Conservative? Say It Ain’t So
In the New York Times my old friend Tyler Cowen writes:
Another conservative economist and Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, emeritus professor of economics at George Mason University,…
I guess Tyler has never read Buchanan’s 2005 book, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative, reviewed here by another distinguished economist, William A. Niskanen.
Nonintervention: the New Isolationism?
Today, the Obama administration released its FY 2012 budget, and with it the Pentagon’s spending request. Regrettably, the Pentagon’s plan shows that the federal government’s 4th consecutive $1 trillion-plus annual deficit has not quelled an appetite for a continued quasi-imperial foreign policy that subsidizes a multitude of rich allies around the globe.
Unfortunately, if you argue against such a massive budget, you are immediately labeled an “isolationist.” Take the example of Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) crusade to cut the federal budget by $500 billion. Among many other substantive cuts, Senator Paul called for ending U.S. foreign aid around the globe. And when pressed, he included aid to Israel.
Aid to Israel represents less than one percent of his proposal, but the reaction was swift and immediate. The Senator was labeled a “neo-isolationist,” and condemned widely, while his argument for ending aid to Israel was not addressed. Benjamin Friedman wrote about this episode in the Daily Caller and presented his own arguments for ending aid to Israel.
Expanding on this theme, over at The Skeptics I have written a piece citing the vociferous attacks on Senator Paul as the latest example of modern conservatives—often of the neo-conservative variety—and liberals coming together to label anyone with a noninterventionist foreign policy outlook an isolationist:
Conservatism once was cautious, urged prudence, and emphasized fidelity to the Constitution. Conservatives saw responsibility as the flip-side of liberty, opposed the transfer society, and detested welfare dependence. On international affairs conservatives believed in defending America, not promoting social engineering overseas.
Liberals responded by tarring traditional conservatives as “isolationists.” Skeptical of joining imperial wars in the name of democracy, unwilling to risk American lives in dubious foreign crusades, and unenthused about transferring U.S. wealth abroad, traditionalists were treated as somehow disreputable. After all, progressive thought required turning Americans into warriors on behalf of a new global ethic.
Now neoconservatives toss the same epithet at conservatives who oppose promiscuous war-making and endless foreign aid. Never mind that many opponents of today’s hyperinterventionist foreign policy favor free trade, cultural exchange, liberal immigration, and political cooperation. If you do not believe in bombing, invading, and occupying adversaries and subsidizing allies, then you be an isolationist.
Click here to read the entire article.
Conservatives, Liberals, and the TSA
Libertarians often debate whether conservatives or liberals are more friendly to liberty. We often fall back on the idea that conservatives tend to support economic liberties but not civil liberties, while liberals support civil liberties but not economic liberties — though this old bromide hardly accounts for the economic policies of President Bush or the war-on-drugs-and-terror-and-Iraq policies of President Obama.
Score one for the conservatives in the surging outrage over the Transportation Security Administration’s new policy of body scanners and intimate pat-downs. You gotta figure you’ve gone too far in the violation of civil liberties when you’ve lost Rick Santorum, George Will, Kathleen Parker, and Charles Krauthammer. (Gene Healy points out that conservatives are reaping what they sowed.)
Meanwhile, where are the liberals outraged at this government intrusiveness? Where is Paul Krugman? Where is Arianna? Where is Frank Rich? Where is the New Republic? Oh sure, civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald have criticized TSA excesses. But mainstream liberals have rallied around the Department of Homeland Security and its naked pictures: Dana Milbank channels John (“phantoms of lost liberty”) Ashcroft: “Republicans are providing the comfort [to our enemies]. They are objecting loudly to new airport security measures.” Ruth Marcus: “Don’t touch my junk? Grow up, America.” Eugene Robinson: “Be patient with the TSA.” Amitai Etzioni in the New Republic: “In defense of the ‘virtual strip-search.’” And finally, the editors of the New York Times: ”attacks are purely partisan and ideological.”
