poet
Banned
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What Is The Conservative Ideology?
The conservative rallying cry is "freedom." Freedom generally meaning freedom from government intervention in matters they do not want government interfering in (usually their own personal or professional lives). But as we shall see later in this essay, conservatives have an inherent mistrust of personal freedom, and can become quite uncomfortable when serious proposals are made to extend it to someone other than themselves. The problem here is that allowing personal freedom without allowing a similar degree of freedom to others violates to principle of 'greatest good for the greatest number.' It therefore creates a basic inconsistency.
The essence of a free society is "openness," which implies two things: the right to free speech, and the right, even the requirement, to think for oneself, make one's own decisions, and chart one's own destiny. While conservatives loudly proclaim these ideals, they do not mind circumscribing them in the name of their own ideology; restrictions on abortion, based on their own definition of human life, as if no other were possible, and the restriction on the civil rights of gays to marry the informed, consenting adult of their choice, presuming that their own definition of marriage is the only one that is worthy of being allowed by law. Such circumscriptions and many others that could be cited show clearly the distance that exists between conservative ideological rhetoric and actual practice. This is because in the headlong rush towards a laissez-faire economic model, it is easy to forget that the values and institutions of an open society are not neccessarily supported by the market, and need care and nurturing if they are to survive. This is because the conservative has failed to understand that by increasing his comfort level (ensuring that abortions or gay marriages don't occur) he has circumscribed the right of others to make their own decisions. Simply claiming that he is right is not enough; no evidence is ever provided to show that the greatest good for the greatest number is provided for by circumscribing the right of women to direct their own reproductive destinies or the right of gays or lesbians to marry the informed, consenting adults of their choice.
The reason that the conservative doesn't nurture those values and instititutions of freedom for all, is that the concept of freedom to a conservative is a deeply personal one. It generally stems from personal experience or from personal history in which the conservative or someone close to him has had a negative experience with government or the intervention, perceived or real, of government in his life. Therefore, the language used by conservatives in relation to freedom is personal. It is replete with personal examples, such as personal forms of taxation, stories of government regulations or bureaucrats gone bad. In relation to the rest of society, it is always vague generalizations, such as "getting government off the backs of the people." The disparity in the language reflects the personal nature of conservatism.
Economically, conservatives hold only Adam Smith to be a true prophet of economic theory. Other, more modern economists such as Milton Freidman are held in esteem only to the extent that they echo Adam Smith's views. Why this is true is simply that Adam Smith propounded the most purely non-regulated economic model that has ever seen any degree of acceptance. This fits hand in glove with the conservative view that government is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The obvious synergy of the theories seems to verify for the conservative the sensical basis of conservative theory. Yet conservatives fail utterly to acknowledge that the regulations they so angrily denounce were put there originally for a reason. That reason is that free markets, unrestrained by government regulation, do not neccessarily lead to the greatest good for the greatest number -- in fact, they never do. To the extent that they don't, government regulation is often neccessary to prevent abuse. This is a patently obvious fact almost never acknowledged by conservative theorists.
A persistent, dominant feature of conservatism is social Darwinism. In economic terms, it takes the form of declaring intervention in the market to be the ultimate evil, and that non-interventionism informs the social theories that underlie conservative philosophy. By claiming that the free market will solve the ills, social Darwinism becomes an easy extension of that view, by asserting that those who aren't successful in the market are morally inferior; i.e., they are unsuccessful because they are weak or lazy. The anecdotal evidence that others have made it after starting with few if any resources, is used to justify this view.
While this view is a central tenet of conservative social philosophy, it fails to consider differences in individual temperment and talent, and that while some have "made it" after starting from nothing, it presumes that all are equally equipped to do so, which is obviously not the case. The fact that some have, however, presumes to alleviate the conservative of any responsibility towards those who can't. Therefore, any notion of government support of the weak, infirm, or defective becomes anathema.
This social Darwinism stands in stark contrast to the view of religious conservatives that Darwinism is the ultimate expression of the evil of secular science, which declares that humanity arose from the primates from just such a system of survival of the fittest. The irony that on the one hand, the view that Darwinism is an insult to what the religious conservative regards as the divinity of human creation with the disregard of that portion of that creation which is other than self, seems lost on such conservatives.
