Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
Conservatives abandoning their principles
Colin McNickle is the Trib's director of editorial pages. Ring him at 412-320-7836. E-mail him at: cmcnickle@tribweb.com.
President Bush's political savant Karl Rove was the cock-of-the-walk this month bragging that conservatism has become "the dominant political creed in America." Surely it must be one of those off-brands because what's been passing for conservatism these days is quite troubling.
Let's start with Rick Santorum.
Pennsylvania's junior U.S. senator this week is planning to introduce a bill that would raise the minimum wage. The economy is growing, the Republican notes; his "sense" is that now "is probably a good time" to raise the wage floor.
Actually, there's never a good time to raise the government-mandated wage floor because the "good" of minimum wages is a fallacy. As Henry Hazlitt, the late, great economic journalist once put it:
"You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment."
If adopted, Santorum's measure would compound the mistake of government-set wage floors -- it would base the minimum wage on a government decree instead of productivity. The better way to raise wages is to increase marginal labor productivity. In the current climate, that means allowing companies to invest in capital improvements that help workers produce more better. As productivity rises, so do profits. And as profits increase, so do wages.
The Santorum proposal would discourage capital accumulation at exactly the wrong time. There would be fewer jobs paying less. And that's the mistake of a liberal, not of a "conservative."
The debate over Social Security reform rapidly has devolved into an unseemly contest among "conservatives" to see who can snooker the American people into believing that taxes must be increased to "save" the supplemental retirement system.
The most preposterous involves raising the $90,000 cap on which workers pay Social Security taxes. Cap-lifting is billed as a way to both gain a short-term reprieve against program insolvency and to pay for transition costs for partially privatized accounts.
As 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat would have noted, that's the "seen." But Heritage Foundation scholar David C. John has been peeling away the multiple layers of paint from the proposal to expose the largely "unseen," or perhaps in this case, the denied.
A growing number of "conservatives" have succumbed to the liberal argument that it's only "fair" that the cap be raised. After all, why should income in excess of $90,000 not be taxed for Social Security purposes? Because the cap actually "serves to limit the ... benefits that a well-off retiree will receive," Mr. John notes.
Liberals would be shocked to learn that raising the cap will really stick it to the rich -- by allowing the wealthy to draw even higher Social Security benefits.
That said, raising the cap will not only offer about six years of reprieve for this pyramid scheme, but it will result in serious unintended consequences. John cites a Center for Data Analysis study that concludes the elimination of the payroll tax cap would:
Again, this sounds like a typical liberal government-based economic "development" package. But it's conservatives who more and more are buying into this badly broken thinking.
There are ample other examples of "conservatives" practicing anything but conservatism.
To wit, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, President Bush's former budget director, wants to jack up taxes 1 percentage point on those making $100,000 or more. It's billed as a "temporary" increase. Yeah, right.
Liberals are toasting several GOP governors who are eschewing market solutions to the growing Medicaid problem.
And some key Republican senators, including Ted Stevens of Alaska, appear to be succumbing to the nonsense that humankind must curtail certain activities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to "save" the planet. For the thousandth time, never mind that mankind's "link" is dubious and that global warming (and cooling) are a natural phenomenon.
"Principles become modified in practice by facts," said J. Fenimore Cooper in "The American Democrat." But a growing number of "conservatives" are ignoring the facts and, in the process, abandoning principled conservatism.
We should all fear the consequences.
