“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
— Bertrand Russell
After an extended delay followed by a brief detour, here are my promised albeit untested (and largely uncredentialed) suggestions for the conservative reformation.
I’ll group these suggestions in two painfully simple categories — what conservatives should stop and start doing on their road to reform — discussing the “stops” today and the “starts” later.
Conservatives should stop their narrow focus on — and rote pledges of allegiance to — tax cuts and the free market. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want high taxes, nor have I lost my faith in capitalism. My gripe is not with the merits of either of those cornerstones of the conservative mind, but with the failure of today’s American conservatives to acknowledge the clear limits of both.
Cutting taxes before restoring a balanced budget is maniacal. Turning once again to the example set by Britain’s revitalized Tories, consider this May 19 David Cameron speech, wherein he talks about a government that places “economic stability before tax cuts” and lives “within its means.” Andrew Sullivan is right: Cameron sounds, here, a lot like John McCain “before he committed to the permanence of the Bush tax cuts.”
Even the iconic Barry Goldwater recognized this fundamental truth, writing in Conscience of a Conservative that “as a practical matter spending cuts must come before tax cuts. If we reduce taxes before firm, principled decisions are made about expenditures, we will court deficit spending and the inflationary effects that invariably follow.”
As an aside, Goldwater’s next sentence — published in 1960, five years before I was born — is terribly familiar: “It is in the area of spending that the Republican Party’s performance, in its seven years of power, has been most disappointing.” I guess some things never change.
In short, for conservatives, fiscal responsibility must precede all other economic proposals. First, embrace spending discipline and create stability. Then, when economic growth rebounds, consider tax cuts. A monumental lapse in today’s American-conservative canon is the assumption that we can tax-cut our way to economic growth/revenues, forgetting that the current economic malaise seems to have much more to do with irresponsible fiscal policy (and irresponsible fiscal agents) than with the level of our taxes. I’d even go a step further. Just as I often remind my progressive friends that strangle-taxing the highest wage earners will not solve our collective problems, so I remind my conservative friends that we cannot tax-cut everyone to prosperity. Trickle-down or supply-side economics have merit, but they’re not a panacea. There are no guarantees the mega-wealthy will invest their extra post-tax income (at levels proportionate with their tax cuts) into the economic stream that creates the rising sea that lifts all boats.
Turning to the free market: I love it. I’ve benefited from it. And on many fronts, I trust it more than I could ever trust government. But much like tax-cutting, the free market left to its own devices won’t address all that ails us. Case in point: Health care. To assume the free market can eventually accomplish universal coverage is to pretend the free market is something it is not.
The free market attempts to increase revenues, cut costs, and maximize profits. That’s its mission. And generally, the less government messes with it, the better the market performs its mission.
“Fair dealing” is crucial to a well-functioning market, but giving away the shop is not. There is no free-market rationale for insurance companies to decrease revenues, increase costs, and shrink profits — which is precisely what would happen if they provided universal coverage, adding to their rosters millions of people who require expensive treatments but can’t (try as they might) pay fair-market rates for their premiums. Or, as Jonathan Cohn put it: “ … private insurance operating in a regulatory vacuum is incapable of taking care of the people who need medical attention the most.”
For those conservatives who label my free-market argument as heretical … get a grip. We and our progressive counterparts already know there are certain things the free market should not be trusted to wholly accomplish; police and fire protection jump to mind.
I shudder to imagine a world where private enterprise competed to sell police and fire protection to individual households. The result would undoubtedly be the non-protection of unprofitable households and neighborhoods. To be clear: I am not suggesting our government assume complete control of health care like it commonly does for police and fire protection. What I am suggesting is that conservatives stop making, in reverse, the same fundamental mistake progressives too often make. Progressives skew toward more government/less market; conservatives skew the other way. The tension is healthy, but eventually, we have to consider third-rail options. And tired, irrelevant dogma about the free market (from either side of the political spectrum) won’t help us get there.
More later.
Note: For the purposes of this and other installments in the series, I consider neither of the following groups “conservative”:
(1) “Neocons,” who would make military intervention and unilateral action priorities in our approach to foreign policy rather than two options that should be used only in the most-dire of circumstances/as last resorts
(2) “Sociocons,” who would force their views of behavior/morality on everyone else.
Those two groups are clearly part of today’s Republican party, but they are not conservatives under any definition I’ve ever accepted. To the degree they continue to claim they are conservatives, then yes, that would add another “stop” to my list, i.e., stop allowing these voices to distract and denigrate the movement.