Nothing can be more comforting than a mother’s love. Enter supermom, Momala Harris, aka Kamala Harris. Momala Harris intends to lead us into our brave new maternalistic state. Trouble buying a first house? She’ll give you $25,000. Worried about buying health insurance? She’ll give it to us for free. Depressed about college debt and the high cost of childcare? Worry no more. Momala will take care of it. Trouble starting a small business? Momala has a juicy subsidy for you too. Food too expensive? She’ll punish those greedy farmers and grocery store owners. Free kale, anyone?

Rest assured the maternalistic state will keep us warm, healthy, and safe. For our own good we will be told what kind of car we can buy, what we can drink, what kind of straws we can use, and how electricity will be generated. But with every “free” thing we receive and every new regulation imposed, we relinquish our independence, our freedom to choose and to be responsible for making decisions in adulthood. Momala’s maternalistic policies are “economically dumb but politically smart,” wrote Josh Barro in the Atlantic. 

Biological parents stand aside. The maternalistic state will take over parenting. If biological parents disagree with public-school curricula, keep quiet or face domestic terrorism charges. The maternalistic state will determine if your eight-year-old needs a sex-change operation. No consultation with biological parents needed. Momala will provide $6,000 in tax relief during the first year of every child’s life to pay for food, clothing, and other basic needs. After all, it takes a federal government to raise a child properly. 

The maternalistic state serves as a parent and treats its citizens like children. Those of us who had good parents no doubt fondly remember the care we were given. We didn’t worry about paying the rent or the doctors. We were fed, clothed, and loved. The maternalistic state is seductive in similar ways, harkening back to the childhood we cherished or hoped for. This explains maternalism’s popularity and expansion. Socialism and communism are merely extreme versions of the maternalistic state.

It's hard for almost any economist to disagree with Barro that Harris’s economic policies are “dumb.” Economists usually evaluate policies’ equity and efficiency. Equity entails helping the needy. Efficiency is about the non-wasteful allocation of resources to raise living standards. Throwing money to middle- and upper-class persons (for example, forgiveness of college debt) and providing blanket grants to start small businesses without oversight as to their viability serve neither equity nor efficiency. Seems Momala has neglected to point out that someone other than Momala (that is, you and me) will pay for all the freebies.

Barro says Harris’s policies are politically smart. Divide and conquer is the game here. Give some special interests their political plums. Just hope they neglect the costs of all the other special-interest plums and overlook the damage all the freebies will do to society and freedom.

Momala is on record saying she would abolish the Senate’s 60-vote rule needed for closure on a filibuster to enact the Green New Deal to save the planet from climate change. The Green New Deal is one of Kamala’s dumbest economic policy suggestions. (Huge economic costs with little if any benefits.) 

A one-party maternalistic state with dumb economic ideas is a threat to prosperity. Democrats have a plan to be the one-party state and to impose its dumb economic ideas. They threaten to expand the Supreme Court (assuming they are in control) and make Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states (presumably creating four more Democrat U.S. Senators). This would solidify Democrat control of the Senate and the Supreme Court. 

A friend of mine hopes for a massive blue wave in November. Be careful what you wish for. Let us not be suckered by dumb economics and the maternalistic state.

Burton Abrams is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Delaware and research fellow of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. He is the author of The Terrible 10: A Century of Economic Folly.

Image: AT via Magic Studio