February 24, 2005
Reason-based Progressives
When I read Jonathan Chait's TNR piece I knew I had to blog it. My first thought was "this is the craziest thing I have ever seen, I have to show everybody how wacko these folks are!"
And I still think they is.
Then reading AlexC's excellent post on Social Security and basic Democratic intransigence, I was tempted to add this as a comment.
But it needs its own post and what I hope will develop into its own comment thread. TNR is not "The Nation;" they are partisan but they are thoughtful. So hear it is. Folks really believe this to be true.
The Cliff Note version is that God comes down (see, we already lost JohnGalt) and tells one political party that the other one is right. Chait is well balanced in his summaries and descriptions, but the thesis is that the thoughtful lefties all say "it's a fair cop!" and turn Conservative ---- but those ideological right wing moonbats, boy...
Now imagine the opposite were to happen. God appears in order to affirm liberal precepts: Current tax levels barely affect economic incentives, social programs provide tremendous economic security at modest cost to growth, and most regulations achieve their intended effects without producing undue distortions. Would economic conservatives likewise abandon their views? Some certainly would, but a great many would not. Economic conservatism, unlike liberalism, would survive having all its empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it.And not because conservatives are necessarily more stubborn. (Indeed, on an individual level, liberals may well be just as stubborn as conservatives.) Rather, conservatism, unlike liberalism, overlays a deeper set of philosophical principles. Conservatives believe that big government impinges upon freedom. They may also believe that big government imposes large costs on the economy. But, for a true conservative, whatever ends they think smaller government may bring about--greater prosperity, economic mobility for the non-rich--are almost beside the point. As Milton Friedman wrote, "[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself."
I'm no less a partisan hack than Chait (and, yes, he's a much better writer) but I would have little difficulty asserting the exact opposite. The left is driven by ideology and the right wants to optimize growth and have the trains run on time.
My example would be globalization. It has brought untold wealth and diversity to rich and poor, but the left fights it because it doesn't measure up to their standards of fairness.