First, let’s address the obvious: yes, Jeb Bush has a Wall Street Journal op-ed because the party has been preparing to slot him into the presidential race if there’s no other way to get an electable nominee. But the op-ed was clearly in the pipeline before polls started revealing the implosion of the Newt Gingrich campaign, and the rise of a libertarian anti-Romney who can’t win anywhere where GOP voters insist on a foreign policy that emphasizes killing brown people for Jesus (i.e., the vast majority of red states). So Ron Paul will fade right after Gingrich, Romney is all but anointed, and Jeb will soon retreat to the background, hoping to be Mitt’s market-oriented secretary of education.
But since the party elders took the trouble to put this op-ed together for Jeb, let’s examine it, particularly the opening:
Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: “The right to rise.”
Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn’t seem like something we should have to protect.
But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business.
“The right to rise”? In a sane America, if we wanted to use the phrase “the right to rise” at this moment in history, we’d use it to talk about people who can’t rise because they can’t sell a house and move to where jobs are because the fat cats won’t allow serious levels of mortgage modification to stabilize the housing market; we’d talk about people who can’t rise and find work because we refuse to make a serious effort to engage in the sort of Keynesian public-works stimulus that would put money in people’s pockets that they would later give to struggling merchants in exchange for food, clothing, and consumer goods; we’d talk about people who can’t rise because they’ve been laid off as teachers or cops as we refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for needed services; we’d talk about students who will struggle to rise for decades because they bear a crushing burden of student loans and no job prospects.
But Jeb, and Paul Ryan before him, mean nothing of the sort. They mean the right to be capitalists — a right that every sane person knows is clearly not threatened in America in any way, shape, or form. Ah, but, but … regulations! Jeb says they’re awful!
Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand “Do something … anything.”
…Woe to the elected leader who fails to deliver a multipoint plan for economic success, driven by specific government action. “Trust in the dynamism of the market” is not a phrase in today’s political lexicon.
Several things are going on here: Jeb warming up to substitute for Mitt, Jeb trying to co-opt Ron Paul’s rhetoric, Jeb attempting to lift the albatross of Paul Ryan’s bad reputation from around the neck of what must have been a painstakingly crafted slogan from the GOP laboratories.
But this is still horrifying. The phrase essentially describes operating big businesses without effective government oversight as a fundamental human right, like something that would have been fought for in Tahrir Square or on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
If we as a nation fall for this Orwellian phrase — now or in the future — we deserve the decline and fall that will come to us.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
