Oct. 21, 2007

Can’t Be That Stupid

By Harry T. Cook

The perpetually and understandably enraged Paul Krugman, Princeton economist and New York Times op-ed columnist, is saying in a new book that conservatism is essentially a set of unfair principles (?) that, should they be fully implemented, will favor rich white males and those women they care to enslave.

Okay, it’s not quite that extreme, but close. You’ve got to respect Krugman. He has so often been right in his analyses. He thinks George W. Bush represents the worst that can emerge from the electoral process — maybe even worse than Millard Fillmore and Warren G. Harding. At least neither of them started a pre-emptive and ruinous war.

I like Krugman because he and I operate along a similar arm-waving, tub-thumping continuum, making — or trying to make — our points with both brass and percussion in crescendo. Yet I — yes, even I — am disposed to take a less condemnatory view of the phenomenon Krugman denominates “conservatism,” if only because I have friends who say they are conservatives, and I can’t believe they are the despicable sort he would say they are.

Here’s one short way to understand conservatism: Its exponents believe (often with religious and ideological zeal) that both market economics and immutable moral truths are sacred. Little ambiguity is tolerated and no deviation from the catechism.

It makes sense to economic conservatives that markets work and that the best thing to do is let the proverbial chips fall where they may. That system has worked well for people who had chips to begin with and have managed to garner more and more of them as they have fallen. But I have yet to make the acquaintance of a conservative who has never been in the chips and is therefore unable to imagine the law of gravity not causing them to appear like deserved manna from above. Conversely, the chip-less seldom benefit from the same phenomenon.

So when I read in the same newspaper on the same day an editorial that blames “union contracts that are unaffordable in the global economy” and advocates stratospheric compensation for CEOs even — or especially — when their companies are in bankruptcy, I have to wonder about any conservatism out of which such ideas come.

At this writing, the NYSE is floating just below the 14,000-mark, and the business pages of nationally circulated newspapers are reporting the creation of more jobs. So I must scratch my head and ask the following questions:

 · If the tycoons are raking it in at record levels, why are union contracts unaffordable in the global economy?

 · Are CEOs and their stockholders not raking in enough? Must there be no limits imagined to what they might rake in?

If Krugman and other analysts are right, the same type of conservative who believes that markets must rule — even if whole economic classes of human beings are thereby hurt and deprived — also demands that the tenets of religion (principally bible-based Christianity) be regarded as revealed, absolute truth. In such a belief system, women have no reproductive rights, and gay and lesbian persons are not entitled to the enjoyment of the tangible and intangible benefits of marriage. Likewise, the teaching of evolutionary biology has to be subordinated to the biblical version of creation.

And yet, my conservative friends are OK people. They pay their taxes, keep their lawns trimmed and their homes tidy. They go to church or synagogue with regularity and are not stingy in their contributions to such benevolences as the United Way and PTA candy sales. Anyone would be pleased to have them for neighbors.

They are to the person, however, adamant about the high cost of doing business in this country because of union labor. They think that UAW retirees should not have the health-care benefits that were promised them during the years of their employment at one of the Big Three. My conservative friends think the same of retired public school teachers, and if the former could take such benefits away from the latter, they would do so thinking themselves justified by the faith in the market economy. Or as someone recently said, “You need health care? Go to the emergency room.”

The only people I hear praising the much-touted “global economy” are those who are directly benefiting from it. If you have invested in the stock of companies who have moved their operations offshore to cut labor costs, your dividends or at least the value of your stock are likely to increase because domestic wages stagnate, decrease or disappear altogether. And what’s wrong with that? It’s just the market at work.

What’s wrong with that is the same thing old Henry Ford discovered about the manufacture of automobiles. If you don’t pay your workers enough that they can buy what they make, your economy will collapse of its own weight. So he paid out the famous $5 a day wage in an era when that was really big bucks. This era’s counterpart to the $5 a day wage, absent a national health care system, is health care and retirement benefits to keep the working class from slipping into penury in their old age.

Conservatives can’t be so stupid as to want their precious market to produce whole neighborhoods of poorhouses, can they? I don’t think so, especially of my friends. Yet, I also don’t know what to think.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.