GOP future
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
I agree completely. Instead, the GOP future needs to focus on grow-the-pie economic dynamism, meaning entrepreneurship, economic growth, job creation, and the regulatory and tax policies that are known to promote those things. That agenda must be forcefully contrasted with Obama's redistributionist views, which ultimately will result in what that approach always produces: slower growth for the sake of enforcing equal pieces of a diminishing pie. And it must be made crystal clear that there is nothing about a ferocious commitment to economic growth that in any way implies any degree of acceptance of corrupt Enron-style crony capitalism, or of quick-rich, slight-of-hand schemes in the financial markets. Those practices eventually impair economic growth, as we are seeing today, and all such have to be explicitly rejected and the reasons for their rejection explained.
In an email, John Carenen suggests that the GOP needs to formulate a new version of Gingrich's Contract With America. It's an excellent idea, especially if the contract were specifically a roadmap for maximizing economic vitality, opportunity, and wealth creation. But parallel to that must be a program of public education aimed at teaching Americans what capitalism and free markets are, and how they can operate to rapidly raise living standards to unprecedented levels. The economic record is a matter of historical fact, but as it stands now very few people have any clue about the basic principles by which it occurred. That lack of understanding makes them them easy prey for demagogic appeals to the supposedly higher morality of constantly re-cutting the economic pie into more equal-sized pieces, because they lack any understanding of why that process must result in the pieces becoming progressively smaller. We currently see people like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd blaming the sub-prime meltdown on an insufficiently regulated mortage market, when in fact the mess was created by market interference in the form of artificial incentives to make bad loans. Without those non-market incentives, sub-prime loans would not have been made, and the toxic debt instruments based on those loans would never have existed. That such absurd arguments are not laughed off the public stage testifies to how few people in our society have any conception of how markets operate. It's pathetic.
Socialism is a system of misconceptions that is very easy to accept. It's easy to grasp, it sounds good -- how can planning be bad? -- and it contains an explicit moral rationale that capitalism lacks. It is unfortunate that the ideas comprising market economics, an economics that ACTUALLY WORKS to produce wealth and opportunity, are not self-evident; those principles and processes have to be systematically explained. On the bright side, the internet now makes possible any number of creative and appealing ways to accomplish that task. It will take a sustained and systematic effort, aimed at No Citizen Left Behind. (By analogy, the primary reason that creationist nonsense gets the traction it does is the abysmally poor job that's been done in biology classes of teaching the basic principles of natural selection. Science deserves the lion's share of blame for that, just as the economics and business professions deserve the blame for widespread ignorance of basic economics.) This is an important and necessary job of public education that we will continue to neglect at our peril. It needs to be done, and done right, because the rotten fruit of that neglect is on the verge of poisoning our nation's political and economic life. It is sad commentary indeed that it actually could be possible that the educated Chinese population now has a better understanding of market economic than ours does. If they leave us in their dust, we shouldn't wonder how it happened.
If any of this has merit, it suggests why Mitt Romney would have been a far superior candidate to John McCain. I originally didn't think that, but I do now. Romney is an articulate, experienced spokesman for market economics, and he would have challenged Obama's redistributionist blither in instructive ways. The gospel of opportunity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship is one that has always resonated in this country, and properly so; people across the globe know that those ideas define us as a nation at least as much as anything in our founding documents. Many thousands of inspiring success stories are there to be held up as examples; they are motivating, and they are found in every community and among every category of persons. Even if Romney had ultimately lost the election, public understanding of economics would have been advanced by his campaign. Progress would have been made, some interest stimulated, some appetites whetted.
In that regard, I don't detect any positive residue at all from McCain's candidacy, which suffered, ironically, from our success in Iraq. As that issue receded, it was replaced by concern about the economy. That should have been no problem at all, because economic matters should always to be the GOP's strong suit, its special expertise. But McCain had already admitted it was a subject he didn't know much about. That left Obama free to spoon out his redistributionist baby food far and wide without serious, informed challenge. Late in the game, and by sheer dumb luck, Joe the Plumber appeared out of nowhere to tee up the Golden Teaching Moment. But it was whiffed, evoking nothing but some outraged talk about the moral injustice of the government taking money from one person and giving it to someone else. Nothing about the bad economic consequences of doing that sort of thing, no description of the chain of causation by which those bad consequences come about. Just a diffuse moral objection that the Obama campaign quickly labeled as simple selfishness. Game, set, match.
So, we here we are, lying face down on Square One, at best, as our standard bearer exhorts us to all unite behind Obama. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. Going forward, what I really don't want to hear about is some intensified focus on the brand of conservatism described in that quote at the top. In my opinion, any future prospects for the GOP lie in a completely different direction, and the party needs to re-tool intellectually. In my fantasy, step one is a call that goes out sometime soon, inviting 50 or so of the best free market economists and economics educators in the business to a general meeting, the premise of which is the proposition that socialism cannot be sold to an educated public. The question then will be how to get from here to there, which means the development of a public curriculum and the vehicles to most effectively present it.
Byron
"If the GOP decides to go in the Bobby Jindal direction (fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights), it will be committing political suicide."
