Liberalism and Economy
JONAH GOLDBERG
Editor-at-Large, National Review Online
Posted 04.08.05 | 3:00 PM

Dear Jonathan,

Even though debate etiquette calls for me to go last in this thing, I was planning on letting your last entry be the end of it. But I just can't do it. The e-mail chatter was a factor, but the basic reason is that I think your final entry is more bogus and objectionable than your original essay or earlier debate entries. As I've said before I think you're a very sharp guy. There are plenty of policy areas in which I would defer to your greater expertise. But this is just plain shabby and leaves you in a more intellectually offensive position than the one you started out in.

Your entire argument depends on straw men and cherry-picking who you will claim as liberals and who you want to anoint as "true conservatives." That was my point in the beginning and it is doubly so now.

You write: "You want to focus on liberals such as the lynch mob chasing after Larry Summers. I prefer to focus on liberals like, well, Larry Summers."

Okay, Jonathan. Last time I checked mobs were groups of people far larger than the quantity of one. In all the movies I've seen depicting mobs chasing some poor soul or souls, the mobs were always much, much bigger than the prey they chased. (If they weren't, someone would say "Wait a minute! Let's chase them!") You say you want to focus on liberals like Larry Summers. You're cherry-picking, dude. In your original essay you spoke sweepingly about "liberals" and "liberalism" — not "some liberals" or "the best liberals" or the "smartest liberals" or "liberals like me," but liberals, period. Now you are referring to "smart, honest liberals." When I offered the example of liberals clinging to foreign aid long after the data doesn't support that, you didn't dispute it. You simply said there are researchers like Jeffrey Sachs who hold a more "subtle" view of the subject. Big whup. I think Sachs's views are less nuanced than you do, but let's stipulate that they're more nuanced than Van Gogh. Of course there are liberals who have nuanced views. But here again, you're cherry-picking. The "mob" of liberals ain't so nuanced.

Again, your original essay would have been very, very boring if you'd said that if God came down to earth and proved that conservative economics were correct that a handful of intellectually honest liberals you really respect would change their minds but most wouldn't. Yes, speaking sweepingly about liberals and conservatives was more provocative, but it was provocative because it was so inaccurate and unfair.

You also speak of "smart, honest conservatives." You write that the "crucial difference" between conservatives and liberals is that a "smart, honest conservative will not necessarily change his mind in the face of contrary data, while a smart, honest liberal will." This is just a cruder version of your original pronouncements about "true conservatives." In other words, if a self-described, committed conservative doesn't play to the stereotype you've cast, he's either not a "true conservative" or he's not smart and honest. Who the hell are you to be declaring that?

Your False Note

Conservatism is a far more complicated, nuanced, and often self-contradictory complex of ideas and sentiments than you are even remotely giving it credit for. But empiricism has always played an important part. "Example is the school of mankind," declared Edmund Burke, "and they will learn at no other." There are some conservatives who don't consider freedom the highest value, economically or even politically. They tend not to be from the American tradition, of course. Peregrine Worsthorne, for example, once wrote a fascinating essay entitled "How Freedom Enslaves Us All." (It's not on the web, but I discuss it a bit here.) Still, I think you're being fair when you speak sweepingly of conservatives' taking freedom as an end in itself. There are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule.

But you do more than that. You elevate freedom to a level of importance far beyond any other value or principle. Intellectually, it's as if freedom is a melody you don't like and so you've isolated it amidst an entire symphony of arguments, motives, and explanations. Every time I try to explain to you that not all conservatives see things according to your prescribed caricature, you fall back in one way or another on this argument that, well, true conservatives see things exactly as you suggest.

You offer an interesting spin on The Public Interest's history (may she rest in peace) and we could have a fun discussion about that. But while I certainly agree with you that the neoconservatism the PI represented was less hostile to the welfare state than the folks at the Cato Institute would like, this is only an interesting point if one accedes to your pontifical power to excommunicate the inauthentic conservatives. Your own magazine has contributed mightily to the notion that the "neoconservatives" have taken over conservatism and/or the White House. Does that mean the White House is admirably un-ideological in your view? Or perhaps conservative ideology is about more than you allow.

Indeed, this is one of the hysterical ironies of your entire argument. While you complain that conservatives define limited and smaller government as the sine qua non of liberty and liberty as the sine qua non of conservatism, the conservative movement is in the midst of a wrenching debate about how Bush is a "big government conservative." Moderate republicans, libertarians, economic conservatives, and traditional conservatives are wrestling with each other and amongst themselves about what to do and say about "compassionate conservatism" and all of the bells and whistles that come with it. But despite your humble claim to be merely describing "the political world that we actually live in," you ignore this enormous herd of elephants in the corner. Indeed, while you can't resist zinging Bush for enacting, in your words (and mine), the "biggest entitlement expansion in four decades," you refuse to accommodate this fact into your own schema. Is Bush not a "true conservative"? What about Newt Gingrich? He supported that awful legislation too.

But forget about contemporary politics for a moment because they tend to muddy the distinctions you're claiming to clarify. Take the sainted Irving Kristol, the founder of The Public Interest. The guy was a central player in the rise of supply-side economics. More recently he's voiced quite a bit of skepticism about Darwinism. He's carried more water than Gunga Din for the conservative movement and his fingerprints (or DNA) can be found in almost every major conservative success of the last 30 years. By almost any liberal's definition of "conservative ideologue" he fits the bill. But in the hope of repeatedly banging square pegs into round holes, you suggest that he's less ideologically conservative than a "true conservative." Why? Because he's got an empirical bent.

