Balkinization  

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Hayek and Katrina (or: How to Be a Compassionate Conservative, For Real)

Brian Tamanaha

Conservative beliefs are being tested by Katrina, perhaps as never before. The idea that--beyond serving to maintain social order--government is the problem rather than the solution has been a fundamental conservative tenet at least since the Reagan Administration. The nigh universal, bipartisan criticism of the government's inadequate (to put it politely) response to this humanitarian disaster, however, is evidence of a broad and deep social consensus within the United States that the job of the government is to do much more. It is responsible for the health and welfare of the people, and for insuring a decent way of life for the most disadvantaged among us.

Conservatives are reading this message loud and clear:

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a principal architect of the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, argues that this [Katrina aftermath] is nothing less than a transformational moment in American politics that demands a new conservative response. "I think the challenge to Republicans now is you have the House, you have the Senate, you have the White House, you had better so thoroughly reform this government that people believe you can deliver," he said.

It is hardly a theoretical debate. So far, Congress has approved more than $60 billion to deal with Katrina, and spending is expected to quickly surpass $100 billion. Conservatives are already making decisions on Capitol Hill and in the White House, very quickly, and under fire from the Democrats. For many, it is painful. Leading fiscal conservatives acknowledge that the federal government will - and should - spend generously on disaster relief, but argue that President Bush and Congress should find some of that money elsewhere in the federal budget.

....

Grover Norquist, a leading advocate of substantially reducing the federal government, argued that the disaster only underlined the need for more tax cuts to spur the economy. "Step one is you deal with the problem - rebuild New Orleans," he said, "and step two, you enact economic policies so you can afford to rebuild New Orleans."

But Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican and a staunch believer in limited federal government, worried that the post-Katrina reaction shows "people have a more expansive view about what the role of the federal government is or ought to be than is warranted by the Constitution or the principles of good governance."
...

William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine, said there clearly needed to be more "energy in the executive," as Alexander Hamilton would put it, in the first days after the hurricane. "Personally, I don't have a problem saying maybe conservatives should favor more spending in some areas of security, disaster relief," he said. "That's a pretty core function of government from a conservative standpoint. This isn't Great Society, New Age, government feel-good kind of stuff."

Wow. If this new conservative thinking is more than a reluctant, temporary concession to the public demand for more from government, we may be witnessing the formation of a set of common beliefs about the role of government that would allow liberals and conservatives to work together.

Conservatives who are searching for intellectual guidance would do well to take a look at the work of an old conservative standard--Friedrich Hayek. In his period classic, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek made statements about the role of government that sound much more generous than the niggardly ("don't tax me") conservative views of late:

The fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion, is capable of an infinite variety of applications. There is, in particular, all the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are. Probably nothing has done so much to harm the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some [conservatives] on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.

Conservatives as well as liberals might be surprised to learn of Hayek's explicit rejection of laissez faire. That reaction is evidence of how far in an extreme direction conservative views have moved post-Reagan.

There's more. Hayek recognizes that pricing mechanisms and competition can be inadequate, for example, "when the damage caused to others by certain uses of property cannot be effectively charged to owners of that property." He's talking about pollution and environmental degradation:

Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for agreed compensation.

In such situations, Hayek says, we must resort to "direct regulation by authority." Did you get that Bush's EPA?

There's more shocking stuff from Hayek, which relates not only to Katrina directly but to the general conditions of the poor:

[T]here can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody...

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance...the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong....

To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state's rendering assistance to the victims of such "acts of God" as earthquakes and floods. Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.

Hayek insisted that "there is no incompatibility in principle between the state's providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom."

Hayek said a bunch of other stuff liberals would object to, of course, but what's important about the above is that it identifies a minimum baseline of shared expectations from government that conservatives and liberals can agree upon as a starting point. Today the conservative dominated government is not meeting this minimum. Never mind disaster relief, what about the millions and millions of Americans without health insurance?

The irony of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" slogan is that its mere formulation is a reminder of how cold conservatism has become. Former conservatives, before conservatism was captured by ideological extremists, built compassion into their conservative ideas, so adding the word would have seemed redundant to them. Hayek constantly referred to the primacy of the general welfare, which his conservative doctrines were designed to serve.

In Hayek--one of the most important conservatives of the 20th Century--conservatives might find a guide for the new (old) conservative view of government.

Comments:

Hayek was certainly a complex thinker, and a bit of an optimist. Compassion is fine, but you can't make a person feel compassion, you can only compel them to act as if they did. The Great Society must happen spontaneously if at all. I'm not so optimistic.
 

