Straight to the point

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech was so well-written and so well-delivered that it could have won her the Presidency all by itself — if the election were held today. But there are still more than 70 days left until voting closes, during which Harris will not be able to evade all the questions that have remained unanswered since her sudden elevation to Presidential candidate. It’s been more than a month since Biden renounced his re-election attempt, and Harris has still not held a single press conference nor given any interviews.

Such a systematic avoidance of the press requires an explanation, and the most obvious is that she is afraid of having to answer all of the questions she has dodged by receiving the nomination without going through any primaries at all. Some of those questions would have addressed her moral character, including her affair with Willie Brown, the exceptionally powerful Mayor of San Francisco; others would have addressed her unremarkable performance as Biden’s Vice President and “Border Tsar”.

Yet much bigger unanswered questions are raised by the only policy proposals that Harris issued after Biden’s renunciation — just two of them, both deeply flawed. The first proposes government price controls on food sold by retailers of all kinds, but most often by local supermarkets, which Harris blamed for “price gouging”. That is truly strange: as a lawyer, Harris should know that such activity is already illegal during emergencies and very rarely enforced. And second, as an educated person, she must know that when governments spend much more than they collect in taxes, as the Biden Administration did on a huge scale, the dollar loses value and prices must rise. If price controls are nonetheless imposed on, say, carrots, their price will not go down, instead shopkeepers will just stop selling carrots. Nobody will work to lose money by selling carrots at a loss — and the same goes for everything else. 

The second Harris proposal also ignored economic realities: to help first-time home-buyers afflicted by high house prices, she proposed to give them money grants. Had she asked any economist, either Democrat or Republican, she would have learned that injecting government money into the housing market will not produce more houses but only higher house prices. Moreover, it’s striking that Harris did not propose the one thing that could reduce house prices: the abolition of the many regulations that impose high costs, including the especially costly new “green” regulations.

Crucially, these indefensible policy proposals are not just narrow measures, but rather expressions of something 10 times bigger: the application of Californian “Big Government” principles throughout the United States. Since 2017, more than a million Californians have left to emigrate elsewhere, from Montana to Texas, because of the extreme nature of the state’s new laws and taxes. Extreme environmental regulations, which increase housing costs and are driving people into homelessness, have been one result. A law that calls for slavery reparations, even though slavery was never allowed in California, is one more, while another, the new S-1955, prohibits school employees from telling parents that their child is wearing the clothes of the opposite sex — while protecting them from any punishment for “guiding” children in choosing their gender. (Elon Musk reacted to S-1955 by moving to Texas.)

That is the sort of California madness that Kamala Harris considers the new normal. And this is the sort of programme she is proposing. Over the next 73 days, non-Californians will have an opportunity to find out what Californian measures Harris intends to apply throughout the US, and then vote accordingly. If the vote were held today, immediately after her Chicago triumph, Harris would probably win. But with each passing day, as more people consider the few political ideas she is offering, victory becomes less likely.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/