Excellent Article from FreedomWorks (Old) Criticizing Hawley

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Hawley is a social conservative and economic moderate.

I would put Hawley to the left of most of the Dems elected in 2018.

Its where the GOP base is at though. Most fiscally conservative base voters live in trendy, fast growing metros and are either being transformed by immigration, transformed by generational change (with millennials desperate for gov't action on student loan debt and climate), or being alienated themselves for whatever reason. There just isn't vast tracts of endless suburbia ready to crawl over broken glass to vote Republican up and down the ballot anymore.

There is endless swaths of hollowed out middle America, rural areas, small towns, ex-manufacturing enclaves, and working class non-college white suburbs that are more than willing to because they hate the Democrats on immigration, energy/environment, and social issues. It just so happens these people want their social security, their medicare, healthcare and good paying jobs.

Chase a phantom of the past or evolve to meet the needs of the real tangible voting blocks (be it those new voters in the suburbs or the old ones in the rural areas), the direction markers are point the same direction.

Reality is unraveling the lie that conservatives have told themselves for the past 30 years about static ideologies advancing static agendas. The economy is constantly evolving and the policies have to be just as dynamic or the voters will eventually cast those advocating the static boilerplate to the dustbin of history.

Large numbers of voters loved higher tariffs in 1860 and 1896, not so much in 1932. Reaganism was the new thing on the block in 1980 just like Protectionism was in the 19th century and it benefited the growth region and that region reacted by powering its majorities. Eventually though the dynamic shifts, tariffs became a hindrance to exports and once that became painfully exposed, it was washed away in an instance. I expect the same to happen to supply side tax cutting.

Conservatism will be just fine and will exist forever but the exact policies that were popular and benefited the growth region in 1980 are a chapter in a book people will read about decades from now, with several more coming after it. When it worked, and then when it didn't work anymore.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Hawley is a social conservative and economic moderate.

I would put Hawley to the left of most of the Dems elected in 2018.

Its where the GOP base is at though. Most fiscally conservative base voters live in trendy, fast growing metros and are either being transformed by immigration, transformed by generational change (with millennials desperate for gov't action on student loan debt and climate), or being alienated themselves for whatever reason. There just isn't vast tracts of endless suburbia ready to crawl over broken glass to vote Republican up and down the ballot anymore.

There is endless swaths of hollowed out middle America, rural areas, small towns, ex-manufacturing enclaves, and working class non-college white suburbs that are more than willing to because they hate the Democrats on immigration, energy/environment, and social issues. It just so happens these people want their social security, their medicare, healthcare and good paying jobs.

Chase a phantom of the past or evolve to meet the needs of the real tangible voting blocks (be it those new voters in the suburbs or the old ones in the rural areas), the direction markers are point the same direction.

Reality is unraveling the lie that conservatives have told themselves for the past 30 years about static ideologies advancing static agendas. The economy is constantly evolving and the policies have to be just as dynamic or the voters will eventually cast those advocating the static boilerplate to the dustbin of history.

Large numbers of voters loved higher tariffs in 1860 and 1896, not so much in 1932. Reaganism was the new thing on the block in 1980 just like Protectionism was in the 19th century and it benefited the growth region and that region reacted by powering its majorities. Eventually though the dynamic shifts, tariffs became a hindrance to exports and once that became painfully exposed, it was washed away in an instance. I expect the same to happen to supply side tax cutting.

Conservatism will be just fine and will exist forever but the exact policies that were popular and benefited the growth region in 1980 are a chapter in a book people will read about decades from now, with several more coming after it. When it worked, and then when it didn't work anymore.

Do you think Hawley would actually campaign on raising federal income taxes?!

I could more reasonably see the next Republican president imposing a federal VAT.  That goes pretty hand in hand with protectionism.

Hardly, evolution occurs in small steps.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Hawley is a social conservative and economic moderate.

I would put Hawley to the left of most of the Dems elected in 2018.

Its where the GOP base is at though. Most fiscally conservative base voters live in trendy, fast growing metros and are either being transformed by immigration, transformed by generational change (with millennials desperate for gov't action on student loan debt and climate), or being alienated themselves for whatever reason. There just isn't vast tracts of endless suburbia ready to crawl over broken glass to vote Republican up and down the ballot anymore.

