Climate change has been described as an “existential threat,” but given recent government depletion of oil reserves to keep gasoline prices low and voter gratitude, the existential threat seems of secondary importance.
Releasing one million barrels (one-ninth of the nation's average daily use) would not have a noticeable effect on prices. But it's a “whole of government” approach that fits not only with President Biden's reelection drive, but also with his progressive agenda of filling Americans' lives with government. Aside from the successive student loan forgiveness, marijuana liberalization, and many other small panderings, Biden can truly boast that he has delivered the most progressive governance in U.S. history.
Two defining features of progressivism are its goal of minimizing the role of markets by maximizing the role of government in the allocation of society's resources and opportunities, and its confidence that the world is amenable to progressive government intervention and that the future is transparent to the progressive's gaze.
Biden wants to create the worst inflation in 40 years and ban Chinese made electric cars (through 100% tariffs), which will keep US made electric cars prohibitively expensive for most consumers and give Biden a reason to continue subsidizing buyers. Protected US automakers can raise prices and Biden can call this “reindustrialization”. The subsidies will not end because this artificial (government subsidized) manufacturing “revival” will stop when the subsidies end.
Progressives have focused on jobs protected or provided by the government, especially since the “China Shock” of 2000-2015, but The Economist calls this supposed shock “insignificant.” “A reasonable upper limit for the number of jobs lost in the U.S. is…about 2 million, a tiny fraction of the size of the workforce (130 million in 2000). People left their jobs about 900 million times in that period…the vast majority quickly found new jobs…'Despite localized difficulties, the China Shock is really just a blip on the overall U.S. workforce,' says Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute.”
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This “shock” is the gift that keeps giving progressives the excuse to socialize the economy through “partnership” with government. While Biden denounces “tax cuts” for “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil” (as Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute points out), he supports putting trillions of dollars into “Big Semiconductors, Big Wind, Big Solar, Big Battery, Big Automakers, Big Utilities.”
Automakers are now public utilities whose future investments and product decisions are determined by government. 21st century progressives maintain a shell of the (former) private sector as an appendage of government, but any vestiges of private autonomy have been subordinated to the “existential” imperative of decarbonization, making everything a government concern.
Jake Sullivan (technically Biden's national security adviser, but really a wandering genius beyond the borders) has said that the government is spending trillions of dollars “not to pick winners and losers, but simply to pick 'areas that are essential to the well-being of the nation.'” This is non-discriminatory, since “well-being” includes everything.
Biden, speaking less grammatically and more seriously, said: “Americans who are willing to work hard should be able to get a job anywhere and put down roots where they grew up.” In other words, the government's plan would make geographic mobility, a source of national vitality and modernization, optional; stagnation a right. Already Americans are only half as likely to move between states as they were in 1980.
Writing in the Financial Times, Ruchir Sharma, chairman of Rockefeller International, said: “Something is shifting in the culture. Just as America's 'pain relief revolution', which insisted on treating even moderate injuries with powerful opioids, got the public addicted to OxyContin, our economic approach to pain relief has made the system dependent on trickle-down government support.”
During the 2008 recession, Sharma says, Washington “dropped a hail of bailouts: unsolicited offers of aid to businesses big and small, struggling and not, and hundreds of billions of dollars in cash handouts to more than half of the country – 170 million Americans – whether they were unemployed or not.” Significant sums were given to people earning more than $100,000.
Republicans who call themselves “tariff men” are complicit. After the 1987 stock market crash, the Federal Reserve, led by Republican Alan Greenspan, promised to support financial markets and joined what Sharma calls “continuous stimulus.” And “the pre-Great Depression instinct to 'liquidate' weak companies in times of crisis was replaced by the opposite excess: 'liquidate, liquidate, liquidate.' Why not bail out everyone all the time when the government can borrow for free?”
Over the past 30 years, under administrations of both parties, the federal government has repealed just 20 regulations combined, while adding about 3,000 per year, Sharma said. Biden 2.0 would be worse than Trump 2.0, but sometimes gauging the differences between today's competing nationalisms requires an ideological micrometer.
