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April 23, 2009
Exclusive: Conservatism After the Tea Parties
Across the country, the April 15th Tea Parties were a great success. Protests against the high cost of government have long been common on the tax filing deadline. I took part in some while an economics graduate student at the University of Tennessee and chairman of the local Young Americans for Freedom chapter too many years ago to comfortably count. This year’s demonstrations, however, were much larger and better organized. They could herald a new populism that could revive the conservative movement. I only say “could” because it is an open question where the energy unleashed will go when translated into practical politics. There is already a contest underway to divert popular discontent in ways that will reinforce current problems rather than solve them.
More precise thought needs to be given to what the protests are about if effective reform is to result. The cry cannot simply be to oppose “government” per se. In a major financial crisis like the current one, when comparisons to the Great Depression are not unwarranted, it is the responsibility of Federal authorities to take action to stabilize the economy and lay the groundwork for recovery.
Milton Friedman, the guru of modern capitalist ideology and foe of socialism, laid out this responsibility in his monumental A Monetary History of the United States. He makes the now standard interpretation of what made the “great contraction” so severe. During the years 1930-33, a wave of bank failures reduced the money supply by a third. Federal authorities did not take action on the scale needed to counteract the impact of the financial collapse on the real economy. No advocate of Big Government, Friedman could nevertheless declare this earlier dilatory attitude “confused and misguided.”
So why did the Federal Reserve fail to do what it was originally established to do? Friedman cites the attitude of its governors, “They tended to regard bank failures as regrettable consequences of bad management and bad banking practices, or as inevitable reactions to prior speculative excesses, or as a consequence but hardly a cause of the financial and economic collapse in process.” These sentiments have been voiced again today – and with more justification, by those who are happy to see things just fall apart.
One can properly argue about the particular policies now being used to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s. Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke is a student of Friedman, and his decision to buy $1.2 trillion of government bonds and mortgage-related securities last month makes more sense than trying to rebuild a financial system crippled with $2.7 trillion in toxic assets (according to the IMF) with tax money. The losses are too large to replace with fiscal measures, and the public is rightfully worried that to try would burden future taxpayers (and their children) with too much debt.
What should really agitate the public is not the principle of government intervention to prevent an economic collapse, but how the politicians have seized the opportunity to spend huge sums on non-emergency, special interest programs. At one point, Congress was going to add $150 billion to the bank refunding package until a public backlash forced some reduction in the bill’s pet projects.
As much as two-thirds of the $787 billion stimulus package went to uses that had nothing to do with fighting the recession. Talk in the Obama administration of not letting the crisis go to waste as a cover for spending trillions on new social programs is alarming. And then there is the perception of corruption in the connections between Congressional leaders of both parties with the very Wall Street entities whose blunders plunged the country into economic disaster. These are the proper targets for outrage, not some formless chanting against “government” per se. Such chanting is the nonsense of anarchists (known in polite circles as libertarians), not the wisdom of conservatives.
John P. East, an eminent political science professor before becoming a Republican Senator, warned, “Where genuine libertarianism is committed to the legitimate role of the limited state in protecting against internal and external disorders, and in adjudicating disputes among its citizens, the new ideological libertarianism is anti-state and seems bent on excursions into the mindless, chaotic, and disoriented world of anarchy. In view of the social nature of man…regarding the conduct of domestic affairs, traditional conservatives find the new libertarianism naïve and simplistic.”
The most alarming sign that the anarchists are trying to take over the Tea Party movement is the sudden revival of the amoral and anti-social screeds of the late and unlamented Ayn Rand. Her name has been bantered around far too often on talk radio and by Fox News commentators.
An April 20th column by John Tammy in Forbes magazine was entitled “Ayn Rand Rises Again.” Tammy described Rand’s most famous fictional character Hank Riordan of Atlas Shrugged, “Success for him resulted from being profitable, and profits were the certain signal that he was giving customers of his massive steel corporation what they wanted.” Unfortunately, this is not an accurate description of the world of business today, at least not in its most critical dimensions. And Riordan is not a hero, but an anti-hero, exhibiting what Rand called “the virtue of selfishness.” The self-sacrifice associated with the heroic sense of duty shown by soldiers, police, firefighters, and loving parents is alien to Randian ideology.
Libertarians may claim that the “invisible hand” of the market will automatically serve the public interest by allocating resources in an optimal manner, but in truth they do not really care if this happens of not. Their focus is on the “freedom” of entrepreneurs and business leaders to do whatever they want. “Globalization,” which has decimated the American steel industry of Riordan’s day, has spawned executives who maximize organizational (and personal) objectives rather than national prosperity. The scandals which first engulfed Worldcom, Global Crossing and Enron before menacing the entire capitalist system on Wall Street are examples of how Rand’s ideology can be abused.
Business lobbyists are trying to turn a concern over taxes and debt into a campaign against revived regulation of errant corporations, aided by unfocused cries against “big government.” They do not want any constraints on what firms (or executives) can do in the name of profit or personal gain. Yet, it was exactly this attitude that led to the current crisis which has devastated families on a scale not suffered in generations. It has been exactly those households of a conservative outlook, who worked hard, saved and invested to provide for their futures, which have been hit hardest by the collapse of the financial markets in which they had placed their trust. The middle class core of America has been grievously wounded by Randian attitudes that subverted those whose positions should have been instilled with the highest sense of responsibility.
And when those who had failed, and had plunged all around them into chaos, still demanded millions in payments as their Randian rights, the public exploded in outrage, as well they should.
True conservatives know the character of Mankind is “fallen” and that there is a dark side to human nature to which bankers and fund managers are just as vulnerable as anyone else. Freedom without responsibility, and rights without duties, leads to license and wrong-doing. Constitutional scholar Walter Berns once asked “if the laws are based merely on self-interest, some wicked men will see immediately that their interests can best be advanced if others obey the law…while they disobey it.” He warned that our modern problem is the retreat of government, not its growth. We have already instituted too much of a libertarian state, one “that does not get involved in censorship, in moral education. It would not forbid abortions. It makes not attempt to form the character of its citizens.” One might add that is does little to effectively defend the nation’s borders, end drug peddling, or combat sedition. And it increasingly seeks to accord foreign enemies the same liberal rights of protected self-interest as enjoyed by citizens. Indeed, on the issues of crime, borders, family values, and national security, libertarians are indistinguishable from the far Left.
For conservatives, the enemy cannot be “the government” as an institution, for the security, prosperity and integrity of national society must be protected by a sovereign authority. History presents no clearer lesson. The real threats emerge when the government is corrupted by self-interest or subverted by the enemies of a society built on conservative values.
The dean of modern conservative thinker was Russell Kirk. In one of his last books, The Politics of Prudence, he noted, “Not a few of the people who have studied closely with me or who have become my assistants had been attracted a few years earlier, to the arguments of Ayn Rand or of Murray Rothbard. But as they read more widely, they had become conscious of the inadequacies and extravagance of the various libertarian factions; as they had begun to pay serious attention to our present political difficulties, they had seen how impractical are the libertarian proposals. Thus they had found their way to conservative realism, which proclaims that politics is the art of the possible.”
Hopefully, those attracted to the Tea Parties will follow the path of Kirk and not of Rand.
FamilySecurityMatters.org William Hawkins is a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues.
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