There is endless swaths of hollowed out middle America, rural areas, small towns, ex-manufacturing enclaves, and working class non-college white suburbs that are more than willing to because they hate the Democrats on immigration, energy/environment, and social issues. It just so happens these people want their social security, their medicare, healthcare and good paying jobs.

Chase a phantom of the past or evolve to meet the needs of the real tangible voting blocks (be it those new voters in the suburbs or the old ones in the rural areas), the direction markers are point the same direction.

Reality is unraveling the lie that conservatives have told themselves for the past 30 years about static ideologies advancing static agendas. The economy is constantly evolving and the policies have to be just as dynamic or the voters will eventually cast those advocating the static boilerplate to the dustbin of history.

Large numbers of voters loved higher tariffs in 1860 and 1896, not so much in 1932. Reaganism was the new thing on the block in 1980 just like Protectionism was in the 19th century and it benefited the growth region and that region reacted by powering its majorities. Eventually though the dynamic shifts, tariffs became a hindrance to exports and once that became painfully exposed, it was washed away in an instance. I expect the same to happen to supply side tax cutting.

Conservatism will be just fine and will exist forever but the exact policies that were popular and benefited the growth region in 1980 are a chapter in a book people will read about decades from now, with several more coming after it. When it worked, and then when it didn't work anymore.

Better dead than red. If conservatism doesn't include fiscal, than it is not a place for the 60% of Republicans who define as fiscally conservative, and it certainly doesn't include me. I'd still never vote D for baby killers, but if it's one statist party vs another the American experiment has failed.

America was industrialized under a policy of protectionism, internal subsidies and land grant colleges.

How can you judge a 250 year old country a failure, based on the failure of an economic agenda that is just 40 years old? Are you saying that America was a "red" country prior to 1980? This would come as quite a shock to Calvin Coolidge, Ike and especially Richard Nixon.

I divide it into periods like this:
1860-1896 - Protectionism+Internal Subsidies (mainly for railroads, but also land for farmers)
1896-1932 - Protectionism+Lassiez Faire (Yes, Wilson and TR don't neatly fit this paradigm but the 1920s does and so does McKinley)
1932 - 1980 - Free Trade+Keynesianism
1980 - ? - Free Trade+Supply Side Economics

Of course there were exceptions to this naturally and the years are somewhat arbitrary, but it illustrates the point just how short term these economic policy cycles are, 36 to 48 years in length and typically book ended by a Depression/Recession that reshapes people's understanding of how policies benefit them in reality.

Values are not policies. The values can guide policy, but the policy should not be mistaken for values, clinged to inflexibly. If that were the case, then Reagan would have never overcome Keynesian economics himself. The situation on the ground dictated that result. Likewise, the situation now dictates difference means.

Plus I don't think it will be the same level of statism, far from it. Also its worth noting that Hawley is at this point mostly positioning with little substance or accomplishment to back it up. So I wouldn't be hitting the panic button of him, but it should validate my years old predictions, the fact that he has calculated as much and is positioning himself accordingly is solid evidence that is where possible contenders think things are heading.

Also fiscally conservative is not the same as supporting supply side. In fact I would point out that pre-Reagan, "fiscal conservatives" opposed deficit funded tax cuts because their priority was removing the debt not cutting taxes.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

No, America was industrialized by men like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockerfeller. It was not land grant colleges that built the Erie Canal, or the steel mills of Pennsylvania. It was not internal subsidies (save for the selling off of land) that built the oil drills of Texas.

So does anyone else see the problem here? Just because "one" of the above listed policies didn't apply, doesn't refute the overall point. What I said was, we were industrialized under 1. Protectionism, 2. Internal Subsidies and 3. Land Grant Colleges. This is not in any way factually inaccurate, these policies existed at the time. Mistakingly drawing the lines connecting what policies benefited which development doesn't change that. Subsidies benefited railroads and thus benefited steel. Tariffs protected a range of industries from foreign competition (mainly from Britain during this period) and then of course the Land grant colleges are a more generalized impact, but education and importantly technical education were critical to the development and advancement of industry. We take this for granted in an era when computers and internet are what we think of as technology, but industrialization required a range of skills both in terms of college and non-college in origin, engineers, architects, a range of sciences, not to mention the vast growth in what we now call white collar jobs that these industries tend to create in law, finance, accounting, banking etc.

