Reform Conservative Manifesto TL;DR
I wrote a fairly long ‘Reform Conservative Manifesto’ post on Forbes this morning.
For those interested in skipping to the good parts, here are the key points.
1) The key problem facing America is family breakdown, which causes inequality of opportunity, economic insecurity and social dysfunction, and drives higher demand for government as private safety nets fail and human capital formation is inadequate. There are a number of policies that can address this, particularly family-friendly tax reform.
The Republican Party needs to take up this mantle of affordable family formation. If it does, it would get political victory (as starting a family makes you much more likely to vote GOP), a more vibrant America, and the political capital to truly shrink government for good.
If it doesn’t, ever-increasing social dysfunction and stratification will lead Americans to increasingly embrace big government and lead America on the path to France.
I describe the alternative scenarios this way:
Address family formation seriously -> win elections -> make it easier to start families and have kids -> more families and more kids -> a better economy, a healthier society, less demand for big government, more GOP voters -> win more elections -> shrink government, grow the economy and civil society -> win more elections -> rinse, lather, repeat.
The alternative scenario would go something like this: Don’t address middle income voters’ day-to-day concerns seriously, don’t make family formation more affordable -> concede the field to Democrats -> increase economic and social insecurity -> increase demand for government -> lose elections -> government grows bigger -> social pathologies get worse -> keep conceding the field -> increase demand for government -> etc.
2) The “Grand New Party School” of GOP Reform and the “Libertarian Populist School” have a tremendous amount in common, much more than separates them. The problem is that an austerity-plus-flat tax-plus-hard money agenda is a sure-fire political loser and terrible policy. GNPers and LPs should merge. GNPers should adopt the LP small-vs-big framing, and attendant impulses and reforms (anti-corporatism, prison reform, civil liberties) and LPs should adopt family-friendly reform and Milton Friedman-style economic policies.
Comment-submission weirdness on the Forbes site, but I’ll make my point here: How can the massive transfer represented by the child credit be part of a “conservative” plan? I may (and do) feel a personal obligation to America’s children, but I can’t ethically expand that to a Government-mandated seizure of everyone else’s money to support this transfer. Likewise your enthusiasm for deductions for charitible giving. Those deductions amount to pitting one citizen’s pocket-picking acumen against another’s. Best to leave those dollars with their earners, allowing them more to donate as they choose. A “tax break” for a special class is just a prettified description of a tax increase for everyone else. It leaves us on the horns of an ethical dilemma: do I forego my deduction (and avoid robbing my neighbors, but thereby making my less-scrupulous political opposite’s money more valuable) or do I take the deduction and rob all my neighbors regardless of their agendas?
— Jay · Jun 6, 04:00 PM · #
Or events beyond anyone’s control will happen that make a Republican victory in 2016 fairly easy, even if they stay in their current meanie arch-reactionary form
boring I know
— plebe · Jun 12, 03:26 AM · #