Friday, August 17, 2018

Elizabeth Warren’s Batty Plan to Nationalize . . . Everything



By Kevin D. Williamson

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has one-upped socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She proposes to nationalize every major business in the United States of America. If successful, it would constitute the largest seizure of private property in human history.

Warren’s proposal is dishonestly called the “Accountable Capitalism Act.” Accountable to whom? you might ask. That’s a reasonable question. The answer is
— as it always is — accountable to politicians, who desire to put the assets and productivity of private businesses under political discipline for their own selfish ends. It is remarkable that people who are most keenly attuned to the self-interest of CEOs and shareholders and the ways in which that self-interest influences their decisions apparently believe that members of the House, senators, presidents, regulators, Cabinet secretaries, and agency chiefs somehow are liberated from self-interest when they take office through some kind of miracle of transcendence.

Under Senator Warren’s proposal, no business with more than $1 billion in revenue would be permitted to legally operate without permission from the federal government. The federal government would then dictate to these businesses the composition of their boards, the details of internal corporate governance, compensation practices, personnel policies, and much more. Naturally, their political activities would be restricted, too. Senator Warren’s proposal entails the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States, and nothing less. It is unconstitutional, unethical, immoral, irresponsible, and — not to put too fine a point on it — utterly bonkers.

It is also cynical. Senator Warren is many things: a crass opportunist, intellectually bankrupt, personally vapid, a peddler of witless self-help books, etc. But she is not stupid. She knows that this is a go-nowhere proposition, that she will be spared by the Republican legislative majority from the ignominy that would ensue from the wholehearted pursuit of this daft program. It is in reality only a means of staking out for purely strategic reasons the most radical corner for her 2020 run at the Democratic presidential nomination. The Democratic party in 2018, like the Republican primary electorate in 2016, is out for blood and desirous of confrontation. So Senator Warren is running this red flag up the flagpole to see who salutes.

Read the rest here.



3 comments:

  1. The better answer is don't let a business buy another business. That way a single person would have to own them, not a unanswerable corporation. When the business gets caught breaking the law someone will have to answer the charges. People will act in a more reasonable manor.

    How many laws do corporations have to get caught breaking. Then settle for dollars without accountability before we understand the system isn't working?

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    1. There's an even simpler proposition: end the legal fiction of corporate personhood and limited liability. It basically allows shareholders to reap benefits of antisocial behavior by the executives while protecting them from the losses of previously gained benefits should said behavior result in legal action against the company. This encourages reckless behavior of the executives by reducing incentives for strict oversight by the shareholders.

      If legal liability was apportioned to all shareholders (in direct proportion to their share in voting rights) and executives of the company rather than the company itself, I'd bet they'd suddenly discover conscience.

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