As Election Day nears, highly charged political turmoil swirls. It’s time we focus on what matters most. Elections aren’t personality-based popularity contests. They’re choices between different policy agendas — this year, stark policy differences.
Using property rights as the lens, the differences between candidates for president, Senate and Congress, and state and local office come into stark relief.
For example, Montana Democrat Steve Bullock indicates he’ll back increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices — court packing — now an article of radical leftist faith. The intent is to ensure liberal or worse judicial outcomes, the rule of law be damned. This will threaten Americans’ property rights.
This from a “moderate” who’s already discovered it’s in his interest to go along with whatever Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer demands. The same will happen to Colorado’s John Hickenlooper, South Carolina’s Jaime Harrison and other “moderates.”
Scandalous dealings involving China and his son Hunter with Joe’s knowledge aside, Joe Biden comes across as the more conventional politician seeking the White House. But the high price for peace in his party with the Bernie Sanders-AOC wing amounts, at best, to Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Adolph Hitler. Ultimately, the bad guys get their way.
The “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations” leaves little to the imagination of where a Biden administration will go. It doubles down on anti-property rights, Obama-Biden policies — and dramatically extends that regime: forcing the Green Raw Deal and extremely disruptive shifts in energy and other key sectors of our economy, reregulating everything, a “public option” health plan and socialistic government price controls that lead inexorably to government takeover of health care, expanding federal land holdings and closing off public property to practical benefit, going soft on crime and hard against police, raising taxes and imposing new taxes on entrepreneurial individuals and on employers. You can kiss your property rights goodbye.
Now, many people find President Trump’s aggressive, blunt ways off-putting, jarring, offensive. Many regard his manner as not “presidential” or worse. They may judge the book by its cover.
We Southerners are raised to be polite, display good manners, and unfailingly treat others civilly. You’d better say “sir” and “ma’am,” “please” and “thank you,” and if you can’t think of something nice to say, go with “Bless your heart.” We smile and say “hey” to strangers. People lacking such common courtesy are duly shamed. So, let’s just say the past four years, in this respect, have been hard on Southern sensibilities (and apparently too much even on the brusk, course sensibilities of much of the rest of the country).
Getting past the cover into the book’s contents, the Trump administration has improved the livelihoods of American families across the board and sparked the economy in ways not seen in decades. Mr. Trump has cut taxes, boosted family income, relieved the heavy regulatory burden (including creation of a Regulatory Bill of Rights), spurred a pre-pandemic economy that resulted in the best employment (particularly for minorities, women and those who’d given up on the job market) and household earnings growth in half a century, and launched a U.S. industrial revival that has challenged China’s centralized economy and made the U.S.A. energy-independent (Biden will force our oil industry to shut down). America now exports more oil and gas than Saudi Arabia and Russia. Meanwhile, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have fallen, thanks in part to fracking.
His Patent Office has improved patent reliability and certainty, while his Antitrust Division appropriately reset, viewing the exercise of intellectual property exclusivity as proconsumer and advancing dynamic competition. And Trump policies positioned America to rebound more quickly from the coronavirus shutdown and its damage to our surging economy.
All this adds up to tremendous, positive results based largely on market and property-rights principles. To anyone basing their votes on book covers rather than on book contents, there’s just one thing to say: Bless your heart.
Comments