In social theory, conservatism harks back to what it considers a simpler and somehow better time. More modern problems, such as feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, urban decay, economic decline and political instability are considered by conservatives to simply be evidence that society has strayed from what it believes to be the non-interventionist wisdom of the past. To cure these ills, conservatives suggest simply returning to what they presume the values of the past to be, neglecting the obvious fact that the problems of today are quite different from those of past generations, and that the egregious moral and political inequities of the past are too unpleasant to be worth returning to, and that the past was nowhere near as non-interventionist as they presume. Nor do they consider that the interventions of the state were made neccessary by very real problems.
These social theories are often lumped together under the banner of "traditional family values." That term is never carefully defined, but usually is taken to mean a rejection of feminism, gay rights and even the right of women to control the destinies of their own reproductive lives in some cases. It also decries the decline of the two-parent family, while totally ignoring the factual reasons that the two-parent family is in decline. Again, government is often blamed, even though the problem is primarily an economic one. And conservative economic policies are largely to blame. The fact that these values have no effect at all on inner city decay, illegal drugs, street crime, collapse of the educational system, etc., are lost on the conservative, because he never stops to actually think about how these values would actually affect these problems. He simply accepts that they will, on face value, because such has been the pronouncement of conservative pundits.
Running through all of this is a common thread of patriarchialism. There is an unspoken objectification of women and sexual minorities, in which they are regarded as less than men in terms of their rights within society. This view takes voice in such statements as "A woman's place is in the home" as if she weren't competent to run her or her family's affairs. Homophobia is considered quite acceptable, even honorable among many conservatives, as homosexuals don't quite seem to be men or even women, so are therefore something less that totally human (or even downright evil and perverted), and therefore don't deserve human rights. Many of the more outspoken and extreme conservatives will even give voice to this Fascist sentiment. There is also an assumption, false as it turns out, that the male was programmed by evolution to be the head of the family and by extension, head of everything else too. Even female conservatives, who from their own experience ought to know better, often buy into this mistaken view.
The nostalgia for an earlier, and presumed better time takes a particularly virulent turn when it links up with a need for an enemy. Conservatives need enemies simply because of the failure of conservative policies to produce the nirvana predicted for them. Finding a scapegoat and blaming the problems of society on that scapegoat are vastly easier and more comfortable than the introspection and self-examination required to determine just where the root of society's problems lie, and whether conservative policies can actually affect the problems. To an extent, government intervention fills the role of scapegoat, but in cases were government obviously can't be blamed, another scapegoat must be found. In the "golden age" of the 1950's, that enemy was communism, the nostalgia was for a pre-world war II innocence, and together the virulence took the form of McCarthyism. Today, communism is dead, but the need for a scapegoat still exists, so in casting around for scapegoats, conservatives seem to have found twin evils in the gay community and providers of services needed by and used exclusively by women, particularly family planning services. Never minding, of course, the bigotry and stereotyping that the use of this particular scapegoat betrays.
A priceless quote from a conservative "intellectual" about the gay community can be found in the November, 1996 issue of Commentary, a conservative intellectual journal. Norman Podhoretz wrote: "Men using one another as women constitutes a perversion. To my unreconstructed mind, this is as true as ever; and so far as I am concerned it would still be true even if gay sex no longer entailed the danger of infection and even if everything about it were legalized by all 50 states and ratified by all nine justices of the Supreme Court." Of course, he might as well have said that to his pre-Enlightenment mind, it didn't matter how effectively he was proven wrong, he'd still believe he was right. As gay men and lesbians come out of the closet and prove such stereotypes wrong, the "unreconstructed" minds of such "intellectuals" start looking like the sorry lot of just-plain bigots they are. Yet such is the neo-conservative mentality of holding prejudices more dearly than the truth, just because it is so very, very comforting to believe yourself right in spite of all evidences to the contrary.
In international relations, the laissez-faire ideology promotes the openness of borders and the internationalization of markets. It is doctrine that everyone benefits by the reduction of trade barriers on the assumption that the doctrine of "comparative advantage" will cause everyone in the world to do what is most economically advantageous.
What this doctrine fails to consider is that, although about the only comparative advantage Bolivia has in international trade is in beef production, not everyone in Bolivia wants to be a cowboy. Nor the fact that while Mexico can build car engines cheaper than the United States, it may not be in America's strategic interests to become dependent on Mexico for all of its car engines. It was no surprise during the North America Free Trade Agreement debate that predictions were made that many American jobs would be lost to Mexico. Indeed, the threat of moving production to Mexico is routinely used by American manufacturers to extract wage and benefit concessions from American workers. Is this really in the workers' interests?
