Monday, March 3, 2008

George Will's Political Economic Platform Only Represents the Corporate Elite's Interests

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"George Will: Buckley's voice improved his era and none shall forget it"
By GEORGE F. WILL, Sunday, Mar. 2, 2008

THOSE WHO think Jack Nicholson's neon smile is the last word in smiles never saw William F. Buckley's. It could light up an auditorium; it did light up half a century of elegant advocacy that made him an engaging public intellectual and the 20th century's most consequential journalist.

Before there could be Ronald Reagan's presidency, there had to be Barry Goldwater's candidacy. It made conservatism confident and placed the Republican Party in the hands of its adherents.

Before there could be Goldwater's insurgency, there had to be National Review magazine. From the creative clutter of its Manhattan offices flowed the ideological electricity that powered the transformation of American conservatism from a mere sensibility into a fighting faith and a blueprint for governance.

Before there was National Review, there was Buckley, spoiling for a philosophic fight, to be followed, of course, by a flute of champagne with his adversaries. He was 29 when, in 1955, he launched National Review with the vow that it "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." Actually, it helped Bill take history by the lapels, shake it to get its attention, and then propel it in a new direction. Bill died Wednesday in his home, in his study, at his desk, diligent at his life-long task of putting words together well and to good use.

Before his intervention -- often laconic in manner, always passionate in purpose -- in the plodding political arguments within the flaccid liberal consensus of the post-World War II intelligentsia, conservatism's face was that of another Yale man, Robert Taft, somewhat dour, often sour, three-piece suits, wire-rim glasses. The word "fun" did not spring to mind.

The fun began when Bill picked up his clipboard, and conservatives' spirits, by bringing his distinctive brio and elan to political skirmishing. When young Goldwater decided to give politics a fling, he wrote to his brother: "It ain't for life and it might be fun." He was half right: Politics became his life and it was fun, all the way. Politics was not Bill's life -- he had many competing and compensating enthusiasms -- but it mattered to him, and he mattered to the course of political events.

One clue to Bill's talent for friendship surely is his fondness for this thought of Harold Nicolson's: "Only one person in a thousand is a bore, and he is interesting because he is one person in a thousand." Consider this from Bill's introduction to a collection of his writings titled "The Jeweler's Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections":

"The title is, of course, a calculated effrontery, the relic of an impromptu answer I gave once to a tenacious young interviewer who, toward the end of a very long session, asked me what opinion did I have of myself.

"I replied that I thought of myself as a perfectly average middle-aged American, with, however, a jeweler's eye for political truths. I suppressed a smile -- and watched him carefully record my words in his notebook.

"Having done so, he looked up and asked, 'Who gave you your jeweler's eye?' 'God,' I said, tilting my head skyward just a little. He wrote that down -- the journalism schools warn you not to risk committing anything to memory. 'Well,' -- he rose to go, smiling at last 'that settles that! We have become friends."

Pat, Bill's beloved wife of 56 years, died last April. During the memorial service for her at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, a friend read lines from "Vitae Summa Brevis" by a poet she admired, Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

Bill's final dream was to see her again, a consummation of which his faith assured him. He had an aptitude for love -- of his son, his church, his harpsichord, language, wine, skiing, sailing.

He began his 60-year voyage on the turbulent waters of American controversy by tacking into the wind with a polemical book, "God and Man at Yale" (1951), that was a lovers' quarrel with his alma mater. And so at Pat's service the achingly beautiful voices of Yale's Whiffenpoofs were raised in their signature song about the tables down at Mory's, "the place where Louis dwells."

We will serenade our Louis

While life and voice shall last

Then we'll pass and be forgotten with the rest.

Bill's distinctive voice permeated, and improved, his era. It will be forgotten by no one who had the delight of hearing it.

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George Will is a columnist for Newsweek in Washington, D.C., and a commentator for ABC News.
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George Will: "Russia, not Rielle, is what matters"
August 12, 2008

Asked in 1957 what would determine his government's course, Harold Macmillan, Britain's new prime minister, replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Now, into America's trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded -- a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again.

