Will Capitalists Fight Elizabeth Warren, Or Sell Her The Rope She’ll Hang Them With?

I&I Editorial

With President Trump facing a high-risk impeachment, and far-left Democrat Elizabeth Warren now beating Joe Biden in national polls — including the latest IBD/TIPP poll — anyone on the productive side of the economy should be deeply worried, and ready to do anything to prevent Warren from getting the keys to the White House.

Instead, some are already trying to make peace with the prospect of a Warren presidency.

The chief of U.S. equity strategy for Canada’s RBC Capital Markets signaled on Monday that maybe an Elizabeth Warren administration won’t really be that bad. “Any pain from a Warren win is likely to be temporary,” Lori Calvasina reassured investors in a report that included a survey showing that many of the firm’s industry analysts at least partially agreed.

“Most of the sectors at high risk under a Warren presidency from a policy perspective (Financials, Energy, Health Care, Industrials) are already deeply undervalued versus the broader market,” she added.

There’s the silver lining of potential market winners too, such as small caps, according to the RBC report. And besides, a Warren presidency could be “supportive of the already growing popularity of ESG as an investment approach,” according to Calvasina, referring to using the criterion of “environmental, social and corporate governance” or so-called “socially responsible” investing.

Plus Warren breaking up, say, Amazon might be good for brick-and-mortar retailers. (You know, the way Ford Motor Co. going bankrupt in the 1900s would have been good for stagecoach makers.)

“The stock market tends to go up over time, regardless of who occupies the White House,” Calvasina wrote. “Ultimately we think corporate America and U.S. equity investors would learn to adapt to new political leadership, as they always do.”

Maybe the citizens of Hong Kong ought to start thinking this way. Just lie down and let the Communist Party of China come on in and take over completely; capitalism is resilient enough to survive any kind of beating that intrusive Big Government can think up.

As opposed to this, some big Wall Street players have been found expressing concern in hushed tones. And some figures in big business who traditionally give to Democrats recognize the Warren threat and warn that they will act accordingly — again, speaking privately.

No Silver Linings For Business Under Warren

There’s no mystery motivation here. People in the business of making money want to be able to play ball with whoever occupies the Oval Office. But more soldiers have saved their own lives in the face of the enemy with artillery than with wishful thinking, and business and finance shouldn’t kid themselves: Sens. Warren, Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the like are their mortal enemies.

What they should be fearful of is not identifying and fighting the adversaries of the market, but of taking a hand in fulfilling Lenin’s prophesy that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Not to say the left in America has immediate plans to hang capitalists to death. As the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn, appearing on Fox News last week, said of post-Mao Beijing’s hard-line policy toward staunchly capitalist Hong Kong’s aspirations for freedom, “It’s always been more about Lenin in power than Marx in economics. They might want to get rich but they want control.”

The left in this country might not wave little red books with quotations from the Chairman , but it wants to control as much of the American economy as it can. Warren’s schemes, for instance, include a $3 trillion “wealth tax” on those who possess $50 million or more, and the requirement that larger U.S. corporations “obtain a federal charter from a newly formed Office of United States Corporations” in which groups of people with no ownership stake would be making corporate decisions. Her promises of a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, and vast multiplication of regulation would more than double the size of government, and spread corruption in society and state more akin to that of Beijing or other totalitarian regimes.

On Monday she even proposed banning judges from owning stocks.

There’s an alternative to the sorry spectacle of the seemingly endless supply of self-loathing, guilt-ridden, pusillanimous capitalists. From Wall Street to Main Street, leaders of business and finance should explicitly warn of the Warren threat, and they should unashamedly explain the goodness of the free market, the moral superiority of a system that has lifted countless millions of proletarians — who never invested a dime — out of destitution. Don’t know how? Search YouTube for “Milton Friedman.”

Or ask J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who did a pretty good job earlier this year in his annual letter to shareholders. “Socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse — such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives — which they frequently do to maintain power,” Dimon warned. “This would be as much a disaster for our country as it has been in the other places it’s been tried.”

Thanks to the vast majority of young Americans being products of government-run schools, there is a woeful deficiency in understanding economics and appreciating a free market society. They need a dose of truth from the mouths of leaders in the private sector.

Instead of slipping anonymous quotations to reporters and looking on the non-existent bright side of what would be a very dark future under the rule of haters of capitalism, its time for more capitalists to buy themselves a backbone and stop selling the free market short.

for more capitalists to buy themselves a backbone and stop selling the free market short.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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