king. And when Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez decapitalized the oil industry through the state seizure of the industry, Venezuela found it could no longer pull oil out of the ground – because the state is far less competent than private industry in setting prices to satisfy national and international demand. We all know “How Venezuela went from a rich democracy to a dictatorship on the brink of collapse.”
Here in the United States, price controls have failed every time they were instituted by grasping politicians who think a state controlled economy will be more productive than a state controlled economy.
Harris, a neo-progressive, is set to unveil her economic proposals today as this is being written, Thursday, August 16. Despite all the campaign head fakes, Harris, if elected, will choose neo-progressivism over real progress and false statist solutions over the liberties of a free market. She will increase the national debt. “U.S. National Debt Tops $35 Trillion for First Time,” the New York Times tells us.
Neo-progressivism is a kinder, gentler variant of socialism. We’ve seen the socialist future, and it does not work.
