George Rebane
Date Everything – Rebane Doctrine
In this election year which promises to be a political milestone (watershed?) two significant neo-Marxist messages from Democratic politicians blanketed the country yesterday. Presidential candidate and VP Kamala Harris told the nation that her economic program (here) going forward would be based on government price controls in order to control inflation. And Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA17) wrote an excellent article (here) in the 17aug24 WSJ contrasting his and VP candidate Sen JD Vance’s (R-OH) views on industrial policy. Both progressive politicians cannot see America’s private sector making the country’s economy work without massive participation by the federal government that involves more regulatory controls, more directed subsidies, higher taxes on industry and ‘the rich’, and a heavily unionized workforce blessed with ‘living wages’ and price controls.
Rep Khanna’s piece is well written and very convincing to an audience mired in ignorance about economics, finance, human behavior, and the history of socialist governance here and abroad. Unfortunately about two out of three Americans are so burdened as they attempt to make sense of the current daily tsunami of political punditry. Khanna’s essay is both effective and impactive through the way he erroneously characterizes conservative thought, policies, and its ideological tenets. He constructs excellent strawmen (i.e. lies) which are then readily demolished by his adroit wordsmithing.
One of the prime fallacies both Harris and Khanna promulgate is that government price controls actually work in managing a national economy to the benefit of its citizens. Each presents that as an axiomatic notion of truth requiring no evidence to support it. Central to their message to the benighted is that fixing prices does not affect supply and stifle economic growth. The common thread from both politicians is that the Democrats have been and are the competent stewards of our economy who build factories and make jobs for main street.
No one of the Left understands any of the basic science of how nature manages complexity. Their ideas about how complex economies work is based on a small trove of simplistic slogans and shibboleths that are demonstrably wrong. And principles like ‘you cannot control what you cannot measure’ is also beyond their ken. They still have no idea how primitive are our methods of collecting relevant, accurate, and timely economic data, and then using it to fashion information that would come close to supporting correct policy decisions made by a cohort of centrally controlling technicians.
As a coda to the above riff, I want to remind present day readers, most not all that interested in the view from my perch, that a prime motivation of this blog is to insert a collection of my observations into the great archive in the cloud – ‘the internet is forever’ – which may someday be dredged up by future data archeologists studying the mentality of the citizenry that allowed their great nation at its apex to go to hell in a handcart.
rebanesruminations.com 
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