Unstoppable (5 page)

Senator Hank Brown called himself a free trader. As a conservative Republican from Colorado, he had voted for NAFTA in 1993.
One day in 1994 he received, as did all other members of Congress, a challenge letter from me. I would give a $10,000 contribution to the lawmaker's favorite charity if they would sign an affidavit certifying they had read the entire text of the WTO treaty and then would be willing to answer questions about its contents in a public forum open to citizens and the media. Only Senator Brown replied, and while he did not want the donation made, he accepted the challenge. About two weeks later, in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting, with the reporters and camera people ringing the room, he answered all twelve questions accurately. He then declared that, as a free trader, he was so appalled by the antidemocratic provisions within the WTO agreement that he was going to vote against it and urge everyone else to do so.

Why did he vote against it? Because Hank Brown went from the abstract slogan—free trader—and immersed himself in the realities of what the WTO was: a transnational, secret, autocratic system of control inimical to our democratic system of governing, which includes open courts. He went down the abstraction ladder and found that his fundamental conservative principles of prudent public governance were violated in powerful and varied ways. He saw that hundreds of pages of rules were in effect regulations without recourse, pressures on the United States for often having higher standards than many of the other 128 country signatories to the agreement. It is remarkable how doing one's homework can correct stereotypical thinking.

Take conservative Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley. I went to see him in 2007 to ask for his leadership, given his seniority on the Senate Finance Committee, in pushing faster for legislation he supported that would require the full text of all federal contracts (above a minimum amount) be placed online for all to read, report, scrutinize, or challenge. Before I got started, he asked, “What's going on with your Democrats?” He had just come from a committee meeting where “liberal” Democrats Chuck Schumer of New York and John Kerry of Massachusetts opposed his position
requiring hedge funds to pay taxes on their commissions as ordinary income rather than the present, much lower 15 percent capital gains rate. He left little doubt that he believed Wall Street had gotten to them.

Corporatism, which so often targets conservatives, is increasingly targeting so-called liberals and creating the opposite type of convergence than the one this book is promoting. This sinister convergence between Democrats and Republicans beholden to the corporatist message often confounds outside citizen groups, who expect a greater difference between liberals and conservatives in this two-party duopoly.

All these overlaps can become confusing, which is why one quest in this book is to pull back the curtain of corporate camouflage and political duplicity. People need more awareness of how corporate pressures lead to the forked tongue of elected men and women. While this book notes and recommends a convergence on the common ground of increased democracy and people's power, it also records the mirror image at the top, where so-called conservative and liberal politicians forget their labels when they join together at the trough of corporate largesse on the way to fronting for the corporate agenda.

2

Conservatism's Authority Figures: Principles Versus Dogmas

I
f all the revered conservative philosophers agree on one principle, it is that conservatism is not a dogma, not a catechism, not a rigid belief system—as they accuse Marxism of being. They believe in liberty too much to even want a system of prescriptive rules. Rather, they see conservatives as attaching primacy to established institutions, traditions, and orderly ways that have met the test of time and temper while viewing with keen skepticism any untested, upsetting ways of thinking and doing.

Since established ways and institutions usually reflect the existing distribution of power, wealth, and property, conservatism has been associated with societies where the few dominate the many, ultimately through the use of the police force when all other silent and overt repressions fail. Plutocrats and oligarchs attach themselves to the label “conservative.”

Nonetheless, conservatism has received a bad rap over the past century, and its philosophers have been misused, distorted, and sometimes willfully mischaracterized in order to propagandize the
public mind and cover crass commercialism with a moralistic, philosophical camouflage.

Adam Smith, First Victim of Corporatist Mishandling

Has any moral philosopher and political economist been more manipulated by the power brokers than Adam Smith? In their war against regulation (critics would say against “law and order”), taxation, and government spending, combined with their defense of bigness, monopolies, and oligopolies, and their imbalanced use of the law to their advantage, corporatists have cited Adam Smith's “invisible hand” over and over again.

Writing in England about the time of the emerging American revolt, Smith produced two prodigious achievements,
The Wealth of Nations
(1776) and
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759). They reflected an immensely nuanced mind able to conceive thoughts from the constants of human nature, nourished by social and individual morals and sympathy, and a deep understanding of the realities of the emerging industrialization and merchant trade of Britain with nearby nations. At the time, the use of large joint-stock companies—limited liability firms owned by shareholders—was breaking down the old order of agrarianism and craftsmanship. Smith's suspicion of government regulation proceeded significantly from his belief that such restraints favor the privileged interests that want to entrench their economic advantages through the force of law. (In the twentieth century, this belief was updated as “regulatory capture” by famed University of Chicago conservative economist and Nobel laureate George Stigler.) More prophetically, Smith foresaw what Robert Monks described as “four underlying dangers in the joint stock company, predecessor to the modern corporation. He observed that these entities tended to seek: unlimited life, unlimited size, unlimited power, and unlimited license.”
¹
Smith, way back in the eighteenth century, worried about these managers “of other people's money” and the separation of ownership from management's controls.

