Senator Tom Coburn, a longtime ally of conservative causes from life to taxes, is taking heat from Grover Norquist.
His sin? Advocating for some form of tax increase to fix the federal budget mess. From Senator Coburn:
“Which pledge is most important… the pledge to uphold your oath to the Constitution of the United States or a pledge from a special interest group who claims to speak for all American conservatives when, in fact, they really don’t?. . . . The fact is we have enormous urgent problems in front of us that have to be addressed and have to be addressed in a way that will get 60 votes in the Senate. . . and something that the president will sign.”
”Where’s the compromise that will save our country?. . . This isn’t about politics that is normal.”
Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist is lighting up Coburn like a Christmas tree for having violated the “taxpayer protection pledge” in trying to fix the macro-level economic pressures facing the federal government.
Spending is part of that equation, most especially at the federal level. Of course, it gets tricky when you talk about what to cut.
Who wants to cut entitlements?! Me too… until it’s your grandma who now has to come up with Medicare payments.
How’s about Social Security?! Me too, especially since my generation will never see it and I can make more money in a 401k than the Ponzi scheme that is paying for, oh, about 76 million Baby Boomers who are expecting you and I to work harder to get their due.
How’s about all those government pensions?! Me too… until you hear those Tea Party activists sitting on their pensions scream about what they “rightfully earned” and what you’re rightfully paying into a system that — again — won’t be there when you go to retire.
How’s about defense spending?! I’m sure that will make al-Qaeda and Ghadaffi happy…
How’s about cutting Labor, Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Education?! Me too… but are you ready for the state tax increases that will follow in turn?
How’s about reforming education?! Me too… but that starts in Washington, then Richmond. Are your teachers unionized? Oops… what your next step?
How’s about stripping out welfare?! Me too… until all those families on food stamps and TANF cry out that food is a basic human right. In this economy, you’re going to be surprised at which one of your neighbors is truly struggling to get by…
The problem is that the economic conditions are truly macro level problems. Coburn like a lot of other conservatives is trying to hammer out a compromise that will preserve the best of America and allow our economy a chance to grow out of the economic H-bomb that the Keynesian economy has dropped on middle-class America.
- “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” — Lord John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919
Now there are some from the objectivist right that insist that this collapse of the American government and economic system is what they want to happen. “Shrug Atlas, Shrug!” is the mantra of the day.
Conservatives have never believed this. Conservatives believe that we require a strong polity in order to protect our rights. Without it, our rights are surrendered to those who have the might to make their own right… a Randian paradise if there ever was one, but certainly nothing that a conservative such as Reagan or Goldwater would have recognized.
Coburn is right. Conservatives need to gird themselves for a budget solution that will cut spending, raise taxes, increase the debt ceiling once (as Rubio has so famously drawn the line in the sand) and no more, alter the monetary policy of the United States, end major components of the entitlement system, devolve responsibilities to the state such as education, and seriously attack the federal deficit and national debt. Only then are we ever going to be able to allow the economy to grow our way back into prosperity (provided we have the backbone to keep the Leviathan in its box).
At the end of the day, Frederic Bastiat was right as well. It’s a war of plunder, a Hobbesian nightmare if we don’t preserve civil society. Coburn and other conservatives are doing well to defend American society against the twin extremes of socialism and tyrrany on the left, and libertine anarchism on the right. It’s the Aristotelian balance that made America great — not mere compromise.
That is the only Constitutional answer that will satisfy future generations of Americans. The “here and now” set is the enemy, whether it’s socialists on one side or Randian objectivists on the other.
Pry them out, bench those voices, and fix America.