I agree completely. Instead, the GOP future needs to focus on grow-the-pie economic dynamism, meaning entrepreneurship, economic growth, job creation, and the regulatory and tax policies that are known to promote those things. That agenda must be forcefully contrasted with Obama's redistributionist views, which ultimately will result in what that approach always produces: slower growth for the sake of enforcing equal pieces of a diminishing pie. And it must be made crystal clear that there is nothing about a ferocious commitment to economic growth that in any way implies any degree of acceptance of corrupt Enron-style crony capitalism, or of quick-rich, slight-of-hand schemes in the financial markets. Those practices eventually impair economic growth, as we are seeing today, and all such have to be explicitly rejected and the reasons for their rejection explained.
In an email, John Carenen suggests that the GOP needs to formulate a new version of Gingrich's Contract With America. It's an excellent idea, especially if the contract were specifically a roadmap for maximizing economic vitality, opportunity, and wealth creation. But parallel to that must be a program of public education aimed at teaching Americans what capitalism and free markets are, and how they can operate to rapidly raise living standards to unprecedented levels. The economic record is a matter of historical fact, but as it stands now very few people have any clue about the basic principles by which it occurred. That lack of understanding makes them them easy prey for demagogic appeals to the supposedly higher morality of constantly re-cutting the economic pie into more equal-sized pieces, because they lack any understanding of why that process must result in the pieces becoming progressively smaller. We currently see people like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd blaming the sub-prime meltdown on an insufficiently regulated mortage market, when in fact the mess was created by market interference in the form of artificial incentives to make bad loans. Without those non-market incentives, sub-prime loans would not have been made, and the toxic debt instruments based on those loans would never have existed. That such absurd arguments are not laughed off the public stage testifies to how few people in our society have any conception of how markets operate. It's pathetic.
Socialism is a system of misconceptions that is very easy to accept. It's easy to grasp, it sounds good -- how can planning be bad? -- and it contains an explicit moral rationale that capitalism lacks. It is unfortunate that the ideas comprising market economics, an economics that ACTUALLY WORKS to produce wealth and opportunity, are not self-evident; those principles and processes have to be systematically explained. On the bright side, the internet now makes possible any number of creative and appealing ways to accomplish that task. It will take a sustained and systematic effort, aimed at No Citizen Left Behind. (By analogy, the primary reason that creationist nonsense gets the traction it does is the abysmally poor job that's been done in biology classes of teaching the basic principles of natural selection. Science deserves the lion's share of blame for that, just as the economics and business professions deserve the blame for widespread ignorance of basic economics.) This is an important and necessary job of public education that we will continue to neglect at our peril. It needs to be done, and done right, because the rotten fruit of that neglect is on the verge of poisoning our nation's political and economic life. It is sad commentary indeed that it actually could be possible that the educated Chinese population now has a better understanding of market economic than ours does. If they leave us in their dust, we shouldn't wonder how it happened.
If any of this has merit, it suggests why Mitt Romney would have been a far superior candidate to John McCain. I originally didn't think that, but I do now. Romney is an articulate, experienced spokesman for market economics, and he would have challenged Obama's redistributionist blither in instructive ways. The gospel of opportunity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship is one that has always resonated in this country, and properly so; people across the globe know that those ideas define us as a nation at least as much as anything in our founding documents. Many thousands of inspiring success stories are there to be held up as examples; they are motivating, and they are found in every community and among every category of persons. Even if Romney had ultimately lost the election, public understanding of economics would have been advanced by his campaign. Progress would have been made, some interest stimulated, some appetites whetted.
In that regard, I don't detect any positive residue at all from McCain's candidacy, which suffered, ironically, from our success in Iraq. As that issue receded, it was replaced by concern about the economy. That should have been no problem at all, because economic matters should always to be the GOP's strong suit, its special expertise. But McCain had already admitted it was a subject he didn't know much about. That left Obama free to spoon out his redistributionist baby food far and wide without serious, informed challenge. Late in the game, and by sheer dumb luck, Joe the Plumber appeared out of nowhere to tee up the Golden Teaching Moment. But it was whiffed, evoking nothing but some outraged talk about the moral injustice of the government taking money from one person and giving it to someone else. Nothing about the bad economic consequences of doing that sort of thing, no description of the chain of causation by which those bad consequences come about. Just a diffuse moral objection that the Obama campaign quickly labeled as simple selfishness. Game, set, match.
So, we here we are, lying face down on Square One, at best, as our standard bearer exhorts us to all unite behind Obama. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. Going forward, what I really don't want to hear about is some intensified focus on the brand of conservatism described in that quote at the top. In my opinion, any future prospects for the GOP lie in a completely different direction, and the party needs to re-tool intellectually. In my fantasy, step one is a call that goes out sometime soon, inviting 50 or so of the best free market economists and economics educators in the business to a general meeting, the premise of which is the proposition that socialism cannot be sold to an educated public. The question then will be how to get from here to there, which means the development of a public curriculum and the vehicles to most effectively present it.
Byron
posted by Byron | Wednesday, November 05, 2008
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