Monday, November 16, 2009

The Morality of Minimal Government

The latest gem from Doc Zero:

Ed Morrissey relayed an interesting quote from Democrat representative Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire earlier today:

I think when you can pay for insurance, you must,” said Shea-Porter. “For those who are blessed to have insurance through their companies, they should keep it.”

Those who are blessed to have insurance through their companies? You might have thought your health insurance was part of your compensation, following a pattern set by decades-old wage controls which obliged companies to offer benefit packages to attract skilled workers. According to Congresswoman Shea-Porter, that health insurance is actually a divine blessing, like having a good singing voice. By extension, this would make the people who don’t have insurance through their companies cursed.

This is more than just a linguistic quirk. Democrats speak often of those who “win life’s lottery,” insinuating their wealth is not their hard-earned property, to which they have an absolute right. Instead, it’s pennies from heaven, and we should spare no pity for those who would catch an umbrella full of those pennies and scurry off to indulge their greed, while others are left to suffer. Those who believe government has a duty to “spread the wealth around” find it essential to compromise the idea that wealth belongs to those who earn it. Ownership is the truth that must be buried before theft can put on its Sunday best and introduce itself as “redistribution.”

Congresswoman Shea-Porter’s remarks are just the latest in a series of incidents that remind me why I become restless when social and fiscal conservatives argue. The philosophy of conservatism cannot be adequately expressed without the fusion of its moral and economic arguments. I’ve spoken with a number of liberals who became conservatives, and they rarely cite the fiscal arguments of conservatism as the reason they switched. I would imagine people who become more liberal over time say the same thing. Neither side seems to win many converts with its pie charts.

A strictly financial argument for conservatism never makes much progress with the electorate, because liberalism is presented as an explicitly moral enterprise. This is one of the big reasons it is never held to account for its practical failures. Every liberal talks up the latest huge expansion of the government as if the year is 1909, rather than 2009, and the ideas he advocates haven’t been proven disasters around the globe. Collectivist agriculture yields starvation, the trillion-dollar War on Poverty produces more poverty, political control of industries crashes those industries… and yet, it’s always Day One of the great socialist experiment, and no one has every hit on the brilliant idea of making the “rich” pay their “fair share” to fund a government crusade against want.

This increasingly stale series of fresh starts is not merely a cynical attempt to keep the population from challenging liberal ideas, by exploiting the case of historical amnesia it gained by slamming its collective head into the public school system. Confronted with the grim history of their ideology, most liberals will say it doesn’t matter if their ideas are efficient, because there is a moral imperative to follow them, and all opposition to them is fundamentally immoral. It doesn’t matter that liberalism doesn’t work, because it’s the right thing to do… the only right thing to do.

Consider the liberal reaction to the concept of the Laffer curve, described in detail here by Arthur Laffer himself. To put it simply, the Laffer curve explains that high taxes produce less revenue for the government than expected, because people change their behavior to avoid the taxes… and many of these behavioral changes result in an overall weakening of the economy, reducing the size of the economic pie government is trying to cut itself a slice of. This is why both Kennedy and Reagan increased revenue to the Treasury by cutting taxes. Young liberals try to deny the objective reality of the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts, and become very confused and upset when shown the hard data. Old liberals are smart enough not to argue with the data. They just say it doesn’t matter, because steep progressive taxation is morally correct, and “tax cuts for the rich” are absolutely immoral – regardless of their net effect on government revenue.

One of the reasons liberals always sound so foolish when they discuss economics is their belief that moral certainty trumps objective knowledge. In his infamous encounter with Joe the Plumber, Barack Obama expressed it like this:

It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too… My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off… if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

In other words, the lot of underemployed plumbers will improve when the government seizes a huge amount of money from the wealthy, keeps a large portion for itself, and distributes the remainder to poor people, some of whom will doubtless use their welfare money to hire plumbers. Keep this logic in mind the next time some fossilized liberal makes a crack about “trickle-down economics.”

The rest here.

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