The asphyxiating climate has gotten so deadly that JPMorgan CEO
Jamie Dimon just blasted it at a bankers’ conference in New York City: “It’s time to fight back. I’ve had it with this s–t.”
So has pretty much everyone else.
No one incarnates this willed stagnation better than Harris fave and current Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
Khan’s fought from the start to
hamstring people like Elon Musk — visionaries actually pushing American tech and industry ahead into the future.
The tech titan bought Twitter in 2022; the FTC then
began a campaign of blatantly targeted regulatory harassment against the Tesla founder.
Of course, this was political in nature: Khan simply dislikes Musk’s views and wanted to use her power to punish him for them.
But it’s part of a pattern with her of taking big swings against big companies for the sin of their success (though, thank God, she usually whiffs them).
She went after Meta for buying VR company Within, and failed.
She did the same when Microsoft bought gaming major Activision Blizzard.
But the insidious power of the regulatory state is such that Khan doesn’t even need to win in court: She and her biz-hating cronies reportedly celebrate the dozen-plus deals preemptively abandoned by big firms scared of the federal onslaught as “victories.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Those are
failures.
The blob doesn’t know how to innovate.
The blob doesn’t know how to engineer.
Can you imagine where we’d be today if the FTC and FCC and the whole rest of the alphabet soup had strangled, say, Intel or Apple or any Nvidia in the cradle?
The more than 2,000 federal agencies include the likes of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, the Stakeholder Engagement Division at Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Defense Department Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
The federal workforce grew from 2.07 million in 2015 to 2.18 million in 2022, a 5.3% jump, and that doesn’t include the military, intel agencies or the ever-growing ranks of “Beltway bandit” private contractors.
Worse, these faceless, gray-souled tinpot tyrants don’t restrict themselves to stupid interventions in industry.
The same cadres come up with and enforce the nonsensical DEI mandates that have spread like a virus through the federal government itself and almost as widely in the private sector (though happily there has been real pushback there, with John Deere and other big names backing off).
The Biden-Harris administration implemented a whole of government DEI push early in office; it has embraced again and again the most extreme rules around gender identity and race, and has done everything it could to make sure that big name companies got the idea as well.
And that’s to say nothing of its effort to stifle and strangle free speech.
Those range from trying to set up a literal Ministry of Truth — the abortive Disinformation Governance Board — to leaning hard on social-media platforms in efforts to suppress viewpoints they disapprove of.