BEZOS AND FDR FINALLY UNITED IN RIGHTWING HISTORY.

I keep forgetting how dumb Jonah Goldberg is, merely because I don't read him as much as I used to (yes, I am still capable of growth and learning). But Jesus:

Amazon is taking its ball and going home, and New York Democrats are actually celebrating.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the deal New York and Amazon worked out. I don’t like corporate welfare, and the race among municipalities to bribe businesses to set up shop in their backyards has a lot of problems.

Followers of the Goldberg style will recognize the all-bases cover he uses when he knows taking a firm position will leave him exposed. (Around here we call it the pee-dance.) He can't just say, as have many wingnut morons doing If I Was Mayor of a City I Obviously Hate cosplay on the internet, that it was bad to reject Amazon's deal because conservatives are supposed to be against "Crony Capitalism" these days (It's one of the THIMK-style signs in his office, the others include Liberal Fascism, You're the Real Racist, and My Mom Can Get You Fired). But he still has to bitch about it -- the big picture over his column of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom the dummies are associating the deal, shows he's pretty much expected to -- so he has to fudge (without thinking about fudge, which would delay his filing by 30 minutes and 700 calories). Now let's look at the horrible mutant baby of logic in which this results:

...But what’s just astounding to me is how Democrats can (almost in one breath, figuratively speaking) champion a Green New Deal that would use the powers of the state — taxes, subsidies, regulatory bullying, etc. — to herd whole industries into alignment with their vision of a just and green society, and at the same time denounce these very tactics when actually put into practice.

Did you know large national projects such as the Space Race and crony capitalism are the same thing? Let's hear Goldberg explain:

...The most prominent architect of the GND is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Under her proposal, cows might suffer, but humans will thrive thanks to all the wonderful new jobs and free health care her utopian scheme would provide.

LOL at the idea you can ever make anything better for non-billionaires!

...When Inskeep pointed out to her that deficit spending is “borrowing money that has to be paid back eventually through taxes,” AOC reversed herself with an impressive lack of embarrassment, saying that’s okay because this isn’t spending, it’s investing. Borrowing tens of trillions for her “investments” will pay for itself, “Because we’re creating jobs.”

The Amazon deal would have created some 25,000 jobs with an average annual salary of $150,000...

Quit laughing -- just because it would cost New York $3 billion in tax breaks, plus which these big corporate promises seldom pan out, doesn't mean it's impossible.

...but AOC was against it because the agreement amounted to “creeping overreach of one of the world’s biggest corporations.”

Maybe it did. But I have news for AOC and others trying to use the precedent of the original New Deal as an excuse to get the band back together: This is how New Deals work.

Yes, Goldberg thinks the profit motive of a rich oligarch is pretty much the same as FDR's reason for launching the Works Progress Administration. His hook, or rather his rusty hatpin, is that the New Deal was a "bonanza for big business":

In their effort to mobilize the U.S. economy to fight the Depression, the New Dealers favored big businesses and “associations” — cartels, guilds, syndicates, etc. — at every turn. The largest corporations individually or in association wrote the “codes” — i.e., regulations — of the National Recovery Administration and other agencies for their own benefit. It was all done in the name of efficiency and progress. 

For instance, the big chain movie houses of the 1930s — the Netflixes and Hulus of the time — wrote the codes in such a way that independents were nearly run out of business, even though 13,571 of the 18,321 movie theaters in America were independently owned.

The New Deal also, indeed primarily, fed, housed, and gave employment to a whole lot of starving, homeless, jobless citizens. Even if Amazon's promised jobs panned out they were not going to the needy, and might not even have gone to locals.

Goldberg thinks it was just a racket, though, the secret purpose of which was... I don't know, to make America Communist by consolidating the power of Big Movie Theater Chains, or to pay off FDR's donors.

The howler is that when Republicans do big-government big-money interventions -- even the one Republican president Goldberg allegedly disapproves of -- he's willing to accept their allegedly patriotic and utilitarian logic: e.g. "My hunch: The tax bill will help the economy," tweeted Goldberg about the amazingly transparent donor payoff Trump and Congressional Republicans pulled in 2017. But if Democrats propose a jobs program, it's a utopian fantasy. Even if it were a fantasy, I'd still take it over the dystopian reality Goldberg seems to think we deserve.