"Conservatives have a supremely validated suspicion about government in all of its branches. It is almost an instinct of conservatives to distrust the wisdom of government, and therefore to limit its powers."People say this a lot. I've seen this idea advanced recently by people arguing that conservatives ought to like Matt Yglesias' new book, The Rent is Too Damn High, since his main argument is that we should relax local land-use regulations. After all, it's deregulation! And we all know that conservatives like deregulation, and individual liberty, and restrictions on Big Government in all its guises. Right?
Well, wrong. Or, at the very least, unsupported. Conservatives like to say that this is what's motivating them, and in popular culture people generally just accept them at their word. Or perhaps they point out that they then behave in hypocritical ways by not supporting various things that are liberty-enhancing or government-limiting, or by supporting things that are liberty-restricting etc. But they don't then question the fundamental, almost definitional claim that "conservative" equates to "distrustful of government."
Certainly this concept of distrusting government authorities has a place in the complex structure of the modern conservative philosophy. Back in 1944, when the Soviet Union was alive and well and in alliance with both the United States and the United Kingdom, and when proper communism was a hale and hardy political movement, Friedrich Hayek wrote a book, The Road to Serfdom, dedicated to the argument that central planning and top-down organization is inferior to the bottom-up approach of capitalistic free markets, that no government planner could ever do as good a job of organizing a society as that which would be done by just letting people tell us by their actions what they want. Since Hayek also denounced Keynesian economics and welfare states, and since conservatives oppose welfare states and, right now, oppoes Keynesian economics, they love to talk about this book. They love to claim that Hayek's arguments are the intellectual foundation of their philosophy.
Except, here's the thing: the central planning debate Hayek thought he was fighting, or is commonly perceived as having been fighting anyway, is a dead debate. Approximately no one in the context of American politics or British politics or European politics is arguing for central planning. So you can't just say, as evidence for why conservatives are distrustful of government, that they oppose central planning; this doesn't distinguish them from centrists, or liberals, or even social democrats like myself. (Note that I'm talking about proper central planning, where the government just decrees how much of each thing each person should receive, not subtler forms of interference in the market like taxes and subsidies.) Conservatives do talk about central planning more than liberals do, but mainly in making mistaken rhetorical conflations of various not-central-planning policies with that dreaded spectre.
But now let's consider how consistently conservatives behave in ways that look "hypocritical" if you take them at their word that they distrust government. A certain kind of liberal, the kind who hasn't yet run out of benefit of the doubt to extend rightwards across the aisle, loves to talk about how conservatives should be receptive to a whole bunch of anti-government management reforms. Tax reform that lowers rates and eliminates deductions. Elimination of subsidies for oil companies. Yglesias' suggestions for reforming urban development policies. But conservatives never actually do seem to support those things, do they? Well, okay, I suppose a few of them might, sometimes, but in the aggregate right-wingers are quite hostile to these causes.
There is one great big form of government economic action that conservatives do oppose, and that's progressive redistribution of wealth. But here's the thing: that really just isn't an issue of the "wisdom of government." Certainly, there are ways to do redistribution that are less elegant than this, but the purest way to achieve progressive redistribution of wealth would be to make some function of income such that the slope is substantially less than 1. Set f(0) at $10,000, or some such figure, and then let f(x) increase quite slowly as x increases. There's no central planning here. You still let the economy run along as it wants to, you just adjust everyone's income by that function. One can agree or disagree about the desirability of such redistribution, but it's just not about "mistrust of government."
Like I said, entirely removed from the question of how progressive we want our government to be about redistribution there's the question of how exactly to implement that, and if conservatives were arguing for an equally progressive but more hands-off approach like the function I outlined above as an alternative to various in-kind transfers, then we could discuss paternalism and the wisdom of government and all that. But instead they're just arguing that redistribution is wrong, that taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is a wicked thing to do.
And notice, of course, that I haven't even touched things other than economics. Because it's really too easy once I do. Ladies and gentlemen, I present, the current champion of the Tea Party, Rick Santorum! A bit more seriously, even aside from the whole theocracy thing, and the whole criminalizing of unconventional sexuality thing, take civil liberties. Some Republicans are also at least a little bit inclined to be civil libertarians, like Ron Paul, and this typically gets them called libertarians. And people keep saying that the Tea Party, who as we all know are libertarian and have liberated the Republicans from social conservativism, will dislike all the violations of civil liberties that have come with the modern security state. But they never do. I mean, come on, our government is operating a prison whose entire point is to be beyond the reach of constitutional protections, and if you propose shutting this prison down and moving those same prisoners to ordinary prisons (which are not fun places to live, mind!), conservatives get apoplectic!
So it's not about distrust of government. In fact, I've always heard "belief in authority" mentioned as one of the defining traits of conservativism. Modern American conservatives believe in an invasive security state, they believe in using the government to monitor and regulate ordinary lifestyle choices, and they have no particular problem with government subsidies or preferential tax breaks. They have no general suspicion of the wisdom of government. What they do have is a profound opposition to taxing wealthy people to improve the lives of the destitute. This, of course, is a very difficult position to defend outright (although they've gotten more courageous about that in recent years), so instead of just saying, hey, we've got ours, screw the poor, they talk about Hayek and central planning. But that's just talk, it's just a smokescreen, and it's just nonsense.
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