The result of NAFTA as of this writing has been a net loss of about 112,000 American jobs to Mexico. One might think that Mexico has benefitted greatly, but the reality is that most of the profits earned by American business operating in Mexico have been repatriated to the United States. Investment in native business in Mexico has been stifled by competition from American businesses seeking the resources for their own operations. How Mexico has benefitted by this is difficult to see. Indeed, Mexico has seen a net loss of nearly a million jobs, because of stiff competition from American and Canadian businesses, who have deprived the native companies of their markets. So even the gains of the 'maquiladora' employment has been more than offset by the loss of employment in local businesses. That this situation has led to a net loss of opportunity for both Mexican and American workers is easy to see, in spite of the fact that the non-interventionist doctrine would claim that the opposite should have occurred.
The Most Fundamental Fallacy of Conservative Philosophy
The conservative theorist and the right-wing Libertarian theories from whom his ideas are derived, love to rail against the power of the state. The obtrusiveness of government, especially in economic matters, are the basis of the conservative's complaints about government.
Yet the reality of life is that it is the economic power of corporations, which conservative theory ignores, that represents the greatest circumscription of personal freedom to the vast majority of people. As conservative principles are applied to government, the increasing restraint with which corporate activities are regulated means that corporations become increasingly free to tread on the personal freedoms of individuals who are powerless to stop them.
Suppose, for example, a major corporation wishes to buy up property across the street to build a shopping mall. Those who already live across the street from the proposed shopping mall are in a very poor position to prevent the mall from being built and have to watch helplessly while their property values are negatively affected. Why? Because they don't have the political muscle that fighting the large corporation would take. In other words, those with the gold make the rules, and the rights of the individual property owners in reality don't matter. So even though the small property owner has the theoretical right to object, his objection will make little difference. As the zoning regulations become increasingly watered down, individual property owners are finding they have fewer and fewer options for stopping the loss of value of their principal investment, because of the greed of a major corporation.
But the most serious circumscription of personal rights by corporations is in the workplace. The constitution and the bill of rights are essentially left at the workplace door. There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no right of privacy, no right to petition for a redress of grievances, and little if any recourse for an unjust decision by management. And now, at least in Michigan and increasingly in other states, workers injured on the job are no longer entitled to compensation either for injuries or for lost income in any practical way.
The conservative argument is that the worker has the right to bargain for improved conditions; but if the worker has no bargaining power, that right exists in theory only. A father with hungry mouths to feed and a single job offer has far fewer options than does a huge corporation with a massive human resources department. And when the ability to organize a union is stifled by unfavorable labor law, it isn't possible for the worker to aggregate that power.
Who Are The Conservatives?
It's hardly surprising that conservatives are most generally the people who benefit from implementation of conservative policies in society. A look at just who they are is quite revealing.
I like to say that conservatism is the politics of the middle and upper class, adult, white, Anglo-Saxon, male, heterosexual, Protestant Republicans. Of course, the ranks of conservatives include many people who don't fit all of those labels, but a look at the delegates who attended the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego was quite revealing. Fully 94 percent of the delegates were white, more than three-quarters male, and only four out of the thousands attending were openly homosexual. Most were from upper-class backgrounds or from the management of corporations. The presence of large numbers of religious fundamentalists was made clear by the frequent appearances in the media by Ralph Reed, the director of the Christian Coalition, who spent over $1 million coordinating his troops there. The people who were present at that convention said more about the agenda than the rhetoric from the platform did.
The other large group of conservatives are middle class (mostly) men of limited education who feel alienated and victimized by liberal policies which they feel have not been to their benefit. These men often come from poor and working class backgrounds and fail to realize that their upward mobility was often made possible by the very liberal policies, such as the fostering of the labor movement, they now angrily denounce.
