OPM, Harris Edition

Accidental Presidential candidate Kamala Harris briefly emerged from her basement to sit for a softball interview with CNN's Dana Bash. With her old-white-guy “emotional support governor” (hat-tip to an Internet acquaintance) running mate by her side, I presume, to rescue her from herself.

So much for smashing the patriarchy.

The interview, culled down to eighteen minutes from some indeterminate original length by a network that has for decades functioned as an extension of the Democratic Party, nevertheless included Harris's signature word salad.

You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I've worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act.

As the old saying goes, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. But, hey, at least she admitted that the Inflation Reduction Act was not actually about inflation.

It also included contradictions (and falsehoods). Harris has flipped her stated position on many areas of policy since being anointed heir-presumptive to Joe Biden, but informed the world that her "values have not changed."

Odd that. Someone anchored to a set of values would not flipflop so blatantly on such matters as single-payer healthcare, fracking, immigration, the border, assault weapon bans, and more.

My jaundiced eye thus concludes that her "values" can be summarized as ‘whatever gets me elected.’

Thus, the policy weathervaning. As to what she'll do once elected? Go with her first presentation, i.e. what she said when running in the 2020 Democratic primaries. And her voting record. Both of which point to someone to the left of Biden. And Elizabeth Warren. And Bernie Sanders.

Which brings us to today's topic. Harris's present-day proposals, which include price controls on consumer goods, a tax on unrealized capital gains, increasing corporate taxes, a large hike in the child tax credit, and massive new spending, all come down to the one lesson I hope, by force of repetition, to teach every reader of my blog:

Politics is always about Other People's Money (OPM). If Harris embraces any value, it is that one.

She is overtly and blatantly telling everyone, "I'm going to take money from the productive parts of society, so I can give it to the people whose votes I hope to buy."

OPM is great if you can get your hands on it. It saves you from having to earn money yourself, through the fruits of your labor. But, its taking is not good for the economy, or for society overall. It saps productive capital out of the economy, it discourages the productive work that creates wealth, it creates inefficiencies, it creates perverse incentives, it introduces moral hazard, and since the government is spending more than it can manage to harvest from earners, it burdens the nation's future.

There is an aphorism, widely shared and widely (but incorrectly) attributed to Alexander Tytler, that informs us:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler,_Lord_Woodhouselee

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

This aphorism's provenance is irrelevant, because it stands on its own. We are well into the "largesse from the treasury" phase of the cycle, and it appears that many of our fellow citizens are copacetic with OPM as a foundational principle of government. They may not understand the perils, or they may not care, or they may figure that they will be among those who remain on the benefiting side of the OPM scam long enough for the damage it inflicts not to matter to them.

Aphorisms are not set-in-stone foretellings, fortunately. History often rhymes, but positive change is always possible. Harris isn't a particularly adept seller of the OPM scam, nor is she a strong candidate overall. She is in a dead heat with the deeply flawed and baggaged Trump despite the recentness of the Democratic National Convention, and if she word-salads in a debate the way she did in a softball and favorably edited video, she should lose.

Unfortunately, even Harris losing will not break the grip that OPM has on today's Left, and by extension the Democratic Party that it has come to dominate.