Your Alternative Reality

In the same spirit you write, "The contemporary economic debate revolves around issues where conservatives have an a priori philosophical position, and non-conservatives don't." "Social Security," you write, "is a perfect example" of this schism. To bolster this point you write:

The distinguished conservative economist Robert Barro wrote a column a few years ago dismissing basically every empirical defense of privatization. But he still supported it. "In the end, I favor personal accounts for Social Security not because of the possible savings boost or the claimed superiority of rates of return," he wrote. "For me, the crucial points in favor of them are those regarding property rights and choice."
Jonathan, you've got terrible timing. The same week you wrote that, Barro wrote a column that begins:

I once thought personal accounts for Social Security were a good idea but have changed my mind. Personal accounts have some virtues, but the common arguments, both pro and con, are myths. Overall the accounts are a bad idea.
So much for the poster boy of conservatives who refuse to change their mind despite the data. By writing this, is Barro suddenly — abracadabra! — not a conservative anymore? You can't get over this hang-up about a priori principles even though you obviously have them yourself. What seems to bother you is that conservatives admit theirs.

Of course, I'm not conceding that you and Barro are right about Social Security and private accounts as an empirical matter. There are other distinguished economists who make strong, empirically grounded arguments about private accounts. Recent Nobel Prize winner Ed Prescott and Harvard's Marty Feldstein come to mind. (See anti-empirical Larry Kudlow here, by the way.) But, oh right, they don't count because your version of empiricism says that "true" economic conservatives, who ground their positions in facts and data, only live in the parallel universe where Spock has a goatee and the Federation is evil. In this corner of the space-time continuum they are a null-set.

Healthcare Boring, Losing Consciousness…

I'm not going to reopen the whole topic of healthcare. But I'd like to make some quick points. You assert — i.e., you don't demonstrate — that I'm wrong about the notion that our healthcare system could be called the best by some legitimate criteria. For the record, I think much of our healthcare system stinks. But you claim that the inefficiencies — i.e., investments into innovations don't equal better outputs — tolerated by conservatives are "bad" independent of any value judgments. Okay. So what? In that sense the inefficiencies tolerated by liberals — long lines, less choice, etc. — are bad regardless of value judgments, too. But how that means saying we have the best technology and the best doctors in the world is illegitimate is beyond me. If I said we have the best hotels and restaurants in the world, I don't have to take into account all hotels and all restaurants, do I? I can leave out Bob's Chuckwagon and the Motel Six with coin-operated beds, right? You want to score the healthcare system by the aggregate results for everybody. I think that's perfectly legitimate, but I think it's a way of understanding things through a prism of value judgments (egalitarianism, utilitarianism, etc.). I should also mention that many of the health problems in this country have less to do with the healthcare system per se and more to do with our lifestyles. That's one reason so many liberals are trying to police what we eat and drink to the extent that they are: another way in which liberals demonstrate that to them, freedom isn't an end in itself.

And then you write:

Indeed, your insistence that liberal policies can't be right makes my point for me. You compare a workable liberal health care plan — any workable liberal health care plan — to a perpetual motion machine. Aren't you willing to consider the possibility that your opposition to this government intervention will be proven as wrong as conservative opposition to previous government interventions?
This is just shabby on your part. You didn't propose a "workable" healthcare plan, you proposed a "government-centric plan [which] would control health care costs and insure every American without harming the quality of care received by anyone." That's a far cry from a "workable" plan. It is a perfect plan. A utopian plan. A plan that doesn't allow for trade-offs. All of the evidence is that the pursuit of such plans is a fool's errand. I'm sure you think the data is encouraging, but I don't. I also don't know very many people who've had to live with Swedish, Canadian, or British healthcare systems who think they're peachy, never mind remotely close to a perfect system. And the people who do love these systems tend to be making "ideological" arguments for them, not "empirical" ones.

Politics & Ideology

Let's get back to that. You concede, wisely, that there are plenty of liberals — a.k.a. the inconvenient "mob" — who are not of an empirical bent, so I will spare you a list of predictions liberals made about events that did not turn out to be true. I will also spare everyone a long recitation of liberal clinging to ideas and positions that are no longer supportable by the facts. This would be pointless, because every time I do such a thing you simply say they aren't the liberals you're talking about.

But I do think your response about rent control is revealing. You argue that there's "no intellectual support" for rent control but many liberals support it simply because they benefit from it. Eggggggzaaactly!

You imply that "real" liberals don't support rent control because there's no intellectual support for it. Wrong. I know very, very well that plenty of liberals support rent control despite the fact there's no intellectual support for it. The thing is they don't think there's no intellectual support for it. But according to your logic, these liberals aren't really liberals because they're wrong on the facts. According to my Earth-logic, they are liberals and they are merely wrong.

I should add that the notion that liberals — or conservatives, or even humans — make clean and sharp distinctions between interests and ideas is poppycock. Many liberals have invested their careers and their lives to the centrality of the state in public policy. Of course that infects their thinking. Of course many liberals oppose vouchers and social security privatization because they think it will undermine the role of the government or the power of teacher's unions and, hence, their own careers (in much the same way some rich conservatives probably like the intellectual case for tax cuts because it is beneficial to them). I'm not going to get into a big spiel about public-choice theory and rent-seeking, but I'd like you to ponder that the confirmation bias I accused you of is at least partially at play in your constant assertion that liberals are the "fact-finders."

