March 14, 2023

Mike Pence served as the 48th Vice President of the United States

In America, the freedom to succeed has always included the freedom to fail. Or at least it used to.

Now we live in a world where certain politically favored businesses are propped up, backstopped and bailed out by government no matter how reckless they may be. That is exactly what happened during the 2008 financial crisis, and that is what is happening now with the banking panic set off by the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Government is behind the bar pouring drinks, and some banks are going on another raging bender.

Just like in 2008, the cause of the current panic is excessive risk taking in the private sector that has been aided and abetted by government. To recap the 2008 fiasco: Congress pushed hard to expand homeownership and encouraged relaxed lending standards. Banks subsequently underwrote risky mortgages to subprime borrowers, which were then purchased by the government-sponsored firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and repackaged into mortgaged backed securities. When subprime borrowers began to default, the whole system melted down along with our entire economy.

This time, the characters and setting are slightly different, but the plot remains the same. Under the Biden administration, Democrats have increased spending by over $10 trillion – more than the economies of Japan, Germany and Australia combined. This spending spree fueled record inflation, inevitably requiring the FED to raise interest rates.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, SVB engaged in risky borrowing and lending on behalf of California’s donor class while committing billions of dollars to woke projects fighting climate change. The bank boasted that it was ‘living its values’ by pursuing left-wing environmental, social and governance goals and donating millions of dollars to liberal nonprofits. When interest rates went up, their long-term bonds imploded and SVB was left holding the bag.

But SVB is not solely responsible for misallocating its resources on left-wing priorities; the Biden administration actively encouraged them to do so. Rather than ensuring the strength of our banking system, Biden ordered bank regulators to push an environmental agenda. At the time of SVB’s collapse, the Federal Reserve was rolling out its latest climate-risk guidelines.

In 2008, I led the opposition to bailouts, and I continue to oppose bailouts now. We cannot have one set of rules for ordinary Americans and another set that takes special care of big tech, big banks and other favored industries.

Bailouts always beget more bailouts. I warned of the moral hazard created by the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) in 2009, asking ‘where is all of this going to end? Just more handouts, more bailouts, and certainly…TARP is just going to be a down payment if we intend to bail out every failing bank in the country.'[1] Indeed, as we are seeing today, TARP was only the beginning.

Instead of encouraging dangerous behavior in the private sector, government should allow bad actors to bear the brunt of their bad decisions. We have bankruptcy laws for a reason. Bankruptcy is an orderly process that allows a failed business to restructure or be bought out by a solvent competitor – ensuring that the strong survive and the weak fall to the wayside, which is critical for maintaining a functioning free market.

The alternative is what we have today: banks make foolish decisions enabled by imprudent government policies and the American people pay the price. Of course, President Biden says taxpayers won’t pay for the bailout, but that is disingenuous – every American with a bank account will pay higher fees to replenish the billions spent by the FDIC to backstop failing banks.

To add insult to injury, Americans will also be paying to guarantee the deposits of many Chinese companies that were SVB customers. Perhaps that is a good first step towards reform: stop insuring the deposits of companies that do business in China or Russia.

But ultimately, we have to stop the insanity of bailing out failing businesses. No business is ‘too big to fail.’ Government should no longer choose winners and losers. Only then can we preserve a vibrant, healthy and flourishing free market.

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Free Speech is and always has been the foundation of American democracy. Our founding fathers knew better than anyone that it was one of the most powerful tools against tyranny, which is why the world over, then and now, free speech is nowhere to be found in nations where the people aren’t free.

Naturally, the First Amendment remains one of, if not, the most important elements of the Bill of Rights for preserving our freedom and keeping the federal government in check. Our Constitution and its protection of freedom of speech is the envy of many nations. Thus, it is all the more disappointing that American corporations – especially Big Tech seem so eager to dispense with it.

Just last year, a report from the Media Research Center found more than 640 instances of bans, deleted content and restrictions placed on social media accounts that criticized Biden over the previous two years. Posts that were punished did not even need to be actual “disinformation.” The Heritage Foundation, for instance, was censored by Facebook for explaining that high gas prices and inflation were a result of Biden administration policies. Big Tech bans against speech from conservatives have even gone so far as to target conservative comedians on YouTube and posts that selected Joe Biden quotes that made him look bad.

The mission to snuff out “disinformation” at the expense of free expression is shared by both Big Tech and the Biden administration.

After the release of the “Twitter Files,” it was clear that Twitter began functioning as a subsidiary to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, spreading Russian propaganda to create a cover to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story, and locking out conservatives like Kayleigh McEnaney from their accounts for speaking out of turn.

And as it turns out, the State Department has sent over $300 million dollars to a non-profit that funds the British owned Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The GDI feeds blacklists to ad companies with the intent of starving websites and outlets that peddle “disinformation.” The list includes the conservative Washington Examiner and at least 2,000 other websites. The GDI also reportedly attempted to convince companies to punish conservative websites that suggested the coronavirus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, which has now been backed by the Energy Department and the FBI.

GDI also listed the 10 “riskiest” news organizations including the New York Post. The freedom of the press is very much at stake.

In a lawsuit filed last year, state officials named Joe Biden, the Surgeon General, the head of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and many others as defendants. The lawsuit alleges that the federal government threatened Big Tech companies to censor conservative speech in ways that they could not. But the untold story is how willing these corporations were to carry out these tasks as reports show they worked in tandem to censor conservative views online. The censorship even included biblical viewpoints on marriage, sexuality and gender.

Americans, especially black households, suffer as a result of the extreme censorship of Big Tech.

Families that can’t afford to pay for subscriptions to news organization sites like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post or the Washington Times, rely on social media to get badly needed information about the issues and public policy debates of the day. Censorship means that task is harder and biased. And because black households tend to have lower incomes, they need this access most.

Sadly, many on the Left are still willing to dismiss this on the basis that it is “necessary to protect American democracy.” This line of thought, unsurprisingly, has become the unique calling card of the progressive Left, and is often used to justify unprecedented levels of government control that ignore public consent, ultimately hurting Americans and especially black Americans.

Just like the myth that black people are not capable of getting an ID, posts and reports that reveal a record number of blacks voted in the last election in Georgia are treated as disinformation by Big Tech.

Ultimately, what the Left fails to understand is that free speech is, as Fredrick Douglass put it, “The dread of tyrants.” Many malevolent rulers across the globe wish they operated in an environment where Big Tech and progressives were working together to limit free speech.

When we cede power to the federal government and Big Tech to restrict speech, everyone loses. Black Americans and America at large have nothing to gain from giving others more power over how they think, speak or see.

Horace Cooper is chairman of Project 21 and a board member at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Paul Teller is the Executive Director of Advancing American Freedom, Mike Pence’s nonprofit organization.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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