By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, February 02, 2019
I‘m not a Democrat—in case you haven’t noticed—but Howard
Schultz is. And Schultz isn’t one of those Blue Dog, Southern or Midwestern,
conservative Democrats either. He’s from Seattle, holds liberal positions on,
as far as I can tell, every issue, and has donated gobs of money to the
Democratic Party and to the last two Democratic presidents. But Schultz is also
a democratic capitalist who attributes his phenomenal success—his fortune from
Starbucks is around $3 billion—at least in part to America’s culture of
entrepreneurial risk-taking, minimal government interference in commerce,
individual responsibility, and rule of law. He worries that the Democratic
Party, radicalized by the presidency of Donald Trump, is in the process of
abandoning support for the very aspects of American life that made his life
possible. “Both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf
of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics,”
Schultz told 60 Minutes last Sunday. The
Democrats then began proving his point for him.
On Monday, in a town hall organized by CNN, Kamala Harris
endorsed a Medicare-for-All plan that would “eliminate”—her word—private
insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, employer-provided health
insurance covers “approximately 152 million nonelderly people in total.” A poll
last year by America’s Health Insurance Plan (AHIP) found that 71 percent of
Americans were satisfied with their employer’s plan. Most Americans have health
insurance, and most Americans are pretty happy with their insurance. Too bad:
Kamala Harris says it’s time to “move on.”
Harris’s rival, Elizabeth Warren, has endorsed a tax of 2
percent on assets above $50 million and 3 percent on assets above $1 billion.
Now, Warren would like to raise taxes on incomes, capital gains, dividends, and
corporations, too. That’s just for starters. A wealth tax of the sort she has
proposed—a government claw-back of property in order to make real a subjective
standard of equality—would be unique in American history. It might even be
unconstitutional. But hey, why worry about that when you can indulge in some
light court packing?
The brightest star in the Democratic Party is Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC. The other week, in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates,
AOC said, “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when
there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they
don’t have access to public health is wrong.” Don’t worry, “It’s not to say someone
like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral people.” AOC’s complaint is with
the “system” that “allows” Gates and Buffet—and Schultz and Bezos and George
Lucas and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest—"to exist.” Presumably, then, Gates
and Buffet are safe, existentially speaking. But the “system” of relatively
free enterprise that allowed them to grow rich—and finance or innovate
remarkable advances in technology and productivity that have benefited the
world—should be altered drastically. Hence AOC’s call for a 70-percent marginal
tax rate—backed by the same genius from Berkley who designed Warren’s
expropriation of wealth—to help pay for the “Green New Deal” that will give us
“a 100% greenhouse gas neutral power generation system, decarbonizing industry and
agriculture and more.” Currently, 17 percent of American energy is renewable.
The scale of coercion required for such a transformation would brighten any
Jacobin’s day. Don’t think too hard about the details of the proposal, though.
AOC says there isn’t time to worry about cost, implementation, and
unanticipated consequences. “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t
address climate change,” she told Coates. Nice while it lasted, I suppose.
AOC also has a message for Schultz, who has been the recipient
of sustained, ferocious, and panicked attacks from members of his former party
outraged that a moderate billionaire might spoil their plans for replacing
Trump with an unreconstructed left-winger. “Why don’t people ever tell
billionaires who want to run for president that they need to ‘work their way
up’ or that ‘maybe they should start with city council first’?” she Tweeted.
Well, plenty of people do tell them that—I seem to recall a lack of government
experience being an issue in the most recent presidential election—but if
anyone has “worked his way up,” from the poorhouse to being the first in his
family to graduate from college to turning a coffee shop at the Pike Place
market into the global behemoth that is Starbucks, it’s Howard Schultz. I’d
even go as far to say that Schultz’s company has done more for its low-wage
workers than the corniest socialist dreams of AOC.
Let’s see … what else happened in the busy world of crazy
… excuse me while I flip through my files … Ah yes, there was congresswoman
Ilhan Omar, parroting the Kremlin-Havana-Tehran line on the democratic uprising
in Venezuela, calling it “a U.S.-backed coup.” A few days later, Omar, a
supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement whom the
Democrats have awarded with a place on the House Foreign Relations Committee,
said she “almost chuckles” because “we still uphold” the Jewish State of Israel
“as a democracy in the Middle East.” I chuckle—and begin seriously to
worry—that someone who cannot distinguish between tyranny in Latin America and
democracy in the Middle East commands such acclaim and receives such attention.
Omar has former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in her corner. When Omar
dismissed Congressman Lee Zeldin’s criticism of her views by Tweeting, “Don’t
mind him, he is just waking up to the reality of having Muslim women as
colleagues who know how to stand up to bullies!”, Jarrett replied, “Shake him
up!” Zeldin is a Jewish Republican.
Finally, as the week came to a close, the Democrats went
beyond their support for partial-birth abortion to defend—the very fact that I
have to write the following words saddens me to no end—post-birth abortion.
This practice has been known throughout history as infanticide, and it
flourished widely in the ancient world before being condemned in the
Judeo-Christian tradition. As we “progress” from that tradition—a progression
that is in fact a reversion—the morals and values that bind us to a culture of
life slowly fade away. They are still there, of course, gossamer-like and
tenuous, which is why Kathy Tran, the Fairfax County delegate to the Virginia
Assembly who sponsored a bill lifting all state restrictions on abortion, hesitated
before admitting that her legislation authorized the termination of a pregnancy
up to the moment of delivery.
No such hesitation on the part of Virginia governor Ralph
Northam who, in defense of Tran, told WTOP radio that
If a mother is in labor, I can tell
you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would
be comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and
the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians
and the mother.
Note the sequence of events. The “infant would be
comfortable,” Northam says, and then “a discussion would ensue.” A discussion
about what? The Boston Red Sox? Or would it be about the fate of the child—the
life or death of a born-alive child? Who would want to be part of such a
discussion? Who can contemplate such an exchange without becoming queasy?
This is the extreme of the extreme. It’s a position
widely at variance with that of most Americans, who favor at least minimal
restrictions on abortion. Team Northam went into damage-control mode, saying
he’d been taken out of context. Nonsense. It’s all on tape. The Washington Post offered its helping
hand, writing that Northam’s answer “was later used by Republicans to suggest
he favored killing live babies.” What a ridiculous suggestion! It’s not like he
said … oh wait. …
The Tran bill failed to pass in subcommittee, thank
goodness. We might not be as lucky elsewhere. The scope of Democratic craziness
is so bewildering, the ambition of the left to overturn the political,
economic, and cultural basis of our society so staggering, that the right needs
all the help it can get. Go, Howard, go.
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