Similarly, what drives me nuts in your argument is that when conservatives, including Reagan, make predictions obviously corrupted by political self-interest you assert that these are ironclad examples of conservative ideological rigidity and otherworldliness. When liberals make equally corrupted predictions about, say, vouchers or rent control, you give them papal dispensation saying that has nothing to do with liberalism you're talking about. When I note that liberals disagree on policy, you say these are good faith disagreements about trade-offs. When I note that conservatives understand trade-offs, you say "true" conservatives don't. When I say politics played a big role in welfare reform, I'm flat wrong. When Mickey Kaus says it, he's an expert. When I say liberalism is out of ideas, you call it an absurd and baseless "taunt." When Marty Peretz says it, you say it's just a considered opinion. And so on.

The Feelings of the Fact-Finders

Ultimately, the problem with your argument is the problem with liberalism in general: emotionalism. I find it impossible to comprehend that a party that believes the government should "feel" the pain of the public and whose standard-bearer today (Hillary) won an election by bragging that she was more "concerned" than her opponent is also claiming to be the party of slide-rules, green eye shades, and regression analysis. Perhaps yours is an attempt to overcompensate for this reality. You emphasize the cold, hard, just-the-facts nature of liberalism, even as you've now conceded that you're really just talking about a relative handful of liberals. But your argument boils down to name-calling, gussied-up with words like "empirical" and assurances that you think conservatives are decent in their hearts. You objected when I made this point before. But I was right. The rigid categories you try to apply to conservatives are made of straw. You cling to them in an attempt to discredit conservative arguments about "good" and "bad" outcomes by claiming that their conclusions are driven by ideology and therefore a priori suspect. I don't think ideology is what you think it is, but you do use it the way liberals do: as a cudgel and an accusation. "Oh, those conservatives, they're just being ideological" is to most liberals akin to saying, "Oh those conservatives, they're just nuttier than a Snickers bar."

As for your own ideology, you insist you really don't have one, even as you object to the accusation that liberalism is merely defined by doing good things. Indeed, you write that you are working from a different definition of liberalism than I am. But you won't explain what yours is. Twice, I have all but dared you to clarify whether or not you see freedom as an end in itself, and twice you declined. Instead you say liberals might be "worried" about freedom given a different political landscape, which I read to mean that you're not worried about it now. I constantly harp on principles, while you shy away from such Asgardian discussions. Indeed, from a quick perusal, you don't use the word "principle" anywhere in your entire discussion to describe what liberals themselves believe. In my mind this underscores how liberalism is a Potemkin label for an ideology that really doesn't have anything to do with liberty. Take back the word "progressive" and be done with it. That way the good libertarians can have liberal back and the anarchists and liberals will be able to play against each other in the ideological softball league rather than getting stuck on the same team.

As this is certainly my last entry in this debate, let me apologize for not sticking to the schedule properly. As an empirical matter, life does tend to intrude. I should also apologize for writing at such length. But I figure people who dig this stuff don't mind reading.

Also let me thank you for a spirited and interesting discussion. Obviously we didn't change each other's minds. But I think we might have illuminated some interesting things for the readers who've stuck it out.

All the best,

Jonah


JONATHAN CHAIT
Senior Editor, The New Republic
Posted 04.05.05 | 8:35 AM

Dear Thor,

Sorry for my plodding and humorless insistence that your reply to my piece was a "reply." We empiricists can be so literal that way. And I certainly didn't mean to imply there was anything wrong with you watching No Escape with Ray Liotta rather than filing your debate entry. As anybody who knows me could attest, me castigating you for putting off your work to watch a B movie would be like you castigating me for name-calling. (Oh, wait: You did that. Nevertheless, the point stands.) As a matter of fact, at some point I'm sure I put off work to watch the same movie. I've actually seen it twice. If you think debating me requires more mental energy than watching it, then you're either overrating me or underrating the narrative complexity of the film.

Anyway, thank you for the long and very smart reply — er, debate entry. (I don't want to have to argue about that term again.) I think you've brought up a lot of interesting intellectual threads that we could tease out if we didn't have jobs and families. But I think your response suffers from some small misunderstandings as well as a general tendency to wallow in abstractions and philosophical absolutes. So I'm going to try to bring this debate from Asgard, or whatever elevated plane you reside on, back down to Earth a bit.

You're arguing against a definition of "liberal" that's very different than the one I'm using. You repeatedly raise areas where you say liberals have ignored empirical evidence. You bring up rent control. In fact, rent control has essentially zero intellectual support. It exists only because its beneficiaries lobby for it, and since those beneficiaries are urban renters, they happen to be liberal. Farm subsidies are the same way. Those who benefit from them are rural and therefore conservative, but that doesn't mean conservatism supports farm subsidies.

You say liberals oppose voucher experiments, but in fact they only oppose experiments they think will be stacked by draining more promising students away from public schools. You think "foreign aid" as a whole has been discredited by evidence, but there are plenty of researchers, like Jeff Sachs, who have a more subtle view. You defend the superiority of the U.S. healthcare system by invoking our advanced technologies, but the whole point is that those technologies don't produce superior health outcomes. There are countless studies showing that Americans get all sorts of expensive medical interventions that don't make them any healthier. Saying that's bad is not a value judgment. If you take away the stuff you get wrong, there's little left in your argument to support your contention that liberals cling to empirically discredited policies.

Still, I'm willing to concede that if given enough time you could think of some very silly things that many liberals support. In part this is a difference in emphasis. You want to focus on liberals such as the lynch mob chasing after Larry Summers. I prefer to focus on liberals like, well, Larry Summers.