Why is it that conservatives come from these two very different groups? Well, just consider for a moment: getting "government off the backs of the people" benefits the upper-class who run corporations which can increase their personal wealth and the companies can externalize their costs by shifting them to the taxpayer through the avoidance of taxes and "burdensome" regulations, such as pollution laws, securities regulations, etc. The middle-class males benefit by discouraging Affirmative Action and similar liberal policies they view, wrongly as it turns out, as a threat to their economic status. Adults of limited parenting skills benefit by the conservative obstruction of government efforts to protect children from child abuse and neglect. Whites like conservative policies because it means they don't have to support and protect racial minorities or suffer from economic competition from them. Males tend to like conservative policies because they would allow the continuation of the presumed right of males to discriminate against women simply because they think they have a natural right to. Heterosexuals who don't like the idea of gay men and lesbians having the same right to marry are drawn to conservative politics because they presume the conservative emphasis on "traditional values" give them the right to deny marriage and other civil rights to homosexuals. Conservatives tend to be Republican because that party has adopted conservative ideology since its earliest days, while the Democratic party, since the founding of the American republic, has always been far more liberal.
Conservatism has a commonality of philosophy amongst its members simply because there is a commonality of experience that has brought these people to their political views. You're far more likely to find yourself agreeing with someone whose life has paralleled your own, because he is much more likely to have arrived at the same conclusions you have. This is why the gatherings of conservatives produce crowds that all tend to look alike.
This leads to an obvious question: If conservative economics is so harmful to the economic interests of the lower and middle classes, why are so many of them conservative?
The answer to that can be only described as a combination of deception and shallow thinking. The deception is on the part of the rich and powerful who see a keen self interest in convincing the lower and middle classes that a simplistic, "free enterprise" model of economics is in their interests. The shallow thinking is on the part of the lower and middle classes who simply accept it without question, because it comes from those who've "made it" and who "obviously" know more than they do, and have limited educational experience with which to understand the rhetoric.
A classic example is Ronald Reagan's so-called "trickle down" theory. In it, he claimed that if the rich were allowed to keep more of what the poor and middle class were producing, more of it would then "trickle down" to those below, and they would end up richer. No one ever thought to ask whether giving someone else more of the wealth you produce really would actually make you richer. Of course it doesn't, but that didn't stop the conservatives from accepting the notion no matter how silly it was. They simply accepted it because it was handed down by their opinion leaders, who had a vested interest in their accepting it.
Another example is the so-called "Laffer Curve." In this half-baked economic theory, the assumption is that the more government takes in taxes, the less the people will produce, and therefore a point is arrived at, where an increase in taxes will actually result in less revenue. True as far as it goes, but no conservative I read during that era ever stopped to ask if we knew whether we had actually arrived at that point in the U.S. Ronald Reagan just assumed we had, and so he cut taxes deeply in the assumption that we'd move back on the "Laffer Curve" and actually generate more tax revenue. Those who really understood economics, the scholars of the university schools of economics, were horrified. Of course the predictable happened, and the result was the largest budget deficit in American history, and a debt was racked up that now costs every American an average of about $500 a year just to service. I love to ask anti-tax conservative supporters of Reagan whether they think their $500 a year is being well spent.
There are other, even more obvious gaps between conservative economic theory and reality. Conservatives love to spout the theory that prices are set by the equilibrium of supply and demand. This simplistic view fails utterly to account for the volatility of stock and commodity markets. This is because the simplistic view of conservative economics fails utterly to account for the fact that both supply and demand curves incorporate expectations about the events that are shaped by those expectations. There is a feedback between what investors are thinking and what they think about. The result is a positive feedback; price volatility causes major investors to seek to insulate themselves from the effects of that volatility. The result is that the volatility is increased. This is why, in spite of all the insulating mechanisms, such as futures and derivatives, that have been invented to allow investors to insulate themselves from the volatility of the markets, those very markets are more volatile than ever before. Conservative economic theory just can't explain this.
The question has been asked of me why, if the persuit of personal advantage of the middle and upper class, white, Anglo-saxon, adult, male, heterosexual protestant Republican isn't morally acceptable, why is it for women and minorities? The answer, again, is whether the adopted philosophy in the persuit of that advantage benefits the greater number or just those like oneself. If liberalism benefited only women and minorities, and disenfrachised the conservatives to the extent that conservatism disenfranchises women and minorities, I'd consider it just as morally unacceptable. But since it seeks to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number, I find it to be morally acceptable.
The fact is that liberalism seeks to be an inclusive philosophy. It seeks to embrace the interests of all, including women, minorities and, yes, even conservative adult males to the extent possible. When women and minorities embrace that inclusiveness, there is nothing wrong with their persuit of self interest thereby. That is the test; how many benefit by what you propose?
