As Much As The Next Guy
Posted on September 29th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
|
I’m as much a limited government guy as the next fellow, but let’s not pretend that we live in some libertarian utopia in which the state has no role in the market. ~Stephen Bainbridge
Of course, that’s just the point. Bainbridge isn’t as much of a limited government guy as the next fellow if the next follow is Mike Pence or, say, Daniel Larison, and his position on the bailout is the proof. He thinks that socializing financiers’ risk on the dubious basis that it will avert catastrophe does not significantly compromise his claim to be “as much a limited government guy as the next fellow,” when it necessarily does. What these people mean when they say this is that limited government is a nice thing to talk about and it is fine to defend when times are good, but when the going gets tough we basically accept that the welfarists and socialists have been right all along, at least up to a point.
Bainbridge takes comfort in the distinction between principle and ideology, but what conservative principle has ever approved of the concentration of power in one man’s hands that is being vested in the Secretary of the Treasury? What conservative principle ever celebrated the accumulation of vast amounts of public debt to prop up financial institutions? This reminds me of the pathetic and servile response of more than a few conservatives to executive power-grabs and unconstitutional surveillance powers. They would cry out, ”The Constitution is not a suicide pact!” Perhaps not, but I have never quite understood why that required us to euthanize constitutional government.
Few on the right are more hostile to the perverse appeal to “creative destruction” than I am when it is used to justify de-industrialization, the displacement of people, the transformation of local communities or demographic upheaval through mass immigration, but what we are faced with this week is the victory of Hamiltonian collusion between finance and government to use the latter’s apparatus of power to shore up the former’s wealth. Central government is robbing the people to prop up concentrated wealth, and claiming in the process that it is doing us a favor. Never mind that the government’s alarmism may well be wrong.
People have been cajoled into submission through fear and intimidation, and above all by the threat that life might become less comfortable. In other words, advocates of the bailout are quite happy to say that liberty has a price and they are very happy to pay it so long as it avoids most of the unpleasantness. “Give me liberty or give me a comfy retirement!” is not exactly a phrase that will live forever. Thus an abject abandonment of liberty is here being implausibly dressed up as a defense of liberty. Burke and Kirk would, I suspect, feel like retching if they had lived to see their understandings of constitutional government and social order used in this way.
It is easy to talk about principle when there is no crisis happening and no risk attached to standing on principle. The real test comes when holding fast may actually cost something. Holding to a principle, if it means anything, means that you value it more than mere self-interest, satisfaction or comfort. A lot of Americans want to have it all–the pretense that they are free, with none of the responsibilities or dangers that go with it. In reality, you can either have the latter and remain free, or you can cease being free and then be kept free (temporarily) from responsibility and danger.
Update: Rep. Mary Kaptur (D-OH) is not going down without a fight.
Most wise, sir, most wise.
Here are my bailout talking points, far more prosaic than yours.
Aside from that,
.
‘but what conservative principle has ever approved of the concentration of power in one man’s hands that is being vested in the Secretary of the Treasury? What conservative principle ever celebrated the accumulation of vast amounts of public debt to prop up financial institutions?’
This is conservatism. Conservatives represent the aristocracy. They believe gov’t should serve the interests of the wealthy (Hamilton favored an aristocracy). The wealthy are in danger of losing some of their wealth, financial instruments may not have their expected future value if someone is willing to buy them at their future value, the gov’t must step in to help them, the gov’t must be that buyer who primes the pump.
This doesn’t seem very ‘conservative’ but then most people don’t understand the ideology. “Limited government’ is one of the terms they use to appear populist but the only limits they want imposed on gov’t is limiting the amount of tax the gov’t can levy on the wealthy or limiting the rules that can be imposed in the financial markets.
Not all self-descibed conservatives are Hamiltonians, and Hamiltonians are not really conservatives. The conservative tradition in this country has little or nothing in common with the Court tradition.