Russia supports two provinces determined to secede from Georgia. Russia, with aspiring nations within its borders, generally opposes secessionists, as it did when America, which sometimes opposes secession (e.g. 1861-65), improvidently supported Kosovo's secession from Russia's ally, Serbia. But Russia's aggression is really about the subordination of Georgia, a democratic, market-oriented U.S. ally. This is the recrudescence of Russia's dominance in what it calls the "near abroad." Ukraine, another nation guilty of being provocatively democratic near Russia, should tremble because there is not much America can do. It is a bystander at the bullying of an ally that might be about to undergo regime change.

Vladimir Putin, into whose soul President George W. Bush once peered and liked what he saw, has conspicuously conferred with Russia's military, thereby making his poodle, "President" Dmitry Medvedev, yet more risible.

But big events reveal smallness, such as that of New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson.

On ABC's "This Week," Richardson, auditioning to be Barack Obama's running mate, disqualified himself. Clinging to the Obama campaign's talking points like a drunk to a lamp post, Richardson said this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama's zest for diplomacy, and that America should get the U.N. Security Council "to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some restraint." Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the U.N. for 19 months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.

This crisis illustrates, redundantly, the paralysis of the U.N. regarding major powers, hence regarding major events, and the fictitiousness of the European Union regarding foreign policy. Does this disturb Obama's serenity about the efficacy of diplomacy? Obama's second statement about the crisis, in which he tardily acknowledged Russia's invasion, underscored the folly of his first, which echoed the Bush administration's initial evenhandedness. "Now," said Obama, "is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint."

John McCain, the "life is real, life is earnest" candidate, says he has looked into Putin's eyes and seen "a K, a G and a B." But McCain owes the thug thanks, as does America's electorate. Putin has abruptly pulled the presidential campaign up from preoccupation with plumbing the shallows of John Edwards and wondering what "catharsis" is "owed" to disappointed Clintonites.

McCain, who has called upon Russia "to immediately and unconditionally ... withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory," favors expelling Russia from the G-8 and organizing a league of democracies to act where the U.N. is impotent, which is whenever the subject is important.

But Georgia, whose desire for NATO membership had U.S. support, is not in NATO because some prospective members of McCain's league of democracies, e.g. Germany, thought that starting membership talks with Georgia would complicate the project of propitiating Russia. NATO is scheduled to review the question of Georgia's membership in December. Where now do Obama and McCain stand?

If Georgia were in NATO, would NATO now be at war with Russia? More likely, Russia would not be in Georgia. Only once in NATO's 59 years has the territory of a member been invaded -- the British Falklands, by Argentina, in 1982.

What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

This year's August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world's preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremony featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony.

Who remembers 1934? Or anything.
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George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.
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Readers' COMMENTS:

When is the U.S. going to mind their own business? We have our military hands in far too many pots.
It's not as if these countries would ever return the favor and fight for us.
Many of these countries have been fighting for hundreds of years. They will fight for many hundreds more.
Let's fix the U.S. and stop trying to change the world to our thinking.
- Pauline, Franklin

The Russian aggression against Georgia, as with the reality of Islamic terrorism, is simply beyond the ken of the Left. They cannot process it and cannot be trusted in government to deal with it.
- Tom, Campton

NATO countries should reduce their need for Russian energy via conservation, energy development, and new foreign energy suppliers. Why help Russia fund it's military when they do not have to?

I recommend people read THE ART OF WAR by Sun Tzu translated by Samuel B. Griffith.

I recommend people read the second revised edition of STRATEGY by B.H. Liddell Hart which discusses strategy and military history.

I recommend people sign up for the free e-mail newsletter from http://www.stratfor.com that discusses many strategic topics.
- Ken Stremsky, Manchester, NH

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"Will, conservatives, stuck in denial"
The Berkshire Eagle - Letters, Tuesday, December 02, 2008

It was (sort of) reassuring to read that George F. Will is back in his comfort zone, writing about Democratic Fiscal Incompetence in his column in The Berkshire Eagle, ("Perils of the new New Deal, op-ed, Nov. 30).

Mr. Will, by using pseudo-scholarly historical smoke and mirrors, was able to pontificate authoritatively about the present economic crisis without once mentioning "George W. Bush." Instead, he insisted that any attempt by a Democratic administration to fix the problem by helping the middle class would set in motion a decades-long economic disaster. The only surprise in Will's column was that he didn't blame the Wall Street meltdown on eight years of prosperity under Bill Clinton, though I'm sure he considered it.

