By Bill Wilson
It always makes me chuckle when I see a writer at the Washington Post attack something or someone for being “Soviet style.” They have been doing it a lot lately. What is so funny about the slur, after all, is that for generations it was the Washington Post and its hangers on that cheered everything “Soviet,” turned a blind eye to mass murder on a scale unknown in human history. It was the Post and its Leftist managers that pushed for policies designed to undercut the work of Ronald Reagan, the man who almost single-handedly overturned the Evil Empire.
So, when Fareed Zakaria recently accused the Trump administration of “Soviet central planning”, it is worth dissecting the attack to see what is really going on. After all, it is not like the Post or its writers have a problem with “central planning.” What they oppose is central planning that does not advance their warped social-justice-warrior pap.
The indictment is by now pretty standard. Trump has not embraced the “limited government” low spending mantra that Republicans are supposed to advocate. Zakaria recounts how the GOP has in the past pushed for lower spending, so-called “free-market” ideals and the elimination of tariffs. But in truth, it has not always been so.
First on spending, the fight over spending in a country that prints its own money and serves as the reserve currency for the world is a bit silly. For many years the GOP would in fact run campaigns on limiting spending. But in power, they rarely embraced it. The late Jack Kemp, icon of the free-market crowd, called reducing spending “root canal politics.” For too long this issue has been nothing more than a call for unilateral disarmament; Republicans can never call for spending while the Democrat-Left spent wildly buying votes from anyone willing to sell.
If now, Trump is honestly throwing away the straitjacket and advocating spending on things that can enhance American sovereignty, rebuild our industrial base and help the military recover from the endless wars of prior Administrations, that is great! Do it. And if this spending boosts the overall economy, so much the better.
The larger attack in the piece is that Trump has turned his back on “free-market” ideology and that the binary alternative is, of course, central planning. The fact is neither of these propositions are true.
The “free-market” mantra has long ago been captured by the owners of large masses of capital. What they seek is freedom to move their capital wherever they want with no penalty or tax — to “find the best return on investment.” That, however, is what has devastated communities across America. When Bill Clinton and George Bush pushed to get China into the World Trade Organization and thereby free any worry by the owners of capital of any penalty or danger, the rush was on. More than 60,000 businesses and over 5 million jobs rushed to China to “maximize profits.”
No cost was assigned the millions of lives harmed. Nobody was held accountable to the tens of thousands of communities destroyed. The cost of addiction, family break-up, lost dreams was never calculated. But there was a cost and it has been the taxpayers who have borne the bill, not the people who caused it. If now Donald Trump moves against the globalist suicide pill, if he forces a better deal with Mexico and Canada, if he demands that China play fairly or else pay a tax, if he insists on the restoration of the American industrial base, that is not free-market but it surely is pro-American.
And that is the real issue at play here. The Post and the entire corporate “media” machine does not want a free, sovereign United States. They want a submissive, submerged U.S. They want international organizations — that American taxpayers are forced to fund — to call the shots. They want the sons and daughters of America’s working families to be policemen to the world, spilling their blood so the world can be safe for mega-banks to move their capital at will. They demand that their view of justice become the norm everywhere, they hate dissent and they will not tolerate independence in any form.
When President Trump moves to defend our national sovereignty at the borders, demands that other nations deal fairly with us and that we have the right to build our own economy, and moves to end the insane endless wars of the past 20 years, he is striking a blow at the heart of the globalist, internationalist ideology that has dominated the world for far too long. That is why the institutional, establishment left and right attack his policies. And, it is why the swamp has come after the President with a bloodlust not seen before in America. He is directly attacking their raison d’etre. It truly is an existential battle.
There will be no middle ground in this fight. Either you will stand with the globalists and their vapid ideology or you will stand for restoring America and for all American citizens. Time to pick a side.
Bill Wilson is the President of the Market Research Foundation and a former board member and former President of Americans for Limited Government.