If "conservative beliefs are being tested," it's only according to progressive rules of the game, wherein calls for faster government response to things like Katrina transmogrify into pleas for federal largesse.

Many conservatives feel vindicated by Katrina. We see that FEMA imploded (predictably, perhaps), and that local and state first responders could have done a better job with better leadership. For good or for ill, what Ray Nagin did and did not do is being measured against what Rudy Giuliani did and did not do. That Nagin suffers by comparison speaks to competence, not to the idea that smaller government is better government.

The National Guard, the active-duty military, and the Coast Guard performed logistical miracles of the kind conservatves expect from American armed forces.

When municiplal employees in New Orleans were lamenting the fact that their poorly-maintained satellite phones were unworkable, the owner of a local ambulance company mobilized his employees to provide the only triage available city-wide in the first hours of the disaster. That, too, affirms conservative faith in private enterprise.
 

"We see that FEMA imploded"

Ridiculous. Reminds me of the line, "Republicans are always saying government doesn't work, and then they get into power and prove it." "Conservative" governments tend to choose not to govern which unsurprisingly leads to poor government. As far as Katrina is concerned at the Federal level this is clearly a case of negligence. The resources were there to handle it, individuals in power chose not to handle it.

FEMA has worked well enough before under different leadership, and with different funding priority. Plenty is wrong with FEMA past and present, but unfortunately for conservatives there are plenty of examples of FEMA and many other state agencies and programs working well enough.

Comparing Nagin to Giuliani is also prima facie absurd. The two events and cities aren't remotely comparable. If Nagin suffers by comparison it speaks mostly to the agenda of those doing the comparing.

As to your last point: Did private individuals mobilize to save victims of the disaster? Of course they did. Could more people have been saved if competent individuals had mobilized gov't resources properly? Of course.

Are you really willing to believe that the baseline amount of people saved in the libertarian free-for-all during the aftermath is the maximum or even approaching the maximum possible amount of people saved had order been kept and plans been enacted? Only a hidebound ideologue could buy that.
 

The middle quote covers the problem of externalities, but much of the debate is how to avoid shifting the costs to the commons. The EPA usually ends up being incompetent in passing silly rules or like the forest service that stopped any big fire until the brush built up and all we had were uncontrollable fires.

Most insurance programs are or will become like social security - if the premiums are sufficient, it will be a raidable cookie jar, if they aren't then we will need more taxes.

If we want mandatory auto insurance, it should be a tax - many end up going bare when they can't afford it and the state doesn't help with it.

But there are still moral hazards - If no one would insure the mortgages for buildings below sea level, they wouldn't be built and NOLA wouldn't have been as much of a problem.

If treatement for lung cancer and emphysema became "free", there might be more smokers.

And private insurance and charities would be crowded out. If FEMA wasn't there, and the Red Cross and the thousands of individuals with cases of water in their trunks were allowed in, I think things would have worked out better.

Does the state (that which uses violence) have a role in "acts of God"? A minimal one at best. Private charities managed to do good jobs back when we had a constitution (when it was not a living document and a dead letter at the same time).

To get back to social security - does anyone think in 20 years it will still be there? The promises were that we could all retire. Then the benefits were taxed. Then they were taxed at over 80%. It will eventually be means-tested and medical care will end up being "third world" quality for those who cannot afford it.

Overpromise. Deliver while Mr. Ponzi lets you. Blame someone else when it collapses.

Overpromise so government becomes the first resort and for the most trivial problems instead of major disasters - but eventually it gets bankrupt so it can't handle major disasters (assuming you could get competent managers instead of political cronies - and whomever led FEMA under Clinton would likely have caused the same problems).

You look at the secularization and the culture of death and forget that there were other institutions beside the state which handled everything in the past.

We live in a society where we have no community in the church, no community in local organizaitons (kiwanas, FOE, Lions club), and no community elsewhere, and the family has dissolved, so the only thing left is the unfeeling but resourceful state to take care of anyting and we think such a situation normal. It is highly abnormal. But when you've thrown down the cathedral, you are left with the cube.

If I thought Hayek would have endorsed Social Security as an insurance policy, I would lose a lot of respect for him. Or if he would have approved of destroying all the private and community (non state) charitable institutions that would take care of things to give the state a defacto monopoly on welfare (welfare is redistribution without the virtue of charity).
 

Interesting that you would refer to Hayek as a "conservative standard". Hayek was a classical liberal, and thus as opposed to "conservatism" (defined as favoring the status quo as he would have been to the leftism that we term "liberalism" today.

IMHO, champions of political/economic liberalism like Friedman and Hayek should be more properly classed as "conservative libertarians" or perhaps even straightforward libertarians than simply "conservative".
 

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