The Pro-Business and Pro-Birth Party

As one who switched from engineering to the social sciences, I quickly understood that I didn't know a damn thing.

I wonder if such jumping across intellectual fields ought to be a requirement for everybody because we will then have far greater intellectual humility than we currently seem to have, which will in turn promote a far greater level of collaboration and cooperation.

Anyway, there I was learning the ABCs of the field, and one of the first ideas that I was drawn to was about market failure.  The market might not always be competitive.  Or, maybe the market is unable to address the issue.  And, therefore, the argument that called for the government to take the lead where the market simply cannot.

Of course, in the Indian context, I had an understanding of these but without the language of market failure.  But, the Indian politics back then had gone way overboard to the extent of killing competition and creating an environment that practically treated the market as the enemy of the people.

Here in America, I came across an ideological position from the other extreme, which argued in favor of the supremacy of the market and that any government intervention will be wasteful.

My intellectual and political interest since those early days in graduate school have been about exploring the combination of market and government.

In this exploration, it has been increasingly disappointing and frustrating that the Republican Party, which supposedly is pro-market and anti-government, is actually merely pro-business.

There is a difference between being pro-business versus being pro-market.  Creating conditions for an economically competitive landscape and maintaining competition means that sometimes, for instance, businesses that are unable to compete will be wiped out.  However, the realpolitik leads Republicans to engage in various anti-competitive practices, from promoting industrial policies to imposing tariffs to tax cuts to ...

The same political party also pretends to be the only one concerned about life.  The anti-abortion messaging is channeled through the party being pro-life.  Here too, the party engages in empty rhetoric.  It is not pro-life but merely pro-birth in making sure that a fertilized egg is carried through to childbirth.  The party is clearly against life when it comes capital punishment, healthcare, guns, ...

Ultimately, it appears that the Republican Party has worked a pretty impressive public relations campaign of supposedly championing life when it does not, and supposedly promoting the market when it is not.  The old joke is that Austria had the best PR ever by making sure that the Austrian-born Hitler was a German and the German-born Beethoven was an Austrian.  It is clear that in the Republican Party we have a better working model of what a fantastic public relations campaign can achieve!