Unstoppable (24 page)

Neither Russell Kirk, who referred to the grasping super-rich as “a host of squalid oligarchs,”
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nor Henry Calvert Simons, one of the founders of the conservative Chicago School of Economics, and a major mentor of Milton Friedman, had any illusions about who was running the economy.

Here are Simons's prescriptions, written in the Depression (1934) as an essay, “A Positive Program for Laissez Faire,” to bring private enterprise to its potential:

Eliminate all forms of monopolistic market power, to include the breakup of large oligopolistic corporations and application of anti-trust laws to labor unions. A Federal incorporation law could be used to limit corporation size and where technology required giant firms for reasons of low cost production, the Federal government
should own and operate them. . . . Promote economic stability by reform of the monetary system and establishment of stable rules for monetary policy. . . . Reform the tax system and promote equity through income tax. . . . Abolish all tariffs. . . . Limit waste by restricting advertising and other wasteful merchandising practices.
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Compare the economic stands of Simons with those of his cruel corporatist successors at the Chicago school, who would not consider moving against even the financial conglomerates that brought down the economy in 2008–2009 and that now, in 2014, are even more concentrated and “too big to fail.”

Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon both supported a “negative income tax” that led to an earned income tax credit for poor people with children. In a debate I had with Milton Friedman, he reluctantly admitted that government regulation—and was he ever against just about every government regulation from tariffs to licensing of doctors to car safety—had to be applied to pollution. Even the biggest conservative icon of them all, Adam Smith, was big on public works. Smith also “maintained that a chief goal of taxation should be ‘to remedy inequality of riches as much as possible by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'”
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But let's move from thinkers to doers and examine some of the flexibility found in conservative politicians of the past. Senator Robert Taft was the towering Mr. Conservative in Washington after World War II. His father was William Howard Taft, president of the United States and later chief justice of the Supreme Court. As president, William Howard Taft supported the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing the income tax, went after big monopolies with many antitrust prosecutions, and backed regulation of railroad rates. His conservative standard-bearer son was even more surprising. While Senator Taft had been a supporter of Herbert Hoover and opposed Roosevelt's New Deal's “socialistic experiments without paying for them,” he was anything but a clenched-jaw ideologue.
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Remarkably, the Senator favored taxing investment income
before taxing income on labor. As Bogus relates: “In the early days of the New Deal, he favored price controls for oil and coal, some forms of debtor relief, and spending $3 billion (‘but no more' for public works programs). He supported old-age pensions, increasing payments for the health of mothers and children, and some unemployment insurance under Social Security, but he did not want to extend coverage too far.”
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Believing that the free enterprise system “has certain definite limits,” he accorded the state a role in reducing poverty. In Taft's words, the federal government should “put a floor under essential things to give all a minimum standard of living, and all children an opportunity to get a start in life.”
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Raising the eyebrows, if not ire, of some of his fellow conservatives, Senator Taft voted for FHA loans to home purchasers and for constructing public housing for the poor. After a visit in 1943 to Puerto Rico, where he witnessed grievous poverty, he became a strong champion of federal aid to education. Accused of being socialistic by his hidebound, right-wing peers, Taft showed his pragmatism by retorting: “Education is socialistic anyhow, and has been for 150 years.”
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Here are some other statements and stances adopted by Taft in a time when they were not conventional positions.

As to racist attitudes, he stated, “I see no reason to think that inequality of intellect or ability is based on racial origin,”
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and he opposed poll taxes and discrimination against African Americans. In 1942, going against such liberals as FDR and California governor Earl Warren, he was the only lawmaker in Congress to question the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor.

The notorious anti-union Taft-Hartley law of 1947 bore his name and active advocacy, though he believed in the workers' right to collective bargaining and to strike. He even blocked President Truman's outrageous but then-popular demand that Congress enact legislation allowing him to draft strikers who he believed jeopardized the national welfare. Taft believed the 1947 law would create a better balance between labor and management. Two years later,
he saw the opposite had happened—that the law heavily favored management—and he wanted to amend it accordingly to achieve the hoped-for balance. The unions wanted total repeal, and they ended up with nothing. Sixty-seven years later, Taft-Hartley has stayed unchanged.

On foreign and military policy, he presciently warned against our nation becoming “a garrison state,” being imperialistic, and spending too much on military budgets and non–disaster-related foreign aid. He did not believe that the Soviet Union wanted war with the United States or with Western Europe. For this he was labeled an “isolationist.”

Compared to his relatively nonbelligerent views against Western European defense involvement, Taft was a hawk in Asia, opposing Communist China, calling for an escalation of the war in Korea, and supporting Chiang Kai-shek and Formosa. Generally, however, he was an exponent of using reason and reality to guide political philosophy, in strong contrast to today's Republican “nattering nabobs of negativism” (using Spiro Agnew's words in a new context), who blockade the Senate and House of Representatives.

