Tuesday, November 20, 2012

What Are Conservatives Getting Wrong About the Economy? (Douthat Reply Edition) | Next New Deal

What Are Conservatives Getting Wrong About the Economy? (Douthat Reply Edition) | Next New Deal

Paradigm Down
I have no interest in seeing a resurgent conservative movement in this country. One reason I was worried about Romney winning the 2012 election and passing the Ryan Plan in January 2013 and Lochnerizing the Supreme Court is because an animal is most dangerous when it is dying and knows it. But it might be helpful for those on the right to get an outsider's perspective.
Douthat argues that conservatives focused too much on those getting "gifts" and other free-loader metaphors. But the most sustained conservative economic arguments of the Great Recession have been reviving the liquidationist, Mellonite approach to the business cycle.  I think that's one important reason Romney and conservatives were unable to put real pressure to President Obama's vulnerability on the economy. They believe the recession is purging the weakness in the economy, doing healthy work, and to the extent the recovery is sluggish it is the fault of activist government and policy attempting to address unemployment.
The House GOP, in particular, has pushed the Mellon-wing, calling for austerity to promote growth, while also pulling back on monetary policy to stimulate the economy. Understanding the "47 percent" and "free stuff" comments benefit from the context of conservative arguments that government policy is the primary reason that unemployment remains high, as all the free stuff allows the unemployed to stay on vacation. If conservatives want to build a new economic paradigm that works for working people, they should probably have some idea on getting unemployment down sometime in the next decade.
Another important conservative focus is running everything the government does through private hands. The conservative movement is not about small government, it is about privatized government. From Bush and Ryan's attempts to privatize Social Security, to turning Medicare into a Groupon, to bringing private industry into the military, every step involves introducing market agents into government processes and pushing market risk to individuals. This continued under Mitt Romney's big policy ideas. He had an idea for taking our system of unemployment insurance and turning it into a system of private unemployment savings accounts. He wanted to fix higher education costs by expanding the for-profit industry, which would "hold down the cost of education," even though they are far more expensive than their non-profit equivalents.
The conservative idea that citizens don't have enough undiversifiable exposure to the risks of the new economy - long-term unemployment, low wages, risks of a large drop in income, globalization, automation etc. - is not one that is going to work going forward. The economic voters Douthat wants to win over see the cronyism of funneling money through private agents, and they think of the market with far more dread and anxiety than entrepreneurial glee. Though they may be ambivalent about more liberal solutions, they certainly don't like the perpetual conservative project of making all of government's functions look more and more like their empty 401(k)s. That might be another place to start for conservatives who want to rebuild their economic ideas.