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

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."
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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.