What Is The Conservative Ideology?
The conservative rallying cry is "freedom." Freedom generally meaning freedom from government intervention in matters they do not want government interfering in (usually their own personal or professional lives). But as we shall see later in this essay, conservatives have an inherent mistrust of personal freedom, and can become quite uncomfortable when serious proposals are made to extend it to someone other than themselves. The problem here is that allowing personal freedom without allowing a similar degree of freedom to others violates to principle of 'greatest good for the greatest number.' It therefore creates a basic inconsistency.
The essence of a free society is "openness," which implies two things: the right to free speech, and the right, even the requirement, to think for oneself, make one's own decisions, and chart one's own destiny. While conservatives loudly proclaim these ideals, they do not mind circumscribing them in the name of their own ideology; restrictions on abortion, based on their own definition of human life, as if no other were possible, and the restriction on the civil rights of gays to marry the informed, consenting adult of their choice, presuming that their own definition of marriage is the only one that is worthy of being allowed by law. Such circumscriptions and many others that could be cited show clearly the distance that exists between conservative ideological rhetoric and actual practice. This is because in the headlong rush towards a laissez-faire economic model, it is easy to forget that the values and institutions of an open society are not neccessarily supported by the market, and need care and nurturing if they are to survive. This is because the conservative has failed to understand that by increasing his comfort level (ensuring that abortions or gay marriages don't occur) he has circumscribed the right of others to make their own decisions. Simply claiming that he is right is not enough; no evidence is ever provided to show that the greatest good for the greatest number is provided for by circumscribing the right of women to direct their own reproductive destinies or the right of gays or lesbians to marry the informed, consenting adults of their choice.
The reason that the conservative doesn't nurture those values and instititutions of freedom for all, is that the concept of freedom to a conservative is a deeply personal one. It generally stems from personal experience or from personal history in which the conservative or someone close to him has had a negative experience with government or the intervention, perceived or real, of government in his life. Therefore, the language used by conservatives in relation to freedom is personal. It is replete with personal examples, such as personal forms of taxation, stories of government regulations or bureaucrats gone bad. In relation to the rest of society, it is always vague generalizations, such as "getting government off the backs of the people." The disparity in the language reflects the personal nature of conservatism.
Economically, conservatives hold only Adam Smith to be a true prophet of economic theory. Other, more modern economists such as Milton Freidman are held in esteem only to the extent that they echo Adam Smith's views. Why this is true is simply that Adam Smith propounded the most purely non-regulated economic model that has ever seen any degree of acceptance. This fits hand in glove with the conservative view that government is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The obvious synergy of the theories seems to verify for the conservative the sensical basis of conservative theory. Yet conservatives fail utterly to acknowledge that the regulations they so angrily denounce were put there originally for a reason. That reason is that free markets, unrestrained by government regulation, do not neccessarily lead to the greatest good for the greatest number -- in fact, they never do. To the extent that they don't, government regulation is often neccessary to prevent abuse. This is a patently obvious fact almost never acknowledged by conservative theorists.
A persistent, dominant feature of conservatism is social Darwinism. In economic terms, it takes the form of declaring intervention in the market to be the ultimate evil, and that non-interventionism informs the social theories that underlie conservative philosophy. By claiming that the free market will solve the ills, social Darwinism becomes an easy extension of that view, by asserting that those who aren't successful in the market are morally inferior; i.e., they are unsuccessful because they are weak or lazy. The anecdotal evidence that others have made it after starting with few if any resources, is used to justify this view.
While this view is a central tenet of conservative social philosophy, it fails to consider differences in individual temperment and talent, and that while some have "made it" after starting from nothing, it presumes that all are equally equipped to do so, which is obviously not the case. The fact that some have, however, presumes to alleviate the conservative of any responsibility towards those who can't. Therefore, any notion of government support of the weak, infirm, or defective becomes anathema.
This social Darwinism stands in stark contrast to the view of religious conservatives that Darwinism is the ultimate expression of the evil of secular science, which declares that humanity arose from the primates from just such a system of survival of the fittest. The irony that on the one hand, the view that Darwinism is an insult to what the religious conservative regards as the divinity of human creation with the disregard of that portion of that creation which is other than self, seems lost on such conservatives.
