Happy Halloween!
Wanna hear something really scary?
In August of 2009 I found myself sitting on the dock of a family fishing camp in South Louisiana chatting with my relatives about the first 8 months of the Obama regime. The general feeling was one of frustration that, as many of us predicted, Obama turned out to have no idea how to fix the broken economy that had crashed in the wake of the 2008 sub-prime crisis.
We agreed the problem was that, like the Foreign Policy “experts” of the Kennedy era, the modern-day left has become too enamored of their own Ivy League-imposed “expertise.” They believe that they are smart enough, and wise-enough to mico-manage the largest and most complex economy in human history. That they have been wrong over and over has done nothing to blunt their own high opinion of themselves, and in fact the Left has now completely embraced a modern version of Soviet top-down Socialist economic controls, despite having no evidence that it actually works.
This is certainly an unfortunate development now, just as it was back then. But I remember saying to my relatives in 2009 that they should try to look on the bright side.
“The bright side!?” they asked… “what the hell could be the bright side of all this!?”
“It’s simple”, I said… “The Modern Left, of which Obama and Biden are a part, does not understand how economies work. They have embraced a new Socialism not because it is effective but because it gives them the total control over the country that is their most secret desire. They are completely committed to it as a policy prescription, and they will ride it straight into the ground. They cannot change course because they do not understand that there IS another course, and so this economic malaise will persist as long as Obama is in office. But the good news is that things will be so bad that the moment even a moderately pro-market GOP President steps in, things will change so quickly that the entire Leftist neo-Socialist approach will be discredited forever.”
Turns out I was half right.
Because what happens when the Government smothers a struggling economy with a pillow? Well, frustrated economic demand builds up behind the pillow like water behind a flooded dam, and eventually the pressure becomes so great that even the smallest action can blow the damn apart and send all that frustrated energy downstream at speed. Sometimes, all you have to do is SAY that you’re going to remove the pillow and the dam will blow… you don’t even have to actually remove it.
And that’s exactly what happened in 2017, literally within weeks of Trump taking office, the entire economy had turned around. It happened so fast, in fact, that Trump could barely have had time to find the bathrooms in the White House. How could this have happened so fast? Because Trump said “I’m going to remove the pillow.” He promised a low tax, low regulation, pro business economic environment. And when he surprised everyone by winning, American businesses, frustated by eight years of zero growth, responded enthusiastically. As a result, we got the best economy Americans had ever seen.
So I was half right. The economy did explode (in a good way), but I was wrong about Socialism being discredited for generations. I was wrong because I didn’t recognize that the Democrats had one final (forgive me) “trump card” to play. Although, in my defense, even if I had realized it, I probably would have discounted it as too crazy, too evil, even for the Democrats.
I did not see the Pandemic Lockdowns coming.
I didn’t see them coming because locking down in response to a pandemic is an idea so radical, so crazy, that it had never before been tried in Human history, not even during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. In fact, before Trump came along the official policy of our Government, up to and including the CDC, was that Lockdowns should NOT be implemented because they were likely to do more harm than good. This was the conventional wisdom right up until the very moment where Donald Trump had to be destroyed, because the Left understood that unless they could destroy the Trump economy first, they had no chance of destorying his Presidency… and so Lockdowns were suddenly not so crazy after all. Without them, we were told, millions might die. And to his eternal shame, Trump went along with them.
And that’s what scares me about the next seven years. We are in almost exactly the same cycle we were in back when I was sitting on that dock in August of 2009. The economy is in the shitter because, once again, the Left (led by the Mushroom-in-Chief Biden) just can’t see past their own obsession with top-down Neo-Maxist economics and so they’ve put the pillow back on the face of their struggling patient. It won’t take much for a President DeSantis, or Trump, or whomever to set this economy on fire again. As with 2017, all they’ll really have to do is say “we’re going to remove that pillow” and once again we’ll be sitting atop an economic rocket.
Which will present a huge problem for the Left who, like the Men of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, desire power above all else. How to destroy the economy so that President DeSantis doesn’t win re-election with a 50 state sweep in 2028?
Welp… since these novel viruses seem to come along every 6 to 8 years, it’s safe to assume we might see another one right about the time DeSantis is getting ready to run for re-election on the back of a roaring economy. Remember, we had a pandemic during the Obama years… the H1N1 swine flu, which killed more than twice as many children (1100) as COVID has (500). It’s just that no one in our “elite institutions cared because there was a “transformative” and “historic” Democrat in the White House and he had to be protected at all costs, even at the cost of your children’s safety.
But do you really think that there wouldn’t be a trememndous amount of pressure brought to bear by Democrat organs in the media and teachers’ unions to close schools again if we were facing a virus under President DeSantis that had “killed twice as many children as COVID!”?
Of course there would.
So I hope you’re ready for a new pandemic lockdown in 2028? Cuz there’s one coming. That’s the only arrow the Left has in their quiver. We can only hope that a President DeSantis would be smarter about resisting a new lockdown than Trump was. Based on how he’s managed Florida over the last two years, I’m cautiously optimistic.