By Tim Dunkin
Some of you may remember James Carville’s
rather blunt expression of what he understood to be the priory issues in the
1992 election when he said, “The economy, stupid!” This was in response
to his view that then-President George H.W. Bush was talking about foreign
policy issues more than economic ones, and was intended to serve as a bit of
back-handed campaign advice for Bush’s opponent, Bill Clinton. Since
then, the expression, in various permutations, has become a trope in American
political discourse, intended to convey the impression that its target just
doesn’t get it, they just haven’t figured out what’s really important in an
election, and is chasing rabbit trails by pursuing unimportant topics.
So it is in the present electoral
season. Once again, we find ourselves in the midst of a deep recession
(even worse than that of 1991), this one created, prolonged, and sustained by
the horrid fiscal policies of both major parties, but especially the
President’s party when it controlled both houses of Congress. And once
again, the refrain is that this election is, and must be, all about
the economy. Anything else is a distraction. Serious candidates
won’t let themselves be sidetracked by unimportant matters.
And so continues the great political shell
game whereby both parties, when in office, will pursue policies that will
maintain the gradual slowdown of the American economy by burdening it with
increasing taxes, regulations, fees, mandates, more social spending, and other
hoops that economic producers will have to jump through to continue to be able
to do business. Meanwhile, when the inevitable economic slowdowns catch
up with this, as they invariably will, the party currently out of power can use
the distress and anger of the electorate to toss out the other. Hence, a
couple of terms with a Republican in office will be followed by a couple with a
Democrat, and then a couple more with a Republican, and then a couple more with
a Democrat, and on and on. They both get their turn in due time, because
they’re both playing the game and setting the rules.
All because self-appointed “informed,
intelligent” commenters convince themselves and others that the “it’s the
economy, stupid” conventional wisdom is foundational to prosperity and growth.
But it’s not.
Instead, the refrain should be
“It’s about liberty, stupid!”
There are two main reasons for this.
First, there is the simple fact that having a good economy really doesn’t mean
much when you have no individual liberty to go with it. It strikes me as
being rather pointless to be able to afford property, yet not be able to enjoy
or use it without having to pay thousands in fees and fines, jump through reams
of regulatory hoops before I can develop it, while having to constantly worry
that it can be taken from me or otherwise rendered useless at the drop of a hat
if the EPA decides to declare it a wetland or a local government decides it can
make more tax revenue from taking it from me and giving it to the city
commissioner’s brother-in-law to turn it into a strip mall.
Each of us ought to ask ourselves whether
having a good-paying job in a robust economy would matter if we could no longer
say what we want, worship how we want, travel where we want, own what we want,
live how we want, and be free from having government agents bust down our door
for whatever reason they see fit. Is being able to afford to buy all
kinds of baubles and trinkets to decorate our homes or entertain ourselves really
more important than being able to freely exercise our fundamental natural
liberties as free citizens?
And make no mistake – this is a question
that each of us is being asked, whether we realize it or not. We cannot
say we are a free people – not when we have to allow the government to take
nudie pictures of us before we can get on an airplane; not when the government
has allotted to itself the power to decide who gets what medical treatment or
even if they get that treatment; not when the government passes a law at the
behest of big agro companies like Monsanto that can be used to criminalize
growing a garden on your own property, and selling or even giving the food to
your neighbors; not when the government arrogates to itself the right to tell
us what kind of light bulbs we use in our own homes. Is
all of this really less important than whether one candidate or the other is
going to shave a few percentage points off of the marginal tax rates?
Of course, this leads to the second point,
which is that the conundrum given above won’t pertain for very long, for the
simple reason that without individual liberty, we will lose all economic
liberty as well, as Milton Friedman so presciently observed decades ago.
You cannot have the latter without the former. When the government is in
a position to control your daily life to the extent that the U.S.
When you lose economic liberty, you lose
economic prosperity at the functional individual level. The examples of
this are legion the world over and throughout history. Why do you think
the Soviet Union , despite its much-touted
“wonder growth” after WWII, nevertheless provided no prosperity to the large
masses of its people, and eventually collapsed under its own
inefficiencies? Look at China
Looking to history, we see the Roman Empire
– which in its heyday actually had a much more vibrant and broad-based
commercial economy than many people think – sinking into economic doldrums at
almost the same time as its government became more and more autocratic and
personal liberty became non-existent, even to the point where many professions
became hereditary – not by choice, but because the Roman government enforced a
sort of professional caste system onto its people so as to ensure that the
government’s needs for money, arms, and other state necessities were met.
It’s little wonder that many Romans – citizens, mind you, of the wealthiest and
most powerful state ever relative to its surroundings and time period – simply
gave up and went over to the barbarians who were soon to extirpate the western
half of that Empire.
Hence, all of this talk about the vital importance
of economic issues is somewhat misplaced. If we’re really concerned about
the economy, then we should be concerned about liberty, first and
foremost. We have to break out of the conceptual box that the governing
elites from both parties have set around us, and start realizing that until we
regain our liberty, our economy is, of necessity, going to keep getting worse,
regardless of who is in office. It only makes sense. When you
punish the successful, when you oppress the producers and the workers, you
destroy their incentive, and even drive many of them away. You cannot
legislate a nation into prosperity, because the legislation itself often works
to destroy the drive of those being legislated upon. Until we’re free in
our personal and social lives, we won’t really see true economic prosperity
again. Instead, we’ll end up like Europe
– broke, over-regulated, unfree, and happy when the unemployment rate drops
back to 10%. Do we really want that? If not, then let’s get serious
about addressing the root issue – liberty.
