1) They Actually Said It: Government Should Pick Industry Winners and Losers
A who’s who of liberal groups and top Biden officials held a conference this week gushing about their plans to break up monopolies in America. And, no, they weren’t talking about the teachers unions. Featured speakers include FTC chair Lina Khan, DOJ Antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter, CFPB director Rohit Chopra, Senator Amy Klobuchar, NEC Director Lael Brainard, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
It was like a surreal scene in a Batman movie when all the arch-enemies gather in one smoke-filled room conspiring to wreak havoc on Gotham City.
Mr. Kanter either wittingly or unwittingly let slip the Biden Admin’s overriding goal here:
“We don’t want corporations who are as powerful as governments making decisions about winners and losers,” Kanter said.
In other words, it’s the government’s job to pick industry winners and losers - not our businesses and consumers or the free enterprise system. And why not? The politicians have done such an amazing job picking winners with green energy.
Kanter openly bragged that he and other Biden super-regulators have killed more merger deals than any president.
This army of regulators is growing. The Justice antitrust division has grown 35% in two years, while the FTC (under aggressively anti-market chair Lina Khan) grew an astonishing 81%. The best way to stop these interferences is to slash these agency budgets.
The new law provides $6,000 scholarship accounts for lower-income students, with initial funding for 5000 kids in the first year, 10,000 in year two, and 15,000 in year three. It’s a start, but we’d like to see the families given closer to twice that - to match what the public pays per child in the public schools.
Mark our words: By the end of next year, virtually the entire South will be a school choice zone.
The Economist magazine has identified some 311 billionaires around the world whose riches largely stem from business dealings that have special access, monopolies, or privileges from the state.
For some odd reason, Joe and Hunter aren’t on the list.
By The Economist’s estimates, Russia is the most crony-capitalist country of the 43 surveyed. Only one-fifth of Russian billionaires’ made their money the old-fashioned way of earning it. The rest stole the money from the Russian citizens.
We think The Economist’s China estimates aren’t even close to accurate. Most Chinese billionaires run businesses that are in part functionaries of the state. The City University of New York study finds that as many as 91% of corrupt officials were in the top 1% of income earners, owing to their ability to cash in on their insider government connections.
America is less prone to such sweetheart deals paid for by taxpayers. Last year, corporations lined up with their outstretched tin cups lobbying for the mammoth Biden “infrastructure,” Green New Deal, and semiconductor bills.
Senator John Kennedy asked Biden's Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk whether spending $50 trillion to get U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to zero would reduce world temperatures and he repeatedly refused to answer the question.
Why? Probably because the impact would be indiscernible.
Wouldn’t it be a lot less expensive to save the planet by just hiring the Guardians of the Galaxy?
5) Quote of the Day: Druckenmiller on the Fiscal Tsunami
We love it when really smart people echo what we’ve been saying for years.
“The fiscal recklessness of the last decade has been like watching a horror movie unfold... all this focus on the debt ceiling instead of the future fiscal issue is like sitting on the beach at Santa Monica worrying about whether a 30-foot wave will damage the pier when you know there’s a 200-foot tsunami just 10 miles out.”