If, as you say, there is no conservative principle that allows for the government to act to prevent a disaster, there should be. At base, conservatism means “to conserve” our way of life. If there is a threat to that, conservatism is not paralyzed by “principles” and unable to act. Conservatism endorses the use of government to prevent all kinds of disasters, so I see no reason, in principle, why the government cannot act in this complex financial market to prevent a disaster. It’s of course a valid question to ask whether this bailout will actually do that, or whether it is necessary, but those are practical issues. In principle, I see no reason why conservatism can’t support a government bailout that represents the a serious effort to actually prevent an economic disaster. Maybe you could explain why that would violate conservative principles.
I have never proposed that we sit around and do nothing. I have talked about a variety of alternatives with varying degrees of approval. Zingales’ proposal is worth taking seriously. Kling’s ideas make sense to me, and the basic idea of providing more capital to facilitate lending strikes me as a good one. I am a little tired of the idea that if you don’t endorse an awesomely terrible plan, which may not even work and which will have real adverse consequences even if it does, you don’t think there’s a problem and want to invite an economic disaster. Assuming that the danger of the disaster is real, and I am still inclined to think it is over-hyped, this was not the best way to address it, nor was it the most immediate way.
Instead of having a real debate about viable alternatives for providing more capital to banks and leaving the MBS market to its own devices, bailout supporters said it was basically their plan or nothing, and so we got nothing. Yes, conserving our way of life is the goal, which is why a plan that would radically change the relationship of the government to the financial sector and alter our way of life in many ways, some of them entirely unpredictable, is not one that conservatives should be backing. Maybe now we can contemplate real alternatives that have a chance of winning broad support.
Given the number of conservatives who have championed the executive power-grab of the last eight years, it’s difficult to credit “limited government” as a conservative principle, any more than a belief in tax cuts any deeper than “more money for us.” It’s also difficult for one who doesn’t worship markets to understand why the most important thing, in the face of their spectacular failure, is to preserve them in all their current catastrophic instability. I’m really not willing to risk my family’s welfare in a possible depression in order to preserve a hypothetical libertarian ideal, any more than I’m willing to sacrifice my children to the volcano gods.
Daniel, I’m not attacking you for not supporting the bailout. I simply pointed out that there is no overriding conservative principle that would prevent one from supporting a good bailout plan. My own reactions were originally opposed to the bailout, and in favor of creating some kind of alternative credit agency through the government, which is no less “socialistic” of course. But I don’t really see that as practical now, and in some sense it’s an even worse example of “Big Government”. There are other ideas of course, some worthy, most not. The problem is timing. If we had taken one of those alternative plans six months ago, perhaps, this crisis could have been averted. At this point, however, this seems to me to be the best plan.
Incidentally, after the bailout vote failed, the market lost about 1.2 trillion dollars in value. That alone is greater than the cost of the bailout. Not to mention the trilliions that we stand to lose throughout the economy.
But the point of this thread, I thought, was “conservative principles”, and I don’t see how you have justified the notion that the proposed bailout violates those principles. I’m all for real debate about the best course of action, and I’m glad that you aren’t suggesting no action at all, but to me it seems that the best “conservative principles” are those that practically conserve our way of life, which you seem rather contemptuous of, and seem to enjoy the idea of it being dramatically altered by adverse economic circumstances. You say that people are putting comfort above principle, as if most Americans were actually living comfortably. They are not. Most of us are just getting by. The idea that the bailout somehow takes liberty away from ordinary people seems a little bit crazy. What are you actually talking about? Economic disasters are what take liberty away form ordinary people, because to ordinary people liberty means having money in your pocket to do with as you like. The bailout certainty takes some liberties away from very rich people who control stock and credit markets, but that’s because they’ve squandered their liberties and destroyed the wealth created by those who actually work for a living, and they need to be regulated more closely. I don’t like helping these people, but taking greater control over those people does not seem to me to be an infringement on the liberties of ordinary people, but a protection of those liberties. In principle, at least. The devil is always in the details, of course.