Montana Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) introduced legislation Monday condemning socialism as the 2020 Democratic presidential field pulls the Democratic Party further to the left in the midst of the campaign season. “A radical, socialist, far-left movement is growing across this country. And it has taken root as the new voice of the Democratic Party,” Daines said on the Senate floor Monday, taking aim at Democrats’ Green New Deal and “Medicare-for-All” proposals pushed by candidates on the presidential campaign trail. The proposed resolution would make it the official position of the U.S. Senate that Marxism and socialism are “failed ideologies,” while praising capitalism as “the greatest engine for human advancement in the history of the world, bringing more people out of poverty and into prosperity than any economic model in the history of mankind.” In his floor remarks introducing the proposal, Daines evoked the world-renowned economist Milton Friedman. “It was renowned economist Milton Friedman who said, ‘One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,’” Daines said. “Radical Democrats are advocating for disastrous policies that would wreck our economy under the guise of cleaning up the environment,” Daines asserted. The Green New Deal would indeed pose significant costs to Americans. According to a preliminary analysis of the legislation from the American Action Forum, a center-right D.C.-based think tank, the environmental components of the deal would cost $52,000 – $72,000 per household between 2020 and 2029 if enacted...MORE
Senator Daines quotes Milton Friedman. So will I:
INTERVIEWER: Marxists say that property is theft. Why, in your view, is private property so central to freedom?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: Because the only way in which you can be free to bring your knowledge to bear in your particular way is by controlling your property. If you don’t control your property, if somebody else controls it, they’re going to decide what to do with it, and you have no possibility of exercising influence on it. The interesting thing is that there’s a lot of knowledge in this society, but, as Friedrich Hayek emphasized so strongly, that knowledge is divided. I have some knowledge; you have some knowledge; he has some knowledge. How do we bring these scattered bits of knowledge back together? And how do we make it in the self-interest of individuals to use that knowledge efficiently? The key to that is private property, because if it belongs to me, you know, there’s an obvious fact. Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
Friedman again
I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.
So hear we have Senator Daines, a Republican, using Friedman to critique marxism and socialism, and yet that same Senator Daines believes we should have less private property, not more.
Really? Yes. Senator Daines was one of the primary proponents of fully funding the Land & Water Conservation Fund, which is used by the feds and the states to gobble up private property. So much so that he made the funding of the LWCF mandatory. Government acquisition of private property no longer has to compete with other uses of the taxpayer dollar. It is on automatic pilot, which is to say it is now the highest priority of all federal spending.
Now we have Senator Daines posturing as the defender of capitalism and freedom, when in reality he votes to undermine its most important ingredient: private property. This posturing may work in the Senate. However, his attempt to deceive, or possibly this public display of ignorance, whichever it is, will not be accepted by us.
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