A Stitch in Haste

I’m in general agreement with Ryan Sager’s latest round in the conservative v. libertarian strain within the Republican Party. I have been echoing such sentiment for quite some time.

Samizdata, meanwhile, asks whether we have moved from the “beginning of the end” to the “end of the end” of limited government:

At this point, I see no hope for limited government in the near or medium term. I don't see any political home for us, anywhere that we can exert any meaningful influence. We can look forward only to the expansion of the state, until the entire political system is rendered chaotically fluid by some shock or upheaval.

I concur, and think that the “shock or upheaval” is closer than we may realize. And I’m convinced that it is going to be economic rather than political.

Louis Rukeyser used to say that the only sure thing on Wall Street was that if you bet against the U.S. economy, in the long run you were sure to lose money. But, as Sager and others are pointing out, if we are now in the era of the tax-and-spend Republicans, with Democrats not opposing fiscal recklessness but rather merely distracted by the Iraq Reconstruction, the War on Terror and other non-economic issues, then the long-run health of the U.S. economy is seriously imperiled.

Does this mean that a Twenty-First Century depression is on the way? Probably not. But I am utterly convinced that severe and rapid economic shocks are inevitable under the current political situation. These shocks could include one or more of the following:

• the collapse of the U.S. dollar


• the collapse of the housing market


• an explosion in long-term interest rates


• a widespread consumer credit crisis coupled with a near-collapse in the credit card industry specifically and the consumer finance sector generally


• severe fiscal crises and possibly defaults by city and state governments and public authorities


• the collapse of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (see my most recent post)
• increasing awareness of, and therefore panic over, the Social Security and Medicare crises.

By contrast, I do not envision a stock market collapse or a general economic contraction. Businesses have for the most part been so focused on cost-cutting, operational efficiencies and reducing their financial leverage that the economy as a whole could probably weather these shocks, although certain specific industries (e.g., airlines) might not. Any bailouts of industries deemed “too important too fail” would, however, constitute another component of the “shock list.”

Most of these potential economic shocks can happen very quickly, even in a single day. As they start to occur, don’t be surprised if more and more Republican voters demand accountability from their own party and lose confidence in the social conservative wing of the party that is now so thoroughly in control.

Couple that with other issues that libertarian Republicans have been biting their tongues over (e.g., anti-gay legislation) and a true schism, perhaps even a split, is imaginable.

Furthermore, the more the Democratic Party continues to self-destruct, the more likely such a schism seems.

Not tomorrow, certainly. Not in 2006 or even 2008, either.

But somewhere down the road, the contradictions within the Republican Party will outnumber, overwhelm and overtake the consistencies.

And will a new, non-fringe small-l libertarian party emerge? Who knows.

But it's certainly something for frustrated libertarians to look forward to.

Related Post (With Archive):
Two-Party System, Revisited

You'll eat it and you'll like it!

So if we are all agreed that the libertarians need the conservatives a whole lot more than the conservatives need the libertarians, the question then becomes, and I mean this with all respect: Shouldn’t the libertarians just sit down and shut up?

Of course, the question of why exactly libertarians "need" the new-era, Bible-thumping, judge-hating, school-regulating, tax-and-spend Republicans remains unanswered. To make sure the PATRIOT Act is renewed? To make sure the Iraq Reconstruction continues to be botched? To add on even more benefits to Medicare? To explode our budget and trade deficits even further? To make sure the single best chance for Social Security reform in a generation is squandered? We can get most of that from the Democrats, thank you very much.

All I can say on top of what I've said before is: enjoy it while it lasts — because it won't. And I look forward to a well-deserved "I told you so..."

Hat tip to Polipundit.

POST SCRIPT: Speaking of conservatives.

I'm currently reading a book about the presidential election of 1912 — probably the most exciting vote since the early days of the Republic. As you may recall, there was a four-way race:

--The incumbent conservative Republican, William Howard Taft.

--The former President for whom he veeped, Theodore Roosevelt, who was so disenchanted with Taft's abandonment of progressivism that he quit the Republican party and started the Progressive Party, often called the "Bull Moose Party." (Try to imagine an alternative reality where a disgruntled Ronald Reagan had run against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992!)

