Ross Douthat on Reform Conservatism

I have never much understood what it means, or had meant, to be a Reform Jew. But I have always been one. Reading Ross Douthat's argument about Reform Conservatism does not help me understand reform movements in general.  It is hard, then, to consider myself one.

He writes that its major premises constitute "... not just a tendency or an impulse, but at least the outline of a reasonably coherent reform agenda." Already, I wonder if being a reformist means stretching for certain specifics or attempting to reorient the project along its main principles.  Revisiting Oakeshott, I have always considered conservatism to be tendentious, rather than concretized into details. Thus conservative reform would not concern content, per se, but about vision.  And vision bogs down precisely when principles are exhumed into rules.

He presents the dilemma this way: "The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class ...  But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find ...  The existing welfare-state institutions we’ve inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, however, often make these tasks harder rather than easier: Their exploding costs crowd out every other form of spending, require middle class tax increases and threaten to drag on economic growth; their tangled web of subsidies and credits and tax breaks often benefit the already-affluent and create perverse incentives for the poor, and the distortions created by the way they pay for health care, in particular, contribute mightily to the rising cost of health insurance and thus the stagnation of middle class incomes. So we don’t face a choice between streamlining the welfare state and making it more supportive of work and family; we should be doing both at once."

Conservatives prefer to adhere to our collective inheritance, until exigent conditions deserve change.  From my experience of the past 30+ years, today's conditions make it seem more crucial to protect the infrastructure of these programs, explicitly for the reasons Douthat entertains: growing inequality in social opportunity and outcomes, stratification along economic and thus social lines and a stagnation of social mobility.  In fact, the failure of conservatism to be conservative begat the heart of the problem Douthat raises.  These inherited programs have been long predicted to 'explode' in costs because of the aging baby boomers. And yet past attempts to ameliorate this disproportionate expense - by uncapping the SS and FICA levies; creating a 'lock box' for the future - have been met with derision.  Adjustment now includes middle class tax increases only because past attempts to structure differently - progressivity in the tax code above $250/450k - have been met with tax absolutism.

Thinking of conservatism as a set of philosophical and policy specifics distorts it from an orientation of sustainability to a tribunal of activism.  Put another way, the more outcome-focused reform conservatives become, the less they are conservative.  We can see this in the first two of Douthat's recommendations for action:
"a. A tax reform that caps deductions and lowers rates, but also reduces the burden on working parents and the lower middle class, whether through an expanded child tax credit or some other means of reducing payroll tax liability."  A conservative would look at Social Security, Medicare and other social wide programs and ask how well they are integrated into the American social structure.  In the first two cases, hugely.  A conservative would then ask how we can continue to fund them in order for them to function as purposed. The answer is one that political conservatives abhor: raising revenue: tax increases on the segment of the population whose behavior will be fundamentally altered through the imposition. We are back to uncapping SS and FICA fees and increasing the progressivity of marginal tax rates. We can lower pay-outs, of course.  But that is not what the program was created to do.  It boggles the mind that anyone could assume that those who depend on Social Security and Medicare do so as malingers, nested in moral hazard through life-long dependency on the nanny state.  To do so means to have no idea what life is like living solely on state aid.

"b. A repeal or revision of Obamacare that aims to ease us toward a system of near-universal catastrophic health insurance, and includes some kind of flat tax credit or voucher explicitly designed for that purpose." Revision, yes. Repeal is merely a flag waived to signal allegiance to the current flavor of political conservative, not a policy implication of a conservative orientation. Rather than fight the current law, conservative awareness demands agressive action to make sure the reasons behind the law are functional and prudent. Does increasingly universal advancement toward single-payer coverage create poorer health outcomes? That is a question best answered not through ideological rhetoric but through efficiently empirical science and qualitative feedback of those in such a system. A conservative would prefer to find out before either abandoning the project or erecting a system through wild abandon.

The rest of his ideas unspool in equal measure: a kernel of an idea, shaped to appeal to existing political conservative proclivities.  His one pseudo-reformist solution ("An attack not only on explicit subsidies for powerful incumbents (farm subsidies, etc.) but also other protections and implicit guarantees, in arenas ranging from copyright law to the problem of “Too Big To Fail.”") would be better served by naming powerful incumbents who have the expressed power to block this idea: military contractors, energy conglomerates, insurance and bank multinationals.

Douthat makes other specious claims about what a reform conservatism would not do, particular regarding addressing climate change (When is conservationism not a conservative tendency? When it is opposed by radical, aggrandizing economic interests) and  tax increases (When is fiscal prudence not conservative? When it means raising the revenue needed to sustain the infrastructure upon which America demands).

Reform conservatism is needed.  Or rather, conservatism needs reform, if by conservatism, we mean those in Congress and in state government who are pushing for radical not conservative ideas.  If not, then conservatism does not need reform. It needs conservatives to be, actually, conservative.

"Free" Speech

The WSJ, again, Rivkin and Casey edition.  I could not get past their first sentence without feeling the urge to reply.

To start, they write: "The unfolding IRS scandal is a symptom, not the disease.For decades, campaign-finance reform zealots have sought to limit core political speech through spending limits and disclosure requirements. More recently, they have claimed that it is wrong and dangerous for tax-exempt entities to engage in political speech."

So, 'core' political speech is not, say, politicians speaking, but donor contributing money to campaigns? And I my tax dollars should subsidize the political work of a non-profit?

How are either of those beliefs conservative?