Bret Stephens is very afraid of Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren Wants to Lose Your Vote: has a sub-head that summarizes why: Those with plans for everything prove only that they can’t be trusted to plan for anything.
Let’s look at the straw men Stephens marshaled the other day to make his case:
A decade ago, it was conventional wisdom that the world would soon start running low on oil and that the United States would henceforth be at the mercy of the inexorable trend. Then the fracking revolution came about, and the U.S. resumed its long-lost place as the world’s No. 1 oil and natural gas producer…
Stephens cites all the jobs it has created, lower prices, cleaner than coal. etc. Then:
...Elizabeth Warren wants to kill all this...
Climate change? What climate change? But wait - there’s more
...As an ethical matter, it may be defensible for Warren to argue that Medicare for All is fairer than the current system. As an economic matter, she could be right that overall costs will come down under her scheme. And as a political matter, it isn’t surprising that she has been less than forthright about the middle-class tax increases her plan will require.
But what about the fact that Warren isn’t merely proposing a dramatic change in the way 170 million or so Americans obtain health insurance? She is advocating the abolition of an entire industry, one that employs approximately 550,000 people….
So, preserving an industry that inflates costs and leaves millions of Americans without health coverage is necessary … to protect the jobs of 550,000 people (and the multi-million dollar salaries of CEOs and payouts to shareholders he doesn’t add).
Then there’s big tech, another industry Warren doesn’t like and promises to “break up” by turning Facebook, Amazon and Google into regulated utilities. For this task, involving some 800,000 workers and companies with about $500 billion in revenues, she has … a 1,700-word plan.
Stephens is terrified because Warren has plans — and planning is Socialism! Socialism bad! (And when the heck did conservatives ever worry about putting people out of work?)
Will President Warren have contingency plans for her ever-proliferating plans when — as they inevitably will — things don’t go according to plan?
Of course she won’t. She won’t because she can’t; she can’t because the central flaw of every economic plan is the plan itself. That’s the lesson of the 20th century, and it’s why Warren’s critics aren’t totally off the mark in accusing her of being a socialist — not in intent, but in mentality. Those with plans for everything prove only that they can’t be trusted to plan for anything.
The idea that Warren would be unable to cope with plans that don’t work out exactly as planned is ludicrous on the face of it. Someone who is not afraid of facts and knows how to use them, someone who can learn from experience, someone who is not afraid to seek the advice of others who may have better ideas or understanding — that person is hardly going to be left all at sea if all the ducks don’t line up immediately.
But for Stephens, who has the conservative mind set that can’t admit flaws in their view of how the world works, and believes their own myths without question, that kind of ability to cope with the real world is simply incomprehensible.
Stevens says he’s afraid of a Warren presidency, and what she’ll do:
...It’s one thing for a Democratic politician to promise, as Barack Obama once did, to “spread the wealth around” — but only when “wealth” and “wealthy” mean the same thing. The Warren standard is to spread your wealth around whether you’re wealthy or not.
Be very afraid! Warren is coming to take everyone’s money, rich AND poor!
One of the comments on Stephen’s over the top anti-panegyric to Warren suggests that he’s doing this because as a never-Trumper, he’s trying to rationalize voting for Trump anyway. See, he’s not worried about Warren failing as much as he’s terrified that she could succeed.
I wonder if bedbugs panic when they hear someone might be changing out the mattress...