--The relatively obscure, anti-big-business, anti-political-machine governor of New Jersey, Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

--The anything but obscure Socialist union organizer, Eugene V. Debs.

I went into the book hoping to find analogies between the conservative-progressive schism in the Republican Party of nearly a century ago and the "Big Tent" tensions between social conservatives and libertarians in today's Republican Party. I'll try to report back on that when I've finished the book.

Anyway, I found this snippet astounding, concerning the Socialist Party platform going into the 1912 election:

It furthered proposed to abolish the Senate and to deny the president the veto power over legislation. It would also deny the Supreme Court the right to declare laws unconstitutional, and eliminate federal district and circuit courts.
...
All these measures were but "a preparation for the workers to seize the whole powers of the government."

Curious, the Socialists of a century ago wanted to strip the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction, indeed eliminate most of the federal judiciary if necessary, in order to devolve power down to "the people" (i.e., as much direct democracy as possible).

Which party is proposing similar maneuvers today, through targeted jurisdiction-stripping and using ballot proposals to circumvent the traditional governing process and judicial review?

How the world turns.

Meanwhile, libertarian critter chronicles some analogies between today's conservatives and yesterday's Communists.

UPDATE: Red Guy in a Blue State reminds us that there are still Bull Moose Republicans.

Reading Wall Street Journal editor James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" screed is a lot like driving past a car crash: you know what you'll see will likely repulse you, but you just can't help looking.

Today, in regards to some obscure academic hissy fit about whether there is such a thing as "the Israel lobby" (answer: of course there is), Taranto raises up a Straw Man of Babel toward conservative heaven:

It seems to us [David] Bernstein has an incomplete picture of libertarians. He probably thinks of them as cute little nerds who have basically sound (if somewhat extreme) ideas about economics along with various eccentric enthusiasms: private toll roads, pornography, drugs, head-freezing. This is the libertarian world of Reason magazine. ... But libertarianism is an ideology. Ideology can lead to fanaticism, and fanaticism to hatred.

So let me see if I understand Taranto's "Reasoning" (pun intended) correctly: A man I've never heard of, associated with a think tank I've barely heard of, writes an op-ed piece about a subject for which there is no obvious default position for libertarians. That, plus a five-year-old Reason article about people who want to clone their dogs, yields the conclusion that all libertarians are potential hate-filled fanatics? And this is coming from a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal?

It is no secret that the Journal editorial board has, like so many others in the Republican establishment, abandoned libertarianism in recent years, choosing instead to embrace the radical social conservative elements (e.g., anti-gay rhetoric and laments about "activist judges" appear on the Journal's op-ed pages with depressing frequency). But is the puerile name calling and the hopelessly strained and twisted logic really necessary?

We libertarians already know you don't like us anymore, conservatives — there's no need to get, um, fanatical about it.

James Taranto, editor of the increasingly embarrassing "Best of the Web Today" feature at OpinionJournal, continues his descent into hopeless unsalvageability:

As regular readers of this column know, we especially enjoy making fun of libertarians. Of course, some people who call themselves "libertarians" are just normal folks who don't fit the "conservative" or "liberal" label because they're on one side on economic issues and the other on social ones. But a true libertarian ideologue is marvelously kooky: relentlessly logical in the service of utter insanity, sort of a cross between Mr. Spock and John Hinckley.

His sole piece of evidence: an economic analysis of airport security waiting times put out by Tim Kern of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Because of course trying to put some numbers on TSA policies and inefficiencies is somehow analogous to trying to assassinate a president.

And of course Taranto can't even get that part right:

[I]n our experience the total amount of time it takes to go through airport security is well under an hour, except when there is a long line (which happens maybe 15% to 20% of the time).

Yeah, so? The cost of the TSA process is of course not the actual wait time for any given flight, but the potential wait time for every flight. Would anyone dare suggest that it is rational not to assume the worst delay but rather the average delay? Especially when the penalty for guessing wrong is a missed flight? Do the airlines and the TSA advise us to "take a shot and take your time," or to "give yourself plenty of time to get to the airport and through security"? If I show up early in anticipation of a lengthy security line and end up breezing through the process, is my time no less wasted?

