[bootlegga]

$1:

"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.

Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?

In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.

Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.

But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... 43,00.html

Some interesting points here...

[BartSimpson]

He's confusing conservatives with socialists. Actual conservatives want less government spending, less government taxation, and less government in general. We do not want to "modernize" in the sense of what Mr. Zakaria all so often advocates. We do not want nationalized health care as Zakaria tacitly supports http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02300.html

We don't want higher corporate taxes as Zakaria proposes: http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/27/faree ... ion/print/

And I can go on.

In short, Zakaria is a statist who wants the US to more resemble his native India with a far-reaching socialist government and his body of writing and on-air commentary substantiates my opinion. This is someone who has no credible conservative credentials and therefore his opinions on what conservatives should or should not do can be reduced to the advice that they should be more liberal.

Yeah, he can GFH.

[bootlegga]

I don't think he claims to be a conservative in this article, he just points out flaws in their rationale. His point about infrastructure and science/R&D investments in the 50s, 60s and 70s definitely rings true.

Imagine the US today without the Interstate System that Eisenhower started. Or the massive investment in the space program. Or DARPA (no Internet). And so on. Government investment is not ALWAYS a bad thing, as the current crop of Republicans seems to think.

Furthermore, his examples of nations doing the same thing are also valid. China for example, has embarked on a program to build more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined. That will have far-reaching implications for the growth of their economy, much in the same way the US Interstate program did for the US.

Of course, if the US wants a neutered/miniscule government, the US will either be relegated to the trash bin of history as a has been (like the British and French), or even worse, wind up in a massive war as it desperately tries to prevent rivals like China and India from surpassing it in the next generation or two.

[Proculation]

bootlegga bootlegga:

I don't think he claims to be a conservative in this article, he just points out flaws in their rationale. His point about infrastructure and science/R&D investments in the 50s, 60s and 70s definitely rings true.

Imagine the US today without the Interstate System that Eisenhower started. Or the massive investment in the space program. Or DARPA (no Internet). And so on. Government investment is not ALWAYS a bad thing, as the current crop of Republicans seems to think.

Furthermore, his examples of nations doing the same thing are also valid. China for example, has embarked on a program to build more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined. That will have far-reaching implications for the growth of their economy, much in the same way the US Interstate program did for the US.

Of course, if the US wants a neutered/miniscule government, the US will either be relegated to the trash bin of history as a has been (like the British and French), or even worse, wind up in a massive war as it desperately tries to prevent rivals like China and India from surpassing it in the next generation or two.

The US became the biggest economy on the planet precisely because they were having a capitalist economy last century.

As for the Internet, you are talking like if the government didn't invest in it, the private sector would not have invented it, while Internet and IT in general became was it is today because it's running on a capitalist platform. I think you are reinventing history here.

[BartSimpson]

Infrastructure spending in the USA is opposed by various political spectrums for various reasons.

Subsidized high speed rail is opposed by myopic conservatives because they want it to turn a profit but when you ask them if they want the Interstates privatized so they can also turn a profit you hear nothing but crickets.

Liberals are craftier. While they show up at press conferences to shill for high speed rail when the door to the committee room closes they defund it and try to move the money elsewhere. The latest example is California where the voters passed a $9 billion bond for HSR and the Democrat-controlled Legislature proposed selling the bonds and then 'borrowing' the $9bn to pay for other pet projects.

China can do these things because they've got a dictatorship and they've got money.

The USA, for now, is dealing with a collective abdication of leadership from all sides and an absence of vision from all sides.

In the endgame of it all, I still find myself agreeing more with the conservatives who say we first need to stop insane spending before we address anything else. The credit card is just about maxxed out and the conservatives are saying we need to step back from the precipice of national insolvency as an immediate priority and after that's fixed we can come back to the table to discuss infrastructure and etc.

Now, were it up to me I'd allow for high speed rail to be built by private investors and I'd give them immunity from lawsuits by 3rd parties to encourage them to do this and to cut costs.

Texas was close to a HSR project but it was Southwest Airlines that actively killed it because they saw it as competition. And the California HSR opposition is likewise being funded by Southwest Airlines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed ... ates#Texas

Unsurprisingly, the airlines opposition to HSR mirrors the railroads opposition to the Interstate program of sixty years ago.

The advent of the Interstates ended the traditional passenger rail service in the country in the space of just fourteen years.

A dedicated high speed rail service would end regional airline service just the same and it's airliness like Southwest that have the most to lose. Thus they oppose it.

Likwise, high speed rail advocates oppose investing in highway infrastructure because that money comes from the same pool of funds and every dollar spent on fixing highway bridges is a dollar not available for HSR.

[andyt]

Except even the conservatives can't agree on what the insane spending is to cut. Cut Medicare and you're going to have a bunch of old sick people to look after anyways, plus realistically nobody can get elected doing it. Your private system costs you way more than or public one, so one way or another people will pay.

Military? That's a conservative no go zone.

Social Security - just create more poverty with all it's attendant costs.

That leaves the pork barrel stuff. Except again, the hardest conservative is going to be against cutting port in his district, just in the next one.

So good luck trying to make significant cuts. Especially in a fragile recovery that looks like it can go south any time - just exacerbate that.