Conceptually, your focus is just as good as mine. Likewise, in the world of philosophical absolutes, it would be interesting to debate whether my belief in empiricism could lead to socialism. (Short answer: My objection to socialism is practical and not ideological, so yes, in theory, no in practice.) You're right that if the political center were much further to the left than it is, liberals would be worrying about government programs impinging upon freedom. What you've shown is that if you stretched my argument out to sufficiently extreme examples, it would lose its explanatory power.

But what I'm trying to do is describe the political world that we actually live in. And in that world, the majority of the public does not see the government that emerged from the New Deal as a significant impingement on freedom, whereas conservatives do. You cite The Public Interest, a journal that you correctly note was extremely interested in data. That's a great example, one that I intended to include in my original essay but had to cut for space. It actually bolsters my case, not yours. The founders of The Public Interest supported the New Deal ideologically. Now, that journal happened to come into existence at a time when there were lots of government programs rushed into existence without much empirical basis. So that put them on the "conservative" side, just as people like Larry Summers or I, who are on the left today, would have been in the center or even center-right thirty years ago. But The Public Interest's founders did not see smaller government as an end in itself. That's exactly why they had such an interest in which government programs worked and which didn't. That is to say, their lack of ideological conservatism was a cause of their empiricism.

Iceberg, Goldberg, We're All the Same

The contemporary economic debate revolves around issues where conservatives have an a priori philosophical position, and non-conservatives don't. So conservatives may have empirical arguments, and they may believe them, but basically those arguments don't matter.

Social Security is a perfect example. While most conservatives think Social Security restricts freedom in a meaningful way, most Americans don't. So conservatives argue for privatization on practical grounds: as a way to improve retirement security. Their arguments center around rates of return and insolvency dates. If they're proven wrong, though, it changes nothing. The distinguished conservative economist Robert Barro wrote a column a few years ago dismissing basically every empirical defense of privatization. But he still supported it. "In the end, I favor personal accounts for Social Security not because of the possible savings boost or the claimed superiority of rates of return," he wrote. "For me, the crucial points in favor of them are those regarding property rights and choice."

That is the crucial difference between conservatives and liberals. A smart, honest conservative will not necessarily change his mind in the face of contrary data, while a smart, honest liberal will. You focus on liberals who aren't open to data, but that only shows that there are liberals who aren't smart or honest, just as there are conservatives who aren't smart or honest.

A huge part of your argument rests on the premise that, essentially, liberals can't be right. You portray economic conservatism as driven by practical experience:

[A] great many conservatives--particularly "economic conservatives" (which I use as a shorthand for libertarians too) — became conservatives not so much because they loved liberty more than anything else, but because the empirical evidence mounted that socialism, "economic planning," statism, etc., just don't work as well as liberty, markets, etc.
But conservatives have been proven wrong time after time. As I noted before, they predicted that things like child labor laws, the minimum wage, the Clean Air Act, and so on would destroy American business. They predicted Medicare would enslave us by putting all medical decisions in the hands of Soviet-style bureaucrats. They predicted Clinton's tax hikes would strangle growth. None of those things happened. But none of those results changed the conservative position.

When policies like wage controls or welfare have proven ineffective, on the other hand, liberals have abandoned them. Not just as a concession to political reality, but as a goal. Read any issue of The American Prospect as closely as you want. You won't find anybody pining for wage controls or a restoration of the pre-1996 welfare system.

Another major theme of your reply is attempting to show that we're both equally ideological. "You have an ideology and I have an ideology," you write. "I can admit it, you refuse to." Yet to sustain that argument you have to caricature my ideology. Where I point out areas that liberals don't favor government intervention, you reply, "the only reason liberals like you show such restraint is that they don't think they have the governmental answer to the problem — yet." Actually, on the basic questions that have vexed the left over the last century — ownership of the means of production, allocation of labor and capital — liberals have sided with the market. The rest of our agenda is simply handling the rough edges of the market. We don't pretend to know all the answers.

Indeed, your insistence that liberal policies can't be right makes my point for me. You compare a workable liberal health care plan — any workable liberal health care plan — to a perpetual motion machine. Aren't you willing to consider the possibility that your opposition to this government intervention will be proven as wrong as conservative opposition to previous government interventions? I'm not open to trying conservative policies that have already been tried and failed, but I'm certainly willing to entertain the prospect that new ones, especially ones I haven't heard of, might work. I'm very skeptical about vouchers as a large-scale solution to public education. But I admit they might work.

Since this is probably my last entry, let me say thanks for your thought-provoking comments.

Best,

Jonathan




GOLDBERG
Posted 04.01.05 | 11:50 AM

Jonathan —

Delighted we're getting so informal, though if you could call me Thor next time I'd be really psyched. Sorry if you took offense at my not-that-into-you bit; I merely meant that I hadn't planned my column as the opening salvo of this debate. But upon plodding, humorless, reflection: You're right, I did "respond" to your article. As for my Corner post about No Escape, well, I know you're really into me and all so it may come as a shock for you to discover that when I'm operating on three hours of sleep, I find watching No Escape considerably less of an intellectual burden than debating you. Even with sleep, it takes some effort.

Nonetheless, since this exchange is starting to acquire a bit of a gangrenous smell (or maybe that's the old Almond Joy on my desk?), and since we're letting our freak flag fly here, I'm going to try to stick to the big themes.

Words, Things, Words

The first problem is all this label stuff.

You write: "But of course liberals don't want to use government to solve every problem. That's the difference between liberals and socialists."

