The Three Principles of Conservative Government and Free Market Capitalism
by John Lawrence, May 11, 2020
1) Ronald Reagan said the 9 most feared words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
2) Grover Norquist said, "My goal is to cut government ... down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
3) We're not all in this together. There are no meaningful public solutions, only private solutions.
4) There is no such thing as "public health" or public anything else. Everything should be privatized including police, fire, ambulance services and health care. There is only private health, not public health. That's why Trump tried to slash funding for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The latest problem is that there is not enough Remdesivir to go around. Therefore, it has to be rationed. Well who decides how many units go to each hospital and which patients get Remdesivir? Using the above conservative, free market principles, the obvious answer is to let patients bid on Remdesivir with the units going to the highest bidder. That's the free market, capitalist solution to the problem. If the patient is intubated and can't do the bidding themselves, they could have a proxy like a family member bid for them. The problem is totally solved because, according to free market principles, the Remdesivir will go to the highest bidder.
Evidently, the only country that really understands free market capitalism is China. China manufactures all the PPE and test kits. So it set up a bidding war for US states and municipalities so that they all had to bid against each other for the necessary supplies to deal with the coronavirus. US conservatives should be proud that they have exported their ideas around the world so successfully especially to the world's largest Communist nation where free market principles seem to have prevailed.
It was China who partnered with the US to solve the inflation problem during Ronald Reagan's administration. The 1970s were an era of high inflation. Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, had struggled mightily to get inflation down to a reasonable level during the Carter administration. Finally, during the Reagan administration inflation was finally gotten under control. There was a two part strategy. Reagan broke the union movement by firing all the air traffic controllers in 1981. It was the beginning of the end for the union movement. Since unions essentially vanished, so did wage inflation. The next thing was that laws were changed making it possible for US corporations to export most manufacturing jobs to China. The imported products were much cheaper than products "Made in America." Therefore, price inflation was solved. Cheap products and ineffectual unions allowed to US to get inflation finally under control where it has been ever since thanks to Volcker, Reagan and China.
The only problem is that inflation with regard to asset prices did not go down. Real estate, and therefore, rents continued to go up, but they don't count in the inflation index so while Americans are treated to cheap products imported from China, you can't import real estate from China, so these prices continue to skyrocket. Hence you have a growing homeless problem which is only exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Another asset, the stock market, also continues to inflate wildly beyond where any price to earnings ratio would indicate it should be. In fact it is totally detached from any economic reality as it remains high despite the fact that the economy is in shambles.
Conservatives can rest comfortably, however, in the knowledge that China has finally adopted free market capitalist principles at least in regard to the prices it charges the US for PPE and test kits. That's why there are few of them available. As conservatives have taught them and us, the most important principle of all is profit. Profiting from a pandemic is just par for the course for capitalism. Remember, drown government in a bathtub, blah, blah, blah. We're not all in this together.
