The 2020 Democrats, hell-bent on implementing their policies at all costs, are promising a bevy of new executive orders in case they win the presidency.
Most recently, Elizabeth Warren announced an executive order plan on Friday to increase wages for women of color. The policy would require all companies with a federal contract to comply with a laundry list of qualifications, including diversity quotas and a $15 minimum wage. Though these requirements may promote social justice, “just” is not a word I would use to describe Warren’s remarkably unfair policies.
As Friedrich Hayek pointed out, social justice demands actual injustice: the unequal treatment of individuals. Warren’s plan would bring about precisely that. Her race and gender quotas would require employers to elevate less competent workers due to color or sex while turning away more competent workers because of biological characteristics they cannot control. Usually we would call such actions racist and sexist, because that’s exactly what they are.
The Left has come to redefine racism and sexism not as hatred of or discrimination against people based on race or sex, but as something dependent upon the color and sex of those in power. And note that it doesn’t matter whether the particular white person or male you discriminate against actually has power or privilege. It’s enough that those who have power and privilege tend to be white and male. That alone makes all abuse of whites and men into a tool for the greater good, according to the social justice crowd. “Justice” is now about punishing people for past social ills they personally had no hand in creating.
Warren’s plan would also have the federal government discriminate against businesses located in rural areas where the cost of living is lower. For example, these businesses would find it most challenging to pay all of their employees $15 an hour. It doesn’t take an economist to see that holding businesses in Iowa and businesses in New York City to an identical wage requirement is remarkably foolish.
Kamala Harris has her own executive order lined up in the area of guns. Just last week, she tweeted, “When elected president, I will give Congress 100 days to put a gun safety bill on my desk for signature. And if they don’t, I will take executive action.” She wants several policy changes, including universal background checks and a so-called assault weapon ban, which would prohibit the importation of assault weapons. However, “assault weapon” is a meaningless term that in practice means scary-looking guns, regardless of functionality. She also promised to prohibit fugitives from purchasing firearms, but as my colleague Becket Adams pointed out last week, that law is already on the books. Harris’ executive order would get around some of the privacy rights of gun owners by redefining who counts as a gun dealer under federal law to include anyone who sells five guns in a year.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has promised to reverse all of President Trump’s immigration and border security policies. Cory Booker raised Sanders and said he would “virtually eliminate immigrant detention” through executive order on day one of his presidency. This would include an effort to “phase out contracting with private prison facilities,” although private facilities (which aren’t prisons) are actually more financially efficient than government ones. Additionally, immigrants in detention centers would experience even worse conditions without private facilities to help carry the load, unless we’re just supposed to let millions of unchecked people loose into the country.
The 2020 Democrats aren’t just proposing radical policy ideas, they’re selling empty promises they know they can’t deliver on. If the candidates continue to push each other further left, the winner of the nomination may be unable to scramble back toward the center in time to beat Trump.
