The Benito Brothers

Gavin Newsom, Calfornia's "let them eat cake" governor, is offering the other 49 states of the Union a preview of what progressive governance in the third decade of the twenty-first century would look like at the Federal level.

• A minimum wage high enough to kill off entry-level jobs and the market for unskilled/teen labor.

• A law that kills independent jobs, aka the gig economy. This has repercussions way beyond the Uber/Lyft 'independent contractor' designation that so irked the Best-and-Brightest*, and contributed substantially to the bottleneck and backups at the Long Beach port that rippled across the nation's supply chain across the past couple years.

• A law that kills the franchise business model by imposing liability for franchisees' activities on parent companies.

• A heavy regulatory burden that disproportionately impacts smaller businesses, imposing compliance costs that bigger companies are far more able to absorb.

The list goes on, and includes various scale-tippers in favor of unions (public and private sector), as well as strictures and incentives that end up favoring the big guys and hurting the little guys.

There is an economic system that is, at its core, a small number of large, privately owned companies that are heavily controlled and regulated by government. Where "dirigisme," where the state directs those big businesses via subsidy, targeted restrictions, selective permitting, and discriminatory taxation, supplants free markets and independent action.

That system is called "fascism," and its poster child was Benito Mussolini.

While the Left screams that the Right is where all the fascism exists, and the Right screams about the socialists on the Left, Newsom is doing what Biden would do but for a want of votes in the Senate - continue his former boss's imposition of economic fascism on America.

Newsom has aspirations to the White House, and the New York Post's Miranda Devine pulls the curtain back on that notion. Biden is apt to draw from Newsom's playbook - or, perhaps, the playbook written for them both - as we shift from the "Democrats control Congress" phase of Biden's tenure to a "pen-and-phone" second act.

That second act will be as free (pun intended) of respect for individual liberty and self-determination as the first one. Biden won't dip into Clinton's playbook and rewrite his Presidency in the wake of losing the House, but will instead go Obama-style, and dig his heels in with petulance and stubbornness. Biden has been, and I expect will continue to be, far more fascist than any of those he accuses.

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Chapter 1 - A Catastrophic Failure
Chapter 2 - A Brief History
Chapter 3 - A Society Rooted in Individual Liberty

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Peter.