Former Reagan budget director, David Stockman, has been blogging up a storm these last few years. I have mixed feelings about his work. It’s packed with emotion and (let’s say) definite conclusions. Sometimes I’ll cluck my tongue at the run-on sentences, typos, excess of adverbs, wandering, exaggerations, inaccuracies and other signs of ranting that mar Stockman’s work. On the other hand, Stockman is a free-market, balanced-budget guy and often I admire him for saying what needs to be said.
In that spirit I note his recent piece, Good Riddance To Rep. Eric Cantor: Bagman For Wall Street And The War Party. The gist is that Cantor could give a nice free-market speech, but in practice, Cantor stood for venture socialism and Washington business-as-usual. Cantor was a key factor in the GOP supporting the 2008-9 TARP and GM bailouts, the Export-Import Bank (long cited as an example of corporate welfare), unexamined Defense spending, and so forth.
Stockman gives details and he ties Cantor to Paul Ryan, whose wonderful budget plans really mean little change to Washington in practice (Ryan’s plans are merely not as insane as the Democrats’ budget plans). And, however all that might be, Stockman as usual gets near to the heart of what ails us:
…financial repression, ZIRP, QE, wealth effects and the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen “put” under the stock market and risk assets generally are not just a major policy mistake; they are a full-throttle assault on the heart and soul of conservative economics.
You can not expect to have fiscal rectitude in a modern democracy, for example, when the central bank since the year 2000 has monetized nearly $4 trillion of public debt…Indeed, financial repression makes the carry cost of the public debt so painless—-that is, probably about $400 billion per year less than it would be under a regime of free market interest rates—that not one in a hundred politicians can see they virtue of fall[ing] on the fiscal sword in the here and now [o]n behalf of unborn generations of taxpayers who will carry the burden of today’s fiscal folly…
So Eric Cantor made a career of milking the Warfare State and pandering to Wall Street. This brought him nearly to the top of the Washington heap. But in the end, it did not fool his constituents. And most certainly it set back the conservative cause immeasurably.
So, then he has paid lip service to the Tea Party Movt in the past & deceived those who thought he was supportive. People who have agendas don’t have to implement them right away. But their timelines catch up to them. It’s a calculation. He made a bad decision not to forgo something in order to maintain a principled conservative facade.
I’m all for holding a politician to the standard of Public Servant in a conservative district whose challenger likely will not lose in a general election. That it is easy to do doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done with both joy and urgency. But I think Republicans make a mistake if they take short-termed uncompromising positions in political races where ideological opposites have electoral strengths. There is a difference between political and philosophical pragmatism, especially when it involves telling someone ‘No’ and so when I read a recitation of a politician’s flawed congressional votes, I’m hesitant to immediately reach for the pitchfork.
I will not miss Eric Cantor. He was essentially a lobbyist on the taxpayer’s dime and he’s a good reminder that a lack of principles (particularly economic principles) knows no party. But amid all this Tea Party glee, I cringe that a less obvious call in a more difficult race will ultimately hurt the rightward trajectory this country so badly needs.
Stockman is not exactly a reliable source to consult for fiscal conservatism. That said, he is far closer to be correct than being a poseur.
The old “Iron triangle” of Eisenhower’s warning was: the military/industrial complex and the permanent government bureaucracy. He was entirely correct, in my opinion.
Wall Street and big oil and big pharma and big big have all got their 800 pound gorilla presence. So, when you look for the money that is driving the policy, it almost something a blind man can do by smell alone.
I am amused that the Pro-regressives have started inferring that the TEA Party and the Wall Street sit-in crowd are ideological Siamese twins.
Hardly. The TEA Party wants the national government stripped of its whole market planning socialism which we are now calling “crony capitalism.”
Nearly every person and entity in the upper reaches of power has drawn a bead on stealing money from the tax payers.
Chelsea Clinton is a semi-sentient human with no skills. But she is a doorknob that leads to her conniving parents and their powers. Therefore, she is worth whatever price is considered reasonable access to the cloud cuckoo land of crony capitalism.
Cantor was a play in this realm. He was selling smoke and mirrors and demanding that he was a good as we fiscal conservatives are ever going to get. Now he belongs to the maze of charlatans and small satraps who inhabit the alleys of crony capitalism influence peddling.
It is going to take a Cruze or Paul to stand up to the status quo financial shenanigans.
Never listen to what they say, look at what they do. That’s why rinos are ok with political correctness since it is a war on noticing.
If anyone here thinks that the deeply entrenched problems that this country suffers from will be resolved in any other way is a liar or a fool…or delusional.
Being charitable, it’s called “whistling past the graveyard”.
And you ‘pragmatists’ have moved through comedy and tragedy, and are now residing in a precinct named FARCE.
If pragmatism doesn’t have any principles girding it, then it’s no better than the ‘how do I feel about it’ approach that our emotionally stunted friends on the left employ.
Unprincipled pragmatism is nothing more than being clever, and you should re-familiarize yourselves with the old saw about “the fine line that separates clever from stupid”.
I was always a fan of Stockman. He was a deficit hawk when Reagan was not due to the defense buildup at the end of the Cold War.
Jman,
Thanks for the editing help.
You certainly don’t need any of that from me.
I was extrapolating from your comment, so thank you for that.
Living by principles means that there are some things that aren’t up for discussion or compromise; others are, but even then there’s a point past which a principled person won’t discuss or negotiate, because after a certain point you’ve negotiated the principle out of existence.
Period.
We’ve had too many clever and pragmatic people on ‘our side’ (allegedly) who have given away the store in the last 100 years, only to have the store thoroughly trashed.
I want to take the store back and evict the SOBs who’ve run it into the ground.