Do Unemployment Benefits Disincentivize Work?

 No, says this discussion. 

These claims remind me the line from the theme song for "All in the Family.""Didn't have no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight." 

And it is one of the most difficult aspects of conservatism for me to buy. 

Prager on the Left's Misplaced Concern

You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the Left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and — of course — Big Government are left-wing angels.
And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the Left fear big corporations but not big government?


VR: My view is that anyone with too much power can be very effective in doing evil. But, more to the point, what happens when Big Business in the a position to buy Big Government through its control of campaign financing?
I must say I don't understand why many conservatives oppose campaign finance reform and rejoice at Citizens United. If the goal is to get government to stay out of our economic lives, this can never be accomplished so long as corporations can determine the results of elections through campaign donations. Sure, you might get less of one kind of socialism (social programs for the poor and middle class), but money-driven politics is invariably going to result in the government picking winners and losers in the marketplace, upholding position of those with existing money. Rather than allowing free competition to determine how things go in the marketplace, entrenched interests will continue to use the power of government to keep themselves on top, all the while claiming to be conservatives. If corporations can buy big government, then the can do all the evil of big government.

Cafeteria Conservatism and Corporate Prostitution

A redated post. 

It seems to me that the Republican leadership, while calling itself conservative, is prepared to abandon conservative principles whenever and wherever it helps the corporate bottom line. I respect conservatives, but I despise corporate prostitutes, and that is what I think these so-called conservatives have become.

I mean look at Medicare Part D. Now conservatism would say this is a bad idea, expanding gummint to cover prescription drugs for people on Medicare. It expands government bureaucracy, etc, all the arguments against Medicare from when I was a kid. Liberals are disappointed because Medicare can't negotiate prices for these drugs. So why do it? Cui bono? Who benefits? Not the people on Medicare, so who could it be? The drug companies, who are happy to see an increase in Federal bureaucracy so long as it help line their pockets?

Do you really need to be a liberal to point this out?

Explicating Conservatism: Some Questions for Ilion and other self-described conservatives

Ilion, let's try to unpack your claim here.

I: Meanwhile, Prokop and his fellow leftist partisans *do* believe in, and *do* agitate for, using the violent power of The State to forcibly confiscate the honestly-earned wealth of [someone] so as to give it to [someone else] … and this is open theft. It is grossly unjust and immoral; that “the government” is doing it does not make it just or moral. Any society which tries to operate on this principle of mutual looting must utterly destroy itself.

VR: I think this is a fair statement of a standard conservative perspective. The presupposition seems to be that, before the government gets its greedy mitts on our money, it is distributed by markets, both the commodity markets and the labor markets. When this original distribution occurs, that distribution is relatively meritocratic; those who have more merit more. However this meritocracy is compromised by government's "well-intentioned" (and here I reference the signature statement on your blog), attempt to help the have-nots at the expense of the haves.

Now, I take it you do think the government has the right to ask that we all ante up to provide for our common defense, and probably some of this also needs to go to make sure the country's infrastructure is maintained. So there should be a military budget, there should be a budget for building roads and bridges and maintaining those, etc. As I understand it those should be paid for not at the point of income but at the point of consumption; those who use it should pay to use it.

But here, it seems to me that conservatives draw a distinction between the protective role of government and the non-protective role. The protective roles of government have a constitutional mandate (provide for the common defense, etc.), the non-protective roles are, pretty largely, a matter of government overstepping its authority. So, for example, if health insurance companies have a policy of excluding people with pre-existing conditions, it is unjust government intrusion to come in and prevent them from doing this, so that more people can be insured. So, conservatives at least can be hawks when it comes to what we need to do to defend ourselves, although there was a time in our history when conservatives tended to be isolationists.

At this point I am trying to spell out what I think is the conservative vision as you understand it, and I want to invite others who describe themselves as conservative to look at this and see if their own view is accurately represented. Amend as you see fit, guys. I want to put the descriptive process first before I start talking about why I have trouble believing this whole story.

Deficits and "Conservatives"

When I was growing up, and Barry Goldwater was my senator, I learned that one thing conservatives were concerned about was budget deficits. They have returned to the charge in response to Obama's budget deficits. However, this is an article written in Business Week in 2004 chronicling the disappearance of deficit hawks from the Republican Party in the Bush years.