Could this just be a matter of viewing everything through a partisan lens? Liberals rally around the DHS of President Obama and Secretary Napolitano, while conservatives criticize it? Maybe. And although Slate refers to the opponents of body-scanning as “paranoid zealots,” that term would certainly seem to apply to apply to Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of the Nation, who stomp their feet, get red in the face, and declare every privacy advocate from John Tyner (“don’t touch my junk”) on to be “astroturf” tools of “Washington Lobbyists and Koch-Funded Libertarians.” (Glenn Greenwald took the article apart line by line.)
Most Americans want to be protected from terrorism and also to avoid unnecessary intrusions on liberty, privacy, and commerce. Security issues can be complex. A case can be made for the TSA’s new procedures. But it’s striking to see how many conservatives think the TSA has gone too far, and how dismissive — even contemptuous — liberals are of rising concerns about liberty and privacy.
Spending and Deficits
E. J. Dionne writes in the Washington Post today that many Republicans think the George W. Bush administration was “too ready to run up the deficit.” But, he says,
That the deficit increased primarily because of two tax cuts and two wars was not part of most conservatives’ calculation because acknowledging this was ideologically inconvenient.
That’s one explanation. Of course, spending did rise by more than a trillion dollars during Bush’s eight years, and it wasn’t all military spending.
And as Michael Tanner writes today, “The Deficit Is a Symptom, Spending Is the Disease.”
Traditionally, federal spending has run around 21 percent of GDP. But George W. Bush and (even more dramatically) Barack Obama have now driven federal spending to more than 25 percent of GDP. And as the old joke goes, that’s the good news. As the full force of entitlement programs kicks in, the federal government will consume more than 40 percent of GDP by the middle of the century.
The real objection of libertarians and many conservatives to Bush is the massive increase in federal spending. As Tanner says, the deficit is just the symptom of an out-of-control, overspending federal government.
Ideological Warning Labels
A story this morning on NPR’s “Morning Edition” reminded me of my continuing complaint that the mainstream (liberal) media regularly put an ideological label on conservative and libertarian organizations and interviewees, but not on liberal and leftist groups. In a report about states accepting stimulus funds, reporter Kathy Lohr quoted “Jon Shure of the Washington D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,” “Maurice Emsellem with the National Employment Law Project,” and “Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst with the fiscally conservative Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.” (Thanks! And I’d say the label is correct, even if I might prefer libertarian.)
Those are all legitimate sources for the story. But only one of them gets an ideological label — even though the other two groups are clearly on the left. They’re to the left of the Obama administration; indeed, they’re probably part of what the White House press secretary calls the “professional left.” So why not alert listeners that you might be getting a “liberal” or “leftist” perspective from those two sources, just as you warned them that the Cato Institute was speaking from a fiscally conservative perspective?
Back on March 23, I noted but did not blog about references on “Morning Edition” to “the libertarian Cato Institute,” the “conservative American Enterprise Institute,” and “the Brookings Institution.” No label needed for Brookings, of course. Just folks there. (A bit of Googling reveals that the Brookings reference came from Marketplace Radio, heard on WAMU as an insert into “Morning Edition.” But NPR never labels it either.)
NPR’s ombudsman noted in July that NPR uses the term “ultra-conservative” a lot more than “ultra-liberal.”
It’s all too typical of the mainstream-liberal media: They put ideological warning labels on libertarians and conservatives, lest readers and listeners be unaware of the potential for bias, but very rarely label liberals and leftists. Note the absence of labels on NPR in frequent references to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Journalists should be more even-handed: label all your sources ideologically, or none of them. It’s stacking the deck to label those on the right but not those on the left.
Grigori Rasputin Bailout
Sending billions of federal taxpayer dollars to teachers and other public school employees is the bailout that just won’t die. It’s been sliced, shot up in a firefight between Democrats, and even had a battle with food stamps, but it just can’t be killed!
