(1) Growth in the size of the government, as measured by employment and spending.
(2) Lack of fiscal discipline, as measured by budget deficits.
(3) Lack of commitment to price stability, as measured by pressure on the Fed for easier monetary policy when politically advantageous.
(4) Departures from free trade.
(5) Use of government powers to protect and subsidize favored special interests (such as the oil and gas sector, among many others).
Hard to argue with this list of economics departures from conservative principles and hard to argue that George W. Bush has not violated the first two and the last two. Ronald Reagan does not fare well based on these criteria either and #3 seems to be directed towards Nixon. As Jeff notes:
I would contend that, not just George W. Bush, but also Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and (to a lesser extent) George H.W. Bush, all - in sharp distinction from their conservative rhetoric - in practice have been interventionist. They have all wandered, far from the principles of good neoclassical economics, and far from from the principles of small government and laissez faire. How far? Farther than did, for example, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton … Documentation that Republican presidents have since 1971 indulged in these five departures from “conservatism” to a greater extent than Democratic presidents can be found in some writings of mine, listed below. The name I would give to this set of economic policies, as well as to the parallel abuses of executive power in the areas of foreign policy and domestic policy, is neither “liberal” nor “conservative” but, rather, “illiberal.”
Jeff also offers a link to a 2003 paper that he wrote on this topic.
Here's how Paul Krugman put the same phenomenon as heard this morning on the Australian Broadcasting Commission radio program 'Background Briefing'.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2008/2160260.htm#transcript
"..The Republican party as moved a long way to the right, that's because it was in effect captured by something that I'd call Movement Conservatism. It's not actually my name, it's what the Movement Conservatives themselves call it. There is a conservative - (Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right wing conspiracy). But it's not hidden, it's not secret. There's an overlapping set of institutions that create a lot of incentives to follow what amounts to a party line. So the instituting of the whole range from the Heritage Foundation to Fox News. You can very clearly see it's cohesive, you look at a lot of these institutions, you ask Where does the funding come from? And the same five or six large right-wing foundations come up again and again. It is a cohesive movement. They won't really tell you otherwise.
Kirsten Garrett: The term 'Movement Conservatism' is quite well understood in America. On Google there are about 22,000 references to it. It stands for a political movement that set out to roll back American society to the days before social security and health care. Professor Paul Krugman poses the rhetorical question of how such a movement, Movement Conservatism, could take over American politics, and undo the principles of the New Deal economics.
Paul Krugman: Key institutions of Movement Conservatism actually believe and try to do exactly that. So a fund-raising letter from the Heritage Foundation will say that 'Never forget, connect the dots, our goal is to undo the New Deal and the Great Society'. In other words basically social security and Medicare, that these are alien, these are bad institutions. They want to roll this back. ...And so the question has to be if you have what is essentially an anti-populist, elitist, economic philosophy that has taken over one of America's two great parties, during a time of rising inequality, how is it that this can win elections? .."
[Hey! The answer to that is simple. They didn't. But Paul Krugman either hasn't done the research or doesn't have the guts to spell it out. Sigh.]
PS: I refer to the 2000 and 2004 and 1963 (assassinaton non-election) and the Gerald Ford post-WaterGate non-election.
ReplyDeleteOf course, then there was the 1960 fraud-rive election too when Kennedy outdid the dirty tactics of the GOP.
Er, and the 1993 non-election when Bill Clinton lied his head off promising all things he subsequently didn't deliver.
..I'm struggling here. When was the last 'real' election in the US?? (And under what system of vote counting??)
Michael Parenti(author,political analyst and lecturer) said: "Democracy is not about trust,
it is about mistrust. It's about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge,
and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. We have to get our fellow Americans to
trust their leaders less and themselves more. Trust their own questions and suspicions, and
their own desire to know what's going on." [hmmm, try switching the words 'democracy' with 'investment' and 'leaders' with 'enterpreneurs'.]
This is not new territory. We've blogged this until the screen is turning blue. Right wing ideologues win elections, and they do repeatedly whether they are Republicans or sheep's coat Democrats, because they are able to obfuscate economic good sense with emotional absurdity. If Osama didn't exist they would have invented him. Come to think of it that's exactly what was done. The Red Menace has morphed into al Qaida. It's a good two fold loy because the fundamentalist Muslim has replaced the "n....s" and the "gooks" as others to be feared and despised.
ReplyDeleteWill education over come fear and loathing fanned by alternative education with a hidden agenda. Are the stink tanks any different from that? Pour over the writings that come out of Heritage and such. What scholarship is there to glean? Yet, like our misguided and deceitful punditocracy of the right, these think tank "fellows" are continuously published and cited by the media. I'm still hearing relatively well educated people talk about the legitimate connection between the war in Iraq and 9/11. The right wing anti-Christs have done their job well and they are exceptionally well coordinated.
Even the current nonsense about how the true conservatives hate McCain seems like a well coordinated canard. The crazies have been put on notice to diss McCain so that the more moderate
centrists will see him as less threatening than he truly is. Machiavelli couldn't do a better job. It has Karl Rove's brand all over it.
"The principles of good neoclassical economics" are conservative?
ReplyDeleteLottery Democrats don't vote their pocketbooks because when (not if?) they hit the lottery they don't want no stinkin' taxes to reduce their winnings.
ReplyDeleteHell's bells, the so-called "Conservative" parties going all the way back to Hamiltonian Federalism have favored some sort of mercantilist policy.
ReplyDeleteYou're exceedingly unlikely to find any sincere support for genuine free market ideas (as opposed to the cynical promotion of corporate interests cloaked in phony "free market" rhetoric) among the sort of neoliberal politicians and journalists who talk the most about the "free market." If there were even a remote chance of a genuine free market (no corporate welfare, no "intellectual property," no regulatory cartelization in the guise of "public welfare") the Fortune 500 would organize a coup d'etat.