Today in Capital Matters: Censorship and MMT – National Review

Robert Bork Jr. criticizes the bipartisan consensus that is emerging on Capitol Hill around censorship on social media:

Big Tech today represents the greatest accumulation of power market power and monopoly power over information that the world has ever seen, Cruz said in a Senate hearing last year. They behave as if they are completely unaccountable. And at times they behave more like nation states than private companies. . . . When it comes to content moderation, they are absolutely a black box. They refuse to answer questions.

All of which makes one wonder: How could it escape this inarguably bright man that he voted to bring a bill to the Senate floor that would subject American business to socialism and make Big Tech social-media companies more woke and dedicated to the censorship of conservatives than ever before?

The bill that Cruz voted to forward in the Senate Judiciary Committee is Senator Amy Klobuchars American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Despite Klobuchars breathless references to her bill as being sweeping, she did not allow it to be subjected to a committee hearing and expert witnesses. If Klobuchar had, other senators would have learned just how sweeping it is. . . .

Jonathan Deluty writes about the political problems with Modern Monetary Theory:

There is a very good reason that fiscal and monetary policy should be kept separate. Monetizing the debt so that the government can put (allegedly) idle resources to use would quickly lead to hyperinflation, which (as mentioned above) the MMT crowd would solve with the only tool at hand: raising taxes. This entails the government, which created the inflation by overspending, having to seize an even greater percentage of control over the economy by taking money away from citizens.

MMTs vision assumes that Congress would, once granted the ability to monetize debt and effectively spend unlimited amounts of newly printed money, spend right up until the economy reaches full employment. At that point, the same political body currently blaming corporate greed rather than itself for increased coffee prices would turn off the money spigot, with no concern for the interest groups reliant on newly created government programs.

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Today in Capital Matters: Censorship and MMT - National Review