National Review Online
Monday, September 25, 2023
Nikki Haley gave a speech in New Hampshire
calling freedom “America’s secret weapon.” It’s too bad that it seems like a
secret these days.
Haley spoke out against the bipartisan skepticism of
freedom as a guiding political principle. Most of her fire was trained on
Democrats, who have taken big government as their guiding principle during the
Biden administration. She rightly decried the fact that 42 million Americans
are on food stamps and 100 million are on Medicaid. That so many are dependent
on government for food and health care is a sign of deep trouble.
But she also went after Republicans, some of whom have
spoken positively of government-directed economic policies for specific
industries or supported variants of “stakeholder capitalism” for supposedly
conservative ends. She made sure to note that Donald Trump — as well as Barack
Obama and Joe Biden — was guilty of running up the debt.
When she sounded the alarm about the debt, she was also
honest about its cause: entitlement spending and interest payments. She wants
to reform Social Security and Medicare by raising the retirement age for
younger generations, limiting benefits for high-income recipients, and pegging
cost-of-living adjustments to a lower inflation measure. She promised to
balance the budget and veto any budget that wouldn’t return spending to
pre-pandemic levels.
Exactly how she plans to get there is less clear. Her
plan on taxes would likely reduce revenue overall. It eliminates the federal
gas tax entirely and cuts individual income taxes by an unspecified amount,
with the elimination of the state-and-local tax deduction as the only specific
revenue-raising measure. On the spending side, she’d repeal the green-energy
subsidies from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, say no to any requests
for bailouts, and cap spending at an unspecified percentage of GDP. Those
reforms mostly seem fine, but there’s a $2 trillion-per-year gap to close, and
it’s hard to see how the math would work.
But this is just a campaign speech right now, and it’s a
breath of fresh air in a campaign season where economic freedom has gotten
short shrift.
Haley correctly recognizes that economic freedom is
America’s greatest advantage against China, not a weakness to be corrected by
“strategic” government intervention. She pointed out how Biden’s interventions
in green energy can work out to China’s benefit, as it is currently the world’s
largest electric-vehicle producer and solar-panel producer.
She also told the story of her own state, which
illustrates how Americans, more often than not, adapt to changing economic
conditions. South Carolina was a center of the textile industry, until it
wasn’t. That had negative economic ramifications, but rather than pretend the
government could save the textile industry or promise welfare in exchange for
lost jobs, the state moved into new industries and remains a very attractive
place to live. Most politicians today would tell that story as a victim narrative,
but Haley instead focuses on American ingenuity and resilience, attributes
Republicans should always highlight to provide contrast against the Left’s
grievance-first mentality.
The problem with the “political-subsidy economy,” as
Haley describes the economy under Joe Biden, is not that it was designed by
Democrats. Republicans aren’t significantly better at designing subsidies than
Democrats are. The problem is the very idea that the government can engineer
superior economic results. It can’t, and when it tries to, it will make things
worse.
Haley understands that Americans don’t need some
politician to fight for them. Americans know how to run their own lives, thank
you very much, and they don’t trust politicians or bureaucrats to make
decisions for them. After four years of Biden’s stifling freedom, and too
many Republicans’ being afraid to unapologetically defend freedom, it would be
a relief for America’s secret weapon to be out in the open again.
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