Yes, we have defenders of the proven economic creed of free markets. It’s just that it’s not evident among the high-profile windbags who inhabit today’s soapboxes, left and right. Go down the list from Trump to Bernie, Tucker Carlson to Rachel Maddow, France’s Marie Le Pen to French socialists, etc. All of them built fame and fortune on bashing free markets. For them, it stinks!
We should recall that old style conservatism in Europe meant a defense of feudalism, aristocratic prerogatives, and throne and altar. The old Right came by their distrust of the then-voguish ideas of free markets of David Hume and Adam Smith honestly. Choices in life were made to fit the prevailing order for these defenders of the status quo. It worked for a time. In Britain, the Parliament had its rotten boroughs (districts dominated by powerful gentry), an omni-powerful House of Lords (till the 17th century), the preeminence of the established Church and hostility to religious upstarts, its guilds to regulate labor, and taxes and legal privileges to favor local and national producers (Corn Laws, etc.). This web of government and custom restricted personal career choices and the basic staples of life. Competition and free mobility of labor and product were anathema. As such, putrid feudalism earned its reputation.
The conservatism of Reagan was originally the platform of the 18th century British Whigs, the other party vying for public support. Liberal meant Adam Smith and free markets, not the pablum of today’s faculty lounges.
In contrast, the old Tory attitude was reflected in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whether in the books or Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. Saruman’s and Sauron’s industrialized machine of war and subsequent despoilation of nature are the principal means to seize the ring and envelop Middle Earth in the Dark Shadow.
Catholic social teachings (Tolkien was a Catholic) abides criticisms of free marketeers. Protestantism wasn’t far behind. Concerns for the plight of the poor and condemnations of crass materialism, a la Dickens, while understandable, provided cover for government intervention. Religion wasn’t even necessary. In fact, for many critics of a free economy, the religion was left behind but the hostility remained. The modern Left was born. Marx showed how, and some Christians noticing the symmetry between their readings of the Gospel and the scribblings of this atheist revolutionary gave to us the Social Gospel movement. Marxist instigators in the raiment of the clergy became a fixture around the world.
Take Bernie Sanders, socialist and paragon of the modern Left. His faith commitment slinks into a word salad. One has to wonder if his belief is of a kind that requires nothing of him, the lazy man’s faith. He explains,
“I am not actively involved with organized religion. I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”
Previously, in response to Jimmy Kimmel, he was even vaguer: “I am what I am. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” Whew, hiding your beliefs so as not to be repellant to the still-sizable Christian chunk of the electorate leads to a ramble through mind-numbing Bernie circumlocutions. But it works for him to advance “Workers of the world unite!” – “we’re all tied together.”
If you think that the Bernie of the Left can’t come around to meet someone on the Right, well, I give you Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s rants against billionaires could have easily emanated from AOC’s Twitter feed, or Bernie’s stump speeches . . . and maybe did. Not to say that the corporate suits’ propagation of the vile identity politics and race essentialism isn’t deserving of condemnation, but that’s not the only cause of Tucker’s bloviating. His is AOC’s gripe: the rich exploit the worker. Watch him from 2018 castigate the rich, play lefty class warfare, and embrace Bernie, while tossing into the spiel a few throw away lines for his right-leaning (me included) Fox News audience (below).
And then we have Trump. MAGA has become a cliché, a banality meant to push the view of a floundering America in need of Making America Great Again, meaning Trump. The “Again” part is a nostalgia for the 1950’s; however, it isn’t as simple as that. The 1950’s weren’t a time without troubles: massive pockets of poverty, Jim Crow, dead lakes, filthy air, filthy streets, filthy water, and society-wide health problems.
That’s not all for MAGA. For Trumpkins, the sight of too many Toyotas on the road is proof of the death of American manufacturing. The MAGA mantra is manufacturing good, fewer manufacturing workers bad. But chants only have a superficial truth to them. The decline in factory workers is real but not overall manufacturing. Technological innovation made each worker more productive and freed up others to seek fortunes in other lines of employment, as it did at the dawn of the industrial revolution when people left the farm for jobs in the cities and subsequently created a dearth of rural workers which spurred innovation on the farm. An economic need is filled by invention in much the same manner as nature’s disposition to fill a vacuum.
Contra Trump, 2016, the year of Trump’s ascendancy, set an all-time high for American manufacturing. And manufacturing’s prospects look bright if our government gets out of the way. Off-shoring may have lost its luster as more American firms see that life in kleptocracies and totalitarian nightmares isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In addition, off-shoring is a two-way street for foreign companies. Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest chip producer, sees the Taiwan Strait as not much of a shield from an increasingly bellicose Xi and his People’s Liberation Army and Navy. They’re opening up shop in Arizona. Those Toyotas are increasingly coming off American assembly lines – the Tundra from a Texas one. Do I need to list all the other foreign nameplates?
But our government won’t stay out of the way, even for my friends on the Right. Trump has tariff-love and an unstated affection for a form of central planning called industrial policy. Enthusiasts of the so-called populist right have allied with Sanders to stiff our biggest companies with the cost of any employee on the dole. Unbeknownst to the goofs is the fact that the labor market is righting itself as companies compete for workers and come to realize that the costs of a constant churn in the payroll is deleterious to business health. The chest-pounding of Trump, Carlson, and congressional lackeys is a sideshow to more fundamental economic trends. True to form, though, that won’t stop them from taking credit for any good news.
The Right under the rubric “populists” has rediscovered its vintage inner-feudalist with their frozen-in-amber economics, but nothing at this moment can compare to the state-aggrandizement of the Left’s greenie zealotry. Here’s where the two sides part company.
Our nation could be crippled in a haze of the Left’s greenie visions. A Green New Deal (GND) in a totality or in pieces would turn off-shoring into one-way street out for anyone with a bottom line. The critical mass for the suicide pill has been building for decades. Relentless pounding in the schools and media has prepared the generational ground for greenie flights of fancy from boomers to millennials to gen z‘ers. Gavin Newsom’s “California Way” – the combination of high taxes, regulatory minefields, and gauntlet of greenie infatuations touching nearly all activity – once brought to the Beltway, will only imitate the state’s outbound migration crisis of business and the middle class on a national scale.
So, Tucker, Trump, and their sycophants will accomplish little with their tariffs, subsidies, and tax bribes if firms are forced to face a firing squad of the EPA, SEC, IRS, DOJ, and state counterparts back home. If you want more on-shoring and less off-shoring, then put Leviathan on a leash. Fact is, we’ve got a free-range Leviathan. A hellhole of Jacobins awaits them. Instead of Make America Great Again (MAGA), try Make America Competitive Again (MACA).
Congressional Republicans began the process with the tax reform of 2017 and their vetoes of Obama-era regulations by means of the Congressional Review Act. The whole country will take a leap backwards if the clumsy populist Right, intent on castigating “neocons”, joins hands with the clumsy populist Left.
Hoping for prosperity by bashing job-creators is an endorsement of masochism as an organizational principle. Slavery, besides being immoral, is the height of economic masochism: the belief that owning and beating people is sufficient to make them produce. Don’t expect the turning of the men and women of commerce into bondsmen of the state by regulation, prosecution, and taxation to be any more fruitful. Sen. Liz Warren and the Bernie bros will need a new Fugitive Slave Act to go with their wealth tax and coercive ecotopia to stop capital flight.
It comes down to the clown-theory of pain as pleasure in the junk-thought precincts of economic policy. It didn’t work for the American South and won’t work for the Right’s pining for the 1950’s or the Left’s eco-nuttery. The foolishness of economic masochism is a lesson that needs to be relearned by the Right and abandoned by the Left.
RogerG