Senator Josh Hawley made many excellent points in his speech at the recent National Conservatism Conference, especially on cultural issues. But his economics is lacking. For example, he said,
“In the name of capitalism, these Republicans sang the praises of global integration while Wall Street bet against American industry and bought up single family homes—so that after the banks took the working man’s job, he couldn’t afford a house for his family to live in. Then Wall Street crashed that global economy—multiple times—and the housing market, and these same Republicans kept right on rhapsodizing. And subsidizing.”
Senator Hawley should know that the US hasn’t practiced capitalism for over a century. The country followed the principles of capitalism from before our founding until the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 that gave it the legal authority to counterfeit money. The Fed’s massive money printing in the 1920’s caused the unsustainable bubble of the roaring twenties that gave us the Great Depression when the bubble burst. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society piled on the socialist policies that crushed what was left of capitalism.
