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Zombie Reagan Has My Vote
Imagine how pathetic the GOPe would be without pressure from Reagan supporters, not to mention Trump supporters. Would they even consider fighting the Left? On anything?
There is a lot of opposition to “Zombie Reaganism” by much of the GOPe and some of our brethren in the MAGA movement.
The GOPe folks talk about Reagan a lot but are adamantly opposed to his governing philosophies.
The argument against Reagan principles is always the same. We are “stuck in the ’80s, pushing that tired old formula of tax cuts and deregulation.” Then they produce straw-man arguments against duplicating the exact same policies we implemented in the ’80s. They also complain about “unfettered free markets,” as if that ever happened.
No one is saying we should bring back the exact same policies. (Who wants to invade Grenada? Raise your hands, please.)
It’s the Reagan principles that matter, and they didn’t originate with him. Reagan was guided by principles that pre-dated him and are applicable any time. Before Reagan, you would have to go all the way back to Calvin Coolidge to find another president who understood them. The principles worked then, too.
“Reaganomics” and “Supply-Side Economics” were just names for plain old Classical Economics — a thing despised by most politicians. Classical economics consists of solid principles that existed before Adam Smith wrote them down. Bad things happen when you violate those principles.
And violating the principles is on the to-do list of every Democrat and far too many Republicans.
You know who else appreciated the Reagan principles? Donald Trump. The economy was pretty good under the Donald, wasn’t it? That’s because President Trump implemented that “tired old formula of tax cuts and deregulation.”
The “ditch Reagan” people don’t like those principles. A lot of them are former Bushies who did a subsequent stint at National Review. A common thread among them is a dislike for classical economics, especially sound money and free markets. They don’t get starry-eyed about limited government, either.
More than once, I’ve heard that it’s time to “deemphasize” free markets, as if we hadn’t already done that. Free markets consist of the absence of something – that something being government control of the economy. You can’t deemphasize free markets without increasing emphasis on government control.
The free market de-emphasizers want bigger government. Otherwise, why would they complain about a President who’s been dead for 18 years?
Several political groups — such as National Conservatism, Reform Conservatism, and American Compass — have formed around the deemphasis of free markets and an aversion to limited government. Those groups advocate things that sound very reasonable to the uninitiated but will steer us to increased government coercion.
It’s true that times change, but the right thing to do doesn’t change so quickly.
Published in General
Separately, long supply chains and just-in-time management systems are obviously problematic.
My point is that, if we prioritize high and narrow to exclude low and wide, you are trading off something.
You say that regulations on big people hurt little people, but an unregulated big business can also hurt little people when the little people can’t just walk away. We saw this already. It’s why the regulations exist.
The deregulation argument that no one is out to kill their customers is belied by its very existence in history. They may not seek it, but their carelessness goes there and their too big to fail makes it easy to ignore.
Let us not pretend consumers do not need protection here. In a wide and low market, there’s protection by means of competition. No regulation needed, there are more entrepreneurs and more job makers and no one is “too big to fail”. In narrow and high, there is less competition. It may be more efficient, but that efficiency doesn’t just translate to lower prices. It also translates to fewer entrepreneurs, fewer jobs, and a near universal need to keep the business afloat for critical supply chain need … ie. Too big to fail.
While a huge amount of deregulation needs to happen, it will never be the case where 100% deregulation exists. Ever. But what I am saying is that small businesses should not be subjected to those same regulations when it is so easy for them to be abandoned and fail if they do something stupid that only harms the 5 out of 50 customers in their community.
This is the same principle as Tower of Babel, nations, and decentralized states, only applied to business.
Tax cuts hurt the little guy. The little guy and his small business doesn’t experience the corporate tax cut. He doesn’t experience the capital gains tax cut. What happens is these behemoths get to play with way more money to screw the little guy and create barriers to entry. It is way past time for the tax structure to focus on and incentivize the small to medium business and major corporations can choke for all I care. And that doesn’t even include the money they use to push woke leftism down our throats.
Businesses don’t pay taxes, they merely collect them.
/sigh
Here is how this works. A big business agitates to the government to regulate their industry. Government complied.
Being big and super efficient (that comes naturally with size), meeting the regulations is peanuts to the well established. It just costs them a very small fraction of overhead cost to comply.
However, the little guy now has to ensure his business plan complies with regulations when his overhead is multiple times his income (which is typical in a start up without established market share) and makes it harder to reach profitability.
Then, taxes. A small business has ways around business taxes. The structure of the business allows income to be declared as personal income or handled differently via taxes. When we talk business taxes, they are aimed at big business by profit. Income taxes hurt small businesses more than business taxes do.
So big business gets hit with hefty income taxes. You say this hurts the customer, but the profit taxes are so easily chiseled away by tax cuts, it nearly negates the added overhead from compliance. And that’s how you have big businesses that don’t pay taxes.
And so those big businesses then push our attention to raising income taxes) where CEOs etc have no cash income, but all the small business profit is considered personal income for the owner. And who wants to touch capital gains, which WOULD hit the CEOs and rich guys, but would also hit millions of Americans whose 401ks are nearly completely capital gains?
Eliminating some of the tax cuts would help small business that doesn’t benefit from them anyway. It’s just a version of crony capitalism.
Personally, I vote for sales tax over any form of income, profit, or capital tax. Sales and import taxes. That’s it.
Central planning through the tax code is stupid. There should be one flat personal income tax and one deduction for procreating more W-2 slaves. That’s it.
In a free economy those problems are self-correcting.
The regulatory environment created by sloppy legislative process has delegated law-making to the Executive bureaucracy and the President. Some regulations and executive orders are necessary and appropriate, no question. But the tendency to favor big is a natural with the federal bureaucracy paired with the Democrats and big business. Our system of government then essentially prohibits any opportunity to reconsider these things legislatively by the opposition party unless they control all of government.
I usually don’t talk about it as much as I think about it, but natural interest rates would solve a million problems. I pay for proprietary analysis of this stuff and people have no idea what suppressing the interest rate does to decision making and the misallocation of capital.
There’s hope here. Even Chief Justice Roberts understands the need for the Legislative and Executive branches to stay in their lanes. The rulings have been slow in coming and usually don’t make big headlines, but we may eventually get to the point where the Executive branch won’t be writing so many rules that ought to be written, and owned, by the Legislature.
Are we talking about interest rates decided by markets? There is actually a fair amount of that going on, especially in the small business world. There are loans available outside of the hyper-regulated banking industry.
The Fed has been suppressing interest rates since 1996.
We passed a very tiny credit union on a trip through horse country aimed specifically at farmers and horse farming.
Yes. And I have heard some stuff about negative interest rates. That makes me think children are running things.
It’s insane.
Yes, when Toyota and others started the just-in-time systems, their suppliers were “across the street” not across the ocean.
Local regulations, if they are unique to the locality, sometimes help small businesses stay in business. Uniform regulations at the federal level favor consoslidated, centralized businesses, i.e. large businesses. State regulations are somewhere in between.
Large businesses favor doing away with any “crazy patchwork of state and local regulation,” because that crazy patchwork hinders their scaling up so that the winner can take all (or most).
What the heck does Washington know about where I live? Why should some politicians who have never visited my city tell me what to do? I am fine with crazy patchwork nonsense.