It was President Richard Nixon who recognized Communist China, made arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, proposed a national health insurance scheme that was better than Clinton's, wanted a drug policy emphasizing rehabilitation over incarceration, got rid of the gold standard, and, apostasy itself, instituted wage and price controls to restrain inflation. All these and other signed enactments by Nixon of new regulatory agencies outraged William F. Buckley and William A. Rusher of the
National Review.

This accounting, which has detailed some of the eminently sensible and progressive attitudes of many famed conservatives, both thinkers and politicians, could be extended, but enough has been said to indicate that any progressive who seriously delves into conservative thought will find much common ground, on which can be built LC convergences.

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What of the Liberals? And Populist Conservatives?

Liberals' Shibboleths and Weaknesses

What of the liberal/progressive intellectual tradition over the past century or so? That is, after the period when “classical liberalism” became so accepted, even thinkers viewed as conservatives would adhere to its stance on individual and religious freedoms, private property protection, civil rights, curbs on arbitrary government, and the rule of law.

If we go beyond the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “classical liberalism,” in which conservatives also find their roots, we see the Left does not possess the kind of revered champions, delineating norms and guarding its frameworks of thought, as found among conservatives and libertarians. Political economist Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, believes that Henry George, Harold Laski, Eugene Debs, and the institutionalists like John R. Commons and Thorstein Veblen, filled the role of liberal sages in their day. But starting with the age of FDR, much of the Left became very practical, eschewing the grand philosophies that could be equated with the persecuted
adherents of domestic socialism or communism—a fear of being equated with these “isms” whose characterizations were defined by the prominent accusatory career of Senator Joseph McCarthy. For himself, FDR was content with telling American workers to join unions.

Consumer and later environmental advocates were stiffly empirical, evidence- and exposé-oriented, avoiding more sweeping ideologies. The New Left in the sixties, Faux says, had very little connection with the past, sometimes even ridiculing its elders and the intellectual output from the Great Depression. The New Left was going for a cultural revolution, expanding individual rights and behaviors, eschewing wars with the cry “Hell no, we won't go” or “Make love, not war,” while showing little interest in establishing institutions to carry forward. There was, Faux, says “a lack of seriousness in ideas.”
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Liberals have been mostly programmatic—a mode of operation that connects with reality. Ask them what they espouse, and you'll see. But the energy behind this pragmatic attitude begins to dry up without the nourishment of a larger philosophic or general vision. So it has come to pass that liberals and, to a lesser extent, progressives must own up to their own shibboleths and weaknesses if convergence is to widen beyond the easy areas of agreement.

Over the years, many outspoken liberals/progressives were not as attuned to communist despotism—its end purposes were said to be fairer—as they were to fascist despotism. This began to change with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 to put down popular resistance to the domestic communist government. Moreover, they turned away from facing up to union leaders' corruption even as they excoriated corporate corruption. They overlooked serious and violent corruption at the top of the United Mine Workers in the last years of the sixties and later in the Teamsters, which joined with trucking companies to force drivers to run unsafe rigs. Some of us criticized repression of the rank-and-file workers by union officials when it came to union governance and worker rights. None
of these criticisms, which would have strengthened unions, were received with much enthusiasm by liberal politicians and writers, who, allied with unions on other important issues, felt constrained to look the other way.

Liberals/progressives have also feared that any criticisms of social welfare programs would jeopardize their existence or their needed budgets. So they would overlook the waste and unintended consequences of bureaucratized dispensing agencies. Coming late to this problem set up the Clinton-era mischief called “workfare,” administered by the likes of Lockheed Martin and intended to get aid recipients to take jobs for unlivable wages, assuming the cut-loose welfare mothers could get them in the first place. All this emphasis on welfare abuse also distracted politicians from addressing the burgeoning corporate welfare extravaganzas draining far more of the taxpayers' dollars than do poverty welfare payments. Not confronting the hard edges of these poverty programs also allowed the avowed terminators of such programs to daunt or co-opt more reasonable conservatives in the tradition of Senator Robert Taft, conservatives who could have pushed reform efforts that shed the negatives and strengthened the positives of these compassionate programs for the sick, maimed, impoverished, or unlucky people of all ages in our country.

Here is an opportunity for convergence that the extreme right wing would do everything it could to block, especially by relying on the absolutist, often sneering daily media presentations on their radio and cable talk shows, led by mega-millionaires Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage (themselves being enriched by the corporate welfare of free radio licenses to use the public airwaves). As professor Robert Brent Toplin noted: “The militant right has distorted the meaning of conservatism to the point that . . . much that passes as ‘conservative' does not truly represent the principles of intelligent, responsible, and thoughtful conservatism.”
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A column by the peripatetic reporter Nicholas D. Kristof in the December 9, 2012, edition of the
New York Times
provided a
“heartbreaking” example of what can happen when the Left avoids forthright examination of some perverse incentives of poverty programs, which makes these programs sitting ducks for the extreme right while scaring off thoughtful, compassionate conservatives from finding any good in the broader goals of the programs.

Kristof was in Jackson, Kentucky—a poverty-belt area, long classified as afflicted with endemic unemployment. He describes “parents here in Appalachian pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check [of up to $698] for having [a child with] an intellectual disability.”
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