In social theory, conservatism harks back to what it considers a simpler and somehow better time. More modern problems, such as feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, urban decay, economic decline and political instability are considered by conservatives to simply be evidence that society has strayed from what it believes to be the non-interventionist wisdom of the past. To cure these ills, conservatives suggest simply returning to what they presume the values of the past to be, neglecting the obvious fact that the problems of today are quite different from those of past generations, and that the egregious moral and political inequities of the past are too unpleasant to be worth returning to, and that the past was nowhere near as non-interventionist as they presume. Nor do they consider that the interventions of the state were made neccessary by very real problems.
These social theories are often lumped together under the banner of "traditional family values." That term is never carefully defined, but usually is taken to mean a rejection of feminism, gay rights and even the right of women to control the destinies of their own reproductive lives in some cases. It also decries the decline of the two-parent family, while totally ignoring the factual reasons that the two-parent family is in decline. Again, government is often blamed, even though the problem is primarily an economic one. And conservative economic policies are largely to blame. The fact that these values have no effect at all on inner city decay, illegal drugs, street crime, collapse of the educational system, etc., are lost on the conservative, because he never stops to actually think about how these values would actually affect these problems. He simply accepts that they will, on face value, because such has been the pronouncement of conservative pundits.
Running through all of this is a common thread of patriarchialism. There is an unspoken objectification of women and sexual minorities, in which they are regarded as less than men in terms of their rights within society. This view takes voice in such statements as "A woman's place is in the home" as if she weren't competent to run her or her family's affairs. Homophobia is considered quite acceptable, even honorable among many conservatives, as homosexuals don't quite seem to be men or even women, so are therefore something less that totally human (or even downright evil and perverted), and therefore don't deserve human rights. Many of the more outspoken and extreme conservatives will even give voice to this Fascist sentiment. There is also an assumption, false as it turns out, that the male was programmed by evolution to be the head of the family and by extension, head of everything else too. Even female conservatives, who from their own experience ought to know better, often buy into this mistaken view.
The nostalgia for an earlier, and presumed better time takes a particularly virulent turn when it links up with a need for an enemy. Conservatives need enemies simply because of the failure of conservative policies to produce the nirvana predicted for them. Finding a scapegoat and blaming the problems of society on that scapegoat are vastly easier and more comfortable than the introspection and self-examination required to determine just where the root of society's problems lie, and whether conservative policies can actually affect the problems. To an extent, government intervention fills the role of scapegoat, but in cases were government obviously can't be blamed, another scapegoat must be found. In the "golden age" of the 1950's, that enemy was communism, the nostalgia was for a pre-world war II innocence, and together the virulence took the form of McCarthyism. Today, communism is dead, but the need for a scapegoat still exists, so in casting around for scapegoats, conservatives seem to have found twin evils in the gay community and providers of services needed by and used exclusively by women, particularly family planning services. Never minding, of course, the bigotry and stereotyping that the use of this particular scapegoat betrays.
A priceless quote from a conservative "intellectual" about the gay community can be found in the November, 1996 issue of Commentary, a conservative intellectual journal. Norman Podhoretz wrote: "Men using one another as women constitutes a perversion. To my unreconstructed mind, this is as true as ever; and so far as I am concerned it would still be true even if gay sex no longer entailed the danger of infection and even if everything about it were legalized by all 50 states and ratified by all nine justices of the Supreme Court." Of course, he might as well have said that to his pre-Enlightenment mind, it didn't matter how effectively he was proven wrong, he'd still believe he was right. As gay men and lesbians come out of the closet and prove such stereotypes wrong, the "unreconstructed" minds of such "intellectuals" start looking like the sorry lot of just-plain bigots they are. Yet such is the neo-conservative mentality of holding prejudices more dearly than the truth, just because it is so very, very comforting to believe yourself right in spite of all evidences to the contrary.
In international relations, the laissez-faire ideology promotes the openness of borders and the internationalization of markets. It is doctrine that everyone benefits by the reduction of trade barriers on the assumption that the doctrine of "comparative advantage" will cause everyone in the world to do what is most economically advantageous.
What this doctrine fails to consider is that, although about the only comparative advantage Bolivia has in international trade is in beef production, not everyone in Bolivia wants to be a cowboy. Nor the fact that while Mexico can build car engines cheaper than the United States, it may not be in America's strategic interests to become dependent on Mexico for all of its car engines. It was no surprise during the North America Free Trade Agreement debate that predictions were made that many American jobs would be lost to Mexico. Indeed, the threat of moving production to Mexico is routinely used by American manufacturers to extract wage and benefit concessions from American workers. Is this really in the workers' interests?
