> Of course, liberals will promptly proceed to squander even that advantage
It's up to business owners to capitalize on that advantage. Neither liberals nor conservatives are beholden to stabilizing prices at Costco or Adam&Eve. These are privately owned businesses that are fundamentally allowed to plan their businesses apart from (or even against the wishes of) the federal government.
This is how we ended up importing our cars from Japan and Mexico, and why our iPhones and Nike won't get made without slave wages. It wasn't Obama or Reagan that did that, it was executives and shareholders.
Business owners and so on as you enumerated have names, addresses, and assets susceptible to seizure. And the law does not often anticipate novel crimes, nor need.
> "It wasn't Obama or Reagan that did that, it was executives and shareholders."
That pretty much sums up the delusion of the Left. The buck stops with the government, oligarchs understand that and work skillfully to turn the government into their tool. It wasn't ONLY Obama and Reagan who did that (the tool thing), it was the Democrat and Republican parties who almost unanimously did that, helped by a few gatekeepers who made the process more effective.
So the 'delusion of the left' is that...the money power has exceeded its legitimate influence in government, to constitute some serious degree of corruption? I'm having trouble following your thesis here.
The money power couldn't have exceeded anything without help from the two governing parties. You're saying that the horses are out of the barn, I'm telling you who opened the barn door and went to the bar to drink with lobbyists. The government's got the key for that door, it might be worthless now but we have to be very clear with the situation if we want to have any hope of fixing this mess.
Okay, sure, you're not wrong in that sense, but I think you may be confusing leftists with liberals. The idea that leftists favor the Democratic over the Republican style of modern party-machine politics, or indeed even recognize any meaningful difference between those two halves of the same sclerosing and hypoxic brain, would be a delusion.
I admit I don't have a clear idea about the leftists you mention. I don't know how politics can be done without a party-machine either. I'll stop here before I start sounding like a political cynic but for me it's just the nature of reality.
You've yet to study history. You may have had it taught at you, which isn't the same but can make a decent start.
Bernie Sanders was a genuine and extremely credible leftist presidential candidate in 2016, and a sellout stalking horse for establishment liberal candidates in 2020 and 2024. Understand why that is and whom his antecedents are in the American political tradition into which his example falls, and not too much else in American politics remains obscure.
It's up to business owners to capitalize on that advantage. Neither liberals nor conservatives are beholden to stabilizing prices at Costco or Adam&Eve. These are privately owned businesses that are fundamentally allowed to plan their businesses apart from (or even against the wishes of) the federal government.
This is how we ended up importing our cars from Japan and Mexico, and why our iPhones and Nike won't get made without slave wages. It wasn't Obama or Reagan that did that, it was executives and shareholders.