by Roger Kimball
The socialists funneling ideas to Harris have put together an economic plan redolent of Venezuela or, indeed, the Soviet Union.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
Cry for Kamala the Kamunist.
It took them a while, it’s true, but at least Argentina has someone with a rudimentary knowledge of economics in charge.
Indeed, Javier Milei, one of my favorite leaders on the world stage today (along with Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, Georgia Meloni, and Nayib Bukele) is a Trump-like dynamo. If I had a more developed entrepreneurial bent, I would try marketing a line of Milei chainsaws in the United States. Just as he took a chainsaw (sometimes literally) to excessive spending, regulation, and bureaucracy in Argentina, so my Milei Chainsaws could be employed against waste, fraud, and abuse here across the fruited plain. Milei’s robust policies have put Argentina on the runway to economic success. They have slashed inflation—some 200% when he took office—and his abolition of rent control—surprise, surprise—has sparked a 195% rise in available housing stock.
Meanwhile, the socialists funneling ideas to Harris have put together an economic plan redolent of Venezuela or, indeed, the Soviet Union. Its centerpiece revolves around centrally promulgated and enforced wage and price controls—a recipe for shortages and inflation.
The plan itself has been ridiculed across the ideological spectrum, from CNN to The Wall Street Journal. “Harris’ plan to stop price gouging,” quoth CNN in a masterpiece of understatement, “could create more problems than it solves.”
The WSJ was a bit franker. For one thing, there is “no evidence that supermarkets or other food retailers are gouging anyone. Food prices are higher than they were before the Biden Presidency, but that is because of inflation.”
And who caused that inflation, Kemo Sabe? The man with the keys to the money duplicating machine, Joe Biden or his handlers.
Moreover, “fixing prices is a recipe for shortages, as controls would discourage grocery suppliers. Voilà, empty store shelves. Price controls have led to shortages everywhere they’ve been tried, from Moscow to Caracas.”
Some of the propaganda press—The New York Times, MSNBC, etc—have been working overtime to keep up a brave face. The low hum you hear is the hydrogen pumps shooting gas into the leaky balloon of the Democrat consortium. As I have noted ever since Kamala was plucked out of the bin marked “ridiculous” and dusted off as the mannequin’s understudy, the intoxicating paroxysms of glee that convulsed the left-leaning media pundits was but a sugar-high. It induced feelings of giddiness but could not last. I thought it would probably linger through the DNC convention next week, but the manic phase is already passing the stupor consequent on the sudden drop in energy has set in.
The depressive funk is not helped by the Harris campaign’s strategy of “out-of-sight-out-of-mind.” They concluded that it worked with Joe Biden in 2020, and so they thought they would try it again. But there is no COVID emergency to shut the country down this time around and it is pretty clear that the Dems’ basement strategy cannot be successfully dusted off and applied to Kamala. True, she is nearly as inarticulate as Biden, but the public will not put up with the Wizard of Oz gambit a second time.
Besides, Team Trump is wheeling out all sorts of embarrassing things that will destroy Harris if they are not effectively answered. For example, a clip of Harris discussing her support of the government taking over private patents by fiat has surfaced and is being industriously circulated.
I will snatch their patents, so that we [the American government] will take over.
Yes we can do that!
The question is: ‘Do you have the will to do it’!?
I have the will to do it.
Noted.
I almost feel sorry for Harris, emphasis on the adverb. Reports are that 100,000 protestors are set to converge on Chicago next week to torch the city and torment Democrat convention-goers. Will it be a bigger, badder version of what happened in Chicago in 1968? That time, golden boy Hubert Humphrey* went in on a cloud of fairy dust and came out of the convention 20 points behind Nixon.
Efforts to paint Trump and JD as “weird” have failed miserably, as have the embarrassing efforts to gild the Harris-Walz socialist platform and history of failure by stealing various Trump ideas like exempting tips from federal income tax.
Even more damaging have been the mounting attacks by conservatives on the whole Harris-Walz concession. Governor Walz has turned out to be a special kind of liability, a sick freak who orders schools to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms while sitting back and watching Minneapolis burn as the BLM rioters rampaged through the city. His patina of plaid, dad-like folksiness is completely belied by his sympathy for Communist China not to mention his personal inclinations.
Why was Walz picked as Harris’s running mate in the first place? One midwestern friend might have hit upon the answer. Tim Walz, he said, was what the coastal elites of this country believe a midwesterner looks and acts like. He has all the “progressive” attitudes of the left, but he articulates them accoutered in a more string-tie, aw-shucks manner
I expected a certain amount of small-caliber fire by now, but it turns out that Trump supporters are already pounding Harris-Walz with heavy artillery. For example, speaking on “The Five” just a few days ago, Greg Gutfeld utterly vaporized Harris’s record on the border, inflation, and other issues.
What’s coming will not be pretty. But I predict that it will be cathartic. It’s hard to know just how much of a hose Trump’s victory will be for the rank Augean stables of Democrat incumbency. Doubtless, many clumps of ordure will remain. Many, however, will be flushed into the impatient, rushing currents of change. I am looking forward to it.
- * Update: I had “Eugene McCarthy” for “Hubert Humphrey.” Thanks to an alert reader for the correction.
Roger Kimball
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/18/harriss-kamunist-agenda-faces-harsh-reality/
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