How To Be An Anti-Capitalist

Andy Kessler - Wall Street Journal

It is hard to sit by and watch your economy being strangled. Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist” is all the rage now, but the Biden administration and its progressive hangers-on are providing a master class on “How to Be an Anticapitalist” and suck the air out of the economy.

Start by paying people to do nothing—1.8 million workers, according to a recent Morning Consult poll, have turned down jobs due to generous unemployment benefits, including an extra $300 a week from the federal government in some states. Meanwhile, Burger King is offering a $1,500 signing bonus.

Anticapitalists then shut pipelines (except Russian ones) and suspend drilling leases in parts of Alaska, helping send oil prices above $70. The government says it wants to limit carbon emissions, but then it squashes better energy options like nuclear. On June 30, months after New York state closed the Indian Point nuclear power plant, Mayor Bill de Blasio asked New Yorkers to cut back on energy usage during a heat wave. You can’t make this stuff up.

An anticapitalist would next restrict capital formation, so President Biden has proposed raising the top capital-gains rate from 23.8% to a punitive 43.4% and the top individual income-tax rate to 39.6%. Mr. Biden also wants to waive Covid vaccine patents—making pharma companies think twice before investing in new drugs—and is even pushing a series of antitrust bills that could reverse mergers, like Facebook’s 2012 purchase of Instagram, as if that would do anything good for the economy or consumers. Nothing is safe.

Add the Federal Trade Commission’s roadblocks to mergers. It worked hard to block early-cancer-detection pioneer Grail’s merger with genome-sequencing firm Illumina, now on hold as it lets the European Commission investigate. This is moronic. If you or a loved one is diagnosed with late-stage cancer in five years, the Biden administration could be to blame. Without meddling, Grail may have found it earlier, when it was still treatable.

Anticapitalists in Congress are pushing $3.5 trillion in spending unrelated to infrastructure with an Orwellian sleight of hand by declaring it “human infrastructure.” Big surprise, it is larded with climate provisions and other progressive party favors.

Then anticapitalists limit speech, open the borders, mess with education (math isn’t about getting the right answer anymore), ruin healthcare, and defund the police, causing crime rates to rise. Cities and suburbs have homeless encampments and brazen daytime crime. San Francisco shoplifters limit themselves to a total haul worth less than $950 knowing that the cops won’t stop them if they commit what 2014 California ballot proposition redefined as a misdemeanor.

On top of all that, the Biden administration released its anticapitalist executive order with 72 initiatives promoting “competition” in early July. Sure, a handful are worthy, but they distract from a massive reregulation of the economy including net neutrality and manipulating broadband and drug prices. Your Zoom calls worked during the lockdowns because the last administration repealed net neutrality, and U.S. broadband companies added capacity—unlike in Europe and elsewhere.

Almost simultaneous to the president’s “pro-competition” order, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was against competition, saying at the Group of 20 summit: “For decades now, the world community, including the United States, we’ve been participating in this self-defeating international tax competition.” Ms. Yellen, who should know better given her background and Federal Reserve experience, has been focusing on equity and climate change instead of clearing a path for the American economy to create great jobs and hold back inflation. How disappointing.

This is economic malpractice, just like the Fed’s insisting that June’s 5.4% inflation is “transitory” while it monetizes deficits by slurping up Treasurys and mortgages to keep interest rates near zero as prices keep rising.

Speaking of anticapitalists, in “The State and Revolution in 1917,” Vladimir Lenin wrote that the economic aim of socialism was “to organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service.” More than a century later, the Biden administration is on it, expanding his postal-like government with massive deficits, old technology, long lines, unaccountable executive orders, and unproductive union jobs for all takers.

Mr. Biden wants an FDR legacy, and he might get it, as his policies mirror the price fixing and government largesse that extended the Great Depression. Every new Biden program is a burden on the economy, reducing its natural market-driven ability to create high-paying jobs while entrenching state-run, impossible-to-kill zombie entitlements.

What’s saddest is that Mr. Biden’s policies will likely hurt low-income folks the most by squishing capital formation and job creation, squelching opportunity. Those losses will more than cancel out the “equity” handouts sprinkled like pixie dust to potential voters. Like Lenin and the Soviets, what progressive anticapitalists never learn is that parasites should never kill their host