In the words of an old Donovan song from when I was a teenager, "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is."

Or, as John Kerry put it, "I was for it before I was against it."

Meritocracy and Economics: Herman Cain on Why You're Not Rich

"Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself!" Cain said. "It is not a person's fault because they succeeded, it is a person's fault if they failed. And so this is why I don't understand these demonstrations and what is it that they're looking for."


One of the main things that, for me, made me doubt and abandon the conservative politics of my high school days, was the fact this just didn't seem true. There were too many luck factors out there to believe that economic advantage is the product of personal merit. I heard about a study that showed that, in today's America, the biggest determinant of your economic success is how wealthy your parents were. 

Part of what may be at the bottom of some of this is the Reagan idea that when the government is helpful to disadvantaged persons, it undermines human self-reliance and creates "welfare queens."   I think conservatives have the idea that markets are meritocratic, that they distribute in accordance with what people deserve, or at least approximately. Therefore, when the government acts to help people lower down the economic totem pole at the expense of the people higher up, the government takes money from people who deserve it and give it to people who don't deserve it.  

Is there something more plausible than this for conservatives to say?

A Conservative Argument against Immigration Restriction

Very often discussion on Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona implies that it is liberals who oppose this kind of measure, and conservatives who support it. The linked essay, which criticizes Democrats for pushing for a national ID, suggests that there is a case to be made from conservatism to a more open border policy.

This also is a good time to question the entire idea of the national government trying to “seal the borders,” pick winners and losers among immigrants, decide who gets all the welfare benefits of being a legal immigrant and who is not even allowed into our golden door. Invariably, when the federal government imposes its way on immigration, we get some immigrants who come in with legal sanction and quickly become dependents of the U.S. government—whereas illegals are probably not net beneficiaries of the welfare state, legal immigrants might very well be. What’s worse, plenty of people are denied peaceful and legal entry when all they want is to enter the job market, improve their situation and that of their families, and join in the American dream. Of course, despite the state’s distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, most illegal aliens are de facto invited by the American people—by those who employ them, rent to them and associate with them as part of the community and in the glorious network of voluntary exchange known as the market economy. Since conservatives often say our rights come not from the government but from God and the nature of man, it is not for the government to decide whether someone should have the right to live here or not—it is up to individuals and communities, which obviously are able to sustain a fair number of illegals. Moreover, constitutionalists in particular should question the very notion that the feds have legal authority to crack down on the border, since immigration is not an Article I, Section 8 authority of Congress. Conservatives especially should follow Reagan’s example and embrace immigration amnesty.

Is corporate power more dangerous than governmental power?

Tom Stiles argues that it threatens our democracy. As Acton said, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I am more deeply concerned about the corrupting effect of power in the hands of large, multinational corporations than I am with the idea of too much government. Corporations potentially can buy and control government. It seems to me that they, and not government, are the Leviathans of our time.

Do conservatives see the problem? Do they think it isn't a problem? Why not?

When a company gets sufficiently big, the usual market pressures that might keep it from doing evil seem to me to become reduced.

Conservatism in Theory and Practice, or Belly Up to the Cafeteria

The complaint that I was expressing in the post about the Roberts Court was the deep suspicion that I have that while conservatives believe that they are voting in accordance with conservative principles, but the actual practice of conservative political leaders suggests that they subscribe to a "cafeteria conservatism" that will act on conservative principle when it suits the needs of big corporate interests to act on conservative principles, but will sell out those principles in an instant if corporate profits are endangered. Faced with the prospect of ObamaCare, the minions of the insurance companies fight tooth and nail against Socialism. But when Hank Paulson says that banks need a bailout, they take up the hammer and sickle and give Goldman Sachs what it wants. 


It seems to be a notorious fact about Republican leaders that, although they believe in cutting taxes and cutting expenditures, they have a far easier time gettiing the tax cuts done than they have getting the expenditure cuts done.

I'm sure if liberals get to spend as much time in political power as conservatives have, we will see how the political process undercuts liberal principles.

Is Gummint the problem? Try Living Without It

Ronald Reagan said the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
Eli, from FireDogLake, thinks that the ideal of limited government sounds good, until someone actually tries to put it into practice.

Do Conservatives want a Meritocracy?

