Conservative Hypocrisy

The recently hyped Mount Vernon statement continues the farcical attempt by movement conservatism to embrace ‘small government’ and ‘individual liberty’. Jim DeMint (R-SC) wants every Republican to sign on to it. I suggest that what’s needed is a clean sweep out of Washington for any one that does.

Here’s a the most seemingly innocuous but intensely hypocritical portion of the manifesto. As with everything that comes out of the Heritage Foundation or any of its cronies, it’s always about the inference between the lines and not the words themselves. That’s where the true meaning of the manifesto lie.

“A constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.

• It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.
• It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.
• It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.
• It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.
• It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.”

First, small government in the view of movement conservatism never includes shrinking the budget for military adventurism. This is neatly tucked away between the lines of point four which includes “advancing freedom” and “opposing tyranny”. For example, they would never defund or remove support from our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan or abandon all those unnecessary bases in places like Germany and South Korea left over from previous occupations. They’ve never met a weapons system in which they didn’t want full government investment. They do not recognize their responsibility for that huge part of the federal deficit that was their making during the Reagan defense build-up or the inception of the Dubya Bush wars in the Middle East. They love their military industrial complex and while the word ‘prudently’ is carefully inserted into the ‘we love a good war’ statement, these folks have never found a skirmish from which they cannot profiteer. They’d create an enemy of heaven and command unearthly legends against a god if there wer a buck to make and a flag to wave.

The statement about “the central place of individual liberty” is the most disturbingly hypocritical. You’ll know this is especially true when you look at the list of signers. These are folks who never consider removing those intrusive laws that place the government’s nose between a woman’s legs, inside the minds of those who reject blind faith over reason, or into the lives of those whose genetics didn’t place them firmly into the realm of the conservative’s acceptable definitions of “family, neighborhood, community, or faith” despite the fact that nothing any alternative actually does threatens the lifestyles of the narrowly defined. They just need a ‘them’ so they can further their power agenda and line their pockets. They want a monopoly on the definition of everything and laws to prevent anything else. They decry expanded government only when it threatens to shake their narrow world view and their hold on the rest of us and our own adult behaviors.

As an economist, I know that their notion of “free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions” simply means, again, they can pick and choose which part of capitalism that best profits them and deftly ignore the rest. They would never remove preferential tax treatment from any business even though that’s anathema to a free market system. Indeed, they don’t even seem to realize that any third party payer–be it Medicare or United Health Care–is basically an offshoot of the failure of the market to provide adequate information and service to a buyer. If they really want free enterprise, let’s start getting rid of drug laws, laws against prostitution, all the blue laws on alcohol sales, and see what they say then. For that matter, why have any control on the market for enriched uranium? Certainly, entrepreneurship is a great thing for all markets.

Again, look at the signers. These are the very folks that want monopolies over all the decisions of our lives. Not one of them wants to the free market of ideas, science, economics, or rational thought.

According to the Web site, some of the establishment conservatives who have signed the document are Wendy Wright, the president of Concerned Women for America; Edwin Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center; and Alfred Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator.

These people have never been and will never be the true defenders of liberty and justice for all. They only like the rule of law when it benefits them. Their manifesto is the basis for which they tell the rest of us to go to hell. I have but one word for their type of conservatism: intrusive.