Okay, wrong: that's the difference between the words "socialist" and "liberal"--as you define them. But it's important to say that words are not things. You cannot merely say that liberals don't want to use government to solve every problem because the definition of a liberal says they don't. By doing this you get to basically say that liberals are by definition reasonable and any overly ambitious liberal is no longer a liberal at all and therefore you don't have to defend them. By that way of argumentation your point that George W. Bush expanded Medicare is meaningless because by your own definition of conservatism, conservatives don't want to expand things like Medicare, therefore Bush isn't a conservative. Please don't make me Nexis all the times you've called Bush a conservative.

I should also add that you really shouldn't be so fastidious about the distinctions between socialists and liberals and then be devil-may-care about the differences between libertarians and conservatives. More on this in a moment. But first let me say that you make a perfectly fair rejoinder when you note that many conservatives, including myself, use the "shrink-government" formulation. But you gain fewer yards on this play than you think. I didn't say that conservatives don't want to shrink government. I said that shrinking government is a "sloppy shorthand" for the more universal conservative desire of "limited government." But because of its sloppiness sometimes the difference between shrinking and limiting is lost. (Something similar goes on when we say we want to spread "democracy" around the world when in fact we really want to spread all sorts of things which, technically speaking, aren't necessarily democratic: independent courts, markets, constitutions, etc.) Rather than "muddying" these distinctions, I was under the impression I was clarifying them.

Regardless, I doubt George Will or Ramesh or anybody else on the right would disagree with my point. A limited government is a smaller government but a smaller government is not necessarily a sufficiently limited government. Hypothetically, one could argue that government was smaller in 1934 under Franklin Roosevelt, for instance; that doesn't mean conservatives and (real) liberals were happy when FDR's government threw a dry cleaner in jail for charging 35 cents to press a suit when liberal bureaucrats in Washington insisted the price should be 40 cents. Moreover, it's just simply not true that all conservatives who believe in limited government are always and everywhere opposed to bigger government. William F. Buckley settled this issue for National Review nearly 50 years ago when he made it clear that American conservatives would support a larger defense establishment. And while it may be controversial among some libertarians, the overwhelming majority of conservatives have supported Big Government-level spending on national security ever since. Or consider the fact that conservatism is deeply split over the drug war, with many conservatives (including NR's editors) arguing that limited-government principles should call for the drug war's end while others arguing that basic moral principles require we fight the scourge of drugs.

But since you think so many of my points were an attempt to "muddy" distinctions, I'll be clear as I can (and repeat myself): Sure, conservatives believe that a "smaller" government increases freedom. Milton Friedman was right. Freedom is an end itself. And if that were your only point this debate never would have gotten off the ground. But I think you don't grasp how non-radical and, indeed, uninteresting an observation this is. Conservatives believe lots of things are ends in themselves. Security is an end in itself, prosperity is an end in itself--virtue, happiness, family: They are all ends in and of themselves for most of us. But conservatives understand--I think--that some ends cannot be infinitely pursued without banging up against other ends. Pursue security too far and you unacceptably impinge on freedom. Pursue happiness with your blinders on too tight and you might ignore the less-than-cheery work of defending the homeland. And among the diverse group of people called "conservatives" there are rich and deep disagreements about where these values bump against each other. Libertarians would let the pursuit of freedom run down the track quite a bit longer than social conservatives would, for example.

Why you are so eloquent in explaining that liberals understand there are trade-offs in policy options but stub your toe with the first step toward understanding that conservatives grasp trade-offs as well is beyond me.

Reality Bites

I'm sure you'll say I'm misunderstanding you. You don't think that conservatives fail to grasp trade-offs; your point is that they are unwilling to make them — even when there is no trade off at all!

You write:
The point is that if you could prove that some government-centric plan would control health care costs and insure every American without harming the quality of care received by anyone, I doubt National Review, George Will, or any other important conservative organ would support the plan.


This is a piñata of nonsense and really shows how after all your reading of conservative books you don't understand conservatism very well. Speaking broadly, the chief reason most conservatives and libertarians wouldn't agree to such a plan has nothing whatsoever to do with our love of freedom and everything to do with empirical fact-finding. Conservatives wouldn't agree because you cannot prove such a thing.

There's one item the U.S. Patent Office requires a working model of before it will grant a patent. Everything else simply requires the requisite blue prints, plans, etc. That item is a perpetual-motion machine. The reason you need to show a working copy of such a thing is that such a thing would defy our understanding of the laws of nature. Similarly, if all National Review conservatives opposed your dream healthcare system (and I'm not sure they would) it would not necessarily be because of the damage done to liberty, it would be because we would demand some real evidence it could work because all of the historical (i.e., empirical) evidence is that such a scheme cannot work as you describe it (particularly if "quality of care" includes the ability to pick ones own doctor). That your mind constantly conjures such hypotheticals gives your writing the whiff of utopianism just around the corner.

Indeed, one of the things you fail to grasp is that a great many conservatives--particularly "economic conservatives" (which I use as a shorthand for libertarians too)--became conservatives not so much because they loved liberty more than anything else, but because the empirical evidence mounted that socialism, "economic planning," statism, etc., just don't work as well as liberty, markets, etc. My very libertarian friend Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine has been telling me for years that if socialism worked better, he'd be a socialist.

The "law of unintended consequences" is not some pie-in-the-sky "ideological" credo, it's the lesson one learns from studying previous mistakes. It is the cider in your ear that accumulates after so many people like you promise that we can have healthcare systems that do all things for all people perfectly. Indeed, the entire neoconservative project in the domestic sphere was premised on the notion that the Left's numbers didn't add up. Go back and read old copies of The Public Interest: It's chock-a-block with regression analysis and the like. Bjorn Lomborg became a scourge of the modern left because he actually checked Julian Simon's data and discovered that he was right. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics. So did Friedrich Hayek. The logical upshot of your argument is that their skills at empirical fact-finding had no relationship to their ideological preferences. I promise you: They would dispute this to their last breaths.