Yes entrepreneurship was important and I would be the first to point that out, but the idea that the 19th century was some kind of lassiez-faire paradise belies the reality that America was basically operating under a water down form of state capitalism for much of the second half of the 19th century and yet it was during this period that the American Economy surged past everyone else. Yes freedom and entrepreneurship were critical, but it wasn't freedom that built the Transcontinental or the Erie Canal. It was Gov't intervention (the latter being at the state level but same idea), operating under a framework of economic nationalism. The same vein of thought that Josh Hawley is operating under.

And what Josh Hawley calls for is not just protectionism. Protectionism is the governmental picking of winners and losers. It is shameful economic interference that harms consumers and businesses alike. But we have dealt with it before, and will deal with it again if it becomes an issue. Nay, the issue with Josh Hawley is that he calls for big government, and of the sort that only once in your listing of economic timeframes has ever appeared before. But now is not 1946. It is not 1947. We are not alone in the ruins of a post war world, with America alone as an economic superpower. We live in an increasingly globalized world, where Hawley's big government, just like Roosevelt's big government did with the second spike in 1938, will inevitably harm and burn our country like a chimp with a machine gun. And when they do, it remains to be seen if there is any last resistance. In the 60s, in the 70s, and the 80s, we were lucky enough to be saved by courageous conservatives, men and women like Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schafly, and Ronald Reagan. But with partisanship and demographics today, who is to say that we can pull that off a second time? If the Manchurian Candidate wins, who is to say that we will be so lucky again? Who is to say that the values our great nation was founded upon, of the right to life, of the right to liberty, of the right to property, of the right to the pursuit of happiness, will survive?

When you have a captured market to the point that you can raise prices with no natural restraints except demand dropping and in this case demand dropping meaning bodies are hitting the floor, yea I think that is a good case for price controls. That is not a free market that is functionally a monopoly where the only countervailing natural force is letting people die in the streets. Sorry that is not a recipe for a stable society, nor trust in the free market and if you want to turn America Communist, there is no greater way to provoke that than letting the desperation fester and growth, which will create pressure points for inevitable action. As people get more desperate, they will eventually just elect people who will create an NHS system that dictates prices to the market and they either take it or leave it. Don't want that to occur? Then perhaps you should listen to people like me when we tell you this is to avert that inevitability.

Whenever conservatives rest on the laurels or innate goodness of things they think are unbreakable, they will be disappointed every time. Russia was the most religious country on earth in 1917, all it took was hunger and war weariness and the despair that both created to lead them to atheistic communism. Historical lesson: Hunger and war exhaustion will overcome any historical bonds including America's "love for freedom". You can just as easily throw in lack of health care with hunger because it operates the same way.

People need food to survive, and they need health care to survive as well. Especially if they are diabetic, or have some other disease that means they need ongoing health "maintenance" to survive. You cannot say to them they need to get a job to get healthcare meanwhile their ability to work is actively being degraded by their lack of access to health care. I have seen relatives lose their ability to work because they had to work with a degenerative condition, without treatment and this took them out of the workforce years earlier than and in one case led to an early death.

You cannot treat health care like any other "market place" because the decline in demand means that behind those numbers someone is dying, someone is being made unable to work and someone is being left without a father or a mother (what was all of that stuff about single parent homes leading to worse societal outcomes? It applies here to, those rules don't magically stop applying because a medical condition took them away as opposed to a father running off to get milk and never coming back).

Natural demand thus can never restrain prices and thus companies have what I call a "captured market" and can charge whatever they want. That is not a "free" market, that is a hostage situation, especially if they hold the patent and only they can make that medicine. As far as this is concerned, I think Hawley's position is both right and get this "MORE CONSERVATIVE" then the libertarian alternative, which just will turn more people to socialism out of desperation (political reactions tend to follow Newtonian laws of physics, at least equal and opposite reaction).

Conservatism is not about smaller government (that is only part of achieving a larger objective). It is about preserving stable institutions and stable families. To the extent government is in the way, that needs to change, but the to the extent that nothing short of gov't can alter a situation, like the hostage like environment in the health care market place, they should take action.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

There is more to the world than socialism and "free market".

Just because you acknowledge the need for regulation and the need to reign in captured markets doesn't make you a socialist, it makes you a capitalist because you are trying to save capitalism from the monopolistic practices that in almost every case has led to the rise of socialist movements.