[bootlegga]

Proculation Proculation:

As for the Internet, you are talking like if the government didn't invest in it, the private sector would not have invented it, while Internet and IT in general became was it is today because it's running on a capitalist platform. I think you are reinventing history here.

Well, given that most corporations weren't really concerned with being able to operate AFTER a global nuclear conflict (the original reason it was created/funded by DARPA), I sincerely doubt that the Internet would ever have been built (at least in the decentralized fashion that it is today).

It might have been developed by private enterprise - perhaps after William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, a company might have developed it (much in the same way flip phones are a by-product of Star Trek communicators), but the Internet and the the current world we live would be vastly different.

If say, IBM, developed and built the Internet, development would have gone along the lines THEY saw fit, not the world at large. So it might be around, but there is no guarantee that Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon or any of the other large Internet companies would ever have been created, simply because it would have been an IBM product, to be shaped and molded as IBM execs saw fit, not as entrepeneurs saw fit.

Or perhaps we would have wound up with multiple Internets, as once competitors saw how successful IBM's was, others might have been created. So in that alternate universe, there are dozens of different Internets, all blocked off from each other and not interconnected.

So, no, I doubt that without the government intervention the internet (as we know it) would have been created.

[BartSimpson]

Bootlegga,
AOL and CompuServe were examples of relatively isolated proprietary networks.

I think what killed it for AOL was that once people discovered you could minimize the AOL screen and open Netscape and see whatever you wanted then more and more people wanted the real Internet and not just what AOL wanted you to see.

That was an example of the market dictating to industry and I think that even without the government around market pressures would've brought about the Internet much the same way we see it today.

IMHO, computers made the Internet inevitable in the same way that automobiles made superhighways inevitable.

[Thanos]

Real conservatism will only return when the Republican Party is no longer controlled by religious radicals and fiscal ideologues. Sadly it appears that this will not happen in the frame of the foreseeable future.

[bootlegga]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Bootlegga,

AOL and CompuServe were examples of relatively isolated proprietary networks.

I think what killed it for AOL was that once people discovered you could minimize the AOL screen and open Netscape and see whatever you wanted then more and more people wanted the real Internet and not just what AOL wanted you to see.

That was an example of the market dictating to industry and I think that even without the government around market pressures would've brought about the Internet much the same way we see it today.

IMHO, computers made the Internet inevitable in the same way that automobiles made superhighways inevitable.

True, but AOL and Compuserve were built on top of the Internet, so to speak.

If AOL had been built without the government-developed Internet in the background, users could not go and see everything else as there would have been nothing else to see. All that would exist is whatever AOL built.

If, a competitor arose and built a similar network, unless they allowed connectivity to their rival, there would be no way for Joe consumer to know the differences between AOL and Compuserve without actually having been a paying customer of both platforms (kind of like how cable companies operate).

Imagine if each internet was as compatible as VHS/Betamax or PC/Apple were in the 80s. That would make it incredibly difficult for users to migrate between the two.

I agree that the internet would have been invented, but it would NOT be the same as what we know today. 'Gated communities' still exist on the Internet (huge chunks of Facebook for example are not available on search engines), and the internet that would have developed would, IMHO, likely have been gated communities exactly like AOL and Compuserve were in the 80s.

After all, what benefit it is to IBM/AOL/whomever to spend million developing the internet and then hand out info on how to operate on it for free? I suppose IBM/AOL/whomever could charge companies a rent/licensing fee to operate on their Internet, but unless it was relatively cheap, it would hinder development.

Could you imagine a company like IBM allowing Amazon to make billions of dollars annually on their Internet? I can't. Odds are, IBM (or any other profit-driven company) would kick out Amazon and just take over the business (unless it became an anti-trust issue).

[Thanos]

Wasn't AOL more-or-less ruined by the ill-conceived merger with CNN-Time-Warner-etc.? Perfect example of how the current rules of capitalism manager to wreck an entirely decent and ground-breaking company.

[Lemmy]

Thanos Thanos:

Real conservatism will only return when the Republican Party is no longer controlled by religious radicals and fiscal ideologues. Sadly it appears that this will not happen in the frame of the foreseeable future.

Oddly enough, the article mentions George Will, who IS one of those American conservatives who has a lot to offer in reclaiming the GOP from its hijackers. He's intelligent, articulate and, depsite his record on global warming, is a relatively progressive thinker.

[Thanos]

When Mitt Romney was a governor he brought in a public health care system to ensure coverage for all citizens of his state. This should have been his proudest lifetime accomplishment. Instead, thanks to the current radicalism of thea federal side of the party he belongs to, he's being practically forced to repudiate the whole idea and his entire effort towards it in order to become palatable as a presidential candidate to the radicals and ideologues who are running the Republican machine. And, even if he mollified them on that issue, they probably won't choose him anyway because he's a Mormon, they're mostly Evangelicals, and Evangelicals don't like Mormons.

That in a nutshell is exactly what's wrong with American conservatism today. Dichotomy, intolerance, radicalism, hypocrisy, hyperventalation, and a dozen different varieties of paranoia all wrapped up in one big blanket of crazy. This is exactly why they're not appealing to anyone outside of their own small circles anymore and they're just too dense and too puritanical to even figure it out.

[andyt]

That's the second time you've used repudiate in your posts. You should know by now it's REFUDIATE.

[Thanos]

I only speak English. I'm not fluent in any of the various Wasillan dialects.