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 The New York Times has a story today about a forthcoming effort by the Obama Administration to more tightly regulate executive pay at big finance companies and perhaps beyond. Over at National Review, Andy McCarthy responds with this little gem:
Welcome to the U.S.S.A.
What an imbecilic and morally repugnant, morally unserious thing to say.
Listen, we’ve got a huge problem in the country: It’s the “too big to fail” problem. Huge companies — in finance and out — stand on the precipice of failure. And they’re so big, so intertwined with the functioning of our broader economy, that the actual failure of those companies could well mean the failure of the American economy as a going concern. This is beyond the “creative destruction” within capitalism that causes some pain in our march to ever greater financial rewards; this about the possible collapse of the entire system. So we’ve been left with two ugly and unpalatable choices: A) the government sweeps in and uses taxpayer dollars (present and future) to keep the system from collapse or B) we let the companies fail and hope the devastation isn’t as bad as it appears it could be. Either way, the citizens of this country through no fault of their own bear the burden of the mistakes made by America’s titans of business.
This is a problem. Conservatives like to critique “big government” as a threat to American prosperity, and to some extent they’ve been correct that excessive regulation and taxation can be a drag on private enterprise. But with a few exceptions — I’m thinking here of Rod Dreher, a “crunchy conservative” blogger and columnist in Dallas — few conservatives seem to acknowledge or recognize that non-government private enterprises can also grow so big and pervasive that they can also threaten the prosperity (and, you could argue, the freedom) of Americans.
The Obama Administration, whatever you think about the solution they’re about to put forward, at least seems to recognize this. (And I’m not endorsing the administration’s moves at this point.) But many conservatives — it appears to me — put their hands over their ears and shout “Free markets! Free markets!” Or worse yet, like Andrew McCarthy they compare the Obama Administration’s policies to a political system that killed millions of its own citizens. This is particularly infuriating coming from a man (McCarthy) and movement that spent the post-9/11 years of the Bush Administration defending torture, warrantless wiretapping and a view of executive power that seemingly shrugged off Constitutional checks and balances. Apparently, the only rights that some mainstream conservatives hold inviolate are the ones that concern the pursuit, acquisition and spending of money.
Many conservatives have spent the post-9/11 years responding to debates about security versus civil rights with an old truism: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Fine. But neither is free-market capitalism. (President Bush, for all his faults, at least seemed to recognize this with his advocacy of the original (and, yes, flawed) bailout.) Conservatives could serve the country and their movement well if they could offer a conservative, market-based method of addressing the “too big to fail” crisis instead of making slanderous assertions and empty paeans to lasseiz-faire economics. They could try to help fix the problem.
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