You are correct, this is an example of what is wrong with America.
It is why we got a completely incompetent authoritarian as president when we needed a competent president the most. The problem is public choice theory, the theory developed to tie economic theory to politics with the aim of accomplishing economic goals through political means. Using the government not just to police the economy to suppress bad behavior but to change the economy to accomplish some economic goals.
Unfortunately for the vast majority of Americans the goals that the proponents of public choice worked toward was neoliberalism, itself an economic theory that proposes that the economy would run better if we ignored about 190 years of economists' research to understand the economy and to go back to the economic theories of the so-called classical liberals of 1830s England.
The classical liberals believed that they could create a better economy by applying the theories of the classical economists, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill, but primarily they relied on the work of David Ricardo. The goals that the classical liberals developed from these economists will sound familiar to you and will help you to validate the truth of what I am saying, they are;
- laissez faire capitalism that the government should interfere as little as possible in the economy relying instead on the self-regulating free market
- free trade including the free flow of financial capital,
- a truly free labor factor market
- a strict gold standard for money
- abolishment of open welfare, providing money to the poor, and instead the return of the poor house and the debtors' prisons to provide incentives to work.
The obvious question is why the proponents of public choice and neoliberal would choose to pick the 190 year old theories that failed in England in just a few years in what was an overwhelming simple, agrarian economy to apply to to our complex, diverse, modern industrial economy?
You can see the answer to this question everywhere you look in our economy after forty years of neoliberalism, the new glided age, the direction of the rewards from gains due to productivity increases and technical innovation to capital, not labor, to profits, not to wages, to supply, not to increased demand, all producing the highest income inequality in our nation's history and an underperforming economy, with increased social strife due to not only the income inequality but also to the political means employed to bend the government to accomplish these dubious goals.
And yes, fully one half of the democratic party are neoliberals, including Joe Biden, the Clintons and while Obama was personally a liberal, he relied on the advice of neoliberals to govern, a governing tendency sweetened by the huge amount of campaign cash given by Wall Street to Obama, an amount that will be far less than the contributions from Wall Street that Biden has received for 2020.
But the corruption of the democrats pales in comparison to that of the Republicans Party, for whom neoliberalism is the sole focus of the party and of its biggest donors. The biggest problem that the Republicans face with their complete dedication to neoliberalism is that while it provides them with a huge amount of campaign donations from the grateful already rich, they fall way short of providing electoral majorities. This is because neoliberalism works to increase the incomes of the already rich by suppressing the incomes of everyone else.
To overcome this problem the Republicans moved to the right to become the American conservative party, where because conservatives depend on lies to be conservatives, because the defining characteristic of conservatives, their dedication to the
status quo and their fear of change in the social order requires lies to live in an economy and a society as dynamic and changing as ours. The Republicans cobbled together a coalition of conservatives and single issue voters by exploiting their fears using well-established proproganda techniques, aided by the establishment of a considerable network of media freed from the equal time to opposing views requirement by Reagan.
The Republicans turned to anti-democracy provisions to maintain to make their minority support count in electorical victories.
This is what is wrong with America today.
