What Elizabeth Warren Has That Hillary Clinton Needs
4/17/2015



"Rules are not the enemy of markets,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told me yesterday, on the heels of her major address on the unfinished business of financial reform at the Levy Institute’s Hyman Minsky Conference. “Rules promote innovation and competition. Rules prevent markets from blowing up.

We learned that in 1929 and we should have learned it again in 2008.”

That comment captures what distinguishes Warren from so many of her congressional and political colleagues. Any lawmaker can create a laundry list, and in her Minsky speech Warren did some of that, presenting specific steps needed to bolster financial regulation, which in its current state still puts the country at risk.

But Warren has garnered attention because she actually has a worldview for how to best structure the economy, one which has become impossible for any Democrat, even the former Secretary of State winding through our nation’s Chipotles, to ignore.

Warren’s governing philosophy can be boiled down to one simple sentiment: Actions must have consequences. The way to build functioning markets is to lay out ground rules and actually hold market participants accountable to them. That allows everyone in a market the same set of chances to succeed if they can attract enough customers. “This is about building competitive capitalism instead of crony capitalism,” Warren told me.

... In other words, Warren’s agenda isn’t the result of some narrowly focused monomania about financial institutions. It’s about making the economy work, in a way that it hasn’t for the past 40 years. And it’s rooted in this principle that rules are necessary for healthy markets.

...The simplicity of this framework, along with its universal grounding in firmly held values, has made it difficult to characterize as wild-eyed liberal screeds, no matter how hard industry mouthpieces try...

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2015/04/17/What-Elizabeth-Warren-Has-Hillary-Clinton-Needs

The Democratic Party became a liberal party largely through the "New Deal" policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Before FDR, "laissez-faire" or "free-market" policies were the only policies acceptable to America's ruling elites. FDR's New Deal policies used government spending power to create jobs for the masses of unemployed, and used payroll taxes to provide retirement security through Social Security. FDR also created regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to avoid another financial crisis.

FDR's liberal policies were supported by Democratic and Republican administrations until Ronald Reagan began a conservative counterattack against FDR's policies in 1981.

After 8 years of Reaganism, conservative Democrats began embracing the Reaganite assault on liberalism, and called themselves "New Democrats" to distinguish themselves from traditional FDR-inspired liberals.

These "New Democrats" drew support from large corporations that wanted a return to "laissez-faire" policies to get out from under regulations.

http://www.democrats.com/new-democrats