Now, let’s be clear: This is not some wonderful crusade all about helping ”the children.” It is pure political evil, a naked ploy to appease teachers’ unions and other public school employees that Democrats need motivated for the mid-term elections. It has to be, because the data are crystal clear: We’ve been adding staff by the truckload for decades without improving achievement one bit. Since 1970 (see the charts below) public school employment has increased 10 times faster than enrollment, while test scores have stagnated.
But suppose there were some rational reason to believe that we need to keep staffing levels sky-high despite getting no value for it. Lots of teachers’ jobs could be saved without a bailout if unions would just accept pay concessions like millions of the Americans who fund their salaries. But all too often, they won’t.
Sadly, this is all just part of the one education race that Washington is always running, and it absolutely isn’t to the top. It is the incessant race to buy votes. And guess what? Despite its reputation even among some conservatives, the Obama administration, just like Congress, is running this race at record speeds.
The Two GOPs
As the fall elections approach, two factions within the congressional GOP have emerged. The first faction, which generally controls the Republican leadership, is short-term oriented and just wants to return the GOP to power in Congress. Riding the wave of voter discontent over the government’s finances is a means to an end — the end being power.
The second, and considerably smaller faction, is more ideas driven and views the upcoming election as an opportunity to push for substantive governmental reforms. Whereas the “power first faction” offers platitudes about smaller government, the “ideas first faction” isn’t afraid to offer relatively bold suggestions for confronting the federal government’s unsustainable spending.
The ideas first faction is willing to publicly recognize that runaway entitlement spending must be reigned in and offer solutions to address the problem. Representatives Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann, and Paul Ryan, for example, aren’t shying away from advocating a phase-out of the current Social Security system, which is headed for bankruptcy. In contrast, the power first faction lambasted Democrats for wanting to “cut Medicare” during the recent legislative battle over Obamacare.
In Ryan’s case, he has given the power first faction heartburn by pushing his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” which confronts the entitlement crisis head-on. Although Ryan’s Roadmap is not the ideal from a limited government standpoint, it’s a credible offering with ideas worth discussing. Even though the Ryan plan has received some favorable notice by the mainstream media, the power first faction would probably prefer Paul and his Roadmap went away.
From the Washington Post:
Of the 178 Republicans in the House, 13 have signed on with Ryan as co-sponsors.
Ryan’s proposals have created a bind for GOP leaders, who spent much of last year attacking the Democrats’ health-care legislation for its measures to trim Medicare costs. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has alternately praised Ryan and emphasized that his ideas are not those of the party.
Ryan has not helped to make it easy for his leaders. He is a loyal Republican, but he is also perhaps the GOP’s leading intellectual in Congress and occasionally seems to forget that he is a politician himself.
At a recent appearance touting the Roadmap at the left-leaning Brookings Institution, someone asked Ryan why more conservatives weren’t behind his budget plan. “They’re talking to their pollsters,” Ryan answered, “and their pollsters are saying, ‘Stay away from this. We’re going to win an election.’”
His remarks illustrate the tension among Republicans over their fall agenda. Some strategists say the GOP should focus on attacking the Democrats; others want the party to offer a detailed governing plan.
Ryan’s ideas can be contrasted with those of the House Republican Conference Committee, which is a key power first organization. The HRCC just released a platitude-filled August recess packet for Republican House members to recite in talking to their constituents. Entitled “Treading Boldly,” the cover prominently features Teddy Roosevelt, which should immediately send chills down the spines of anyone believing in limited government.
The document is not “bold.” Take for example the five proposals to “Reduce the Size of Government”:
Fordham Institute 1, Education 0
On NRO today, the Fordham Institute’s Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli take a little time to gloat about the continuing spread of national education standards. In addition, as is their wont, they furnish hollow pronouncements about the Common Core being good as far as standards go, and ”a big, modernized country on a competitive planet” needing national standards. Oh, and apparently having counted the opponents of national standards on “the right,” they note that there are just “a half-dozen libertarians who don’t much care for government to start with.”