In the wake of Obama's landslide victory, many Bush supporters wrote letters to The Eagle in an attempt to marginalize the gross damage that Bush and the GOP did to our country and to our world. One letter writer had the unmitigated gall to state that George W. Bush "did his best during a very difficult time," completely ignoring the fact that Bush created the "difficult time" that did not exist when Bush stole the presidency (twice)!

GOPers were not surprised that Democrats were ecstatic about Obama's historic victory, but the Republican faithful were completely taken aback by the worldwide celebrations of the fact that the Republican Party no longer controlled the White House. In the past eight years, the American media never held Bush's feet to the fire — thus, many Americans had no real idea of how much harm Bush Republicans did to America's global reputation.

After eight years of George W. Bush's "folksy" domestic incompetence, "good-natured" economic witlessness, and "manly" foreign policy debacles, Republicans found themselves unexpectedly embarrassed by people dancing in the streets all over the world on Nov. 5, 2008.

George F. Will is one of many "conservative" pundits leading the feeble charge to have the public forget the unprecedented malfeasance of the Bush administration, but it's not likely to work. If the Obama administration can get a handle on the economic crisis in the next couple of years, hopefully they will have time to bring the Bush administration to justice for its many crimes and misdemeanors.

George F. Will and the aforementioned pro-Bush letter-writers are still in deep and desperate denial.

That's too bad for them.

ERNEST WEST
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
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NOTE: Ernest West was one of my history teachers at Pittsfield High School. He went to Williams College.
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"Brilliant economists make big messes"
By GEORGE F. WILL, December 4, 2008

Three days after the President-elect announced in a radio address that he had directed his "economic team" to devise a plan "that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011," he told a news conference that he favored measures "that will help save or create 2.5 million jobs." To the extent that his ambition is clear, it is notably modest.

It is, however, unclear. How will anyone calculate the number of jobs "saved"? In what sense saved? Saved from what? Saved by what? By government action, such as agriculture subsidies or other corporate welfare? What about jobs lost because of those irrational uses of finite economic resources? Should jobs "saved" by, say, protectionist policies that interfere with free trade be balanced against jobs lost when export markets are lost to retaliatory protectionism?

In recent years, in normal conditions, the economy has "lost" tens of millions of jobs through capitalism's "creative destruction" (Joseph Schumpeter's phrase). It also has created a few million more than that, which is why the destruction is creative.

Investor's Business Daily reports: "Since Eisenhower's first term, the economy has created an average of 1.5 million new jobs each year. Since Reagan's first term, the average has been about 2.5 million a year. And Reagan, who inherited an economy as bad if not worse than the current one, saw 6.3 million new jobs created four years after he entered the White House."

Because the economy's job-creation is not quite as predictable as a solar eclipse, Obama, by promising 2.5 million jobs by 2011, is a bit more audacious than was Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, who astonished King Arthur's court by commanding an eclipse that he knew was due. Still, because scores of millions of today's jobs will exist two years from now, who will be able to dispute a presidential claim that administration policies "saved" some portion of them?

If you must forecast tomorrow's weather, you will be tolerably accurate more often than not if you say it will be sort of like today's. In normal times, the rule for forecasting next year's economy is similar. The problem is that economic forecasts matter most in abnormal times, such as these. The question is: How abnormal are these times?

A snapshot of a moving target is of limited use, but: Sales the day after Thanksgiving were 3 percent higher than last year. Over the weekend, 172 million people, shopping in stores and online, spent an average of $372.57, a 7.2 percent increase over a year ago, when 147 million shoppers spent $347.55 per person. Is this evidence that the recent deleveraging of indebted households has breathed fresh life into personal consumption, which normally is 70 percent of economic activity?

Is it evidence of underestimated strength of an economy in which more than 93 percent of those who want to work are employed, and more than 93 percent of mortgages are being paid on time? Is it evidence that Washington's jaw-dropping interventions with hundreds of billions of dollars are having their intended psychotherapeutic effects?

How much is it evidence of the decline of the price of a gallon of regular gasoline from $4.10 in July to $1.81 today? Over a year, every 1 cent decline is a $1.5 billion saving to consumers.