The Wealth of Nations
argued that high wages were both economically and morally beneficial, compared to the “bad effects of high profits.” Smith wrote: “No society can be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.”
²
He tore into any business collusion, telling his readers to watch out whenever a group of businessmen get together. An early forecaster of the corporate state, Smith asserted: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
³

Smith's “invisible hand” metaphor flowed from his approval of markets so decentralized or
de-monopolized
between sellers and buyers that the cumulative choices, however self-interested, would redound to the larger common good. His approved role of government, other than defense against external enemies, was to administer justice in disputes, invest in “certain public works and certain public institutions” (including “basic education at the parish level”), and regulate prices for essentials, such as foodstuffs, where they were in the grip of a monopoly. He would have been shocked to learn of his conversion into the patron saint of giant corporate capitalism and its professional apologists.

Ludwig von Mises, Second Only to Smith in the Conservative Pantheon

While at times very distorted, the ideas of major scholars and thinkers deemed conservative ring through the ages, from Edmund Burke
(defend the cumulative wisdom), to David Ricardo (free trade), and on to Friedrich Hayek (road to
state
serfdom), and their later twentieth-century successors, notably Frank Meyer, Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, and Murray Rothbard, among others. Though it is not quite as argument-clinching as is the scripture cited by devout Christians, in fervent conservative circles there is a similar citing of words from a hierarchy of revered thinkers, each with their schools of thought and adherents, and each reaffirmed by more contemporary writers, columnists, and lecturers who presume to beat their drums.

Towering over all the other icons of the Right is the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), who started out as a “leftist interventionist but was quickly converted by his study of Carl Menger's
Principles of Economics
(1871) to a self-described libertarian, not a conservative but a liberal in the nineteenth-century sense,” according to his biographer, the well-known author and polemicist Murray N. Rothbard.
⁴
Von Mises's books, published immediately after World War I, were remarkably persuasive; Rothbard noted that they converted “prominent economists and social philosophers out of socialism, including Hayek, the German Wilhelm Röpke, and the Englishman Lionel Robbins.”
⁵
Von Mises is widely considered the most integrative, most scholarly, and most intransigent of conservative economists. Writing in the
Encyclopedia of American Conservatism
, Rothbard summarizes crisply what von Mises concluded:

The only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial area. For Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the
human race; (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed.
⁶

Misesian economics required a noninflationary gold standard and opposition to inflationary bank credit encouraged by central banks. Moving to the United States after World War II, he published what many considered his greatest work,
Human Action
(1949). After his death, the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, opened in 1982. Through its doors have passed thousands of students taught by hundreds of faculty members, who have published over 150 books and monographs, ranging widely in subject, as the titles of two of its more important books reveal:
The Costs of War
(1997) and
Reassessing the Presidency
(2001). Institutes and centers of Misesian economics and social philosophy operate in a dozen major cities on three continents, including Beijing and Moscow.

Arguably the most significant disciple of von Mises, given his influential writings and high-level participation in German free market policies and political structures after World War II, was Wilhelm Röpke. According to the von Mises Institute, he “was able to maintain in one coherent project the best of the logical rigor of Ludwig von Mises, the social understanding of Friedrich Hayek, the anticommunism of Frank Meyer, and the conservative temper of Russell Kirk.” Having “devoted his career to combating collectivism in economic, social and political theory,” he was operationally grounded in the empirical reality of the political economy.
⁷
The Misesian Röpke expressed these often forgotten but memorable thoughts: “The highest interests of the community and
the indispensable things of life have no exchange value and are negligent if supply and demand are allowed to dominate the field. The supporters of the market do it the worst service by not observing its limits and conditions.”
⁸

Comparing Contemporary Reality-Starved Conservatives to the Robust Ones of Yore

My reading through a mass of materials of conservative thought, debate, disciplines, and apostates leads me to dispute the contentions of some liberal leaders that dogmatic thinking is what trademarks overall conservative thinking. Or that conservatism is really the only way to justify or rationalize the rule of the rich over the masses.