Wanted: A Few Good RINOs

Audrey Fahlberg’s interview of the Kari Lake is excellent. Lake is the Trump Party’s Arizona Senate candidate — i.e., MAGA’s most determined effort yet to surrender Barry Goldwater’s state to the radical Left. Audrey moves Lake through a number of topics, one relevant to the next, so that as Lake dilates, her incoherence is increasingly obvious.

Lake, of course, spouts the new, Trumpy GOP’s insistence that Washington must not touch the principal drivers of deficit and debt, Social Security and Medicare. If you’re keeping score, it used to be that Republicans who took this fiscally irresponsible position were known as “RINOs” — the “Republican in Name Only” epithet hurled at faux conservatives seduced by Democratic policy preferences. In today’s GOP, if you take the conservative position that we have an obligation to address our problems before they become catastrophes, you are a RINO because “Republican” is measured by adoption of Trump’s erratic, “transactional” preferences, not fidelity to conservative principles and fiscal probity.

Having rejected any possibility of addressing the root problem, Lake is asked how, then, she proposes to pursue what she portrays as her priorities of cutting the deficit and checking inflation. Here’s her answer, a Kamala-esque word salad that finally hits its stride with economic illiteracy:

Well it’s going to be difficult. I mean, we’re in a dire situation, I don’t think there’s a lot we can do. This is gonna be difficult to pull ourselves out of this. And we’re gonna have to get very creative. And I’m not going to be able to sit here in three minutes and tell you how we’re going to fix the problem. If it were a problem we can fix in three minutes, it probably would have been fixed, but we’re certainly not going to do it on the backs of the hard-working American citizens who have worked hard and paid into this. I think a lot of the things we need to do is increase revenues by bringing manufacturing, home bringing back some high-paying jobs. All of the things that Joe Biden has done have hurt American workers. He’s on the verge of sending our auto industry overseas with these EVs to China. President Trump wants to make sure we’re keeping those good jobs here. We need to bring and reshore some companies in manufacturing and get some jobs that are actually paying Americans a good living wage, where they’re able to then pay into the system and pay into taxes.

Here’s an idea: Perhaps Lake could make time — between loathsomely insulting Nikki Haley and pushing supporters of exiting moderate Senator Kyrsten Sinema into the arms of progressive Democrat Ruben Gallego — to read Dominic Pino, who explains why “the idea that manufacturing is in need of special attention from the government is based on assumptions that are not true.”

Dominic illustrates that manufacturing was hit hard when the overall economy was hit hard by the 2008-09 recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, and it has gradually rebounded as the economy recovered. As he elaborates, there’s no evident correlation between manufacturing value-added in a nation’s economy and that economy’s growth rate. Moreover, he writes:

The idea of the need to “reshore” to make the economy more “resilient” is backward. The Economist says, “Research published last year by the IMF suggests that greater self-sufficiency is likely to leave countries more vulnerable to future shocks, rather than less.” You shouldn’t need IMF research to confirm what should be common sense. Depending on a global network of suppliers rather than only domestic ones means more competition and less reliance on any single supplier, making the system more flexible and responsive to shocks that inevitably arise. The 98-percent-domestic baby-formula market isn’t very resilient.

I don’t really have much hope that Kari Lake will be won over to Capital Matters free-market, pro-growth economics. But if there is to be a Republican Party worth having, it will need to be.