Beware of the GOP’s Central Planners

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, February 29, 2024

 

In early 1990, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan reached the pinnacle of the music industry. The impossibly good-looking duo, collectively known as Milli Vanilli, won a Best New Artist Grammy after releasing their million-selling 1989 album Girl You Know It’s True.

 

But the German-based duo’s dream quickly came to an end when it was discovered that neither man had actually sung on the album — or in concert, or in their music videos. The vocals were pre-recorded by session musicians.

 

After the ensuing controversy that saw the duo stripped of their Grammy, state legislators around the nation decided to step in to protect America from the scourge of lip-syncing Germans. In Massachusetts, for example, two state representatives filed a bill levying fines of up to $50,000 for concert promoters who failed to notify ticket buyers that the act was lip-syncing. Similar laws were proposed in New York and New Jersey in the name of “consumer protection.”

 

One might suspect that such hilariously intrusive, nanny-state legislation would come from some big-government leftist. But in Massachusetts’ case, both co-sponsors of the bill were Republicans. Even 34 years ago, members of the party that craved smaller government and lesser regulation were happy to slap a new law on the books that solved no real problem other than their desperate lack of media attention. (To date, the cultural punishment for lip-syncing songs is more severe than trying to overturn an American presidential election.)

 

But that statist urge is now welcome to let its freak flag fly in today’s Republican Party, in which the GOP’s central planners are more than happy to inject themselves into cultural nonissues.

 

Take Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis once thought a muscular post-liberalism would elevate him to the top of the GOP presidential field. DeSantis has recently said he supports legislation to criminalize the sale of lab-grown meat, a thing that doesn’t really exist on a wide scale and that few people actually sell. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared the process of growing meat in a lab safe, but it will certainly be years before it is available in mass quantities. DeSantis might as well outlaw the Minnesota Vikings winning a Super Bowl.

 

Nonetheless, in order to placate both traditional beef manufacturers and to make it look like he’s fighting against steak-snatching hippies, DeSantis has signed on to this anti-business charade.

 

Even if one regularly enjoys the typical Ron Swanson “Turf ’n’ Turf” dinner (one 16-ounce T-bone and one 24-ounce porterhouse), exactly who is the victimized party if scientists were free to move ahead and innovate in the meat space? I am not particularly concerned that cows are sacrificed to satisfy my hunger or that the cattle’s emissions are warming the planet. But if there turns out to be a way to grow a New York strip in a petri dish, why kill the innovation that can make it happen for the people who want it?

 

That desire to strangle food innovation has purchase at the federal level as well, where Republican senators such as Susan Collins of Maine, James Risch of Idaho, and Roger Marshall of Kansas have signed on to a bill that would effectively ban nondairy products from being labeled as “milk,” “yogurt,” or “cheese.” Evidently these “conservatives” believe state intervention is necessary because Americans are too stupid to understand that products like “almond milk,” “coconut milk,” “plant-based cheese,” and “soy yogurt” are not actually dairy products.

 

One would expect a big-government enthusiast like Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) to promote such heavy-handed regulations, given her unquenchable thirst for state control and her position as a senator from a dairy-heavy state. But once again, Republicans have sacrificed philosophy to the desires of special interests.

 

And then, of course, are the Republican-led states that found themselves at the U.S. Supreme Court this week defending laws that force internet platforms to run content with which they disagree. A Texas law prohibits a social-media platform from censoring “a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person,” while a Florida law — once again signed by central-planning enthusiast Ron DeSantis — would ban a large social-media platform from de-platforming a candidate for political office. (One suspects that, in order to earn immunity from moderation, millions of new state and local candidates will soon pop up in the state.)

 

Again, these laws are couched in the language of “freedom,” given that on historically progressive platforms like Twitter/X, right-wing speech is more likely to be disfavored. Yet this smacks of a historical argument in favor of socialism (made by Oscar Wilde and others): Once the government controls everything and “poverty is impossible,” freedom will flourish and men will be able to pursue their true dreams. In order to provide liberty, we must first crush it.

 

But for government to tell a private business what information it has to host is like the police telling a local bookstore what books it must stock on its shelves; the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to refrain from engaging in or supporting speech as much as it protects his right to participate in it. A conservative-owned bookstore that doesn’t want to stock the bound version of the 1619 Project should not be forced to do so because a bunch of whiny lefties think it’s a good talking point in their culture battles.

 

And, of course, once conservatives set the precedent that federal and state governments get to serve as market hall monitors, calling security every time an anti-vaccination post is taken down, they shouldn’t be shocked when progressives then use that power to impede free-market phenomena of which they disapprove. Imagine if right-wing websites were now required to add a progressive disclaimer at the end of every article they run about the border crisis or transgenderism. Such government-mandated moderation could one day come — and liberals would have the precedent to do so based on the actions of a party that once trusted the market to sort such things out.

 

There is no longer any party to represent people who value both individualism and the right to be left alone, whether applied to one’s business or personal life. At this very moment, Republicans in Oklahoma are considering a bill to criminalize sending a spicy selfie to another person to whom the sender is not married, even if it is consensual. In an effort to crack down on “deepfakes” created by artificial intelligence, other Republicans are pushing poorly worded bills that could, for example, bar publications from running editorial cartoons lampooning a famous person or criminalize a show like Saturday Night Live for having a cast member do a Donald Trump impersonation.

 

We do not need the heavy hand of government to protect us from either fake German singers or fake AI pictures, and we especially do not need such intervention from Republicans. At one point, the Right was the ideology of “Live and let live.” It’s now veering toward “Live the way I want you to, or else.”

 

Sadly, like Milli Vanilli, Republicans are now just lip-syncing the big-government arguments of the Left. Girl, you know it’s true.