Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency – the person responsible for managing risk in our banking system – is Saule Omarova. A Professor at Cornell University’s Law School, she is a self-proclaimed “radical” and a product of the former Soviet Union – the system that gave the world a worthless sorta-convertible currency, a dead-and-rotting economy, Chernobyl and the Trabant automobile.
No, this is not a joke. The Left has no detectable sense of humor, so this is horrifying, not risible. Joe Biden thinks having a communist in charge of our currency is perfectly normal, nay, a clever idea.
According to those who knew her in Almaty, Professor Omarova was the most doctrinaire of leaders in the local Komsomol, a training ground for future communist leaders. She graduated from the Soviet Union’s Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Two years ago she was still praising the USSR’s economic system as in some ways superior to our own. “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there.”
She’s correct after a fashion, but what’s missing is the truth: in the Former Soviet Union, doctors and teachers received equally crappy wages regardless of gender. Consequently, both effective medicines and good grades were commonly “privatized” and expensive. One of the most sought-after jobs was that of a goods transport driver, because it gave one access to merchandise which might “fall off the truck.” Corruption was ubiquitous and apart from the small ruling class, Professor Omarova’s vaunted “equality” was the equality of shared misery.
Three-years of living in the wreck of the “Workers’ Paradise” was about 35 months more than necessary to show your narrator what a miserable, cramped, vicious, unproductive – and yes, misogynistic and racist place it was. But as a favored member of what former Communist ideologue turned anti-Communist Milovan Djilas termed “The New Class,” Saule Omarova profited from her doctrinaire leftism and political bootlicking, so she hardly noticed. And she was doubtless comforted by the knowledge that in the Motherland, those pesky proles knew not to question the decisions of their betters.
Professor Omarvoa apparently wants to recreate the world of the Five-Year Plan and the Central Planning Bureau here. As a first step she has argued for a massive government bureaucracy she calls the National Investment Authority. Modeled on the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the National Investment Authority would “coordinate” the United States’ long term national economic strategy and infrastructure development.
Since she may not be aware of US history, the professor might have missed two major objections to her extravagant power-grab. First, the inevitable corruption and cronyism which ensues from such organizations. The RFC began with a scandal over loans made to the Secretary of the Treasury’s banking house, and by the 1950s its loans were sought not through a government office but through the Democrat party – according to investigations undertaken by the Democrat-controlled Senate in 1951. Second, the former Soviet Union is littered with the wreckage of factories ordered built by Moscow’s central planners and abandoned the moment massive state subsidies evaporated. Sorry, professor. Markets do know better. And wise people pay attention to them.
Impervious to the risks and failures of central planning in the now-defunct USSR, professor Omarova also wants to eliminate private capital deposits, calling instead for people to directly deposit their money into a centralized Federal Reserve system. I suppose that would make it easier for the IRS to track banking activity in accounts over $600, as proposed in a May Treasury Department memo, but I think the risks would outweigh the meager benefits to an increasingly desperate and authoritarian Biden government.
Sorry, Joe. Wrong again. And you’re running out of road on which to screw up. Thank God.