Indeed, I am still flummoxed as to how you could lend any credence to the notions that empiricists can't believe in freedom as a good in itself and that believers in freedom as a good in itself can't be empiricists. Also, how could one possibly claim that the leading philosophers of contemporary liberalism are empiricists? John Rawls? One feels the need to offer Gregorian chants and swing incense every time one opens his books.

Indeed, the idea that liberals have been tromping through reality simply searching for the facts without any ideological agenda is laughable on its face. Forget about Clinton and welfare reform (though I maintain you're still wrong and you distorted what I said). Continued liberal support for everything from rent control to foreign aid, for job training programs to HUD, seem very hard to ground in a greater love for "fact-finding." Is the plague of St. Vitus' Dance running its course through the Harvard faculty an exercise in empirically driven disagreement with Larry Summers's data? Is the refusal to even entertain test projects for school vouchers the high-water mark of high-minded social scientific inquiry?

What's Wrong With Ideology?

You say I spend too much time talking about motives when your argument has nothing to do with them. Okay, let me use a different word: ideology. It seems to me that you use the phrase "what works" as a Trojan horse to smuggle in your ideology. Your whole argument boils down to the assertion that outcomes you prefer are outcomes that "work." The problem is that this is an ideologically stacked deck. If a policy maximizes income rather than freedom, or vice-versa, which one do we want to say has "worked"? You want to claim that only the policy that adheres to "liberal" ends worked. That's fine. But that's an ideological judgment, not an empirical one. For example, you write:

Conservatives say over and over that we have the "best health care system in the world." But that's only true by ideological criteria--which system is the best at minimizing government intrusion.


You made this point in your original article and again here so I assume you really mean it. But do you understand how ideologically loaded this is? The only way you can say our system is the best is by ideological criteria? Jonathan, what are you talking about? America leads the world in terms of innovation. It leads the world in terms of our investments in R&D. It leads the world as a magnet for young doctors from all around the world to train. It leads the world in terms of high-end procedures performed. There's a reason people drive down from Canada for medical procedures in the U.S. There's a reason aging potentates and princes fly to America for treatment.

What you are really saying is that America's healthcare system doesn't meet your ideological criteria for what would make it the best in the world. That's fine. From your articles, I gather you're more utilitarian, believing that the best healthcare system would do the most good for the most people at the cheapest price. That's perfectly reasonable and there's nothing illegitimate whatsoever about arguing from that perspective. But you pull this nonsense — so amazingly typical of smart liberals — that people who disagree with your ideological criteria are the only ones being "ideological."

Indeed, what is wrong with "ideological criteria"? You use the phrase like it means "the enchanted land of leprechauns and harp-playing fairies" — as if ideological criteria have no empirical basis in reality, never mind moral legitimacy. Ideology is merely a checklist of priorities and principles we bring to the real world. You have an ideology and I have an ideology. I can admit it, you refuse to. As I said before, my ideology includes the notion that freedom is an end in itself. Your ideology — ironically called "liberalism" — does not. I made this point before and you let it go unchallenged. If this is really the case, if liberalism doesn't consider freedom an end in itself, than liberalism is more than "bookless" — it is a moral shambles, a hollowed-out crust that maintains the label "liberal" but nothing else.

But Chait, There's More

But that's a taunt. So let me finish up instead by simply summarizing where I'm coming from. You insist that liberalism is better suited to empiricism than conservatism. This is an ancient form of argumentation for the Left. Does nobody remember scientific socialism? You are living up to the finest traditions of your magazine by asserting — just as John Dewey, Charles Beard, Henry Wallace, George Soule, et al. did before you — that people who disagree with your ideological premises really just don't understand the facts. Other liberals have argued — and continue to argue — that political conservatism is in fact a psychological dysfunction which can and should be considered a medical condition rather than a real disagreement. If I'm wrong for thinking that you were adding your own drop to this ocean of ad hominem argumentation, I apologize.

Meanwhile, I don't think you are in fact a socialist, but I think you fail to grasp that you have far more in common with socialists than you think. There are plenty of socialists--real, self-described socialists--who don't want the government to solve every problem. They just draw the line of where the government's authority ends a bit higher than liberals do. You have offered no principled reason why you are different from a socialist. Your semantic distinction is that liberals don't always want to use government to solve problems. Fine. But your ideologically loaded "empiricism" (i.e., "Scientific Socialism Lite") means that the only reason liberals like you show such restraint is that they don't think they have the governmental answer to the problem — yet. This is not liberalism properly understood at all. It is a writ for liberal social planners to enact whatever idea they've convinced themselves "works." Yes, there is an important difference between a monarch who murders his subjects willy-nilly and a monarch who merely reserves the right to murder his subjects willy-nilly but instead chooses to be more selective. But there is no principled difference between the two systems of governance. If I could convince you that socialism would "work," you've given me no reason to believe you wouldn't be a socialist. Why? Because you don't see freedom as a end in itself, and that's the first step on the Road to Serfdom.

