The presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is reeling from a host of self-inflicted wounds that don’t bode well for its long-term future.
But there’s still time before the voting actually begins in Iowa early next year for even the most beleaguered of campaigns to get back on track (if the money holds out, of course). And to that end, Mr. DeSantis, in addition to a series of staff reductions and changes, has put his faith in an economic pitch that attempts to go beyond the mere repetition of “anti-woke.”
In an op-ed for USA Today, DeSantis writes that his plan is roughly based on declaring independence from policies, people, institutions, countries, etc., that have hogged all the prosperity for themselves and redistribute it to the middle class.
As economic policy declarations go, it’s got all the nationalist, state power hallmarks one expects from a modern Republican office seeker. For example:
We will take back control of our economy from China and restore our economic sovereignty by reversing the ever-increasing trade deficit, banning imports of goods made from stolen intellectual property, end China’s preferential trade status and incentivize the repatriation of U.S. capital from China.
We will facilitate stronger economic growth, with a target of at least 3%.
We will do so by advancing an ambitious tax and regulatory reform agenda to unleash American production, increase productivity and growth, and support our families, workers and small businesses, all while lowering inflation.
All fine and good – if one ignores that China-U.S. trade is dropping like a rock and our biggest trading partner today is….Mexico.
As for tax and regulatory changes – again, neat! But what are the specifics? Even on the campaign website, the specifics are thin.
But few campaigns are eager to share specifics of any policy proposals. The more fully cooked ideas a campaign presents to the public, the more likely those ideas are to become fodder for an opponent to twist, turn and demagogue.
What is truly more troubling about the DeSantis plan is the pitch: “We win. They lose.”
Economics isn’t a zero-sum game (I’d expect a Yale and Harvard grad like DeSantis to understand that). Economics, like politics, is instead a game of addition – how we can all win, through mutual exchange, for mutual benefit, in a market economy that’s as free of state interference as possible.
Or think of it this way: what we need is a return of economic liberty. As Cato’s David Boaz writes, neither the right nor the left is keen to let free markets and liberty take their course:
While elements of the American left have always had a soft spot for every new socialist country—the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and even Zimbabwe—we now see American conservatives looking abroad for their versions of paradise, with many flocking to Hungary to admire and learn from Orban’s “illiberal democracy.”
In our own country we see self‐described conservatives in the Trump era embracing new policies of lavish spending, government control of trade and investment through protectionism, and “industrial policy,” which will subsidize favored companies. We have further seen a toxic culture war against transgender people and LGBTQ representation.
Conservatives have jettisoned Reagan‐era talk about freedom. Now they’re focused on power: how to get it and how to wield it to help their friends and to hurt their enemies. Meanwhile, on the left of the Democratic Party, we find growing attempts to censor dissident thoughts — or any discussion — on subjects from COVID-19 to navigating complex gender issues in sports. And there’s increasing talk about socialism.
Imagine a candidate who embraced liberty and free markets over the crabbed, zero-sum world of state-power populism. That candidate might have a real future on the national stage, speaking to the millions of people who know that our nation’s best days are still ahead.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Barf.
You cannot have full free-market for the world economy. Other countries will always do it cheaper. This will end up making us dependent on another country for our very survival. That cannot happen. This country should be as self-sufficient as possible. There needs to be some “protectionism” or we will be at the mercy of rogue nations like China.