Its an interesting article.
"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago.I would agree that simplification and reform would both be a very good thing, but that is not exactly the same as lowering taxes and cutting spending. (I also don't believe that either party is capable of truly cutting spending.)
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Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists.
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Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past.
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The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950.
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Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?The enacting of those price/wage controls was in no way a conservative move. That was an incredibly liberal (and short sighted) move. Rather than tackle the root causes, he chose to control inflation by limiting prices?
In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad.
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In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.
But that history has been forgotten.
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Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?
There is discussion in there about health care and other things, but I think that for me the infrastructure comment rings very true.
JFK's Man-On-The-Moon-By-The-End-Of-The-Decade required a lot of government investment. It also yielded the relatively strong economies of the 80's and 90's and put medicine and technology where they are today. We could do similar things today to develop greener, less geopolitically sensitive energy tech but neither party in the government seems to have the stomach to make such investments (although bailing out large banks, Wall Street, GM, etc... can be done without flinching.)
Whether liberal or conservative, we really need to figure out how to elect people who are truly more interested in the long-term welfare of the nation than they are in serving the short term needs of the special interests that fund them.
