May, 2006

Coming Next Week: The Future of Work

Join us next week for the June issue of Cato Unbound devoted to glimpsing the future of work in America. Richard Florida, author of the bestselling Rise of the Creative Class, will lead off with an essay on Monday. Replying to Florida over the following week and a half will be: George Mason economist and [...]

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For Strong-Government Conservatism

For David Boaz, David Brooks’ talk of strong-government conservatism is the bad news and David Henderson’s suggestion that “spending has got to give” is the good news. I look at things somewhat differently.
Say we accept Henderson’s very persuasive argument, that a sharp increase in lifetime net tax rates–the inevitable result of an unreformed status [...]

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The Democrats and Small Government

I agree with David Frum that the future of the GOP majority depends, in part, on what the Democrats do—but I think it’s worth distinguishing between what Bill Clinton did, in 1996 and ‘98, and what the Democrats have failed to do ever since. Clinton moved the party to the right on economics, as David [...]

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News Notes

by David Boaz

May 16th, 2006

There’s good news and bad news in some recent publications. First, the bad news.
David Brooks again makes the case that conservatism is appropriately moving from less-government conservatism to strong-government conservatism. A journalist suggested to me yesterday that the Republican Party has shifted from a business-oriented party reaching out to social conservatives to a social-conservative party [...]

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Future of the GOP: It’s Up to the Democrats

by David Frum

May 16th, 2006

Ross’ question about the future of “fusionism”—the longstanding alliance between libertarians and social conservatives—is a very profound one. Let me suggest a couple of thoughts that may help us think it through together.

While strict doctrinal libertarians have always been a vanishingly small minority in America (cocaine vending machines anyone?), the libertarian disposition or tendency is [...]

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Voters Will Defend Economic Security Against Painful Reforms

At the risk of sounding simple-minded, I’d like to advance a proposition that will strike most readers as blindingly obvious—a political movement that doesn’t solve or at least alleviate the problems we encounter in daily life will fail. This is why Bruce Bartlett’s broader understanding of freedom is so crucial. Those benighted Europeans, [...]

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Best of the Blogs: Jon Henke on the Republican Marginal Revolution

In a smart response to this month’s discussion, Jon Henke at QandO argues that growth of government has gotten out of hand because there is too little transparency in government spending–it is not clear to voters where their taxes are going–and there is no price mechanism that provides feedback to voters about the real cost of government spending, leading voters too demand goods and services at a level they cannot ultimately afford.

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The Future of Fusionism

One question that we’ve all danced around a bit is whether the old “fusionist” project, wedding cultural conservatives to libertarians, makes sense any more. As a social conservative weary of unfulfilled and unfulfillable boasts about how we’re going to “drown the federal government in the bathtub,” I’m occasionally inclined to say no—as are a lot [...]

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Freedom is More Than Small Government

by Bruce Bartlett

May 10th, 2006

It’s pretty easy to get depressed about the prospects for freedom given the rather gloomy prospects discussed in these essays. However, I think it is important to remember that freedom encompasses much more than just escaping government’s oppression and intrusion, and growth in government spending and taxation don’t automatically lead to totalitarianism.
I think many [...]

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How About “Foredoomed”?

by David Frum

May 10th, 2006

David Boaz takes me to task for my phrase “intellectually incoherent.” Fair enough—and anyway I was not applying the term to him personally. Who in the world is more mentally disciplined than David? I should have said “foredoomed.”

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Libertarianism: Not Incoherent

by David Boaz

May 10th, 2006

David Frum says there’s not much disagreement, then calls me “hopelessly intellectually incoherent.” I guess I’d disagree with that. He’s right to be skeptical of opinion polls, though I would note that Americans also mostly vote against big government at the real polls. But of course they can only do that in some states, not [...]

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Reply to Comments: Small Successes are Big Achievements

by David Frum

May 10th, 2006

Gosh, I’m not sure we have enough disagreement here to sustain a second round!
Still, some responses:
Bruce Bartlett’s proposal for a VAT reminds me of a Larry Summers witticism: Explaining why the United States remains one of the rare major economies on earth without a VAT, Summers said, “Democrats oppose it because it is regressive, and [...]

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Where There Is No Vision, the People Perish

by David Boaz

May 8th, 2006

Cato executive vice president David Boaz argues that the Republicans have failed Reagan’s vision, offering their own brand of meddlesome statism as an alternative to the Democrats’. Although there is in the U.S. a constituency for limited government, Boaz argues, it needs a leader. The task for “advocates of liberty and limited government” is to “make ready the ideas, the platform, the networks that could serve a political leader who wanted to take on the task of clearing away the late 20th century’s accumulated burden of bureaucratic systems, unfunded liabilities, overextended military commitments, and usurpations of the responsibilities of free citizens.”

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Best of the Blogs: Ryan Sager on Frum

Columnist Ryan Sager, author of the forthcoming The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party, takes on Frum on his blog, Miscellaneous Objections, arguing that the Republicans under Bush “could have had a collective spine” and implemented small government reforms, but simply blew it.

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Renewing the Mandate

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argue that although a renewed push for smaller government isn’t in the cards, Republicans can realistically hope to win reforms that promote “freedom, self-reliance, and individual initiative”—values at the core of the small-government movement. In the current climate, Douthat and Salam write, “simply calling for the rollback of government appeals only to those already in the winner’s circle of American life. . .” So, they argue, Republicans “need to accept that government will remain large in the short run . . . while pursuing long-range strategies that will produce a more opportunity-friendly, less statist America.”

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The Forecast is Grim … So What Are We Going to Do About It?

by Bruce Bartlett

May 2nd, 2006

Bruce Bartlett, author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, agrees with Frum’s gloomy assessment of the prospects for small government and argues that conservatives and libertarians often compound the problem by failing to understand the magnitude and political intractability of the government’s non-discretionary entitlement programs. Slashing government is not “as easy as waving a magic wand.” Bartlett warns of the danger of resigning in frustration and calls for “a serious debate among libertarians and small government-types on a realistic political strategy for achieving their goals.”

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Republicans and the Flight of Opportunity

by David Frum

May 1st, 2006

In this month’s provocative lead essay, bestselling author and former Bush speechwriter David Frum considers whether the time has come and gone for the small government heirs of Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich. His answer: “the day in which we could look to the GOP to have an affirmative small-government vision of its own has I think definitively passed.” Government slashing types have never been more than an active minority in the GOP, Frum argues, and there is little chance that Republicans going forward will repudiate the spirit of the big-government Bush agenda. The small-government conservative’s best hope is that, like the defunct Whigs and Progressives, elements of their ideas and ideals will survive as a part of the political consensus.

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