The real culture war

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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 | blogging

About a year ago Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute (and whom I should disclose is a personal friend of mine) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that at the time failed to convince me: that the true culture war in the US was on attitudes towards capitalism. Some excerpts:

… the tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an “ethical populism.” The protesters are homeowners who didn’t walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don’t want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don’t need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right — and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong. …

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It’s also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don’t have without regard for our children’s future.

Enterprise defenders also have to define “fairness″ as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. …

I had always thought that being against “forced redistribution” – i.e. taxes based upon ability-to-pay government-financed public goods and a social safety-net – was a far fringe position, not a serious divide in the population. Even the most free-market-oriented economists, like Milton Friedman, or Hayek, supported some sort of redistribution through the state.

And I thought it a bit of a stretch to claim that with every publicly-financed program freedom is somehow eroded. Do seniors really want private health insurance rather than Medicare, so they can be more free? Have you met one who has said this? I doubt it.

But watching the “tea party” rallies and the things people say there, and I’ve seen enough of these videos and read enough of their blogs, makes me realize that maybe Arthur was right – there is a much larger group of people holding these views than I could have believed.

Here’s a clip from the Columbus Dispatch. Consider the guy in the white shirt between 0:50 and 1:22 for example. Maybe he represents the views of a lot of people, and I’ve just been naive about the whole thing.

UPDATE: Jonathan Chait has more:

It’s a jarring video. But it also captures the heart of what animates the staunchest opposition to health care reform — a principled opposition to the idea the fortunate should be forced to subsidize the unfortunate. A person who has Parkinson′s, unless he is very affluent, is not going to be able to afford the cost of his own medical care. He is going to need to be subsidized by healthier or wealthier people — either by being lumped in with them in an employer-based insurance pool, or getting government-provided insurance like Medicaid, or government subsidies, or the enactment of regulations that force insurers to offer him insurance at a regular price (meaning healthy people would pay higher rates.) Any way you slice it, somebody else is going to have to pay for his health care. But that’s the kind of redistribution the right increasingly cannot stomach.