{"id":1313448,"date":"2019-08-11T23:56:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T05:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/will-column-national-conservatism-is-elizabeth-warren-conservatism\/"},"modified":"2019-08-11T23:56:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T05:56:00","slug":"will-column-national-conservatism-is-elizabeth-warren-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/will-column-national-conservatism-is-elizabeth-warren-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Will column: \u2018National conservatism\u2019 is \u2018Elizabeth Warren conservatism\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WASHINGTON \u2014 Regimes, however intellectually disreputable, rarely are unable to attract intellectuals eager to rationalize the regimes\u2019 behavior. America\u2019s current administration has \u201cnational conservatives.\u201d They advocate unprecedented expansion of government in order to purge America of excessive respect for market forces, and to affirm robust confidence in government as a social engineer allocating wealth and opportunity. They call themselves conservatives, perhaps because they loathe progressives, although they seem not to remember why.<\/p>\n

The Manhattan Institute\u2019s Oren Cass advocates \u201cindustrial policy\u201d \u2014 what other socialists call \u201ceconomic planning\u201d \u2014 because \u201cmarket economies do not automatically allocate resources well across sectors.\u201d So government, he says, must create the proper \u201ccomposition\u201d of the economy by rescuing \u201cvital sectors\u201d from \u201cunderinvestment.\u201d By allocating resources \u201cwell,\u201d \u2014 Cass does not mean efficiently \u2014 to their most economically productive uses. He especially means subsidizing manufacturing, which he says is the \u201cprimary\u201d form of production because innovation and manufacturing production are not easily \u201cdisaggregated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manufacturing jobs, Cass\u2019 preoccupation, are, however, only 8% of U.S. employment. Furthermore, he admits that as government, i.e., politics, permeates the economy on manufacturing\u2019s behalf, \u201cregulatory capture,\u201d other forms of corruption and \u201cmarket distortions will emerge.\u201d Emerge? Using government to create market distortions is national conservatism\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

The national conservatives\u2019 pinup du jour is Fox News\u2019 Tucker Carlson, who, like the president he reveres, is a talented entertainer. Carlson says that what Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., calls \u201ceconomic patriotism\u201d sounds like \u201cDonald Trump at his best.\u201d Carlson approves how Warren excoriates U.S. companies\u2019 excessive \u201cloyalty\u201d to shareholders. She wants the government to \u201cact aggressively\u201d and \u201cintervene in markets\u201d in order to stop \u201cabandoning loyal American workers and hollowing out American cities.\u201d Carlson darkly warns that this \u201cpure old-fashioned economics\u201d offends zealots \u201ccontrolled by the banks.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds: \u201cThe main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose does not come from government anymore, but it comes from the private sector.\u201d Well. If living \u201cas you choose\u201d means living free from the friction of circumstances, the \u201cthreat\u201d is large indeed. It is reality \u2014 the fact that individuals are situated in times and places not altogether of their choosing or making. National conservatives promise government can rectify this wrong.<\/p>\n

Their agenda is much more ambitious than President Nixon\u2019s 1971 imposition of wage and price controls, which were temporary fiascos. Their agenda is even more ambitious than the New Deal\u2019s cartelization of industries, which had the temporary (and unachieved) purpose of curing unemployment. What national conservatives propose is government fine-tuning the economy\u2019s composition and making sure resources are \u201cwell\u201d distributed, as the government (i.e., the political class) decides, forever.<\/p>\n

What socialists are so fond of saying, national conservatives are now saying: This time will be different. It never is, because government\u2019s economic planning always involves the fatal conceit that government can aggregate, and act on, information more intelligently and nimbly than markets can.<\/p>\n

National conservatives preen as defenders of the dignity of the rural and small-town \u2014 mostly white and non-college educated \u2014 working class. However, these defenders nullify the members\u2019 dignity by discounting their agency. National conservatives regard the objects of their compassion as inert victims, who are as passive as brown paper parcels, awaiting government rescue from circumstances. In contrast, there was dignity in the Joad family (of John Steinbeck\u2019s \u201cThe Grapes of Wrath\u201d), who, when the Depression and Dust Bowl battered Oklahoma, went west seeking work.<\/p>\n

Right-wing anti-capitalism has a long pedigree as a largely aristocratic regret, symbolized by railroads \u2014 the noise, the soot, the lower orders not staying where they belong \u2014 that despoiled the Edenic tranquility of Europe\u2019s landed aristocracy. The aristocrats were not wrong in seeing their supremacy going up in the smoke from industrialism\u2019s smokestacks: Market forces powered by mass preferences do not defer to inherited status.<\/p>\n

Although the national conservatives\u2019 anti-capitalism purports to be populist, it would further empower the administrative state\u2019s faux aristocracy of administrators who would decide which communities and economic sectors should receive \u201cwell\u201d-allocated resources. Furthermore, national conservatism is paternalistic populism. This might seem oxymoronic, but so did \u201cElizabeth Warren conservatives\u201d until national conservatives emerged as such. The paternalists say to today\u2019s Joads: Stay put. We know what is best for you and will give it to you through government.<\/p>\n

As national conservatives apply intellectual patinas to the president\u2019s mutable preferences, they continue their molten denunciations of progressives \u2014 hysteria about a \u201cFlight 93 election\u201d (the Republic\u2019s last chance!) and similar nonsense. Heat, however, neither disguises nor dignifies their narcissism of small differences.<\/p>\n

George Will\u2019s email address is georgewill@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Regimes, however intellectually disreputable, rarely are unable to attract intellectuals eager to rationalize the regimes\u2019 behavior. America\u2019s current administration has \u201cnational conservatives.\u201d They advocate unprecedented expansion of government in order to purge America of excessive respect for market forces, and to affirm robust confidence in government as a social engineer allocating wealth and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1313448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-26 03:08:54","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1313448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1313448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1313448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1313448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}