Nevada debate: From impossible promises to the politics of envy (op-ed)

Do you remember John Delany?  If you don’t, I’ll refresh your memory. 

John Delany is an attorney who co-founded two companies, Health Care Financial Partners and CapitalSource.  He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served three terms.  Delany was also a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who participated in the first two presidential debates.

Delany separated himself from the far-left candidates by calling for “real solutions not impossible promises.”  He questioned the constitutionality of the wealth taxes proposed by the far-left candidates and during the second presidential debate Delany stated, if we go down the road of Senator Sanders and Senator Warren, with bad policies like Medicare for All and free everything, that will turn off independent voters and get Trump re-elected, that’s what happened with McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis.   Afterwards Delany told the public, he was the only one on the debate stage with actual experience in the healthcare business and he didn’t think his colleagues understood the business at all.

Then Delany warned the public about the far-left candidates.  He said, “I’m starting to think this isn’t about health care.  This is an anti-private sector strategy.”  Delany didn’t qualify for future debates and discovered that it’s hard to get far-left candidates to understand something when the success of their campaigns depends on them not understanding it.

Delany couldn’t overcome the politics of impossible promises.

The last Democratic presidential debate, in Nevada, featured the first appearance of candidate Michael Bloomberg.  Like Delany, Bloomberg has experience in both politics and business, and during the debate, he warned the audience the Democratic Party could not embrace socialism and expect to defeat Donald Trump.  But, unlike, Delany, who was likeable, but wasn’t considered electable, Bloomberg isn’t liked at all, as a matter of fact, he is despised by the far-left candidates because he is a billionaire.

On the debate stage the far-left candidates implied billionaires like Bloomberg should be outlawed in the United States because they are an existential threat to social equality.  The debate moderator even wasted valuable time by asking Bloomberg if he should have earned all that money and if he should exist. (Bloomberg had to justify his existence by reminding his rivals that he’s a philanthropist who gives his money away.)  No far-left candidate would point out a minimum-wage worker and say they shouldn’t exist because they’re below the poverty line.  So, what justifies the opposite claim?

The politics of envy.

    

Ayn Rand described this mentality in her novel Atlas Shrugged.  She wrote, “They do not want to own your fortune; they want you to lose it. (Wealth tax) They do not want to succeed; they want you to fail. (Ban charter schools) They do not want to live; they want you to die. (Impossible health care promises)” This mentality doesn’t desire the values that led to the status quo they resent.  This mentality seeks to destroy those values under the guise of reinventing the world for the better.  The politics of envy leads to the politics of destruction.  Founding father, John Adams, didn’t like the revolutionary Thomas Paine, when asked why, Adams said Paine was a man who would tear down the house but lacks the skills to rebuild it.

         

In Nevada the far-left candidates attempted to tear down the house of Bloomberg to prove their electability, but in the process, they forgot about likability.  

  

No one likes envious ideologues, especially with green new deals.  

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 2/26/2020