Now, there are more than six conservatives and libertarians who have fought national standards. But Finn and Petrilli are sadly correct that most conservatives haven’t raised a finger to stop a federal education takeover — and this is a federal takeover – that they would have screamed bloody murder about ten years ago. There are many reasons for this, but no doubt a big one is that too many conservatives really are big-government conservatives committed, not to constitutionally constrained government, but controlling government themselves. If they think they can write the national standards, then national standards there should be.
These kinds of conservatives just never learn. As I have explained more times than I care to remember, government schooling will ultimately be controlled by the people it employs because they are the most motivated to engage in education politics. And naturally, their goal will be to stay as free of outside accountability as possible!
This is not theoretical. It is the clear lesson to be learned from the failure of state-set standards and accountability across the country — not to mention decades of federal education impotence – that Fordhamites constantly bewail. Indeed, Finn and Petrilli lament it again in their NRO piece, complaining that “until now…the vast majority of states have failed to adopt rigorous standards, much less to take actions geared to boosting pupil achievement.” And why is this? Politics! As they explained in their 2006 publication To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America’s Schools:
The state standards movement has been in place for almost fifteen years. For almost ten of those years, we…have reviewed the quality of state standards. Most were mediocre-to-bad ten years ago, and most are mediocre-to-bad today. They are generally vague, politicized, and awash in wrongheaded fads and nostrums.
At this point, I really have nothing new to say. That political reality will gut national standards while making the public schooling monopoly even worse is clear if you’re willing to acknowledge it. Regretably, the folks at Fordham — and many conservatives — just aren’t. So congratulations on your victory, Fordham. To everyone else, my deepest condolences.
What Would Reagan Do on Immigration?
Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson tries to answer that very good question in an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s a question my conservative Republican friends should ask themselves as the party tries, once again, to turn public opposition to illegal immigration into political success at the polls.
Robinson correctly observes that Reagan would have had nothing to do with the anger and inflamed rhetoric that so often marks the immigration debate today. “Ronald Reagan was no kind of nativist,” he concludes, noting that Reagan was always reaching out to voters beyond the traditional Republican base, including the fast-growing Hispanic population.
It’s worth remembering that Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which opened the door to citizenship for nearly 3 million people who had been living in the country illegally. Robinson is confident Reagan would have supported the kind of comprehensive immigration reform championed by President George W. Bush and approved by the Senate in 2006.
For the record, I made similar observations and included a few of the same Reagan quotes in an op-ed I wrote soon after Reagan’s passing in June 2004
My only quibble with Robinson is his assertion that Reagan would have insisted that we successfully enforce the current immigration law first before contemplating any changes. It’s true that the 1986 IRCA contained new enforcement measures and launched an exponential rise in spending on border enforcement. But by all accounts the 1986 law failed to stem the inflow of illegal immigration.
My hunch is that President Reagan would not have simply favored spending more money on an approach that has so clearly failed to deliver. Although he embraced the conservative label, Reagan was always ready to challenge the status quo and change the law to further his vision of a free society and limited government.
I wish more of the Gipper’s admirers today shared his benevolent attitude toward immigration.
Estrada and Taylor on Kagan
Kagan gets an endorsement from superstar conservative appellate litigator and Bush II appellate nominee (also my old boss) Miguel Estrada here (see last paragraph).
Plus, Stuart Taylor says Kagan’s nomination could mean a more conservative Court:
Commentators on the left . . . complain that Kagan never compiled much of a record of aggressively championing liberal causes during her years as a law professor. Some say she was too friendly as dean of Harvard Law School to conservatives and did not recruit as many women and minorities for the faculty as diversitycrats desired.
Speaking as a moderate independent, I like everything about Kagan that the left dislikes. To borrow from my friend Harvey Silverglate, a leading Boston lawyer who champions both civil liberties and an old-fashioned liberal’s brand of political incorrectness, ‘they want people who look different but think alike.’
