Candidates kept Spanish to a minimum during Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate. Yet all but a few of the thousands of words uttered by this group of 10 were mystifying.

Author and activist Marianne Williamson set the tone when she said “we don’t have a health care system in the United States, we have a sickness-care system in the United States.”

What does that even mean?

She tried to explain — and came off like a New Age crackpot.

The rest of the evening was an exhibition of adults showing an entire nation that they have no idea how an economy works. How many times did we here the complaint that companies put profits before people? Do these candidates not understand that companies will go out of business, taking jobs down the drain with them, if they don’t make money?

The common rants against insurance and pharmaceutical companies is absolute madness. Kill health insurance companies, or just strangle them with rules, and tens of millions of policyholders who like their plans will be violated. Use increased regulation and punitive taxation to take away the profit motive to develop prescription drugs — and there will be no drugs.

The nonsense was simply nonstop. Global warming voodoo. Health care plans that will wreck both the economy and our health. Mindless rages about wealth inequality. Infinite giveaways. Crackdowns on Second Amendment civil rights. Promises to use a pen and a phone to behave more like a dictator than an elected official who must operate within constitutional limitations.

Every defender of liberty, not just in the U.S. but in the entire developed world, had to be exhausted by the end of Thursday’s debate. Two nights of endless proposals for more and bigger government, two nights of promoting collectivism, two nights of debating whether the party should inflict incremental or instant socialism on the country, two nights of endless promises of interventions into private matters, two nights of confusion about which institution, government or corporations, truly has power over our lives.

How did such people arrive at the positions of power and influence that they occupy? Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek answered this question when he wrote about why the worst get on top in chapter 10 of “The Road to Serfdom.”

“Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

Hayek was not referring to our system of representative government. Yet here we are with nearly two dozen unscrupulous and uninhibited politicians airing their plans for how they would turn our civil society into a political society. Their objective in life is to wield the force of the state. That’s the only thing they made clear Thursday night.

Issues & Insights is a new site formed by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page. We’re just getting started, and we’ll be adding new features as time permits. We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we believe the nation needs the kind of cogent, rational, data-driven, fact-based commentary that we can provide.

Be sure to tell all your friends! And if you’d like to make a contribution to support our effort, feel free to click the Tip Jar over on the right.

We Could Use Your Help Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists from the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to use our decades of experience to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day. We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we think our approach to commentary is sorely lacking both in today’s mainstream media and on the internet. You can help us keep our mission going. If you like what you see, feel free to visit our Donations Page by clicking here. And be sure to tell your friends! You can also subscribe to I&I: It's free!

Share this...





Reddit

Linkedin

email