Over here at The American Spectator I posted a review of Sean Hannity’s new book Live Free or Die: America (And The World) On The Brink. It is, as I called it, the necessary book of 2020.
The review was written before the news was announced that Joe Biden had picked the left-leaning California Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-president. But the book is a red flag warning exactly what it would mean if the Biden-Harris ticket were to win this election.
I wanted to take a moment here to focus on two specific Reagan quotes.
First:
“You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well, I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down: [up] man’s old — old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.”
And then this one:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Everything Hannity is warning about in this book – everything Reagan warned about – is epitomized by the Biden-Harris ticket. The Democrats are now on a full speed ahead race to the far, far left. To socialism. A race that will indeed have consequences.
As would be expected, the Republican National Committee was quickly out of the gate with the Harris announcement to point to her record. It includes (but is not limited to!)
– “Eliminating private health insurance
– The $93 trillion Green New Deal
– Decriminalizing illegal border crossings
– Giving illegals taxpayer-funded health care
– A massive tax hike on hardworking Americans.”
I would add to this Biden and Harris’s support for banning fracking, something that would cost some 600,000 jobs in my home state of Pennsylvania alone.
There will be plenty of time to dissect Harris’s record in more detail than this in the next couple of months. The vetting by the American people has begun. But without question, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the epitome of exactly what Hannity is warning about in his book.
Hannity writes:
“The ability of socialism to wreck an economy is actually pretty incredible – its an awesome force of nature, like a tornado or a tsunami.”
Hannity was spot on. An example: the 2008 financial crisis. Writing in The American Spectator, my Reagan White House colleague Peter Wallison went into detail at the time about what caused the crisis. In part, he wrote this:
“….I believe that the sine qua non of the financial crisis was U.S. government housing policy, which led to the creation of 27 million subprime and other risky loans — half of all mortgages in the United States — which were ready to default as soon as the massive 1997-2007 housing bubble began to deflate. If the U.S. government had not chosen this policy path — fostering the growth of a bubble of unprecedented size and an equally unprecedented number of weak and high-risk residential mortgages — the great financial crisis of 2008 would never have occurred.”
Which is to say, the “great recession” of 2008 was directly caused by liberals/left-wingers (think: then-Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) and California’s Maxine Waters) injecting the government into free market housing policy. It was the socialist insistence on inserting the government into U.S. housing policy that, exactly as Hannity is saying in general of socialism, wrecked the American economy exactly as “an awesome force of nature, like a tornado or a tsunami.”
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Over here at – yes, the self-proclaimed “progressive” site Real Economics one finds this in 2019 – when Biden was in disfavor with progressives in a presidential field that included Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The headline:
How Joe Biden helped spark the Global Financial Crash of 2007-2008
It says, in part, this:
“As a Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden was one of the major promoters of the Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BACPA).””
Written by banks and credit card companies being swamped by rapidly rising rates of personal bankruptcy in the early 2000s, BACPA made it much more difficult for individuals to enter formal bankruptcy.
Not surprisingly, it did not occur to American financial and political elites, like Senator Joe Biden, that simply making it more difficult for individuals to declare bankruptcy did absolutely zilch to solve the economic hard times suffered by people who are bankrupt.
So, what do you think people in financial straits did when they can no longer file for bankruptcy?
Yep, folks, lots of them stopped paying their home mortgages. This was especially noticeable at the time for subprime mortgages.
And what did the problems in subprime mortgages cause?
Well, it blew out these fancy financial derivatives based on mortgage loans, called credit default swaps.
And the collapse of credit default swaps brought down Bear Stearns in March 2008, which was followed in September 2008 by the collapses of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and AIG. And it was all downhill from there for the rest of the world economy.”
In other words, to return to Hannity’s warning: “The ability of socialism to wreck an economy is actually pretty incredible – it’s an awesome force of nature, like a tornado or a tsunami.”
Indeed it is. And with the Harris pick, Biden is making it emphatically clear that he and she would be leading the country down the same socialist path that helped Biden and other liberals cause the global financial crash in 2008.
What Sean Hannity has written in Live Free or Die is a crystal clear warning to the unknowing, the unwary, and the uninformed of exactly what is at stake in the 2020 election. While written before the announcement of Harris as Biden’s running mate, Hannity’s book is a roadmap of exactly what this radical socialist ticket would mean for America.
And none of it is good.