The result of NAFTA as of this writing has been a net loss of about 112,000 American jobs to Mexico. One might think that Mexico has benefitted greatly, but the reality is that most of the profits earned by American business operating in Mexico have been repatriated to the United States. Investment in native business in Mexico has been stifled by competition from American businesses seeking the resources for their own operations. How Mexico has benefitted by this is difficult to see. Indeed, Mexico has seen a net loss of nearly a million jobs, because of stiff competition from American and Canadian businesses, who have deprived the native companies of their markets. So even the gains of the 'maquiladora' employment has been more than offset by the loss of employment in local businesses. That this situation has led to a net loss of opportunity for both Mexican and American workers is easy to see, in spite of the fact that the non-interventionist doctrine would claim that the opposite should have occurred.
The Most Fundamental Fallacy of Conservative Philosophy
The conservative theorist and the right-wing Libertarian theories from whom his ideas are derived, love to rail against the power of the state. The obtrusiveness of government, especially in economic matters, are the basis of the conservative's complaints about government.
Yet the reality of life is that it is the economic power of corporations, which conservative theory ignores, that represents the greatest circumscription of personal freedom to the vast majority of people. As conservative principles are applied to government, the increasing restraint with which corporate activities are regulated means that corporations become increasingly free to tread on the personal freedoms of individuals who are powerless to stop them.
Suppose, for example, a major corporation wishes to buy up property across the street to build a shopping mall. Those who already live across the street from the proposed shopping mall are in a very poor position to prevent the mall from being built and have to watch helplessly while their property values are negatively affected. Why? Because they don't have the political muscle that fighting the large corporation would take. In other words, those with the gold make the rules, and the rights of the individual property owners in reality don't matter. So even though the small property owner has the theoretical right to object, his objection will make little difference. As the zoning regulations become increasingly watered down, individual property owners are finding they have fewer and fewer options for stopping the loss of value of their principal investment, because of the greed of a major corporation.
But the most serious circumscription of personal rights by corporations is in the workplace. The constitution and the bill of rights are essentially left at the workplace door. There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no right of privacy, no right to petition for a redress of grievances, and little if any recourse for an unjust decision by management. And now, at least in Michigan and increasingly in other states, workers injured on the job are no longer entitled to compensation either for injuries or for lost income in any practical way.
The conservative argument is that the worker has the right to bargain for improved conditions; but if the worker has no bargaining power, that right exists in theory only. A father with hungry mouths to feed and a single job offer has far fewer options than does a huge corporation with a massive human resources department. And when the ability to organize a union is stifled by unfavorable labor law, it isn't possible for the worker to aggregate that power.
Who Are The Conservatives?
It's hardly surprising that conservatives are most generally the people who benefit from implementation of conservative policies in society. A look at just who they are is quite revealing.
I like to say that conservatism is the politics of the middle and upper class, adult, white, Anglo-Saxon, male, heterosexual, Protestant Republicans. Of course, the ranks of conservatives include many people who don't fit all of those labels, but a look at the delegates who attended the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego was quite revealing. Fully 94 percent of the delegates were white, more than three-quarters male, and only four out of the thousands attending were openly homosexual. Most were from upper-class backgrounds or from the management of corporations. The presence of large numbers of religious fundamentalists was made clear by the frequent appearances in the media by Ralph Reed, the director of the Christian Coalition, who spent over $1 million coordinating his troops there. The people who were present at that convention said more about the agenda than the rhetoric from the platform did.
The other large group of conservatives are middle class (mostly) men of limited education who feel alienated and victimized by liberal policies which they feel have not been to their benefit. These men often come from poor and working class backgrounds and fail to realize that their upward mobility was often made possible by the very liberal policies, such as the fostering of the labor movement, they now angrily denounce.