Sincerely,
Thor




CHAIT
Posted 03.31.05 | 12:55 PM

Dear Jonah,

(I've unilaterally decided that I'm going to switch to the second person.) I'm sorry that "reasons largely beyond your control" have intruded on your participation. (I suppose that the decision of some programming executive to air "No Escape" on Tuesday night is indeed beyond your control.) But that's no reason to lash out with your Stockdale-like "Who am I? Why am I here?" intro. You write:
In one extended section of the second column I used Jonathan's essay as one example among many. Jonathan takes that column as a "response" to him. It wasn't. As much as I respect Jonathan and his intellect, to paraphrase a current bestseller, I'm just not that into him.
In the column I refer to, you devoted 1,347 words — which would consume nearly a page and a half in TNR — to my piece, quoting from it at length and disputing my logic virtually point by point, under the headline "THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CHAIT." How is that not a response? Is there some word, other than "response," I should have used to describe its relationship to my piece that wouldn't lead you to imply that I'm some kind of deluded solipsist?

My fundamental point is that conservatives see smaller government as an end in itself, while liberals do not see larger government as an end in itself. Your latest response seems to be an effort to muddy that distinction. You begin by insisting, "it isn't accurate to say that all conservatives believe that merely 'shrinking' the government increases freedom." Then why do conservatives, including those at your magazine, use that formulation or ones similar to it constantly? In the February 25 National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru calls conservatism "a political movement trying to shrink the government." You wrote last year, "All good conservatives want smaller government." This is not some slur I've invented.

You note that in my essay I quoted Milton Friedman, who wrote that "[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself." You then try to isolate Friedman as unrepresentative of conservatism. But I also quoted a National Review editorial and George Will as saying essentially the same thing. And those were just examples I had seen in the few weeks before writing that article. It's a very common conservative sentiment.

You also try to muddy up the distinction by defining liberalism as, essentially, an ideology that sees bigger government as an end in itself. You use the analogy of "if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail." But of course liberals don't want to use government to solve every problem. That's the difference between liberals and socialists. Elsewhere, you write that economic liberalism amounts to "Uncle Sam's hop-scotching from one good deed to another, la-de-la." This is the same error. Liberalism does not consist of expanding government everywhere. I'd point out places where liberals do not want to expand government, but then you'd go back to your "see, we're right about everything!" victory dance.

My essay, you write, "nowhere in fact demonstrates that liberal positions are empirically better." Isn't demonstrating the empirical superiority of liberalism in every facet of domestic policy a bit much to ask of a single magazine article? Can't I lay out the general ideological differences that make economic liberalism better disposed toward empiricism without proving it in every single instance? Otherwise, you'll have to give me a multimillion dollar research grant, a staff of researchers, and ten years or so before we can resume this debate.

I did provide some examples in my article, but you did not mention them. One was health care. Conservatives say over and over that we have the "best health care system in the world." But that's only true by ideological criteria — which system is the best at minimizing government intrusion. By objective criteria — cost and health outcomes — our system is poor. Its exploding costs are also causing massive problems for businesses and governments. There are things about health care that make it particularly unsuited to pure free-market solutions. But conservatives are by and large unwilling to deal with that fact. I could go on in more detail, but you asked me not to get too wonky, remember? The point is that if you could prove that some government-centric plan would control health care costs and insure every American without harming the quality of care received by anyone, I doubt National Review, George Will, or any other important conservative organ would support the plan. Whereas if you could prove that tax cuts for the rich really could produce enough growth that the revenue would replace itself, every important liberal pundit would support them anyway.

You seem hung up on the question of motives, which plays little role in my argument. You cling to a clearly erroneous view that Clinton reformed welfare only because Republicans made him, even though he ran on reforming welfare before Republicans gained control of Congress. You write that I describe Clinton as having "the grandest of motives," but that's an obvious caricature. Every politician has at least some political motivations.

If you really want evidence that the public arguments George Bush made for his tax cuts were not the genuine ones, you can start here. The examples are legion. But frankly I don't understand what this has to do with our argument. I'm not arguing about motives. Conservatives think smaller government means more freedom which means a better world. That's a good motivation. Now, it's true that they have to find ways to sell their policies to people who don't share that view. (They may share it as an abstract principle, but they don't want to extend it to things like Social Security or Medicare.) In any case, I honestly don't understand what that has to do with the point at hand.

You end by citing the guy who signs my paycheck bashing liberal ideas. I'd point out that Marty is not exactly a knee-jerk liberal, and even Marty would concede that he's not so all-knowing that the mere fact that he takes a position establishes its truth beyond all doubt. Tell me what kind of liberal books you think don't exist — policy blueprints, big think ideological manifestos, whatever — and I'll gladly cite some for you. They get less attention for the obvious reason that they matter less when conservatives have more political power. Heck, I read conservative books more than liberal books for the same reason. It's a result and not a cause of who has political power.

In any case, you didn't attempt to address the substance of my rebuttal. You argued that, "It's not that liberals have maturely adapted to new data, it's that they've been proven wrong so often — either empirically or at the polls — that they've had to change." I replied that conservative predictions about the disastrous effects of the minimum wage, child labor laws, the income tax, environmental regulations, and so on have all been repudiated, both politically and intellectually, without conservatives having acknowledged their errors. I further pointed out that Ronald Reagan warned Medicare would be the end of freedom in America, but George W. Bush radically expanded Medicare. It struck me as a convincing rebuttal, but of course I'm somewhat biased. Do you care to defend the point?

I know you said you're not that into me, Jonah, but guess what: I'm really, really into you. Really into you. Like, bought-the-T shirt-of-your-dog, have-a-Goldberg-shrine-in-my-room, plan-to-name-my-next-child-boy-or-girl-"Jonah" into you. Just so you know.