Whatever else historians will say about Washington's response to today's crisis, they are not apt to say the government did too little. It certainly has not suffered the fate of Buridan's ass, the animal in a philosophic puzzle who, placed equidistant from two piles of hay, starved to death from indecision. Some Washingtonians can remember when the federal government first had a budget of $100 billion (1962); this year's decisiveness might contribute to a deficit next year of $1 trillion.

In his wise book "Capitalism, Democracy and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery," John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes' central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that "the state is wise and the market is stupid." Mueller continues: "Working from that sort of perspective, India's top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally -- leading one of them to lament recently, 'India's misfortune was to have brilliant economists.'"

Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes' followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the President-elect's economic team is composed of brilliant economists.
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George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.
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NH Union Leader READERS' COMMENTS

This reminds me of the old joke:

If you put twenty economists in a room you'll wind up with twenty-three different opinions.

And these are the people we are depending on to save us from economic ruin?
God help us!
- Mike P., Manchester

If Detroit had been assembling cars with Eyes-Wide-Shut Robert's "$26-an-hour union workers," their cars would be affordable. The true figure is about $75-an-hour--compared to about $55 for Nissan et al to assemble cars in Dixie.

The United Auto Workers has offered concessions of varying significance, but warns that they will require ratification by the rank-and-file. Funny, no one proposed to poll me by national referendum on the way to seizing money from sustainable businesses and giving it to unsustainable ones with toxic union contracts.

To hell with union ratification. Any statute that grants $32,000 million to the Big Three should contain text abrogating the labor contract and decertifying the United Auto Workers.
- Spike, Brentwood NH

Robert--you seem to forget that those CEO's are from blue states. You also seem to forget that the unions are aligned with the Democratic Party. Oh, and one more thing--Obama's big campaign contributions--all from rich liberals. The moral to the story? Greed and corruption are rampant in your party as well. But amazingly, this reality seems to elude you.
- Susie Nickerson, Horseshoe Bay, Texas (NH native)

True--every time the Keynesian economic model of the omnipotent government has been attempted by some lame-brained politician—usually at the urging of some "brilliant economist" or some disenchanted ideologue like Karl Marx--it has failed miserably. It is nothing more than an outgrowth of the socialist movement that swept across Europe in the early 20th century--and it was the touchstone of FDR's New Deal.

But it's a bum deal—one that’s old and worn-out—the botched experiment of a bygone era. Let's hope Obama's team of "brilliant economists" is brilliant enough to steer away from this disastrous path and deliver to us the CHANGE that he has promised. Fresh, new ideas would be a good place to start.
- Susie Nickerson, Horseshoe Bay, Texas (NH native)

The classic conservative fear is that government economists will have done something and that it has a good effect. We'll see. It seems though that since the conservative pundits are rich, they want something done now and are having a great deal of difficulty resisting the urge to again plunder the government tax accounts for all the money that evaporated due to the cartoon economics known as trickle down. Wasn't it fun watching those CEO's flying their private jets in to beg for handouts. Now that is Republican economics at its best. All these complaints about $26 an hour union workers when their uber bosses take $26 million a year out of their failing companies. Gimme, gimme, gimme.
- Robert, Deerfield

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"From McCain-Feingold to Madison"
By George Will, Sunday, September 13, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Last March, during the Supreme Court argument concerning the Federal Election Commission's banning of a political movie, several justices were aghast. Suddenly and belatedly they saw the abyss that could swallow the First Amendment.
Justice Antonin Scalia was "a little disoriented" and Justice Samuel Alito said "that's pretty incredible." Chief Justice John Roberts said: "If we accept your constitutional argument, we're establishing a precedent that you yourself say would extend to banning the book" -- a hypothetical 500-page book containing one sentence that said "vote for" a particular candidate.

What shocked them, but should not have, were statements by a government lawyer who was only doing his professional duty with ruinous honesty -- ruinous to his cause. He was defending the mare's nest of uncertainties that federal campaign finance law has made, and the mess the court made in 2003 when, by affirming the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold's further speech restrictions, it allowed Congress to regulate speech by and about people running for Congress.

