On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article about a Wall Street Journal survey that indicates that Americans have not yet learned the economic lessons of the past.
The article reports:
A new poll shows widespread support for a return to 1970s-style stagflation. Well, not exactly. But most people these days support the very policies that produced the wreckage of that decade.
George Santayana was right. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Unfortunately, this group now includes people such as the current vice president who claim to be conservative.
A new Wall Street Journal survey finds that “Americans in both parties back government-imposed price caps and other market interventions to make life more affordable.”
Significant majorities (more than 70%) also support caps on prescription drugs, credit card interest rates, and child care costs. Sixty-one percent back a wealth tax on millionaires, nearly 60% favor socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ government takeover of healthcare, known as “Medicare for all,” and 57% want to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour.
Our own I&I/TIPP survey found a shockingly high number of adults support the idea of the government owning key industries. (See: “POLL SHOCKER: Socialism Is Infecting The GOP As Well.”)
The article concludes:
But now we have nationalist “conservatives” and party leaders like JD Vance, the putative successor to Donald Trump, treating the free market as an evil that must be tamed, and extolling the virtues of government interventions, also “for the greater good.” Vance has even taken to bashing Milton Friedman (saying it’s a good thing his ideas aren’t driving economic policy these days) and Margaret Thatcher, while praising Sen. Huey Long, “who advocated socialist policies and ran Louisiana as his authoritarian fiefdom,” in the words of Unleash Prosperity.
What’s next? Calls to re-regulate the airline industry? Slapping price controls on oil and gas? The return of wage and price controls? The rebirth of New Deal programs and FDR’s economically ruinous “bold, persistent experimentation”? Once you give up on the free market, there is no end to the mischief.
We know where this all leads. And it’s not a road that makes America great again. Just ask anyone who still can remember what times were like when Jimmy Carter was president.
Those of us who remember Jimmy Carter don’t EVER want to do that again.
Milton Friedman once said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.” If you want the economy to grow, keep the government out of it as much as possible.