I & I Editorial Board“I am now a Keynesian in economics.” — Richard Nixon, January 1971
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” — Joe Biden, April 2020
“I think that’s obviously a good thing.” — JD Vance, June 2026
A new poll shows widespread support for a return to 1970s-style stagflation. Well, not exactly. But most people these days support the very policies that produced the wreckage of that decade.
George Santayana was right. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Unfortunately, this group now includes people such as the current vice president who claim to be conservative.
A new Wall Street Journal survey finds that “Americans in both parties back government-imposed price caps and other market interventions to make life more affordable.”
Significant majorities (more than 70%) also support caps on prescription drugs, credit card interest rates, and child care costs. Sixty-one percent back a wealth tax on millionaires, nearly 60% favor socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ government takeover of healthcare, known as “Medicare for all,” and 57% want to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour.
Our own I&I/TIPP survey found a shockingly high number of adults support the idea of the government owning key industries. (See: “POLL SHOCKER: Socialism Is Infecting The GOP As Well.”)
As our friends at Unleash Prosperity put it:
We all relearned one of the first rules of economics in the 1970s that wage and price controls never work — especially during peacetime. That so many voters (and politicians) don’t understand this today is yet another example of the steep decline of our education system in America.
They are right that the problem doesn’t just lie with poorly educated voters, but with leaders of both political parties, which is even worse.
We expect Democrats, whose party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the DSA, to support endlessly increasing government control of the economy “for the greater good.”
But now we have nationalist “conservatives” and party leaders like JD Vance, the putative successor to Donald Trump, treating the free market as an evil that must be tamed, and extolling the virtues of government interventions, also “for the greater good.” Vance has even taken to bashing Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, while praising Sen. Huey Long, “who advocated socialist policies and ran Louisiana as his authoritarian fiefdom,” in the words of Unleash Prosperity.
What’s next? Calls to re-regulate the airline industry? Slapping price controls on oil and gas? The return of wage and price controls? The rebirth of New Deal programs and FDR’s economically ruinous “bold, persistent experimentation”? Once you give up on the free market, there is no end to the mischief.
We know where this all leads. And it’s not a road that makes America great again. Just ask anyone who still can remember what times were like when Jimmy Carter was president.
—Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Related:
“Is The GOP Failing To Sell Trump’s Economic Gains? I&I/TIPP Poll”
“Why Do The Defenders Of Capitalism Never Have Any Money?”
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Well, there is some argument for capping credit card interest based on historic usury laws. It’s not in any way “conservative” to allow consumers to be trapped in credit-card debt (nor college nor gambling debt).