Could Bobby Kennedy Jr. Worthily Emulate RFK?

The classical Kennedys were "ordoliberals" — proponents of the "social market economy." Call it "compassionate capitalism."

Based on their stature as leading classical liberals I was predisposed to favor Bobby Kennedy, Jr. Not so fast!

I was looking to love Bobby despite some of his ... eccentricities. Until he proposed to feed Ukraine to Russia. Per The Hill: "'We have neglected many, many opportunities to settle this war peacefully,' Kennedy said. ..." "Settle this war peacefully?" I call it "appeasing a brutal aggressor."

Thereafter, Bobby said that COVID possibly was engineered to give Ashkenazi (ethnically German and Eastern European) Jews immunity.

I'm an Ashkenazi — no relation to "Nazi," despite what sounds like a sly subtextual allusion — Jew. Two years ago, I contracted COVID. Q.E.D.

Bobby lost me by showing too much patriarch Joseph and too little Jack, Teddy or Bobby.

I'm a Republican, an archconservative and an admirer of the mid-20^th century Kennedy clan. How so?

By contemporary standards, the Kennedys were conservatives.

JFK: The architecture of Reagan's original supply-side tax rate cut, Kemp-Roth, was consciously appropriated from JFK's pre-assassination tax cut plan.

Teddy: When the Tea Party movement mattered (or seemed to), I was a minor national leader, anointed co-emcee the Boston Tea Party on July 4^th, 2009. Two days beforehand, the City of Boston was not issuing the parade permits. Nor returning calls.

The Boston Tea Party was imperiled! I cold-called Sen. Kennedy's state chief of staff and appealed for the senator's help recognizing his commitment to free speech and freedom of assembly to protest grievances.

As if by magic, Boston promptly issued the permits.

Young Bobby soon distanced himself. Yet per PBS: "… Kennedy … found McCarthy's death in 1957 'very upsetting.' In historian Ronald Steel's words, 'for him the errant senator was a kindred spirit — one engaged, as he was himself, in the struggle against evil.'"

An assassin's bullet ended his political career as a U.S. senator, anti-Vietnam war campaigner, social justice warrior, and presidential candidate. But consider his legacy.

In Sen. RFK's day America's psychiatric hospitals were a scandal. Think "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Per New York City's website: "Willowbrook State School was a state-supported institution for children with intellectual disabilities. Designed to accommodate 4,000 children, by 1965 Willowbrook had a population of 6,000, and scandal soon erupted over news of the institution's horrendous conditions and questionable medical practices.

"Sen. Robert Kennedy toured the institution in 1965. Calling Willowbrook a 'snake pit,' Kennedy stated that individuals in the overcrowded facility were 'living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.'"

Slowly the psychiatric deinstitutionalization movement championed by RFK liberated most mental patients from inhuman squalor. Bravo!

Now, many mentally ill are "the homeless." Yet far better off than under the vile conditions of the "asylums."

There now are voices emerging for humane reinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Their hearts are in the right place.

Yet ... can the socially marginalized summon the sustained political strength to pay the high financial and political tab for providing humane services? That's something we ordoliberals support.

Yet there now are only a handful of ordoliberals left. Maybe even just me, the Last of the Mohicans. We're politically inconsequential.

So let us remember where the road paved with good intentions leads. As Virgil observed, facilis descensus averno. "Easy is the descent to hell."

The conditions endured by the unsheltered are unacceptable, yet truly a lesser evil than the "horrendous conditions and questionable medical practices" called out by RFK.

Meanwhile, The Salvation Army provides shelter (and food and clothing) to … any and every adult age 21-65 in need, provided they stay away from substance abuse, take eight hours of work therapy a day, and accept having grace said over their meals.

And presidential candidate Francis Suarez regularly brags about the number of homeless in Miami having been reduced from 6,000 to 608 on his watch. And he's "not done yet."

Going unsheltered is a choice, not coerced. We can, we must, do better. But not by reincarceration.

If RFK Jr. wishes to be a leader in "the struggle against evil" he would do well, emulating his late father, to use his presidential candidacy to crusade against another scandal: the American prison population has skyrocketed from around 200,000 in RFK, Sr.'s day to almost 2 million today.

Crusading against this would be a worthy cause by which RFK Jr. might claim the classical noble mantle of his father and uncles.

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.