Biden’s anti-capitalist agenda: why the US capitalists support it and the “liberals” are distracted
With the proposal to suspend patents on vaccines, as they are a "common good", President Joe Biden is competing with Pope Francis as the leader of contemporary anti-capitalism. The anti-patent release is in fact only the latest in a long series of pickaxes against the free market system, summarized very well in the speech that the new Catholic and Democratic president gave in front of Congress.
After forty years of White House tenants vowing to lower taxes or at least not raise them, Biden is the first to admit candidly that his program includes a tax increase. He wants taxes on capital gains doubled from the current 20 percent to 39.6 percent. And then a tax rate of 39.6 percent (from the current 37 percent) for households that cumulatively earn more than $ 400,000 a year. If Donald Trump had turned his nose up at his obsession with "buying American", Biden re-launched it in his speech. Therefore, in addition to higher taxes on investments and income, we must also expect more protectionism, therefore more tariffs, duties and customs fees.
And this is only a small part of a plan to finance the largest social and industrial program since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "red decade". The Biden "New Deal" costs the beauty of 6 trillion dollars, three times as much the Italian GDP, equal to about a quarter of the current US one. An ideological program, rather than a pragmatic one, given that the goal is to transform the face of the American market to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero.
But have the entrepreneurs who voted for and financed Biden's election campaign now repent? Are they doing the mea culpa? Are they vowing to vote for the Republicans for the rest of their existence? Judging by their actions, one would say no. On the contrary, they express support and enthusiasm for the new course. At the forefront are the Big Tech companies, the giants of the information economy. YouTube , Twitter and Facebook , as is well known, collaborate with the Democrats as if they were their media arm, censoring Donald Trump. Amazon has openly supported the tax hike for the super-rich. Apple , Coca Cola and MLB (League of Baseball) are engaging in political politics, boycotting Georgia because the local Republicans have proposed a reform of the electoral system. They have decided to increase checks on the identity of voters who send the vote in absence and the Democrats accuse them of "racism", now a passe-partout accusation. It is normal for a political party to make propaganda, less normal for large companies operating in a given territory to boycott that same territory, risking losing customers and jobs.
Why do capitalists support an anti-capitalist agenda? Marx himself could not have explained it. But a fund of (little) rationality exists behind these apparently suicidal policies. As the Wall Street Journal points out with a provocative editorial entitled, " Down with Big Capital, " any entrepreneur who supports Biden's policy has something to gain immediately. Amazon knows it is privileged by tax bonuses on research and development programs. Oil companies embrace the green program in favor of renewable energy: carbon taxes will have a greater impact on the budgets of their smaller competitors, those who had embarked on the shale gas revolution . Competition from Big Tech is easily eliminated by censorship of "hate speech". In short, the anti-capitalist choice pays off, at least in the immediate future, as well as allowing you to give yourself the altruistic image that pleases a woke (conscious) clientele and protects you from political boycotts.
But the medium and long-term consequences will be devastating for all entrepreneurs, large and small. The suspension of the patent, if applied, will hardly improve the diffusion of vaccines in due time (the decision must be taken at WTO level and the negotiation could last longer than the pandemic), even more difficult will it accelerate production (which depends on industrial power in various countries, not from the legal possibility of copying), will certainly improve relations between the US and India (because it was Prime Minister Modi, in this period of crisis, who asked for it) and would cost relatively little to Big Pharma , even if Pfizer announces its opposition .
But beyond the "good figure" of altruist, the message for the future is bad. Without the incentive of intellectual property, who will have the most interest in achieving ambitious and costly goals, such as making a vaccine for a new disease in less than a year? The collapse of the shares of pharmaceuticals on the stock market, immediately after Biden's statements, already gives a practical answer to our question. And the same goes for Biden's other anti-capitalist reforms: more taxes, bans and public spending will reduce competition in the short term, but in the long run they will also discourage the big oligopolists who currently dominate the market.
Defenders of the free market should make themselves heard precisely in historical periods like this, as the first voice of the opposition. Instead they are strangely distracted. In the US, the leading libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute , which in the Trump era contested every single decision and critically downsized its pro-market decisions, is strangely tolerant with Biden. It even justifies its anti-patent discourse . A bit of the same attitude that the liberals who support Mario Draghi have in Italy (and who never missed an opportunity to speak ill of Trump on the US): a strange idea of capitalism, the one that lives on the guilt of the capitalists and on the blessing / protection of the winning political party.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/lagenda-anti-capitalista-di-biden-perche-i-capitalisti-usa-la-appoggiano-e-i-liberali-sono-distratti/ on Mon, 10 May 2021 04:02:00 +0000.