Don’t blow it

FreeCons advise Congress and White House against new regs

In last year’s elections, American voters rejected the Biden administration’s failed polices and the left-wing ideology that informed them.

Inflation and the economy were top issues, according to exit polls, with most Americans expressing little confidence that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their party could effectively address such concerns.

Alas, as a new Congress and administration come to power in Washington, all is not well. While politicians advocating Freedom Conservative policies such as lower taxes, fewer regulations, limited government, free speech, free trade, sounder money, and the rule of law won majorities in Washington and most state governments, some Republican populists are dabbling with the same big-government notions that have damaged American families and politically thrashed Democratic progressives.

Today, we feature FreeCon signatories who urge the American Right to choose a fundamentally different course — one better aligned with America’s traditional principles as well as our country’s best interests and aspirations.

No price controls

Joel Griffith is a senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom, founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. Griffith is also a FreeCon signatory.

Formerly a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, he serves as a limited partner at the equity-trading firm Great Point Capital and has held research positions at the American Legislative Exchange Council and the National Association of Counties.

In an op-ed for The Hill, Griffith rebutted calls from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill to place a federal cap on interest rates charged to holders of credit cards.

Such a regulation would “inadvertently deny temporary financial resources to families dealing with price hikes that outpace pay increases. Expect more defaults, bankruptcies, ruined credit histories, and reliance on disreputable black-market lenders — that is, loan sharks — as government moves to dry up the supply of credit.”

Ending “the scourge of Bidenomics requires rediscovering the path to better family wellbeing,” he argued. “Reducing federal spending and Washington’s onerous regulatory burdens would free up resources to enhance output per hour worked” while “reducing government borrowing will quench the upward pressure on interest rates by curtailing the bidding war for limited capital between the private sector and the federal government.”

Free Labor

Former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, President-elect Trump’s pick to be secretary of labor, has drawn strong opposition from Freedom Conservatives for her defense of coercive unionism in the private sector and her desire to expand labor organizing in the public sector.

“In this woman’s America,” Americans for Tax Reform President and FreeCon signatory Grover Norquist told the New York Post, “every worker would have to have a boss and pay the union for the privilege of working.

“This is an outrage, This is not mildly bad. This is a huge thing that she voted for.”

The editors of National Review — which include such FreeCon signatories as Ramesh Ponnuru, Noah Rothman, and Charles C.W. Cooke — warned that laws and regulations she has championed would have the effect of banning the red-state model.

“Voters are fleeing and rejecting the big-spending, high-tax, anti-worker agendas of blue states, much to Republicans’ political benefit,” they wrote. But Chavez-DeRemer favors forcing even right-to-work states to engage in collective bargaining with unions.

This would “make the red-state model of governance nearly impossible and empower the same unions that contribute to blue states’ woes,” the editors argued.

Another FreeCon signatory, retired California State University-East Bay professor Charles Baird, has studied labor policy for many decades. A key feature of public-sector unionism, he wrote in Inside Sources, is an “iron triangle” of exchange among politicians, government agency heads, and unions to expand government.

“It is in the interest of unions to increase wages and salaries paid to government employees because they can then get more money from dues and fees for which they charge those employees,” Baird observed.

“So, unions and agency heads collude in collective bargaining to pick the pockets of taxpayers. And they do so to the applause of politicians who always seek to spend more and more of other people’s money to increase their power over other people’s lives.

“In the private sector, employers bargain about their own money. Their incentive is to minimize costs. In the government sector, agency heads bargain about taxpayer money. Their incentive is to maximize costs.”

In the mix

• In The Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation economist and FreeCon signatory Stephen Moore urged the incoming Trump administration and Congress to go beyond making the 2017 tax cuts permanent and adopt a flat-rate income tax, offsetting revenue losses by eliminating itemized deductions.

“Collapsing the personal-income and corporate tax rates to 15% would have huge economic benefits,” wrote Moore and his coauthor Steve Forbes, with whom Moore co-founded the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

“America would suddenly have one of the lowest tax rates in the world, resulting in trillions of dollars of new capital flow and a spike in take-home pay.”

• In City Journal, FreeCon signatory Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, describes the implications of Donald Trump’s victory for the institutions of higher education that champion woke ideology and restrict free speech.

“If colleges and universities don’t course-correct,” Shapiro and coauthor Noah Josse wrote, “they will continue to alienate themselves from the American mainstream and lose even more public trust.

“If they continue to teach destructive ideas about the American Founding and intersectional-privilege hierarchies as basic curriculum — if, in other words, the illiberal takeover of higher education proceeds apace — then these institutions will become increasingly irrelevant in American public life.”

• In the Kentucky Lantern, University of Pikeville professor Jeffery Tyler Syck urged state policymakers to devote more attention to the proper instruction of social studies in schools. “History and civics provide the educational foundation that can sustain a democracy,” wrote Syck, a FreeCon signatory. “If voters do not understand history or how government works, then how sound can their political contributions be?”