The Capitalist League: Why Is a GOP Senator Brandishing Hammer and Sickle Against Tech?
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) speaks with reporters about Iran and a potential Senate impeachment trial. |
“Even worse, there is truculent talk in some circles about changing the law governing online content to hold companies like Google, Facebook or Twitter liable for material posted there by users.
“Doing that would effectively ‘break’ the Internet.
“Unclear how many of our Senators and Congressmen grasp this key fact.”
Freshman Republican U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, knows that his jihad against successful internet companies would, if enacted, break the internet. What’s worse? He revels in the prospect of breaking the internet.
Emily Stewart writing at the stylishly leftish Vox's Recode just before last Halloween observed:
“For good.” Or ill, if you prefer the prosperity free markets bring to the heavy hand of Big Government.
Even that curmudgeonly dissident George Will has gone to town on Hawley. Recently, in “ Josh Hawley sounds like he has too much faith in government” Will steals a phrase from William F. Buckley to ridicule Sen. Hawley’s ridiculous anti-tech posturing. Will calls Hawley: “a pyromaniac in a field of straw men. Through the smoke of burning straw one can see in Hawley’s social diagnosis the belief, held by many progressives and an increasing number of conservatives, that individualism, as expressed in and enabled by capitalism, is making Americans neither better off nor better.”
Will then deftly wields facts to humiliate Hawley’s misguided arguments against liberty, individualism, and capitalism.
Will is not alone in his contempt for Josh Hawley. My friend and sometimes colleague George Gilder, author of “Wealth and Poverty,” the bible of Reaganomics, founder of the Discovery Institute, distinguished futurist, wrote of Hawley:
… “A communitarian desire to deny the claims and accomplishments of individuals easily glides into socialism, or worse. In his short career in the Senate, Hawley has not been able to resist the temptation.
… “If telephone companies had been liable for any hate speakers or news fakers using their lines, we would still be communicating by some upgraded pony express. If providers of internet platforms had been required to ensure that no lies, frauds, hate speech or fake news passed through their facilities, they could not have functioned at all. There would be no internet.”
As for me, I’m an old school small government conservative. I was a Reagan White House junior official. I went on to become a Tea Party leader. I remain, as chairman of The Capitalist League, a passionate, full spectrum conservative.
As a small-government conservative I favor having the rhetorical torches and pitchforks in the hands of the people, not the politicians. The spectacle of powerful Republicans brandishing the hammer of antitrust and the sickle of regulation over the heads of some of America’s greatest companies is confounding. Companies such as Google and Facebook are part of what makes America great.
Sen. Hawley? You don’t have to be anti-free-enterprise to be pro-family. Stop crying victim and stop pushing Big Government. That’s the progressives’ game. It is conduct unbecoming for you to play it.
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Ralph Benko is Chairman, The Capitalist League and co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto." He is is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution and contributor to the ARRA News Service.
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Ralph Benko is Chairman, The Capitalist League and contributor to the ARRA News Service..
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