(Photo: AP/Mark J. Terrill)
Does anyone really listen to this crap? (I assume since Ben Carson characterized liberal beliefs as "crap" during Wednesday night's debate, it's permissible to characterize what the debate participants actually said as crap, too.)
Consider Carly Fiorina's response when asked about those Americans who aren't offered 401(k)s: "There is no constitutional role for the federal government in setting up retirement plans."
Um-so what's social security?
To which, clearly on a roll, Fiorina added, "There is no Constitutional role for the federal government to be setting minimum wages."
To these observations, there were no follow-up questions from the moderators or demurrals from the other candidates.
Did anyone actually hear what Fiorina said? Did she hear it herself? Or does the constant din of absurdities render hearing less acute, an evolutionary adaptation to further survival when assailed by such nonsense?
The most interesting aspect of Wednesday's debate was the candidates' acknowledgment of rising economic inequality-just a few years ago a development whose very existence conservatives furiously denied. Now, they not only acknowledge but invoke it as an attack on the dread Big Government Democrats. Particularly wonderful was Ted Cruz's citation of the data revealed by no less than left-wing economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, that the wealthiest one percent of Americans now enjoy the highest share of the nation's personal income since 1928.
The cause of this scandalous inequality, however, is big government, government spending, government regulation-and certainly not the inherent tendency of unregulated capitalism.
Indeed, the biggest takeaway from Wednesday's debate is that the federal government is the cause of everything bad-stagnating incomes, the gender pay gap, the eventual death throes of the sun.
Might not globalization have had a role in checking Americans' incomes? How about the declining value of the minimum wage? The evisceration of American unions? The doctrine of maximizing shareholder value? Did anyone hear any of that above the din?
Indeed, with all those denunciations of regulations, it would have been nice had CNBC's moderators asked the candidates where they stood on some of the regulations that most Americans support: Raising the minimum wage, or requiring paid sick days and parental leave. For a debate supposedly focusing on economics, the CNBCers failed to raise many of the economic questions that concern Americans most, with the notable exception of Sharon Epperson, who posed her two questions on the plight of students saddled with debt and people with no access to employer-provided retirement plans (which provoked Fiorina's wondrous response). To his credit as well, CNBC's John Harwood did ask Ben Carson whether, after the recent revelations of Big Pharma's jacking up prescription drug prices, some regulation of those prices might a good idea. But Carson merely intoned (Carson doesn't speak, he intones) that regulation as such is a bad idea. (Carson's modus operandi is to answer questions requiring nettlesome specifics with the broadest generalities he can come up with.)
It's understandable that the moderators may have despaired of getting the candidates actually to answer more questions on economic regulations, but a show of hands on the issue of raising the federal minimum wage would have been instructive nonetheless.
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The evening's biggest applause lines, of course, came in response to the candidates' attacks on the panelists for asking tough questions, and their hoary allegations that the media are liberal and at some basic level un-American. This line of attack goes all the way back to the rise of national journalism that came when the Big Three networks began to air their nightly newscasts in the early 1960s. Its first master practitioner, so far as I can tell, was Alabama's segregationist Governor George Wallace, who as early as 1965 was complaining that "Huntley and Chinkley and Walter Contrite and all the rest" were slandering (referring to himself in the third person) "Wallace and his fight for constitutional government." (Say what you will about Wallace, his flights of rhetorical indignation at times reached almost poetically surreal heights.) What this really meant was that journalistic institutions not steeped in the parochial (and that's putting it charitably) values of the segregationist white South were now invading that South's living rooms every night at 6:30.
Over the next half-century, as the politics of the white South came to dominate the Republican Party, antipathy to the national media became a pillar of Republican ideology, and a handy escape hatch for GOP candidates when confronted with tough questions, and sometimes even softballs.
If we just got rid of government and journalists and immigrants, we'd all be one big, happy, Republican family.
