Recently, Vice President J. D. Vance attacked the economics of one of the greatest economists of the 20th century and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. In an interview, Vance made the following comments:
“Milton Friedman’s ideas made more sense in the 1980s because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.
“Trump is right that he wants to 'seize the equity of the AI companies.'
“American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman. I think that’s obviously a good thing.
“That Hamiltonian tradition… will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future. Which is not laissez faire. It’s actually much more about building… a set of economic policies that make it easier for a person to raise a family, to earn a living wage, to give back to their community, to maybe go to church on Sunday or to actually spend some leisure time building the kind of life that matters.”
Such nonsense advertises that the VP, a Catholic, has become a sucker for the anti-science propaganda of post liberals like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule who want to restore Medieval monarchies under the control of he Pope.
Post liberals like Deneen, Vermeule and Vance ignore the historical fact that Catholic theologians at the University of Salamanca during the Reformation distilled the principles of laissez-faire from natural law and the Bible. Laissez-faire was Christian economics until the 20th century.
And despising the science of economics, they are ignorant of the fact that the laissez-faire economics they despise launched the great enrichment of the West depicted in the hockey stick graph of per capita GDP and made the US rich and powerful. Laissez-faire made "...it easier for a person to raise a family, to earn a living wage, to give back to their community, to maybe go to church on Sunday or to actually spend some leisure time building the kind of life that matters."
Vance is proud of President Trump's tariffs, but economic science predicts they will do more harm than good. Republicans will soon regret them. Hamiltonian economics has been tried many times in the past and failed. The GOP after Trump needs to dump Vance and his socialist economics. We need to embrace again the powerful economic science of Milton Fridman.
No comments:
Post a Comment