That's not being a libertarian, that's being an economist — or simply a rational, informed thinker. This is somehow deserving of ridicule? Perhaps Kern's analysis is accurate; perhaps it's flawed. But why exactly should he be dismissed as "marvelously kooky" for even contemplating the issue in the first place?

Call me "relentlessly logical in the service of utter insanity," but I score that round to Kern.

---

Meanwhile, Rolling Doughnut critiques another portion of this same edition of "BOTWT."

The Hoover Institution's Peter Berkowitz seems to think so: (W$J; OpinionJournal)

One source of the divisions evident today is the tension in modern conservatism between its commitment to individual liberty, and its lively appreciation of the need to preserve the beliefs, practices, associations and institutions that form citizens capable of preserving liberty.

"Lively appreciation" is of course not the term I would use for bigot amendments, flag burning amendments, the eradication of the separation of church and state, and all the other ways that social conservatives have waged culture war against libertarianism -- and all that even before any discussion of Iraq or the War on Civil Liberties!

"Conservatism" today (to the extent it is not faux "No Child Left Behind" or "Gonzales v. Raich" conservatism) can be summed up thusly:

Liberty? Sure -- as long as that "liberty" doesn't offend my social-conservative "beliefs" (creationism?), "practices" (anti-gay bigotry?), "associations" (VMI?) and "institutions" (the Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist and Mormon churches?), all of which "form" (indoctrinate?) citizens capable of preserving "liberty" (as long as that "liberty" doesn't offend my social-conservative ...).

One especially obnoxious bait-and-switch from Berkowitz:

A crucial segment of those who voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 think that the Constitution should be amended to protect the traditional understanding of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Another crucial segment of the Republican coalition rejects alteration of the Constitution to advance debatable social policy, preferring that states function as laboratories of innovation.

In other words, "conservatism" is so wonderfully diverse that it can embrace declaring an insular minority to be second-class citizens at either the federal or the state level. "We got both kinds -- Country and Western!"

The schism between social conservatives and libertarians within the Republican Party was not a manifestation of "diversity" -- it was political schizophrenia. It was not "celebrated," it was tolerated. And now it's dead anyway -- the social conservatives won; the libertarians were purged. The Grand Old Party was as Grand -- and its ideas as Old -- as ever.

Until it self-destructed under its own hubris.

Now, faced with only half a party, a petered-out "us or the terrorists" hysteria no longer propping it up and an utterly inept president leading it, suddenly Republicans want to rediscover "conservative diversity" and summon back disenchanted libertarians?

Conservatives, facing uncertainty about George W. Bush's legacy, and the reality of their own errors and excesses, have good reason just now to read and ponder [Russell] Kirk, [Friedrich] Hayek and [Leo] Strauss.

Yeah right. You don't uninvite someone to your fraternity party and then re-invite them to help clean up your vomit the morning after. Libertarians are, generally, not that stupid. If they return to the GOP, it will only be on their terms, not Karl Rove's or James Dobson's.

Fool me once -- shame on you. Fool me twice -- ain't gonna happen.

---

Richard Cohen, meanwhile, attacks conservatism from its left flank:

An overriding principle of conservatism is to limit the role and influence of the federal government. Nowhere is this truer than in education. For instance, there was a time when no group of Republicans could convene without passing a resolution calling for the abolition of the Education Department and turning the building -- I am extrapolating here -- into a museum of creationism.

No, that's an overriding principle of libertarianism; conservatives wanted, and got, a federal command-and-control structure in the schools just as liberals wanted -- but with different command(ment)s and controls. That's exactly what No Child Left Behind proves.

And the fact that libertarians and conservatives don't play well together anymore, in the schoolyard or anywhere else, is precisely why the Republican Party is imploding.

Look at who is running for the Republican nomination:

--The utterly unprincipled "say anything" candidates ("Rudy McRomney").
--The all-too-principled "four more years" radical social conservatives (Brownback, Huckabee, Gilmore).
--The nutjobs (Tancredo, Hunter, Gingrich, Paul).

Not a libertarian in the bunch. And who can claim surprise? The GOP has simply reaped what they have sown.