Ed Morrissey relayed an interesting quote from Democrat representative Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire earlier today:
“I think when you can pay for insurance, you must,” said Shea-Porter. “For those who are blessed to have insurance through their companies, they should keep it.”
Those who are blessed to have insurance through their companies? You might have thought your health insurance was part of your compensation, following a pattern set by decades-old wage controls which obliged companies to offer benefit packages to attract skilled workers. According to Congresswoman Shea-Porter, that health insurance is actually a divine blessing, like having a good singing voice. By extension, this would make the people who don’t have insurance through their companies cursed.
This is more than just a linguistic quirk. Democrats speak often of those who “win life’s lottery,” insinuating their wealth is not their hard-earned property, to which they have an absolute right. Instead, it’s pennies from heaven, and we should spare no pity for those who would catch an umbrella full of those pennies and scurry off to indulge their greed, while others are left to suffer. Those who believe government has a duty to “spread the wealth around” find it essential to compromise the idea that wealth belongs to those who earn it. Ownership is the truth that must be buried before theft can put on its Sunday best and introduce itself as “redistribution.”
Congresswoman Shea-Porter’s remarks are just the latest in a series of incidents that remind me why I become restless when social and fiscal conservatives argue. The philosophy of conservatism cannot be adequately expressed without the fusion of its moral and economic arguments. I’ve spoken with a number of liberals who became conservatives, and they rarely cite the fiscal arguments of conservatism as the reason they switched. I would imagine people who become more liberal over time say the same thing. Neither side seems to win many converts with its pie charts.
A strictly financial argument for conservatism never makes much progress with the electorate, because liberalism is presented as an explicitly moral enterprise. This is one of the big reasons it is never held to account for its practical failures. Every liberal talks up the latest huge expansion of the government as if the year is 1909, rather than 2009, and the ideas he advocates haven’t been proven disasters around the globe. Collectivist agriculture yields starvation, the trillion-dollar War on Poverty produces more poverty, political control of industries crashes those industries… and yet, it’s always Day One of the great socialist experiment, and no one has every hit on the brilliant idea of making the “rich” pay their “fair share” to fund a government crusade against want.
This increasingly stale series of fresh starts is not merely a cynical attempt to keep the population from challenging liberal ideas, by exploiting the case of historical amnesia it gained by slamming its collective head into the public school system. Confronted with the grim history of their ideology, most liberals will say it doesn’t matter if their ideas are efficient, because there is a moral imperative to follow them, and all opposition to them is fundamentally immoral. It doesn’t matter that liberalism doesn’t work, because it’s the right thing to do… the only right thing to do.
Consider the liberal reaction to the concept of the Laffer curve, described in detail here by Arthur Laffer himself. To put it simply, the Laffer curve explains that high taxes produce less revenue for the government than expected, because people change their behavior to avoid the taxes… and many of these behavioral changes result in an overall weakening of the economy, reducing the size of the economic pie government is trying to cut itself a slice of. This is why both Kennedy and Reagan increased revenue to the Treasury by cutting taxes. Young liberals try to deny the objective reality of the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts, and become very confused and upset when shown the hard data. Old liberals are smart enough not to argue with the data. They just say it doesn’t matter, because steep progressive taxation is morally correct, and “tax cuts for the rich” are absolutely immoral – regardless of their net effect on government revenue.
One of the reasons liberals always sound so foolish when they discuss economics is their belief that moral certainty trumps objective knowledge. In his infamous encounter with Joe the Plumber, Barack Obama expressed it like this:
It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too… My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off… if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.
In other words, the lot of underemployed plumbers will improve when the government seizes a huge amount of money from the wealthy, keeps a large portion for itself, and distributes the remainder to poor people, some of whom will doubtless use their welfare money to hire plumbers. Keep this logic in mind the next time some fossilized liberal makes a crack about “trickle-down economics.”
The part of the conservative movement broadly defined as “social” is essential to defeating the moral argument of the Left. Electoral victory requires persuading moderate and independent voters, and even some liberals who are still open-minded enough to give the other side a hearing. Such persuasion is impossible without a compelling moral argument, because conservatism does not seem coherent without it. Say what you will about the fundamental argument of collectivism, but you can’t deny it’s simple and consistent: give us your vote and we will take care of you, at the expense of people whose greed is worthy of your hatred.
The difficulty faced by a strictly fiscal expression of conservatism can be seen in way Republican health care proposals have difficulty gaining traction. The recent House Republican proposal was given a $61 billion price tag by the Congressional Budget Office – something like 6% of the cost for the Democrats’ delirious $3 trillion fantasy. It’s a fine expression of fiscal conservatism… but without the accompanying moral argument against socialized medicine, it won’t amount to much beyond a group of well-meaning Republicans clearing their throats, tapping stacks of paper on their desks, and wondering why no one is paying attention to them.
The ideas of the Left are both ineffective and immoral. They are not strictly economic proposals. Economics affect society, an idea the Left currently understands much better than the Right. When the State achieves the massive size of our federal government – and has cocooned itself in preparation for the metamorphosis into something incalculably larger – the difference between fiscal and social policy evaporates. What is the point of claiming to be “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” when the State controls so much of your life, and asserts first claim on so much of your income… which is another way of saying it has first claim on the majority of your time?
I have always thought the embrace of liberty is the key ingredient to achieving the essential fusion between social and fiscal conservatism. I sympathize with most of the goals expressed by social conservatives. I don’t believe they can achieve those goals by imposing them through the power of a massive central State, the way liberalism has done for decades. They should see that State as an offense against the moral imperative of liberty, and relish the challenge of fighting their battles locally, after regaining the freedom we never should have been foolish enough to surrender. Collectivism is premised on the absence of respect for fellow citizens – they must be compelled to follow the collective agenda, or cared for by the State because they’re too feeble to survive without it. Both social and fiscal conservatism can meet on the common ground of liberty, which demands respect for fellow citizens. This does not require social conservatives to abandon the notion of community standards. Instead, it means they must respect the decision of those who disagree with those standards to change them… or relocate to a different community.
From liberty flows competition, of both businesses and ideas. Success in a competition of ideas requires persuasion, not compulsion. No one who is confident in the power of their ideas should fear the challenge of persuasion, just as no one who believes in the quality of their business fears the competition of the marketplace. Liberty is both powerful and moral. The embrace of liberty is something both halves of the Right can agree they are right about. I think current events prove it’s a mistake to think liberty can survive the attack of collectivism – a powerful illusion with the inherent aggression of a nightmare – without both halves of the Right defending it.
