Cato’s Dan Mitchell Strikes Fear

Cato Institute Senior Fellow, Dan Mitchell

Originally posted on February 26, 2015.

With the 2016 elections now on every politician’s mind, what is a politician’s worst nightmare? As always, it is the deathly fear that the voters have finally caught on to the fraud of Republican and Democrat big government!

The post 1914 Big Government sham, running from Wilson through FDR, Johnson, George W. Bush and Obama, has pulled the financial rug from under the middle class. Moreover, a continuous psychopathic foreign policy intervention strategy has made America less safe and less prosperous.

The Cato Institute is clearly America’s home base for reason, logic and a battle plan for the way forward. My friend and Cato scholar Dan Mitchell has a formula for America that will send a chill down the spine of big government proponents like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Dan Mitchell wants to shut down the Department of Education, end Federal involvement and intervention, get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Transportation.

Dr. Mitchell writes of how rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic never works and, instead, focuses laser-like on the debacles of Bush’s no-bureaucrat-left behind and Obama’s Common Core. Dan Mitchell closes with this obvious sore point: “To be sure, there’s no realistic way of making significant progress with Obama in the White House.”

I would add the name Jeb Bush to the rogues gallery list of no realistic-wayers.

So where do Americans turn? In Europe, as I have increasingly witnessed in recent years, it is hard line, anti-radical Muslim immigration and strongly nationalistic third-party candidates like FN’s Marine Le Pen who are gaining steady traction against the old-line party dogs like France’s Francois Hollande. Americans need a third-party option where a reform leader can make the case to all Americans that it is long past time to seal our borders against third-world illegals and potential immigrants from the radical Muslim world. Such a candidate would call for an end to the American foreign policy based on intervention and nation building that has made, as Cato’s Chris Preble writes, America less safe and less prosperous. (See my series on Preble and his philosophy here: I, II, III). Such a candidate would marshal in a broad-based states-oriented plan to help close the income equality gap by empowering America’s jobs creators (small business owners) especially in the field of technology and innovation. The U.S. tax code would be dumped with a crossover to a flat tax system that would end the double taxation of dividends, the capital gains tax, and the estate tax. Job growth, and I refer to high-paying job growth, would explode as America’s small business innovators were freed of the shackles of confiscatory taxation and choking federal government regulation.

As American music legend Al Kooper writes in his lyrics “it’s a brand new day,” it could unfold for America.