American capitalism is once more under attack, this time from opponents seeking democratic socialism on the left and economic nationalism on the right. Each side seeks to impose industrial policies aimed at reviving jobs and increasing wages in the manufacturing sector. Support for free markets is thus increasingly an embattled stance within policy circles, a condition not seen since the end of the Second World War. Particularly striking is the loss of consensus regarding dynamism and free markets on the right, where support for capitalism used to be almost definitional.
Proposals for alternatives from many Democratic leaders are generally more extreme than those from the right, and would be more damaging. Calls to discharge student-loan debt, raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and increase income-tax rates for most Americans — all while doubling capital-gains taxes and imposing a "wealth tax" — would be economically devastating if they ever came to fruition. Implementing the Green New Deal's stated objective of simultaneously eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions and solving economic inequality would result in cultural, political, and economic conditions best described as despotic. Such policies, which have drawn wide support from Democratic presidential candidates this year and from the broader party, would obviously be installed incrementally, forestalling a total capital strike. But they nevertheless entail a striking rejection of free-market capitalism, and represent a remarkable detachment from reality among many leading minds of the American left.
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