The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:
The Cornell University law school professor’s radical ideas might
make even
Bernie Sanders
blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the
Lenin
Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still
believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking
should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.
“Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender
pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old
USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know
best,’” she tweeted in 2019. After
Twitter
users criticized her ignorance, she added a caveat: “I never
claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of
Soviet life. But people’s salaries were set (by the state) in a
gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits.
Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!”
Sure, there was a Gulag, and no private property, but maternity benefits!
Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit
should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has
advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price
levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker
wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according
to her ability to each according to her needs.
In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the
Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end
banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for
generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern
economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital
currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial
system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’”
she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?
Ms. Omarova believes capital and credit should be directed by an
unaccountable bureaucracy and intelligentsia. She has recommended a
“National Investment Authority,” with members overseen by an advisory
board of academics, to finance a “big and bold” climate agenda. Sounds
like the green infrastructure bank the Senate rejected.
She’d also like a politically and structurally independent “Public
Interest Council” of "highly paid” academics with broad subpoena power
to supervise financial regulatory agencies, including the Fed. The
Council, she explained, would not be subject to the “constraints and
requirements of the administrative process.” Ivy League professors know
best.
As comptroller, Ms. Omarova would supervise some 1,200 financial
institutions. While she couldn’t enact her People’s Agenda without
legislation, she would have sweeping powers to punish banks that don’t
follow her diktats. Recall how financial regulators during the Obama
Presidency pressured banks to cut off credit to pay-day lenders. ...
Ms. Omarova is the wrong nominee for the wrong industry in the wrong country in the wrong century.
Notes from the future:
The overthrow overtook the former shining light on the hill almost by accident, and in broad daylight, when an aging, decrepit, Paul von Hindenburg-like leader acquiesced in his dotage to the revolutionary impulses swirling all about him, like vultures waiting for him to die.