A redated post.

On one level, my political allegiances are somewhat more left than right, and in the present political situation I am inclined to vote for Democrats as opposed to Republicans. But I am not a real believer in the political spectrum: I think that interest-groups get a hold of the major political parties, rendering them capable of dumping their most fundamental principles if those interests are in danger. It is, for example, somewhat ironic that Michael Moore's movie about capitalism spends much of its time complaining about the massive bailout of the banks in mid-2008, a step that is one of the most socialistic things our government has ever done (in spite of the fact that it was spearheaded by Republicans). I read conservative thinkers and think they must surely have something fundamentally right, I see conservative politicians and remain convinced that whatever conservatism has right, these political leaders have no idea what it is.

I think a lot of issues strike me as only contingently liberal-conservative matters: I can easily imagine a world in which all the liberals are pro-life, (protecting the weak against the strong you know), I can imagine a world where the conservatives are the environmentalists, conservatives of another era would not have favored such things as the invasion of Iraq or the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (torture, for all you English speakers) against detainees.

One conception that seems popular is that conservatives, more than liberals, want to restore to the idea of merit a central place in our political thinking. Affirmative action, an idea popular amongst liberals and scorned by conservatives, takes advantages away from those who merit them, and gives them to those who lack such merit. But this piece suggests that meritocracy is a bad idea which conservatives ought to reject.

Do Bible Translators have a Liberal Bias?

Apparently, the authors of the conservapeida think so. Apparently it's because the scholars who translated the NIV were too educated for their own good.

The committee in charge of updating the bestselling version, the NIV, is dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal and feminist in outlook. As a result, the revision and replacement of the NIV will be influenced more by political correctness and other liberal distortions than by genuine examination of the oldest manuscripts. As a result of these political influences, it becomes desirable to develop a conservative translation that can serve, at a minimum, as a bulwark against the liberal manipulation of meaning in future versions.

Dang those pointy-headed professors.

Keith Parsons has some responses on the Secular Outpost. Please, please, don't invoke Poe's Law.

Conservatism deserves better than this.

Does conservatism go together?

Conservatism seem to revolve around three central ideas. One of the ideas is economic conservatism, the idea that we deserve what we earn unless it was taken by force, theft, or fraud. The second is national security conservatism, the idea of taking threats to our country seriously and being pro-active in dealing with them, as Reagan was during the Cold War and as Bush was when we launched a War on Terror that sent us into Iraq. This, I suspect, doesn't mix terribly well with economic conservatism, since war is expensive, and the money for guns and tanks probably can't be got from bake sales. And then there is social conservatism, the use of the government attempting to uphold traditional values, leading to anti-abortion/gay marriage positions. The last two increase the involvement of government. If government is out there trying to stop abortions fighting enemies, this has to be paid for.

It would be fair enough to ask if liberalism goes together as well. I suppose we could say liberals accept

1) The proactive role of government to alleviate poverty and its consequences.
2) Restraint in fighting against supposed threats to our country (not going into Vietnam or Iraq).
3) Upholding a strong doctrine of the separation of church and state, not attempting to bring the state into controversial question of value.

A kind of conservatism

On why we deserve what we earn, and why government should get out of the business of compensating.

Do those who have less deserve less?

I think that very often conservatives think that those who have less deserve less, while liberals think that those who have less have had bad luck. Obviously, you've got to go case by case on that one. If you provide assistance liberally, then you're taking the risk that you'll end up with undeserving welfare queens (or kings) and undermine the work ethic. If you go too conservative, then some innocent victims of misfortune get screwed. On which side should we err?

Conservative or liberal

Is the bank bailout conservative or liberal? Are warrantless wiretaps conservative or liberal? Is the unitary executive conservative or liberal? Is the use of waterboarding conservative or liberal? Is pre-emptive war in Iraq conservative or liberal? (William F. Buckley opposed it). Is pro-life conservative or liberal? (Goldwater was staunchly pro-choice). Is gay marriage conservative or liberal? Is theism conservative or liberal?

More on Conservatism and Economic Luck

In response to Mike.

This isn't an argument exactly. It's more of a challenge. I am trying to raise some questions about the absolute sense of ownership that conservatives often appeal to when they oppose even modest redistributionism.