Kagan seems to be a woman who thinks for herself.
Taylor also highlights what many libertarians will find most troubling about her record (other than strong hints of her lack of sympathy, albeit predictable for a Democratic nominee, with the litigation interests of the business community): her apparent endorsement of the Bush administration’s legal framework for detention of enemy combatants.
Kagan on Military Recruitment
Elena Kagan has been getting a lot of flak from the right for her position on military recruitment at Harvard. While the military’s don’t ask don’t tell policy is unjust, Harvard’s position on recruitment was also misplaced—and, were the question ever presented to my faculty, I’d vote against barring the military from recruiting at my law school for the same reasons as Ilya Somin.
But, although Harvard made the wrong call on recruitment (albeit one that, in fairness, is not attributable just to Kagan, but, reportedly, to an overwhelming majority of the Harvard law faculty), Kagan’s opposition to the Solomon Amendment, which conditioned federal funding on JAG recruiters’ access to campus, has much to recommend it from a libertarian standpoint, for the reasons put forward in Cato’s amicus brief in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the case challenging the Solomon Amendment (which you can download here). (Disclosure: I co-wrote the brief when I was at Cato. As I recall, this was a controversial position within Cato, and I’d guess that remains true today. Cato’s current legal shop might well take a different view were the question presented to it now.)
True, the Supreme Court rejected our position 8-0. But it’s not the first time, and will be not be the last, that the Court musters eight votes for what some libertarians think is a questionable outcome.
And for the record, my view on Kagan—while she’s, as Kagan would say, “not my people,” she’s a top-notch scholar, a great Dean (who was very fair to faculty conservatives and libertarians), by all accounts an outstanding teacher, and likely to fall somewhere on the liberal continuum to the left of Breyer and to the right of Stevens. Could be worse!
Ron Paul, the Chamber of Commerce, and Economic Freedom
Tim Carney has a blog post at the Examiner that’s worth quoting in full:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has issued its 2009 congressional scorecard, and once again, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Tex. — certainly one of the two most free-market politicians in Washington — gets the lowest score of any Republican.
Paul was one of a handful of GOP lawmakers not to win the Chamber’s “Spirit of Enterprise Award.” He scored only a 67%, bucking the Chamber on five votes, including:
- Paul opposed the “Solar Technology Roadmap Act,” which boosted subsidies for unprofitable solar energy technology.
- Paul opposed the “Travel Promotion Act,” which subsidizes the tourism industry with a new fee on international visitors.
- Paul opposed the largest spending bill in history, Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill.
(Rep John Duncan, R-Tenn., tied Ron Paul with 67%. John McHugh, R-N.Y., scored a 40%, but he missed most of the year because he went off to the Obama administration.)
I wrote about this phenomenon last year, when the divergence was even greater between the Chamber’s agenda and the free-market agenda:
Similarly, Texas libertarian GOPer Rep. Ron Paul—the most steadfast congressional opponent of regulation, taxation, and any sort of government intervention in business—scored lower than 90% of Democrats last year on the Chamber’s scorecard.
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., had the most conservative voting record in 2008 according to the American Conservative Union (ACU), and was a “taxpayer hero” according to the National Taxpayer’s Union (NTU), but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says his 2008 record was less pro-business than Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.
This year’s picture was less glaring, but it’s still more evidence that “pro-business” is not the same as “pro-freedom.” The U.S. Chamber is the former. Ron Paul, and the libertarian position, is the latter.
I suspect that on issues such as free trade agreements and immigration reform, I might be closer to the Chamber’s position than to Ron Paul’s. But to suggest that Paul is wrong to vote against business subsidies — or that DeMint was wrong to vote against Bush’s 2008 stimulus package and the $700 billion TARP bailout – certainly does illustrate how much difference there can be between “pro-business” and “pro-market.” Instead of “Spirit of Enterprise,” the Chamber should call these the “Spirit of Subsidy Awards.”
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