On the Soapbox

I have to admit, I was probably a bit too smug and deriving a bit too much enjoyment from poking at the Republican Party when I was chatting with Carl on Sunday. But it did make me reflect a bit on my own political journey.

My chat with Carl

The focus of my gratuitous soapboxing was the idea that the Republican Party of today is not the Republican Party of, say, Lincoln or, less gloriously, Herbert Hoover. The old Republican Party was more closely aligned to the libertarians of today: they believed in limited government. But times change, and with the social upheaval of the 60's and 70's, Republicans found a power base in the form of social conservatives angry at the social changes embodied in the Warren Court, the Civil Rights Act, and Roe vs. Wade. This relationship between the "limited government" wing of the party and the "traditional values" wing has a long history, but with Reagan, this relationship turned into a marriage (incidentally, there are old Republicans like Gerald Ford who advocate for abortions). This admittedly over-simplified view of the party would be incomplete without the foreign policy hawks who have been resurgent ever since 9/11. Known as the neo-conservatives, they form the third partner in this group of strange bedfellows. But I am sure that many are already familiar with this history, so why am I rehashing this? These alliances have, I think, caused the Republican party to do a complete 180. Their principles of limited government retreated from the personal arena in the Reagan area when the religious right jumped on board, and in recent years, they are losing their fiscal conservativeness. With an aggressive foreign policy, the new projections of the federal deficit place it above $400 billion. Does it not seem odd that such a budget would come from a party that a just a decade ago was clamoring for the Balanced Budget Amendment? And what about the 10-fold increase (yes, a whole order of magnitude!) in the number of earmarks (i.e., pork barrel spending), from 1,439 in 1995 after the Republican take-over of Congress to 13,997 in 2005? Indeed, a growing number of Republicans are not of the traditional libertarian sort and are instead big-government conservatives who spend money like Democrats but without the same sort of respect for individual freedoms. Of course, the Republicans still give free markets lip service--they have no desire the lose the votes of the old Republicans, but that is all that it is: lip service. Instead of embarking on broad reforms to help the free market, they instead focus mostly on helping businesses in certain sectors, hoping that the voters will mistake "corporationism" for free-market libertarianism (I think that the Republican version of "free markets" over the years have given true free markets a terrible black eye, but that is a topic for another day). This is also why I feel that, as a moderate libertarian, the Democrats are much more closely aligned to what I believe because, if there is going to be a big government no matter what, I would rather have one that does not restrict civil liberties and one that is at least honest about its view of big government.

Of course, political realignments of this massive scale are not new. FDR created the most bizarre of political marriages when he forced together intellectual progressives and Southern whites. In time, the Southern whites bolted from their long-time party and joined the Republicans, converting the Democrats from the party of the South to the party that over 90% of blacks vote for. I always find it amusing that Republicans like to refer to themselves as the party of Lincoln even though they have broad support from southern Whites and virtually no support from blacks. Who they were a century ago is irrelevant, especially if they are the polar opposite today. Anyway, on the topic of political divorces, I wonder how long it will take for the old Republicans to realize that their party has been hijacked and that the time has come to abandon ship and join another party like what the white Southerners did.

My own political journey

Having spent the first seven years of my life in China, I came to the United States thoroughly brainwashed. This was just a few months after Tian'an'men, and I remember strongly believing how great the Communist government was for China's well-being and how terrible it was that the protestors were disturbing law and order. Yes, political indoctrination starts at a young age in China. ;) Incidentally, because of the Republican Party's favorable stance on immigration at the time and because of their anti-Communist policy (which translated towards sympathy towards those who have left China) at the time, my parents told me that they supported Bush, and so I did as well. So I started out as a statist and as a Republican.

In hindsight, I am surprised at how little political education I received before high school. Of course, there were lessons about American history, our founding fathers, patriotism, etc., but glorified pictures of Washington do very little towards touching on the core political values of this country. Those who knew me well in high school will remember that I was one of the few masochists who had very fond memories of Jane McCue's mercilessly grueling and superbly-taught classes. European History AP (or as I like to call it, History of the Evolution of Western Civilization) opened my political eyes, and I grew enamored with the writings of political philosophers such as Locke. Because I took the summer version with other do-gooders, American Government AP with McCue was filled with excellent students who made for lively debates and discussions. I came away from those the two McCue classes with a profound appreciation for the principles of civil libertarianism, and as the unfortunate souls who had to tolerate my overbearing soapboxing in my junior and senior years of high school could easily attest, I was solidly a bleeding-heart liberal and staunch Democrat (I still believed in the principles of large-scale government intervention in the economy). Further readings about the topic of civil liberties over the years only solidified and polished my stance on civil libertarianism. On that note, I was still very conservative in respect to my personal behavior (having been raised with traditional values), but in respect to politics and policy, I was a staunch civil libertarian, which led to a high school classmate to describe me at one point as "the most conservative liberal" she had ever met.

It was not until I started to study economics for USAD during my senior year of high school that I gained appreciation for the power of free markets. Many people learning economics are given at some point some sort of example that illustrates the concept of the winners and losers. For me, it was the parable of the Xerox machines, a fictitious tale of the importation of newly-invented Xerox machines into a society with no such technology and where a third of the population earned a living as scribes. Introducing such time- and labor-saving technology would certainly boost the productiveness and well-being of this society in the long run, but in the short run, it would entail a very angry scribe union and the loss of jobs for many if these devices were imported. Of course, the overall net economic benefit to the society would be positive and a protectionist scheme to block the imports would lead to long-term stagnation, but these benefits would be unevenly distributed as many people lose jobs. However, if government could step in and channel some of the benefits towards temporary welfare and job retraining, the "winners" will still reap a benefit (albeit diminished), the "losers" would not be so badly off, and the devices are imported, avoiding the stagnation of protectionism. It is interesting that, after all these years and numerous economics courses, this little example that I read as a part of my initial introduction to economics is still somewhat iconic of my beliefs. I believe that free markets are, on the whole, wonderful, but I also believe that it would be naïve to think of them as being perfect. I have come to believe that limited and very carefully-targeted government intervention is inevitably necessary to help free markets work because to be dogmatically opposed to any government role would be to deny the true nature of free markets (as an economics professor once quipped, "the first year is spent teaching textbook economics, and every year after that is spent teaching why textbook economics are not quite right"... it is a lot like Newtonian physics vs. relativity and quantum, actually). And so here I am, a moderate libertarian who believes in the principles of civil libertarianism and free markets. Quite a change for someone who used to be the polar opposite, no?

PS: Actually, shortly after being converted to free market economics, I was a libertarian who did not know what a libertarian was; I was still living in the world of right vs. left, and it was not until one of my high school friends pointed it out that I realized that the best label for me libertarian.

PPS: While most people receive their belief indoctrinations in college, I had already received mine before college. Studying economics in college helped solidify and refine my belief in the underlying wonder of free markets, and the extreme liberal campus activism turned me away from my old liberal stance a bit, but for the most part, college had surprisingly very little affect on me politically.