Thursday, I posted a diary entry here called, “I’m a Never Trumper Because…” In that entry I explained, among other things, that I consider myself a constitutional conservative, in that I believe fervently in the values and ideals delineated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. (That, I explained, is one of the many reasons I find Trump so odious.)
I have been genuinely touched by the overwhelmingly positive responses I’ve received to my diary entry. Even more, I can’t begin to describe the generous support and amazing kindness of nearly everyone I’ve encountered at Daily Kos. The participants on this site are a very special and warmhearted breed, and I’m humbled that they tolerate me occasionally offering up my two cents on topics of the day.
A few of Thursday’s commenters wondered what my views on “conservative” economic principles might be, given my bent toward constitutional conservatism. (Regarding “social” conservatism, I hope I made it very plain that I have no tolerance for the bigotry and hatefulness of the Religious Right. Period.) Herewith are some of my thoughts on the economic views generally associated with conservatism.
The raison d’etre of anyone with a conservative secret decoder ring is the free market. To those Adam Smith fans, the free market is a Hadacol-style, patent medicine, a magic elixir that can fix every social, political, fiduciary and meteorological ill known to Man. Yes Sir, just a spoonful of 100 percent pure, non-fat, dolphin-safe, free market capitalism will remedy everything from pernicious racism to grinding poverty to rampant socialism, and leave young and old alike feeling whole, happy and stuffed to the gills with material wealth.
Well, I don’t agree. I think the free market is – and always has been – a chimera. I don’t think it has ever existed beyond a fleeting shimmer in the economic sun. It is antithetical to human nature. As long as there are two or more people competing in any marketplace, at least one of them will seek an advantage over their competition. And, since people are not all equally ingenious, similarly ambitious or identically ethical, one or more of those competitors will succeed in gaining that edge over the others. Once that happens, the advantaged one will seek to solidify their dominance by eliminating their opposite numbers and creating a monopoly over their marketplace. Thus, a stable, free market in which competition creates new products and benefits in perpetuity, is really nothing more than a shadowy smoke dream.
Admittedly, I’m over-simplifying the nuances and minutiae of free market capitalism. But, even in Adam Smith’s time, unfettered competition on the battlefield of the economy was shunned. British monarchs granted monopolies over resources discovered in colonies to individual families and private companies to prevent competition. Over time, especially as mechanization evolved and vast industries were born, the means by which individuals and companies short-circuited competition became more sophisticated and, in many cases, more nefarious. Deception, fraud, tortuous working conditions and outright theft became universal business practices – all to the detriment of the common man.
This is why our relationship with our leaders had to change. The progressive movement of the late 19th and 20th centuries began the process of recognizing that the government simply safeguarding the political rights on which the nation was founded was not enough. Our birthright of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” was meaningless if a lawless, Darwinian economy denied most people the wherewithal and opportunities to actually exercise their freedoms. America’s survival required muscular governments that could manage competition and meaningfully prevent bad actors from acting badly.
A second Holy Writ for capitalist Mouseketeers is, “caveat emptor,” – Let the buyer beware. The logic behind this notion is that each individual (or at least enough people) will do sufficient due diligence before making a purchasing decision that they will avoid either being defrauded or harmed by the maker of a product they’re buying. This, say the capitalists, is how the free market corrects its shortcomings and prevents abuse.
Once more I must beg leave for bearing bad news but, “caveat emptor,” is as much a fantasy as Mitch McConnell’s chin or the mythical woodland Snipe. If it had any real agency it ended a couple of centuries ago when industrialization moved the means of production out of reach of any consumer’s capacity to even begin to identify how any product comes into being. Add to that the never ending avalanche of new technologies and an ever expanding universe of products and services assembled from multitudes of sources, and no one, anywhere, could accumulate, or assimilate, the information necessary to make a truly informed decision about any one product, let alone everything they use to go from pillar to post in modern daily life.
Simply put, we need strong and effective government oversight, as well as intelligent and adaptive regulation of the various “free markets” that make up our abstruse, 21st century economy. At a minimum, we need government to do what we can no longer do for ourselves (in addition to attempt to equalize access to opportunity for everyone). Those are the expectations, the “unalienable” rights of every American in today’s world.
There is yet another sharply-angled truth for which red-staters have to free up cranial real estate. Fealty to our heritage is amazingly comforting. But it is not possible for one generation to bind future generations to that earlier generation’s moral postulates or perspectives on governance. The people of each era establish their own relationship with the organs – and values - by which they govern themselves. We’ve been fortunate that nearly two and half centuries of Americans have chosen to embrace – with continuous modifications – the basic notions of what our country should be that were first articulated by our Founding Fathers. I believe we’ve benefited greatly by carrying on their aspirational legacy. But future generations – including the younger, on-deck generations right now - are free to decide otherwise. Not a single moment of the past can dictate a single second of the future, no matter how many people in the present might want to try.
In short, I believe conservatives are right. We need to respect and learn from our past. But liberals are correct, as well. We must welcome the wonders and exigencies we discover with the dawning of each new day. Doing the latter, as well as the former, doesn’t make us any less conservative. It only makes us a lot smarter – and our world a lot better.