In a State of the Union speech filled with whoppers, President Joe Biden’s biggest was, “I’m a capitalist.”
Not only did Biden claim to be what he’s not, but he then spent an hour and a half giving America examples proving that he’s not. Biden’s vision of capitalism is nothing more than statism financed by the private sector. For him, capitalism is not a driver of economic growth but the funder of government growth.
This became apparent midway through his speech, amid another of his soak-the-rich rants that sounded like it had been written by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Revealingly, Biden declared, “I grew up in a home where not a lot trickled down on my dad’s kitchen table.” Biden’s takeaway from boyhood apparently was to get away and stay away from the private sector. He has done so with unparalleled success. Effectively, Biden has never held a private sector job — and apparently never will. He’s played just about every role there is in the public sector, from public defender to county council to U.S. Senate to vice president to president.
There’s no little irony in having someone who’s effectively never worked in the private sector telling the nation how the private sector works. Indeed, what Biden’s speech told us is that he thinks the private sector should work for the public sector.
Biden’s vision, and his administration’s mission, is the government dictating to the private sector. But that’s not capitalism.
Attempting to elevate himself and the government’s role, he said, “Four years ago next week, before I came to office, our country was hit by the worst pandemic and the worst economic crisis in a century.” What he failed to mention was that the most significant factor in that “economic crisis’s” depth and duration was the government-imposed shutdowns that triggered it in the first place. And one of the biggest economic problems he mentioned during his speech was inflation, something that started on his watch, reached a 40-year high (9.1% in June 2022) on his watch, and was greatly stoked by his excessive spending that is estimated to have resulted in $7.4 trillion in deficits and debt over his four years.
Where capitalism does exist, Biden railed against it: “Once again, Wall Street didn’t build this country!” He went on to blame surging prices, caused by the inflation he acknowledged, on the markets. “Too many corporations raise their prices to pad their profits, charging you more and more for less and less,” he claimed.
In place of free-market pricing, Biden wants price-fixing, extolling efforts against what he called “price gouging or deceptive pricing” across the economy “from food to healthcare to housing.” That these are no more than empty demagogic efforts that will only result in worse problems over time, such as lost innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, is a point he neglected to mention.
And, of course, Biden wants to tax capitalism more because those he deems rich don’t “pay your fair share in taxes.”
Where Biden sees capitalism as working is when it is government-directed. Throughout his speech, he lauded program after program of government spending that he euphemistically labeled “investment.” In the process, he claimed job creation: “Creating tens of thousands of clean-energy jobs, like the IBEW workers building and installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.” Yet this money was not flowing to such endeavors on its own accord, because Americans refuse to embrace his expensive and unreliable green energy initiatives.
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As Biden admitted throughout his speech, he is as far from a capitalist as you can get. This is exactly what he has sought and accomplished all his life. What he does is coopt capitalism’s terms — job creation, investment — to cover his big government, big spending, big taxing, and big deficit and debt approach.
In the end, Biden does not know what capitalism is, beyond being a scapegoat for his government-centric approach’s problems, economic crisis and inflation, and his funding source for pursuing more of the same. And Biden only knows what government is because that is all he has ever been, all he has ever known, and it is his solution to every question.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
