The Case for Conservatism

Washington Post | George Will | May 31, 2007

Conservatism’s recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today’s political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals — freedom and equality.

Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.

Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism’s goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market’s role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.

Hence liberals’ hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education’s semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual’s Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of health savings accounts (individuals who buy high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses — just as car owners do not buy insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals’ advocacy of government responsibility for — and, inevitably, rationing of — health care, which is 16 percent of the economy and rising.

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5 thoughts on “The Case for Conservatism”

  1. George Will writes that government efforts to improve the lives of citizens actually inhibit freedom and stifle prosperity by creating a culture of dependency and entitlement. Abandoning these efforts, on the other hand, Will tells us, creates a self-reliant attitude that leads to greater freedom and prosperity for greater numbers of people.

    Sounds good in theory, lets see how it has worked in practice:

    Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well? The Brookings Institute, Economic Mobility Project, May 2007

    Recent studies suggest that there is less economic mobility in the United States than has long been presumed. The last thirty years has seen a considerable drop-off in median household income growth compared to earlier generations. And, by some measurements, we are actually a less mobile society than many other nations, including Canada, France, Germany and most Scandinavian countries. This challenges the notion of America as the land of opportunity.

    Absolute Mobility: Men in Their 30s Today Earn Less Than Men in Their Fathers’ Generation and Family Income Growth Has Slowed

    ..Beginning with a comparison of men ages 30-39 in 1994 with their fathers’ generation, men ages 30-39 in 1964, we see a small, but fairly insignificant, amount of intergenerational progress. ..Indeed, there has been no progress at all for the youngest generation. As a group, they have on average 12 percent less income than their fathers’ generation at the same age. This suggests the up-escalator that has historically ensured that each generation would do better than the last may not be working very well.

    Does this mean that family incomes have been stagnant over this entire period? Hardly. But the main reason that family incomes have risen is that more women have gone to work, buttressing the incomes of men by adding a second earner to the family. ..For nearly thirty years after the end of World War II, productivity growth and median household income rose together in lockstep. Then, beginning in the mid-1970s, we see a growing gulf between the two, which widens dramatically at the turn of the century. As the data in Figures 6-9 indicate, the benefits of productivity growth have not been broadly shared in recent years.

    Check out these charts: http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/your_world_in_g.html

    Considering that the three decades, which include the Reagan Revolution, the Contract On America, and Bush Presidency and Republican Congress saw government efforts to encourage advancement,scaled back, Will’s theory does not seem to be supported by the facts.

  3. George Will: “Hence their fear of health savings accounts (individuals who buy high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses — just as car owners do not buy insurance to cover oil changes).”

    “Liberals” aren’t afraid of high-deductible health plans; consumers are. It really depends on the plan. A plan with a $1000 deductible and 90 percent payment thereafter is very different from a plan with a $5000 deductible and 70 percent payment thereafter. A plan with good pharmacy coverage is very different from one with minimal pharmacy coverage. The wrong plan can bleed you to death financially.

    I know a single mom with a high-deductible plan whose teenage son suffered a bad fracture of his leg. Including the ambulance, the emergency room visit, the leg being reset in the operating room, drugs, and months of physical therapy, her final tab was around $12,000. There was some question as to whether the kid would need subsequent surgery. Fortunately he did not, but if he did, that would have added thousands more to the bill.

    Using Will’s example of car insurance, imagine that an uninsured driver runs into and totals your new $30,000 SUV, and you end up having to pay $10,000 or $15,000 of that. Welcome to high-deductible car insurance.

    So it depends on the plan. Some high-deductible health plans are Ok. Many work great as long as no one in your family gets sick. With those plans, the words of the famous health insurance advisor Clint “Dirty Harry” Eastwood are particularly appropriate: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?” Because if you’re not lucky, you’d better have a significant percentage of your annual income sitting in savings. And next year. And the year after that.

  4. Father: Yes, one commentator suggested that the Census Bureau’s Income measure is too narrowly defined to support the Brookings Istitutes finding that recent generations are not better off than previous generations. He also stated that based on observation today’s worker appears to be more materially well off with bigger houses, cars, televisions, computers, etc..

    The counterargument was that, while more recent generations have more possessions they have to work far longer and harder, along with their spouses, to obtain them.

    It’s a good debate to have. Economists should never be allowed to become too complacent. Will is certainly correct that we want business to be free enough to create wealth; the question is whether the government shoud intervene to make sure that that wealth is more evenly distributed throughout the population. Thre is other empirical and anectodal evidence of rising income inequality, a more rigid class system, and a growing structural underclass. all of these correspond with the Brookings Institute findings. None of them bode well for the future well being of our country.

    This is where Will is on shakier ground. he doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to the rising economic tide that lifts all boats, and instead argues that we should just let the chips fall they may. Thats easy for a wealthy columnist who rides a limosine from his Park Aveue penthouse to the office every day to say. But other people are suffering and we have a moral duty as Christians to help them, a duty that supercedes the religion of free market fundamentalism.

    People trapped in structural and systemic poverty are not free. Economies with structural and systemic poverty are not healthy. The practical exclusion of millions of people from participation in the economic life of our country robs the economy of millions of productive workers and consumers.

    Will is also careless when he states that the Government shouldn’t try to control everything, because some people will intepret that to mean that the government shouldn’t try and control anything. Obviously when faced with urgent national problems we do want government to step in and provide remedies and solutions.

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