from Michael Salon at The Wall Street Journal,  What 1980 and 2016 Have in Common,

Since 2008, the largest developed economies, in an effort to build financial stability and economic prosperity, have engaged in unprecedented coordination of financial regulation, monetary policy and business taxation. What the G-7 nations got instead was the weakest economic growth, the largest surge in government debt, the riskiest monetary expansion and the gravest deflationary pressures of the postwar era.

The rescue failed because growth wasn’t the ultimate goal. In late 2008, President Obama’s new chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” He was signaling that the White House saw an opening to use the crisis to expand the role of government. Where America led, others followed. Long after the crisis had passed, G-7 authorities pursued debt and monetary expansion along with command-and-control powers. The governments won but their economies, currencies, investors, savers and workers lost.

With President Obama making the world safe for governments to overtax, over-regulate and overstimulate, money has lost its freedom to flee from government excess. As a natural result, such excesses have surged.

Because they feared that centrally coordinating taxes, regulations and monetary policy would lead to abuse, America’s Founding Fathers limited federal power. They intended a union where most regulation and taxation was done by the states, with a hard currency backed by gold. Competition between regulatory and tax systems forced government to serve people’s needs or risk triggering a shoe-leather response. Where federal laws did apply, they were specific prohibitions, not broad grants of arbitrary power.

HKO

This article provides an answer to the question of why this revolt against central planning and elites was a global reaction. Extending the regulatory authority left fewer options, leaving rejection the only alternative to moving.  Competition is critical to progress and ideas need competition the most of all.

Central planning is the opposite of the competition of ideas.

print