In a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1925, President Calvin Coolidge famously declared “the chief business of the American people is business.” Coolidge was succeeded by another Republican, Herbert Hoover, who in a 1928 campaign speech called for American government to foster “rugged individualism” and self-reliance. Republicans have not strayed from that catechism in the hundred years since.
Senior White House Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett, former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, coauthored “Dow 36,000” in 1999. He has advised multiple Republican campaigns and administrations and is now a distinguished visiting fellow a at the Hoover Institution. Perhaps his comments on Sunday about “human capital stock” will land him in the history books beside the Republican presidents whose administrations preceded the Great Depression.
Asked about the prospect of double-digit unemployment coming down before the November election, Hassett told CNN’s Dana Bash, “Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises.”
“Human capital stock” must be put back to work in America’s chief business, “producing, buying, selling, investing,” as Coolidge put it. Therein lies true freedom. It’s what the Revolutionaries died for, dontcha know. They could do all those things under the British, sure, but don’t cloud the issue.
Calling people “stock,” writes Peter Wade at Rolling Stone, “so casually lines up with the lack of empathy shown to the victims of the coronavirus by Trump’s administration and Republicans since the crisis began months ago.”
Asking just who owns and controls our “human capital stock” is the next logical question.
Andrew Naughtie at The Independent elaborates:
The term “human stock” has long been associated with eugenics, a discredited pseudoscience that enjoyed some mainstream credibility in the early 20th century. Many of its adherents, who believed that selective breeding was a self-evident way to better the human race, argued for limiting or cutting off the reproductive capacity of those showing “undesirable” traits.
Author H.G. Wells, whose early views on the hierarchy of racial groups are notorious, wrote in 1904 that “the way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies”.
The idea was so influential that in 1927, the US Supreme Court itself passed a verdict, in Buck v Bell, that compulsory sterilisation “for the protection and health of the state” did not violate the 14th amendment.
While it is not to be implied that Mr Hassett was advocating for the sterilisation of the disabled and “feebleminded”, the furore caused by his phrasing itself testifies to the depth of offence caused by the resurfacing of eugenicist ideas and phraseology.
It is not as if ideas just “lying around” are not there waiting to be picked up in a crisis, as Milton Friedman once said. They’re inside the house. Inside the White House.
Henry Ford had “good bloodlines, good bloodlines,” Donald Trump told Ford employees last week in a deviation from his script. Then with a grin and a delighted chuckle, Trump added a third time, “if you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.”
Those who don’t are, if not canon fodder, economic inputs to be used up and discarded when no longer productive.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.