April 30, 2009

Capital Tea

Some posts ago, The Refugee made a point that conservatism in the '80s was diminished by the MSM through non-reporting and condescension. He postulated that the tea parties were getting the same treatment.

This opinion piece by Arthur Brooks in today's WSJ would seem to bear that out. It contains some encouraging statistics.

Still, the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an "ethical populism." The protesters are homeowners who didn't walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don't want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don't need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right -- and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.

Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement -- maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off "in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed.

Blog Brother PE has often made the case against redistribution on moral grounds. According to Brooks, that's exactly the case that must be made.

Economics and Markets Posted by Boulder Refugee at April 30, 2009 11:19 AM

I was just starting to post a link to the Brooks piece -- it is a compelling read. Allow me to tag along and provide the section a little farther down that I was going to excerpt:

To put a modern twist on the old axiom, a man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart; a man who is still a socialist at 40 either has no head, or pays no taxes. Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the "sharing economy." They are fighting a culture war of attrition with economic tools. Defenders of capitalism risk getting caught flat-footed with increasingly antiquated arguments that free enterprise is a Main Street pocketbook issue. Progressives are working relentlessly to see that it is not.
Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It's also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don't have without regard for our children's future.
Enterprise defenders also have to define "fairness" as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is "not fair at all," according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory -- even if the prey are wealthy.

Posted by: jk at April 30, 2009 11:48 AM

It is very encouraging to see these kinds of ideas being discussed in mainstream publications by people who can influence GOP positions. (Almost as encouraging as seeng a British Petroleum TV commercial that advocates not only for wind, solar and biofuels, but oil and gas too!)

Dagny pointed out that the ideas expressed in the Brooks piece have appeared on these pages before. In the comments to a 2006 post dagny wrote:

"The second problem is philosophical (surprise). You are trying to defend individual freedoms on a collectivist basis. The reason we, “have the argument every time,” is that the majority of people including even you apparently have accepted the premise that the good or evil of a system is to be judged on a COLLECTIVE basis. This assumption allows any moonbat with an agenda to defend his policies on the, “my ideas are better for SOCIETY,” platform. Aka this time my Marxism will work. Your first paragraphs say that the classical liberal ideas result in better societies. This is true, but it is a by-product and not the reason why the ideas of Mises and Hayek are better.

Classical liberalism promotes individual freedom and that is the only standard of good that should be applied to governmental decisions."

AND ...

"As soon as you use the, “class improvement,” argument, especially as a primary argument, you are cutting out your own philosophical underpinnings. You have conceded the argument that governments should do some things because they are best for society. If idea X is best because it makes society better then I can suggest any idea X and insist that it hasn’t been tried exactly my way and it will make society better. This devolves into a he said/she said debate about how much curtailment of freedom is justified in order to make society “better”. THIS is why we keep having the argument “every time.” Because EVERY Marxist really does believe that HIS idea will make society “better.”

Freedom must be defended on an individual basis because then the latest Marxist idea X can be specifically, rationally, consistently and objectively refuted in terms of the freedoms it removes from specific individuals. Indeed, only individuals can possess freedom. (A “free society” is mere shorthand for a group of free individuals. Society is not an entity, it is an abstraction!) Individualism cannot be defended on a collective basis. To attempt to do so is philosophical suicide.

One cannot defeat an opponent’s argument by adopting it himself."

Go dagny!

Posted by: johngalt at May 1, 2009 1:33 PM | What do you think? [2]