LARRY KUDLOW: Stop socialism in its tracks
If presidents have the right to hire, that should give them a symmetrical equal right to fire, without going through a hullabaloo entanglement of deep state bureaucracies and left-wing judges. Just because the Supreme Court made a huge mistake almost 100 years ago during FDR’s new deal that gave authority to all his commissions and bureaucrats, doesn’t mean we have to continue and abide by a long, lost, mistaken era.
On the chopping block right now is the Federal Trade Commission, which itself should have been abolished more than 50 years ago. All the Federal Trade Commission does is block trade, obstruct entrepreneurship, and damage domestic business and hurt the economy. It doesn’t help trade, it damages trade. It doesn’t create jobs, it extinguishes jobs. It relies on phony arguments and even phonyer still definitions of monopoly. But it should be based on the idea of consumer harm, and if they did that, they’d realize that we have no need for the FTC, or its commissioners, or its chairman, because in 99% of the cases brought before it, consumers are not harmed. And for the other small fraction of lawsuits that might be worth pursuing, the Justice Department has an antitrust division.
But there’s a much bigger point here. Going back way over 100 years, we’ve developed this massive patchwork of regulatory commissions and boards and whatnot, that constitutes an administrative bureaucratic state that does nothing but harm our free-market capitalist economy. The whole lot of them exist to throw sand in the gears of capitalism and entrepreneurship.
It is the fourth branch of government. But the Framers did not stipulate a fourth branch of government. They did create an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch. And that’s it. So, the moral of the story should be, get rid of the fourth branch of government. The regulatory state. The socialist branch.
Meanwhile, because the President who is the executive, has the power to hire these people, he should definitely have the related power to fire them. Unencumbered, without cause. Stop socialism in its tracks.