Liz Warren tries to distance herself from the far left wing of the Democrat party by claiming that she's not a Democratic Socialist. To wit: Elizabeth Warren: 'I am not a' Democratic Socialist. And adds this about her own viewpoint:
"Markets have to have rules. They have to have a cop on the beat," she said, adding that "markets without rules are theft."
So is the "cop on the beat" in the market a euphemism for a socialist central planning committee? Seems so.
Richard A. Epstein explained it last year in Elizabeth Warren’s Surreptitious Socialism:
Like many proposals for radical reform, her Accountable Capitalism Act would destroy the institution she says she wants to save. The bill’s central provision tells the whole story: all corporations whose annual revenues exceed $1 billion dollars would be required to receive a federal corporate charter to remain in business. Those charters will come with conditions attached, to force corporations to pay due attention not just to their shareholders, but to their employees, suppliers, and their local communities.
Warren believes the federal government can attach whatever conditions it wants to the charters it issues, and she further claims that it should act to reverse the purportedly dangerous trend of top corporate officials making cash distributions to their shareholders instead of plowing those proceeds back into their own businesses. Her intellectual nemesis, no surprise, is Milton Friedman, who in a seminal 1970 article argued that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
The most obvious problem with Warren’s proposal is that it would likely lead to the largest flight of capital from the United States in history. Foreign investors will see little reason to put their wealth at the mercy of some crusading federal board that can override a company’s board of directors. Current covered American corporations would have powerful incentives to dump assets or relocate overseas. Make no mistake about it, her proposal calls for the outright confiscation of wealth through the nationalization of corporate boards that would be forever beholden to political figures. Surreptitious socialism turns out to be her way of saving capitalism. And for the worst of all reasons.
"[H]er proposal calls for the outright confiscation of wealth through the nationalization of corporate boards that would be forever beholden to political figures." Government control of industry -- isn't that socialism?
------
1:52 PM 3/16/2019
Comments