GOLDBERG
Posted 03.30.05 | 9:30 AM

First, an apology: I intended to respond to Jonathan yesterday, but for reasons largely beyond my control I couldn't. I imagine all those readers who were crowded around the bars of the Opinion Duel thunderdome all day yesterday chanting "Two men enter, one man leaves!" were mighty disappointed. Sorry about that.

Second, let me say I'm a bit disappointed. Frankly, I'm not quite sure I understand what I'm supposed to be doing here. I wrote an admittedly too lengthy, two-part column trying to beat back this flatly absurd notion that liberals are demonstrably and obviously more "reality-based" than conservatives are. In one extended section of the second column I used Jonathan's essay as one example among many. Jonathan takes that column as a "response" to him. It wasn't. As much as I respect Jonathan and his intellect, to paraphrase a current bestseller, I'm just not that into him.

But here we are. So let me start by clearing some brush.

Jonathan begins by restating his argument that "conservatives believe that smaller government is an end in itself, because it promotes freedom. Liberals, on the other hand, do not see bigger government as an end in itself. Therefore, on economic policy, liberals are much more interested in what works than are conservatives."

Already we have flags on the play. Let me explain what conservatives — or at least the ones Jonathan is referring to — do and don't believe. It's true that some — and I hope most — conservatives still believe that limited government is a good in and of itself. Smaller government — which I like very much, by the way — is a sloppy shorthand for the conservative's true desire for a government that has very defined responsibilities that it does not exceed without very good cause. Hence, conservatives who believe in limited government also believe in a government that protects us from foreign enemies, enforces contracts and civil rights, etc. A government that isn't activist in upholding the rule of law endangers freedom. I bring this up because it isn't accurate to say that all conservatives believe that merely "shrinking" the government increases freedom.

Then there's the second flag. I don't care whether or not liberals see "larger" government as an end in itself (though I think the claim that they don't is a more contentious declaration than Jonathan realizes). What liberals certainly do believe is that government can have a role in any problem and that very often government is the best means to their ends. This is particularly true on economic policy. The old adage that if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail comes to mind. I will concede that most liberals don't see the hammer as an end, but they do have a well-deserved reputation for bringing a hammer to every problem and saying "Hey, will this work?" Jonathan sees a man willing to pound a broken vase with a mallet and says, "Aha! A pragmatist!"

"True" Conservatives vs. "True" Liberals

Jonathan insists that I'm wrong to interpret him as accusing conservatives of bad faith. I think this whole thing is a bunch of mush and gets to the heart of Jonathan's misunderstanding.

The reason it seems so mushy is that there are at least two ways of reading Jonathan's argument. One makes it very uninteresting, the other makes it very wrong. The uninteresting argument is that if God — or some other objective, irrefutable authority — were to demonstrate perfectly that liberal social welfare programs were beneficial, fairly low-cost, and in all ways worth the investment, some conservatives would still argue that the costs to personal liberty and the concomitant expansions in government would still constitute real costs for such programs. In other words, some conservatives would say, "The economic benefits don't outweigh the costs to our constitutional liberties."

Meanwhile, Jonathan concedes, other conservatives would not make such arguments. Ho-frickin'-hum. I agree completely with him. Indeed, I would add that many liberals would have the same reaction, depending on the economic policy in question. Surely, at some point, some liberals would object to the mass seizure of private property — even if it "worked" to help the poor — on principled grounds having to do with liberty and the rule of law. If not, then Jonathan's distinction between socialists and liberals is meaningless. Speaking broadly, socialists believe the redistribution of private property is a good in and of itself. If liberals are persuadable of the same, but just need a bit more data to be convinced, then liberalism isn't a distinct philosophy, it's merely a doughy socialism in need of a few more minutes in the oven.

Anyway, it clearly isn't Jonathan's intent to argue that some conservatives are reasonable, empirical-minded fact-finders and that some are not. And not just because such an argument would be so hum-drum. Rather, it is his argument that, in his words, "true conservatives" are ideologically hidebound while any fellow-traveling empiricists in their midst aren't really "true conservatives."

He writes:
But, for a true conservative, whatever ends they think smaller government may bring about — greater prosperity, economic mobility for the non-rich — are almost beside the point. As Milton Friedman wrote, "[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself."


I like Milton Friedman, a lot, but it is worth noting that the man Jonathan considers the purest essence of conservatism does not in fact call himself a conservative. Indeed, Jonathan surely knows that what Milton Friedman champions was once called "liberalism" and still has a greater historical claim to the word than the stew-cooks of so-called liberalism today. Friedman's statement is not an irrefutable fatwah against all government interventions. Rather it is a fairly mild claim that government interventions come at the expense of some personal liberties. Historically speaking, it is stunning to hear a self-described liberal object so strenuously at an idea he should accept with an "Oh, that's obvious" shrug. Maybe Jonathan doesn't think economic freedom is a form of freedom. Or maybe he doesn't think freedom is an end in itself. But if it's the former, why does he want to give poor people more "opportunity," and if it's the latter what the hell is he calling himself a liberal for?

Jonathan Chait's liberalism is quite representative of liberalism in general today. It's an instrumentalist argument in favor of a list of nice things. Philosophy, principles, ideology — these things get in the way of what government should really be about: Uncle Sam's hop-scotching from one good deed to another, la-de-la.

But what's interesting is that Jonathan nowhere in fact demonstrates that liberal positions are empirically "better" than conservative ones. Nor does he demonstrate, empirically, that liberals are better empiricists than conservatives. Rather, he simply takes it as a given that the government intrusions he likes have already been empirically declared the winner by some dispassionate band of fact-finders somewhere. As Will Wilkinson