What Could Kill Booming U.S. Economy? ‘Socialists,’ White House Warns
A report from the Council of Economic Advisers compares Bernie Sanders to Chairman Mao, and warns that pickup trucks cost more in Sweden.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/us/politics/socialist-democrats-trump-elections.html
When was the last time anyone talked about the Council of Economic Advisers? We are certainly far from the days when Walter W. Heller, chairman of the CEA under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice in two years. On Tuesday, the CEA made its first newsworthy move of the Trump presidency, releasing a seventy-two-page “report” warning that “socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse.” The reaction has been universal mockery, which the report and its authors richly deserve. Most of the pages are given over to a potted discussion of the failures of state socialist agriculture and the decline of Venezuelan oil production under Chavismo. There is a confusing discussion of the Scandinavian countries, which are presented variously as being nonsocialist, suffering lower standards of living because of socialism, and benefiting from the inborn tendency of Nordic stock to high incomes. These lessons in comparative history are tenuously connected to U.S. politics through constructions like, “The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren).”
The report has drawn comparisons to “a middle school book report assigned by the Heritage Foundation” and “a Red Bull–addled college freshman’s attempt to parse their introductory economics course through a first-response paper.” The resemblances are certainly there, right down to an appeal to “the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines socialism as…” and the caveat that certain socialists are “different in these important ways.” But reading the document and following the citations, you find a range of references that goes beyond casual Google searches and chain-email folk memory, to include serious socialist thinkers like John Roemer and Alec Nove. There are also references to the work of two CEA staffers, Tyler Goodspeed and Casey Mulligan, perhaps a clue to the authorship of the collectively attributed document.
