BOSTON – Elizabeth Warren is cast as many things: a populist, a left-winger, the paladin against the bankers and the rich, the Democrats’ alternative to Hillary Clinton, the policy wonk with a heart. The senior senator from Massachusetts is certainly a populist and her heart is with those foreclosed upon and exploited by shady financial practices. But she is not nearly as left-wing as many say — she can offer a strong defense of capitalism that’s usually overlooked. And here’s betting that she won’t run against Clinton. What all these descriptions miss is Warren’s most important contribution to the progressive cause. She is, above all, a lawyer who knows how to make arguments. From the time she first came to public attention, Warren has been challenging conservative presumptions embedded so deeply in our discourse that we barely notice them. Where others equivocate, she fights back with common sense. Since the Reagan era, Democrats have been so determined to show how pro-market and pro-business they are that they’ve shied from pointing out that markets could not exist without government, that the well-off depend on the state to keep their wealth secure, and that participants in the economy rely on government to keep the marketplace on the level and to temper the business cycle’s gyrations. Warren doesn’t back away from any of these facts. In her new book, “A Fighting Chance,” she recalls the answer she gave to a voter during a living-room gathering in Andover, Mass., that quickly went viral. She was in the early days of her Senate campaign, in the fall of 2011, and had been asked about the deficit. Characteristically, she pushed the boundaries beyond a narrow fiscal discussion to explain how government helped create wealth. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,” she said. “Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” It was all part of “the underlying social contract,” she said, a phrase politicians don’t typically use. Warren’s book tells her personal story in a folksy way and documents her major public battles, including her successful effort to establish a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But the book is most striking for the way in which her confident tone parallels Ronald Reagan’s upbeat proclamations on behalf of his own creed. Conservatives loved the Gipper for using straightforward and understandable arguments to make the case for less government. Warren turns the master’s method against the ideology he rhapsodized. She tells of meeting with Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., a former FBI agent, to talk about the consumer agency. “After a bit,” she reports, “he cut me off so he could make one thing clear: He didn’t believe in government.” That seemed strange coming from the graduate of a public university and a veteran of both the military and a government agency, though Warren didn’t press him then. “But someday I hoped to get a chance to ask him: Would you rather fly an airplane without the Federal Aviation Administration checking air traffic control? Would you rather swallow a pill without the Food and Drug Administration testing drug safety? Would you rather defend our nation without a military and fight our fires without our firefighters?” How often are our anti-government warriors asked such basic questions? But doesn’t being pro-government mean you’re anti-business? Well, no, Warren says, quite the opposite. “There’s nothing pro-business about crumbling roads and bridges or a power grid that can’t keep up,” she writes. “There’s nothing pro-business about cutting back on scientific research at a time when our businesses need innovation more than ever. There’s nothing pro-business about chopping education opportunities when workers need better training.” Oh yes, and it really bugs her when people assert that “corporate” and “labor” are “somehow two sides of the same coin.” She asks: “Does anyone think that for every billionaire executive who can afford to write a check for $10 million to get his candidate elected to office, there is a union guy who can do the same? Give me a break.” At the end of a long liberal era, Reagan electrified conservatives by telling them they didn’t have to apologize anymore for what they believed. Now, Warren insists, it’s the era of liberal apologies that’s over. http://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/05/18/ej-dionne-elizabeth-warren/9264037/
The part I don't get is anti-government people who don't understand that free markets couldn't exist without government. Government is a necessary condition for free markets to operate properly and regulation is also necessary.
lol, yes it is. In fact, they are far more "free" than they have been since the Great Depression, given the deregulation that has occurred over the last 40 years or so. It is certainly debatable whether that additional "freedom" is good or bad, given the financial crisis we are just now starting to dig ourselves out of. If you actually believe we don't have free markets, you need to turn off the television because the pundits you trust are lying to you.
Obama is THE GREATEST ever President the US has ever seen and I am dead serious. I hope het gets several other terms.
But as far as the ACTUAL definition (as opposed to the theoretical constructs in the minds of Libertarians and pundits) of "free markets" go, we do have them.
I don't know what you are saying to me. We have preserved free and balanced COMPETITION in some of our markets. Others are completely upside down and can't even be vaguely confused with a free market.
Merriam-Webster seems like a good place to turn for such a definition... free market noun : an economic market or system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and not controlled by a government http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/free market
While I agree that some markets are more highly controlled than others, I haven't seen where the US government has set prices or wages in decades.
http://www.law.uh.edu/news/faculty-news/spring2013/0426Mixon-Warren.pdf http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/elizabeth-warren-teacher-0514
It is all about the rich indoctrinators cutting their own taxes. If you trash government then you can have the little guys vote to cut the taxes on the bigger guys thus transferring money upwards. If you write papers, speak persuasively or can be a politician advocating this, you are rewarded professionally.
Love Warren, if there is anyone out there that get's the problems with this country it's her. Reagan did speak in common sense terms it's just his ideas were completely flawed and did this country irrevocable damage. Cutting taxes on the rich will increase tax revenue? How stupid do you have to be to believe that?
Nice article. A lot of people have a disconnect about the many, many ways government facilitates the economy. It's time to connect the dots for these people.
They operate properly because of government, but also because they're not free. Sub-Saharan Africa's a free market: no government investment in technology, infrastructure or education, foreign investors taking trillions of dollars of mineral wealth for pennies on the dollar to the meanest kids on the block, and never-ending gratuities to get the most basic of government services from the lowest of non-unionized functionaries, all in some foreign currency.
Liberal masturbation and navel-gazing. Gotta love it. Won't be the first time the communists overplayed their hands here.