The progressive base has become so radical in their proposals that even Elizabeth Warren is now defending capitalism, albeit with a few qualifiers, reports Fox News.
Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, Elizabeth Warren actually said that capitalism is a “force for good,” admitting that she supports markets so long as they have rules put in place to protect from theft. She likened this to being a “cop on the beat.”
“I believe in markets, I see the benefits that markets can produce,” she said on the program. “When there’s a cop on the beat, those markets start to work again.”
Warren said that this “cop on the beat” forces banks to better their profit models, creating a superior product that makes customers happy and does not cheat people. However, she claimed that capitalism has gone wrong at certain points in history.
“Banks, in that case, are forced to develop their profit models, not on cheating people, but on actually offering a better product,” the senator from Massachusetts said. “I think it also, when it doesn’t work, it’s been a force for bad, but that’s been true of every form of government that we can identify. We’ve gotten it right sometimes, and we’ve gotten it wrong sometimes. When you let markets work with rules and with people on the beat to enforce those rules, we can produce a lot of wealth in this country.”
That even Warren has allowed herself to utter some words of affection toward capitalism proves that Democrats are beginning to understand that the radical ideas posed in the Green New Deal will not play well on the 2020 ticket. In fact, when Ocasio-Cortez proposed the Green New Deal, Warren only said she supports the “idea” of it.
“Senator Warren has been a longtime advocate of aggressively addressing climate change and shifting toward renewables, and supports the idea of a Green New Deal to ambitiously tackle our climate crisis, economic inequality, and racial injustice,” a representative for the senator said at the time.
None of this means, however, Warren will be shifting to the center-left in order to snag the 2020 nomination; she has full-throated endorsed other radical proposals, such as slavery reparations.
“We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences including undermining the ability of Black families to build wealth in America for generations,” Warren said in a statement to Reuters this past February. “Black families have had a much steeper hill to climb – and we need systemic, structural changes to address that.”
As noted by Fox News, Warren’s recent rhetoric in favor of capitalism may be an attempt to pivot away from recent comments made by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who denounced the economic system as morally bankrupt.
“The most important thing is the concentration of capital and it means that we seek and prioritize profit and the accumulation of money above all else and we seek it at any human and environmental cost,” Ocasio-Cortez said at an SXSW conference. “That is what that means. To me that ideology is not sustainable and cannot be redeemed. What we are reckoning with are the consequences of putting profit above everything else in society.”