All Hat, No Cattle

I watched Edward's speech and as many reporters, pundits and bloggers opined today, came away less than impressed. The Intellectual Activist Daily sums it up best:

The Collectivist Convention

The Democrats in Boston are making constant appeals to America's tradition of liberty and "can-do" optimism. Their real message: the Constitution "binds us" to the collective, for which our individual pursuit of happiness must be sacrificed.

Once again the Democrats answer to the country's many issues is to drive a class warfare wedge into the body politic as they do not have an agenda or solutions.

Fred Barnes wrote:

What Edwards is most associated with is the idea of "two Americas," one rich and privileged, the other stuck with second-class schools and health care and subsistence-level jobs. But he gives no evidence of having thought this idea through. In fact, his own biography undermines the very notion of two Americas. Edwards rose from humble origins, the son of a mill worker, to become a skilled and wealthy trial lawyer. He says "everything is possible" in America, oblivious to how this statement contradicts his theme of two Americas.

Indeed, practically everything is possible. Tens of millions of Americans have risen from the lower rungs economically to achieve remarkable success. Like Edwards, they weren't locked in a lesser America. Opportunity is everywhere. Bill Clinton seized it in Arkansas. Barak Obama, the black state senator who delivered the keynote address at the convention and is all but certain to win a U.S. Senate seat this fall, grabbed it in Illinois.

Edwards doesn't understand--or chooses to ignore--that America is an extraordinarily mobile society. People move from job to job, usually for higher pay and more satisfying work. They start businesses. Those in the bottom fifth of the economy routinely soar to the top fifth in a few years. Social mobility is the name of the game. It's a more rough-and-tumble sort of capitalism than exists in Europe, but it works to produce amazing wealth. One fruit is home ownership. More than two-thirds of Americans own their homes and a higher rate of ownership record is achieved every year.

But even if there were two Americas, Edwards's solutions would not help. His answer is to curb the activity of lobbyists in Washington and boost the minimum wage. And he wants to raise taxes in the top economic brackets, going after the very entrepreneurs and small business owners who create most of the new jobs in America. Soak-the-rich is neither a new idea nor a good one.

Nor is industrial policy. Edwards said this in his convention speech: "We will invest in the jobs of the future--in the technologies and innovation to ensure that America stays ahead of the competition." The truth is that America has stayed ahead of the world in technology partly because government hasn't been investing and interfering and regulating. Left alone, the high tech sector has boomed far beyond what anyone in government, Democrat or Republican, might have imagined.

I couldn't agree with Barnes or Tracinski more.

Posted by feste at July 29, 2004 01:33 PM | TrackBack