The graduated income tax is already a little bit redistributionist. Obama made a comment about "spreading the wealth around" but McCain did not come out for a flat tax, and along with Obama and the Bush administration signed the bailout package. So by the time McCain started using the "Joe the Plumber" anti-redistributionist argument, it seems to me he was being a tad hypocritical. But one can be a more consistent conservative than McCain is.

If you read what conservatives often say, the implication is that redistribution of any kind takes money from those who merit and and places it in the hands of those who don't. I am asking whether this is a bit of a naive picture, given all the effects of economic luck which result in my having more than the Smiths but less than the Joneses.

Conservatives have to either say:

1) There is no economic luck. (Not plausible).
2) The extent of economic luck is overrated. Differences in income reflect differences in desert to a much larger extent than liberals are willing to admit.
3) Economic luck is real, but the losses incurred when you use government to correct that economic luck are not worth it.

By the way Mike, I am glad someone finally tackled this.

Are Republicans real conservatives?

Spread the wealth around?

Is the graduated income tax (first proposed by Adam Smith) socialism? If you really think that "spreading the wealth around" is always and everywhere a bad thing, then shouldn't there be a flat tax?

And what about the $700 billion bailout? How can Republicans attack socialism if they participated in the bailout? Spread the wealth around? Isn't that what the Bush administration initiated, and McCain voted for?

From each according to his abilities, so long as you are in the middle class. To each according to his needs, if you are a big enough corporation.

When it comes to actual governance, the "conservatism" of Barry Goldwater is gone. What you get is corporate prostitution. Republicans follow conservative principles when it serves the interests of "the haves and the have mores." They trash those principles when it becomes convenient for the big companies.

I realize that my tone is a little cynical here. Perhaps someone can explain what the Republican Party today has to do with real conservatism.

And please don't tell me that at least this fake conservatism is better than liberalism. I just want to know what real conservative principles are, and how well you think the Republican party of George W. Bush reflects those principles.

Trickle-Down Economics

If you want to grapple with something that bothers me about political conservatism in the economic sphere, it is what seems to me to be a commitment to the trickle-down thesis. The idea is that lowering the tax burden on the higher economic levels will stimulate the economy in general, create jobs, and benefit the people down the scale. I think this is the heart of what the Republicans are using Joe the Plumber to illustrate. Joe himself probably won't be harmed by the Obama tax plan, quite the reverse. However, if he were to get into a position where his profits exceeded $250,000, then the tax plan would increase his taxes (though, I'm told, by just 3%). However, this might cripple his ability to employ Jack the Plumber, Bill the Plumber, and Suzanne the Plumber (let's not be sexist now).

But does it work that way? In particular, does anything trickle down in America when a large corporation goes multinational, and finds labor in Mexico, China, and elsewhere, countries unfettered by American labor laws?

I tried to research the argument that Thomas Sowell had made that it is a mistake to hold that conservatives subscribe to trickle-down economics; that the term itself is a straw man. Offhand, I don't see why it's a straw man.

Ross Perot said "Trickle-down didn't trickle." Where is that guy now that we need him?

Some Questions for Conservatives

Do you support scrapping Social Security, either gradually or suddenly?

Do you hold to a general principle of laissez-faire capitalism, that the government ought to stay out of the economy. That principle is equally violated by a corporate bailout as it is by LBJ's War on Poverty.

Was the GI Bill socialism?

Do you oppose any and all government assistance to poor people?

And who do you think was last conservative President? If you say GW Bush I'm going to laugh. Ronald Reagan? Give me a break. Herbert Hoover? Maybe.

Are child labor laws justified? There's government intervention to be sure.

The leaders who have run the Republican party for years are not principled conservatives. They want government to back big business. Their hearts start bleeding at the sight of a failing multinational corporation.

Do you seriously doubt that many have benefitted from government involvement in the economic life of the public?

What, in your view, constitutes principled conservatism? This isn't just a rhetorical attack. I'd really like to see what conservatism is really all about. The "conservative" ideology that has run the Bush administration seems to be an ideology that looks out for big business first and foremost. If that means government involvement, then government gets involved. It that means reducing government, then government is reduced. But I see no commitment to limited government as an overall governing principle. That is why, if you really convinced me that conservative principles were true, I would register, not Republican, but Libertarian.