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Amazon is taking its ball and going home, and
I wasn't a huge fan of the deal
But what's just astounding to me is how
The most prominent architect of the GND is New York Rep.
AOC, as she's ubiquitously called, rejects the idea that traditional market economics or fiscal bookkeeping should be any hindrance to her scheme.
"I think the first thing that we need to do is kind of break the mistaken idea that taxes pay for 100 percent of government expenditure," she recently told
When Inskeep pointed out to her that deficit spending is "borrowing money that has to be paid back eventually through taxes," AOC reversed herself with an impressive lack of embarrassment, saying that's OK because this isn't spending, it's investing. Borrowing tens of trillions for her "investments" will pay for itself, "Because we're creating jobs."
The Amazon deal would have created some 25,000 jobs with an average annual salary of $150,000, but AOC was against it because the agreement amounted to "creeping overreach of one of the world's biggest corporations."
Maybe it did. But I have news for AOC and others trying to use the precedent of the original New Deal as an excuse to get the band back together: This is how New Deals work.
The original New Deal was a bonanza for big business. In their effort to mobilize the
For instance, the big chain movie houses of the 1930s -- the Netflixes and Hulus of the time -- wrote the codes in such a way that independents were nearly run out of business, even though 13,571 of the 18,321 movie theaters in America were independently owned.
A review board chaired by legendary lawyer
This is what happens whenever any government pursues industrial policy: The biggest stakeholders demand to wet their beaks if they're going to go along. The resolution introduced by AOC says it will "invest in the infrastructure and industry of
As my
The lesson of such efforts throughout American history and across the world is that when the government hugs big business, big business hugs back, and its embrace leaves the rest of us in the cold.
The Amazon deal wasn't the opposite of what AOC wants; it was a trial run.
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Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online.