I am very excited to undertake my duties as Faculty Blogger for the month of May. My colleagues have done an outstanding job in making the Marquette University Law School Blog a “go to” destination for ideas and information about law, politics and society. They have demonstrated an inspired vision of how technology can bring the Marquette community together, and the inaugural year of the blog has been an unqualified success. This makes their apparent lapse in judgment in inviting me to serve as Faculty Blogger for this month all the more surprising. I will try my best not to embarrass anyone.
Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute had an interesting op ed in the Wall Street Journal on April 30 entitled “The Real Culture War is Over Capitalism.” You can find it on the Journal’s website. His key quote: “Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests [like the “tea parties”], and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship.” I agree with his central point, which is that free market conservatives have made the mistake of assuming that capitalism is a good in and of itself, and have failed to make the case that free markets have moral ends. Is it in fact demonstrable that free market capitalism leads to the greatest economic benefit to the greatest number of Americans, a utilitarian standard with its roots in the classical Greek conception of government? Alternatively, can free market advocates demonstrate that the best way to preserve and promote the dignity of human beings is through a marketplace unfettered by regulation or government oversight, a standard that comes from Catholic social teaching? Shouting “Socialism!” at every government intervention in the market is not enough.
The last several years have seen increasing disparity in the distribution of wealth among the population, the accumulation of crushing debt by many households (often from medical expenses), and a domestic labor force that has gotten the message that it is replaceable with overseas and undocumented workers. For many Americans, faith in the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith has not been rewarded. They are willing to try something else. They want to see the economic gains from a growing economy shared in a more equitable fashion, they want the cost of their health care to stop eating an ever growing proportion of their income, and they want a measure of job security.
In political terms, the Republican Party has created its own “brand” as a no tax-small government party. They have succeeded in differentiating their product just as sure as Crest has differentiated itself from Colgate as a brand of toothpaste. But voters are like consumers in the supermarket. If they don’t think your product is working, they will try a different brand.
Marx underestimated how much capitalism could change over time. When he wrote his blistering (and insightful) nineteenth-century critiques, he had in mind industrial capitalism with an exploited workforce of proletarians. Since then, capitalism has evolved, and in the contemporary United States it is best characterized as advanced finance and consumer capitalism. White-collar workers greatly outnumber factory hands, and the middle class is much larger than what Marx thought of as the working class.
It therefore seems duplicitous for the contemporary right to continually invoke images of free enterprise and eager entrepreneurs in its challenges to government regulation of business. The investment banks, financial institutions, and faceless corporations that have screwed up the economy are not struggling and noble individuals but rather large, complex, billion-dollar socio-legal entities. When they try to hide behind the mythical entrepreneur, it is like an elephant hiding behind a pencil.
Prof. Fallone,
You have (inadvertently perhaps) offered some good advice to conservatives. The primary problem with the Republican Party right now is that we are trying to fight old battles, and thus we are offering 1980 solutions to 2009 problems. In a sense, conservatives are being punished for our own success. The problems of the 1970s—stagflation, overregulation, crushing taxes, crime, enfeeblement in the face of Soviet depredations—were solved with conservative ideas. The problems facing the American worker today are vastly different. The primary issues of concern for the American voter are health care, the environment, and affordable higher education. Republicans have responded with: tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts.
The danger is that conservatives are ceding the debate to liberals on all of these issues. Instead of railing against taxes that haven’t even gone up yet or pork spending, conservatives need to listen to the concerns of voters, and respond with conservative ideas. The Republican Party had better quickly come up with some market-based reform ideas for health care or this country is headed towards a backdoor single payer system. And instead of denying global warming, let’s tell the American voter why a carbon tax (yes, a tax) is better for consumers and the environment than cap-and-trade.
Middle class America is feeling desperate. While the Bush era saw a steady expansion in the economy, many middle-class Americans did not feel the effects of the good times because health care premiums ate into their wages. President Obama is busy rewriting the social contract to change America from an individualistic and entrepreneurial society to a culture reliant on the benevolence of government. If conservatives delay the inevitable introspection of their movement, liberalism will have achieved a transformative agenda without a fight. In times of crisis, nervous voters will almost surely choose the party of bad ideas over the party of no ideas.
Well said. Let me offer some advice to the Democrats as well. Democrats should have enough confidence in the merits of the market reforms that they are advocating that they are unafraid to engage the public directly. After all, they are selling a product as well. Democrats shouldn’t rely on the need to respond to the financial crisis in order to hide fundamental change in the fine print. And they shouldn’t rely on the strong anti-Bush sentiment that developed over the last year to garner public support, because that mood is ephemeral. If Democrats cannot win a public debate on the merits of health care reform or regulatory oversight of the financial markets, and cannot convince a majority of the voting public that these measures are necessary, then passing stealth reforms will only ensure that the general public lacks any vested interest in the new regulatory regime. That would ensure that the pendulum swings back sooner rather than later.