The government lawyer was trying to justify the FEC's 2008 decision that McCain-Feingold required banning "Hillary: The Movie" from video-on-demand distribution. The lawyer said, in effect:

Don't blame me. McCain-Feingold orders people to shut up when political speech matters most. It bans "electioneering communications" (communications "susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate") paid for by corporations in the 30 days before primaries and 60 days before general elections. Corporations include not only, or primarily, the likes of GM and GE; corporations also include issue advocacy groups, from the National Rifle Association to the Sierra Club. So, yes, if a book published (as books are) by a corporation contains even a sentence of election-related advocacy, the book could -- must -- be banned by the federal government, and not just during the McCain-Feingold muzzle period.

Stunned, the court ordered that the case be reargued Sept. 9. On Aug. 30, a New York Times story included a delicious morsel about Fred Wertheimer, an indefatigable advocate of increased government control of the quantity, timing and content of campaign speech -- speech about the composition of the government:

"In an interview, Mr. Wertheimer seemed reluctant to answer questions about the government regulation of books. Pressed, Mr. Wertheimer finally said, 'A campaign document in the form of a book can be banned.'"

Last Wednesday, Elena Kagan, the new solicitor general, said, in effect: Relax, the FEC has never taken enforcement action concerning a book under McCain-Feingold. Yes, but the FEC deadlocked about prosecuting George Soros under another section of federal campaign law because he did not make required reports of money spent on his promotion of his 2004 book attacking George W. Bush -- money that might, or might not, have been "independent expenditures" for "express advocacy."

On Wednesday, Chief Justice Roberts said: "We don't put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats." Actually, before he and Alito joined the court, it allowed Congress to put our rights into those meddlesome hands. Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former FEC commissioner, says there are 568 pages of FEC regulations, and 1,278 pages of the Federal Register have been filled with explanations and justifications of those regulations. For James Madison, 10 words sufficed: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech."

The FEC's ever-thickening fog of legal hairsplitting makes it impossible to draw any bright line telling Americans what political speech is and is not legal. Nevertheless, supporters of government rationing of political speech say the court should not reverse itself regarding McCain-Feingold because stare decisis -- adherence to precedents -- is virtuous.

Oh? The court's finest modern moment, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, effectively reversed Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Yes, the court upheld McCain-Feingold just six years ago, but egregious and mischievous mistakes should be corrected before they produce torrents of bad precedents.

Defenders of McCain-Feingold say allowing political spending by corporations will unleash too much speech. Steve Simpson of the Institute for Justice replies:

"Freeing corporate speech will lead to what more speech always leads to -- a debate. Wal-Mart will support President Obama's health care reform, as it has done, but the National Retail Federation will oppose it, as it has done. ... Corporations do not speak with one voice any more than individuals do."

Regulations controlling political speech inevitably multiply and become increasingly indecipherable and unpredictable. The court should take the country up from McCain-Feingold, to Madison.

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"The eradication of individualism"
By GEORGE F. WILL, October 6, 2011

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project, and the stakes of contemporary politics.

The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says.

Warren says:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. ... You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, aka the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.

Warren’s statement is a footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government — of the ability to govern one’s self. This liberalism postulates that, in the modern social context, only a special few people can literally make up their own minds.

In “The Affluent Society” (1958), modern liberalism’s symptomatic text, Galbraith, a Harvard economist, baldly asserted that corporations’ marketing powers — basically, advertising — are so potent they can manufacture demands for whatever goods and services they want to supply. Corporations can nullify consumer sovereignty and vitiate the law of supply and demand. Galbraith asserted this while Ford’s marketers were failing to create a demand for Edsels.

Many members of the liberal intelligentsia, that herd of independent minds, agree that other Americans comprise a malleable, hence vulnerable, herd whose “false consciousness” is imposed by corporate America. Therefore the herd needs kindly, paternal supervision by a cohort of protective herders. This means subordination of the bovine many to a regulatory government staffed by persons drawn from the clever minority not manipulated into false consciousness.

Because such tutelary government must presume the public’s incompetence, it owes minimal deference to people’s preferences. These preferences are not really “theirs,” because the preferences derive from false, meaning imposed, consciousness. This convenient theory licenses the enlightened vanguard, the political class, to exercise maximum discretion in wielding the powers of the regulatory state.

Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.

Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation. Government facilitates this cooperation with roads, schools, police, etc. — and by getting out of its way. This is a sensible, dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.”

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