“Capitalism isn’t working for a lot of people,” said The New York Times’s David Brooks on MSNBC’s Meet The Press, implying that the status quo of the health insurance market was largely free prior to the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Brooks pushed the false premise of Republicans as too supportive of laissez-faire economics, framing them as trapped within a supposedly philosophical pro-market versus pro-government conundrum. Casting Republicans as anarchists by implication, he said the GOP must reconcile its supposedly Randian values with “some form” of support a state:
“I would just say the Republicans are at a historical pivot where we used to have this old argument; the government versus the state, or the market versus the state. And [the argument was] was pro-government [versus] small government. Now, the social fabric is decaying. Capitalism isn’t working for a lot of people.
So if you want to be pro-market, you’ve got to people the security [sic] so they can compete in the market. And you have to use the state to give them that security. And so therefore if you want to be pro-market, you got to be pro-government at least in some form. And Republicans are caught in that historical pivot.”
No Republicans openly support anarchy via abolition of the state.
Brooks chastised Republicans with class warfare rhetoric, deriding “tax cuts for the rich” while speaking nebulously of the tearing of “social fabric.” The proposed American Health Care Act (AHCA), he added, would crush lower-income people by insufficiently redistributing wealth towards the ends of economic egalitarianism.
Republicans had to make a choice between helping their voters or remaining “the party of the rich,” said Brooks:
“Yeah. No. Well, here’s what I don’t get about what’s going on this week. We just had 2016, an election about the working class–election where we learned that a lot of people are out of the job market. The social fabric is fraying. And so the lesson is pay attention and help these people.
So the Republican Party could help these people with market-based mechanisms, which I support. Do they do that? No. They have huge tax cuts for the rich. This investment income tax credit only goes to people [with annual incomes above $250K]. And that has been stable in all the plans that they’ve come up with and thrown around.
And meanwhile they’re throwing 8, 10, 15 million people off the rolls. So it’s declaring war on their own voters. And then there’s a wing of the party that’s saying, ‘No, that’s too much. We need to totally decimate them.’ So the Republican Party has to figure out, “Are we going to help our voters? Or are we still the party that, you know, we’re still going to be the party of the rich?”
At no point did Brooks acknowledge the difference between health insurance via legislation – either in the form of the the ACA or the AHCA – and actual healthcare. In so doing, he implies that governmental promises to provide health care somehow increase the volume and availability of doctors, MRI machines, ambulances, and other healthcare goods and services.
None of Meet The Press‘s panelists challenged Brooks’s statements.
Brooks is a regular presence on left-wing and Democrat-aligned TV news media discussion panels. Wikipedia describes Brooks as a “conservative.”
Watch Brooks’s comments below.
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