Why is it that conservatives come from these two very different groups? Well, just consider for a moment: getting "government off the backs of the people" benefits the upper-class who run corporations which can increase their personal wealth and the companies can externalize their costs by shifting them to the taxpayer through the avoidance of taxes and "burdensome" regulations, such as pollution laws, securities regulations, etc. The middle-class males benefit by discouraging Affirmative Action and similar liberal policies they view, wrongly as it turns out, as a threat to their economic status. Adults of limited parenting skills benefit by the conservative obstruction of government efforts to protect children from child abuse and neglect. Whites like conservative policies because it means they don't have to support and protect racial minorities or suffer from economic competition from them. Males tend to like conservative policies because they would allow the continuation of the presumed right of males to discriminate against women simply because they think they have a natural right to. Heterosexuals who don't like the idea of gay men and lesbians having the same right to marry are drawn to conservative politics because they presume the conservative emphasis on "traditional values" give them the right to deny marriage and other civil rights to homosexuals. Conservatives tend to be Republican because that party has adopted conservative ideology since its earliest days, while the Democratic party, since the founding of the American republic, has always been far more liberal.
Conservatism has a commonality of philosophy amongst its members simply because there is a commonality of experience that has brought these people to their political views. You're far more likely to find yourself agreeing with someone whose life has paralleled your own, because he is much more likely to have arrived at the same conclusions you have. This is why the gatherings of conservatives produce crowds that all tend to look alike.
This leads to an obvious question: If conservative economics is so harmful to the economic interests of the lower and middle classes, why are so many of them conservative?
The answer to that can be only described as a combination of deception and shallow thinking. The deception is on the part of the rich and powerful who see a keen self interest in convincing the lower and middle classes that a simplistic, "free enterprise" model of economics is in their interests. The shallow thinking is on the part of the lower and middle classes who simply accept it without question, because it comes from those who've "made it" and who "obviously" know more than they do, and have limited educational experience with which to understand the rhetoric.
A classic example is Ronald Reagan's so-called "trickle down" theory. In it, he claimed that if the rich were allowed to keep more of what the poor and middle class were producing, more of it would then "trickle down" to those below, and they would end up richer. No one ever thought to ask whether giving someone else more of the wealth you produce really would actually make you richer. Of course it doesn't, but that didn't stop the conservatives from accepting the notion no matter how silly it was. They simply accepted it because it was handed down by their opinion leaders, who had a vested interest in their accepting it.
Another example is the so-called "Laffer Curve." In this half-baked economic theory, the assumption is that the more government takes in taxes, the less the people will produce, and therefore a point is arrived at, where an increase in taxes will actually result in less revenue. True as far as it goes, but no conservative I read during that era ever stopped to ask if we knew whether we had actually arrived at that point in the U.S. Ronald Reagan just assumed we had, and so he cut taxes deeply in the assumption that we'd move back on the "Laffer Curve" and actually generate more tax revenue. Those who really understood economics, the scholars of the university schools of economics, were horrified. Of course the predictable happened, and the result was the largest budget deficit in American history, and a debt was racked up that now costs every American an average of about $500 a year just to service. I love to ask anti-tax conservative supporters of Reagan whether they think their $500 a year is being well spent.
There are other, even more obvious gaps between conservative economic theory and reality. Conservatives love to spout the theory that prices are set by the equilibrium of supply and demand. This simplistic view fails utterly to account for the volatility of stock and commodity markets. This is because the simplistic view of conservative economics fails utterly to account for the fact that both supply and demand curves incorporate expectations about the events that are shaped by those expectations. There is a feedback between what investors are thinking and what they think about. The result is a positive feedback; price volatility causes major investors to seek to insulate themselves from the effects of that volatility. The result is that the volatility is increased. This is why, in spite of all the insulating mechanisms, such as futures and derivatives, that have been invented to allow investors to insulate themselves from the volatility of the markets, those very markets are more volatile than ever before. Conservative economic theory just can't explain this.
The question has been asked of me why, if the persuit of personal advantage of the middle and upper class, white, Anglo-saxon, adult, male, heterosexual protestant Republican isn't morally acceptable, why is it for women and minorities? The answer, again, is whether the adopted philosophy in the persuit of that advantage benefits the greater number or just those like oneself. If liberalism benefited only women and minorities, and disenfrachised the conservatives to the extent that conservatism disenfranchises women and minorities, I'd consider it just as morally unacceptable. But since it seeks to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number, I find it to be morally acceptable.
The fact is that liberalism seeks to be an inclusive philosophy. It seeks to embrace the interests of all, including women, minorities and, yes, even conservative adult males to the extent possible. When women and minorities embrace that inclusiveness, there is nothing wrong with their persuit of self interest thereby. That is the test; how many benefit by what you propose?