It is somewhat bewildering to watch the Republican Party morph into an economically left-wing party without anyone really caring. But that’s what is continuing to happen under President Donald Trump.

His most recent action has been an attempt at price controls on the pharmaceutical industry via executive order.

“I’m doing this for the American people,” Trump said at the White House on Monday. “I’m doing this against the most powerful lobby in the world probably, the drug lobby.”

Ah, yes, the usual populist rhetoric pitting “the people” against “the elites” serving as a smokescreen for constitutionally dubious exercise of presidential power.

As noted by Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, “Trump’s executive order is a laundry list of coercive actions he plans to take against drug companies that do not make ‘significant progress’ toward his ‘price targets.’” This includes leveraging the various regulatory powers of the full alphabet soup of federal agencies, from the Commerce Department to the Food and Drug Administration, to ensure the president gets his wish.

Cannon has suggested that instead of top-down price controls — which will ultimately stifle pharmaceutical development and come back to hurt Americans — the answer is to remove barriers for American consumers to access prescription medications at cheaper prices. Accordingly, Cannon has called for Trump to direct the secretary of health and human services “to finalize a regulation that waives the prohibition on reimportation for all classes of drugs and devices from all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member nations.”

That would certainly be better than Trump trying to bypass Congress and bully the private sector into doing what he wants.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to sell as a good thing supposed “deals” with the United Kingdom and China slashing but not eliminating tariffs.

“We started at 10% [tariffs] and ended at 10% and the market for America is better and this is a perfect example of why Donald Trump produced Liberation Day,” declared United States Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnicklast week upon an agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom.

Hooray? Thanks to the wisdom of Trump, Americans will pay more for goods from the United Kingdom. Is that really what Americans want?

“We have some of the most economically illiterate people in the world in charge of trade policy,” remarked former Rep. Justin Amash.

He’s right. What we have here, as with the pharmaceutical price control scheme, is a White House trying to engage in central planning of the economy, punishing the private sector in the process and spinning it all as somehow a win for the American people.

Sorry, but just because Trump is a Republican, that doesn’t mean he’s any better a central economic planner than a Democrat.

Free markets and free trade will generally yield much better results than government meddling will.

Republicans once understood this but they’re increasingly willing to surrender their principles and await their anti-capitalist talking points.

This is bad for the American people and bad for the Republican Party.

— From Tribune News Service