A decade ago, it was conventional wisdom that the world would soon start running low on oil and that the United States would henceforth be at the mercy of an inexorable trend. Then the fracking revolution came and the U.S. resumed its place as the world’s top oil and natural gas producer.
The result: lower oil prices for American consumers, less dependence on petro-despots, a dramatic shift from coal to natural gas for electricity generation and hundreds of thousands of working-class jobs, including tens of thousands in swing states like Colorado and Pennsylvania.
Elizabeth Warren wants to kill all this.
You don’t have to think that fracking is an unalloyed blessing to acknowledge its benefits. You might also argue that curbs on oil and gas production are needed both to preserve the environment and accelerate a transition to renewables. Fine.
Yet it takes a peculiar sort of political audacity to pledge, as the Massachusetts senator did last month, to “ban fracking everywhere.” Warren also favors a ban on fossil-fuel exports and a “total moratorium” on new fossil-fuel leases on federal lands, which generate billions every year in federal and state revenue.
Native American tribes also got about $1 billion from those leases in 2018. Isn’t the Warren campaign supposed to be about sticking it to richer Americans instead of poorer ones?
Or take health care: It may be ethically defensible for Warren to argue that Medicare for All is fairer than the current system. As an economic matter, she could be right that overall costs will come down. As a political matter, it isn’t surprising that she has not been forthright about the middle-class tax increases her plan will require.
But what about the fact that Warren isn’t merely proposing a dramatic change in the way 170 million or so Americans obtain health insurance? She is advocating the abolition of an entire industry, one that employs approximately 550,000 people. Whatever one thinks of health insurance companies, isn’t it worth wondering what these half-million workers might do with themselves after being put out of work?
Then there’s big tech, another industry Warren doesn’t like and promises to “break up” by turning Facebook, Amazon and Google into regulated utilities. For this task, involving some 800,000 workers and companies with about $500 billion in revenues, she has ... a 1,700-word plan.
One wonders what Warren thinks might happen when things don’t work out. Industries aren’t assemblages of Lego blocks that can be taken apart and reassembled according to a clever new design. They are complex and evolving ecosystems, organized around scores of institutions, hundreds of laws, thousands of personalities and millions of relationships.
What will happen to the real human beings whose lives and careers will be upended or derailed while the mandarins of a Warren administration try to figure it out? Will President Warren have contingency plans for her ever-proliferating plans when things don’t go according to plan?
Of course she won’t. She won’t because she can’t; she can’t because the central flaw of every economic plan is the plan itself.
That’s the lesson of the 20th century, and it’s why Warren’s critics aren’t totally off the mark in accusing her of being a socialist, not in intent but in mentality. Those with plans for everything prove only that they can’t be trusted to plan for anything.
Voters may not yet see this, which is why Warren has risen in the polls. But they will, eventually, especially when they notice what the senator’s plans entails for them. It’s one thing for a Democratic politician to promise, as Barack Obama once did, to “spread the wealth around” – but only when “wealth” and “wealthy” mean the same thing. The Warren standard is to spread your wealth around whether you’re wealthy or not.
In a recent column, my colleague David Brooks posed a difficult and necessary question: If the choice is Trump or Warren, what then? David’s answer is that one would have to choose Warren, for the sake of democracy. Maybe he’s right. But voters tend to place their personal interests ahead of their political ideals. And, other than Bernie Sanders, no Democratic candidate would more richly tempt Americans to vote the former than Warren.
For the sake of democracy, let’s hope Democrats give America a better choice.
Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times.