I think it is very presumptuous to say "policies we know to be right". If policies are right, then they should work and yet look at what they have done. We are now pushing 40 years since the implementation of supply side economics. Over that time we have witnessed, the hollowing out of middle America, the decline of families, the opioid epidemic and one of the largest wealth gaps in the history of the country. You say productivity has grown massively and yet that is because computers and robots can spit out more per-capita production meanwhile the former factor workers sit on disability, food stamps and social security and are voting for Donald Trump over Ted Cruz. You have created your own big gov't base.

I have reached the point where gluing yourself to one set of policies regardless of context is a recipe for disaster. Reagonomics might have worked in the 1970's into the 1980's, but there are points where you also need to build new infrastructure, incentivize new industries and work to maintain and even at times preserve the ones you have. It also means ensuring that market competition works to reign in prices and where it don't, prioritize the price minimization not low regulation for the sake of low regulation even as prices for patent restricted live saving drugs shoot up 12,000% because the declining to buy is a ticket to the funeral home (that is a not a free market, that is how the mafia works).

"Know to be right". Like I said before, the established policy for this country for over a century was infant-industry protectionism. Embargo of 1807, War of 1812, Tariff of 1816, Morrill Tarrif of 1860 and so on until Smoot-Hawley, America went from an economic backwater to the largest industrial power on earth by protecting its new industries from existing-foreign competition. It failed to continue to work, because the economics changed and we were now the dominant producer hence the need for open markets and exports and a move away from protectionism.

Yet if you read the likes of the magazines and writers mentioned above, they just want to pretend that this happened because muh freedom and want to pretend as if these policies either didn't exist or it happened in spite of them. I don't think that is historically accurate and I think the big problem with Reagonomics is that it is at war with both the reality on the ground and the unbiased historical record.

Tax cuts were completely irrelevant prior to Wilson, there were no taxes to cut. Small Gov't didn't appeal to many businesses only to Western and Southern agrarians, meanwhile big business wanted those tariffs preserved, a navy to protect their foreign trade and roads, canals, railroads to haul freight. Even in the 1920's, domestic tax cuts were paired with tariff increases. Small gov't only decidedly entered the conservative language in the Wilsonian and New Deal era. Fiscal conservatism is ancient it just means you are paying for what you spend and not borrowing money. Supply side tax cutting is just 40 years old, a policy designed to respond to stagflation, a problem that hasn't existed for forty years.

Too often we exchange policy for principle, cling to policy regardless of context in the name of principle, and then are shocked when people reject it and seek answers from real lefties and even real socialists. Economic policy has to be dynamic because the economy itself is always changing. What worked 40 years ago, won't necessarily work today. It doesn't mean you are abandoning capitalism, or embracing socialism, just because you have a contextualized policy designed to fit and resolve problems as they exist now.

As for John McCain voting no on ACA repeal. Remember that there are people dependent on that program now, including a lot of rural hospitals and those with pre-existing conditions. He determined that Congress wouldn't have the balls to do the right thing to transition those people and while the rhetoric of "pull it off quick like a bandaid" and other abstract platitudes might sound great to someone who doesn't have to worry about it, it basically amounts to telling several groups of people "we are going to vote to remove your lifeline, but don't worry, we are going to come back and fix it for you later". This line coming from the same group of people that never stops saying how you cannot trust the government.

This is the problem with the whole swath of Paul Ryan Republicanism, all this think thank garbage that sounds so great in a text book, a classroom and a news article written for the investor class, it doesn't pass the smell test for the average lower middle or working class Catholic in Ohio for whom it actually has to work (and whom you are dependent on for your votes I must add). This is why I say the Republicans are a Georgetown leadership running a party heavily dependent on ex-manufacturing hubs.

ACA got tied up in the same mess. They couldn't come up with a plan to protect the hospitals or adequately protect those with pre-existing conditions. I would also note that Rand Paul objected to several bills that might have satisfied the concerns about hospitals and got Collins/Murko on board, but no one complains about his grandstanding getting in the way, it is only John McCain's failure to vote for a practically blank piece of paper that said, "ACA Sucks, repeal ffs".

John McCain is not the reason that ACA repeal failed. ACA repeal failed, because Republican politicians are a bunch of lazy, brain dead lemmings who know only how to spew talking points and couldn't legislate their way out of an out house. Everyone is too afraid to think, because the minute you think for yourself, you get nuked and replaced by another think tank shill. That is why ideological obstructionists like Paul get a pass, while blasting away Murkowski and Collins for their obstruction in the name of  daring to care more their own state's interests then whatever crap was being churned out by freedom works hacks.