Steve Forbes explains in the latest issue of Forbes magazine why there’s nothing particularly progressive about self-professed “progressives.”
FAR-LEFT DEMOCRATS call themselves “progressives” these days, but they’re actually reactionaries who favor the few against the many. Here are several of the endless examples.
– Schools. We’ve known since the early 1980s, when the Education Department released a landmark report on the subject, that American public schools have been providing a subpar to disastrous education, especially to kids from low-income households. Naturally, the teachers unions have fiercely resisted reforms, particularly giving parents the right to choose to send their children to the schools that best fit their particular needs. Whenever parents chained to rotten school systems have the opportunity to exercise school choice, they seize it. Shamelessly, progressives always side with the unions against the needs of the children, thereby blighting opportunities for youngsters who need them most. …
… – Progress. Progressives hate it. A federal judge in San Francisco, of all places, has–with dubious reasoning–given the green light to a lawsuit that’s designed to destroy Uber’s model. New York Mayor “Bolshevik Bill” de Blasio is still waging war against Uber and similar services, despite initial setbacks in his efforts to strangle them. (De Blasio, remember, spent his honeymoon in the workers’ paradise of Havana, Cuba.)
Look at Barack Obama’s success in pushing the FCC to impose sweeping–and innovation-suffocating–regulations on the Internet that are based on a framework designed for rotary-dial telephones. Already capital spending in this space is being scaled back or put on hold until court challenges are adjudicated. Should it wish to, the FCC now has the power to force you to get government permission in order to start a website.
– Health care. ObamaCare is giving us higher costs and less choice in terms of hospitals and specialists. The quality of care for Medicaid users continues to decline. Instead of being chagrined, progressives whine that we should totally socialize medicine, which would lead to longer and longer waits for specialists and surgeries, less innovation in new devices and medicines and more political involvement in who gets scarce care (socialism always means shortages) as people age.
