Inequality For All

Field Marshal Óscar R. Benavides, President of Peru 1933-1939

For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Political columnist Karol Markowicz shared this quote in a recent Substack article, and Google informs me that it was penned by Field Marshal Óscar R. Benavides, former president of Peru, who governed that Latin nation back in the 1930s.

Vice President and Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has certainly jumped into the deep end of the first half of that aphorism, with a bushel of giveaway promises. Including, in a very Bill Clintonesque style, saying that she, too, would rescind taxation of tips. Clinton, some might remember, co-opted the most popular parts of the GOP's Contract With America and convinced many that those ideas were his own. Harris, who clearly learned from her current boss how to pander, didn't even wait for the ink to dry on Trump's offering before saying #MeToo.

So much comes to mind in pondering the aptness of Benavides' aphorism. First is another aphorism:

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.

Authorship is lost to the fog of history, but it might be a Gerald Ford original, with Barry Goldwater using it to caution voters in 1964 against the allure of free stuff.

And, indeed, we see this warning materialize today. The redistributers have become brazen and shameless in their efforts. Biden absolved student loans, was told "no" by the Supreme Court, then found ways to do it anyway, with hints that he or more likely his handlers are going to announce a new wave of wealth transfer from, if we are to be honest, future generations of Americans to recently minted college graduates whose votes can be bought. Rampant government deficit spending has put (printed) money in the pockets of the favored by costing everyone in the country 20% of every dollar they have. Bidenomics en toto presents as a "pick the winners and soak the losers" application of unequal treatment.

As bad, or perhaps even worse in its effect on the zeitgeist, is the unequal application of the law. Starting from the top, we have years of lawfare being engaged against Donald Trump in parallel with years of look-the-other way non-prosecution of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. At the lower end, progressive district attorneys have, via selective non-prosecution, allowed low level crime against others to proliferate. Shoplifting has prompted many store closures in cities such as San Francisco. Rampant fare evasion in NYC's mass transit system costs the cash-strapped Metropolitan Transit Authority hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but no one's getting prosecuted for it. Assaults that do not result in injury are often not prosecuted either, and many habitual criminals have learned that, even when they do get busted, they're back out on the streets in hours.

On the other side, we should all know by now that a creative DA can nail just about anyone to the wall if sufficiently motivated. Thirteen years ago, attorney Harvey Silverglate penned the book Three Felonies A Day, which revealed how the vast body of overlapping laws and regulations made felons of us all. Here, it's worth noting that Trump actually delivered on one of his promises, with the Federal Register (the annual compendium of all federal laws and rules) shrinking from a record high of 97,000 pages in Obama's last year to 61,000 in Trump's first. Alas, that didn't last long, with the tally growing every year since.

The essence of economic fascism is the heavy regulation of businesses, and with that heavy regulation, favoritism, "guidance," cronyism, rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and of course the punishment of the disfavored. This is the functioning of our government today, and that attitude has spilled into (or perhaps originated from, in a chicken-and-egg conundrum) our culture.

A core tenet of liberty is equality, both in rights (no one's rights supersede another's) and in treatment under the law. Equality is being supplanted by equity, which sounds alike but in fact the opposite, as in the systemic application of unequal treatment, under the law and by the dollars, of the people by the government.

This brings us back to the Peruvian Field Marshal, and serves as a stark lesson in why we should distrust the government rather than blessing its behaviors when "our team" is in charge.