THE ANTI-DOGMA DOGMA. Fact Finders

Imagine that God were to appear on Earth for the unlikely purpose of settling, once and for all, our disputes over economic policy. And suppose that, to my enormous surprise, he announced that every empirical claim advanced by conservatives was correct. Cutting taxes produces such great economic growth that even the poor benefit. Privatizing or eliminating social programs like Medicare and Social Security will cause the elderly to save more money and enjoy higher living standards. Slashing regulations, by eliminating unintended side effects, actually does a better job helping those whom the regulations were intended to help than the regulations themselves. Suppose that God presented these conclusions so convincingly--if his stature alone did not suffice--that everybody immediately accepted them as truth.

How would liberals respond? No doubt by rethinking and abandoning nearly all their long-held positions. Liberalism, after all, claims to produce certain outcomes: more prosperity and security, especially for the poor and middle classes; a cleaner environment; safer foods and drugs; and so on. If it were proved beyond a doubt that liberal policies fail to produce those outcomes--or even, as conservatives often claim, that such policies hurt their intended beneficiaries--then their rationale would disappear. It may be hard to imagine liberals advocating capital gains tax cuts as a way to lift up the working stiff. But that's just because there's no evidence to show they do. If the evidence were to change, so would the liberal mindset. The point is that liberalism has no justification other than the belief that liberal policies produce beneficial outcomes.

Now imagine the opposite were to happen. God appears in order to affirm liberal precepts: Current tax levels barely affect economic incentives, social programs provide tremendous economic security at modest cost to growth, and most regulations achieve their intended effects without producing undue distortions. Would economic conservatives likewise abandon their views? Some certainly would, but a great many would not. Economic conservatism, unlike liberalism, would survive having all its empirical underpinnings knocked out from beneath it.

And not because conservatives are necessarily more stubborn. (Indeed, on an individual level, liberals may well be just as stubborn as conservatives.) Rather, conservatism, unlike liberalism, overlays a deeper set of philosophical principles. Conservatives believe that big government impinges upon freedom. They may also believe that big government imposes large costs on the economy. But, for a true conservative, whatever ends they think smaller government may bring about--greater prosperity, economic mobility for the non-rich--are almost beside the point. As Milton Friedman wrote, "[F]reedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself."

We're accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people's lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people's lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

The contrast between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, then, ultimately lies not only in different values or preferences but in different epistemologies. Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy--more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition--than conservatism.

Now, liberalism's pragmatic superiority wouldn't matter to a true ideological conservative any more than news about the medical benefits of pork (to pick an imaginary example) would cause a strictly observant Jew to begin eating ham sandwiches. But, if you have no particular a priori preference about the size of government and care only about tangible outcomes, then liberalism's aversion to dogma makes it superior as a practical governing philosophy.

Conservatives don't always dwell on their first principles because those principles have little use in converting unbelievers. But they pop up from time to time, especially when conservative factual claims come under stress.

Take, for instance, the current debate over privatizing Social Security. Los Angeles Times Editorial Page Editor Michael Kinsley has argued that privatization cannot increase national wealth--an argument that, if true, would undermine the idea's central rationale. A recent National Review editorial implicitly accepted the thrust of Kinsley's argument and proceeded to gamely offer up some possible second- and third-order benefits that privatization could produce. (People might be induced to save a bit more, and maybe higher debt would discourage spending.) Seemingly unpersuaded by its own reasoning, the editorial righted itself by declaring that "reducing dependence on Washington is a worthy goal in its own right."

Likewise, conservative columnist George F. Will conceded not long ago that, contrary to the claims of privatization advocates, Social Security does not face a financing crisis. But Will declared his support for privatization anyway. "[T]he best reasons rise from the philosophy of freedom: Voluntary personal accounts will allow competing fund managers, rather than a government monopoly on income transfers from workers to retirees, to allocate a large pool of money."

This preference for removing power from Washington is simply something that either you accept or you don't. It's neither right nor wrong in an absolute sense. It does, however, make empirical reasoning pointless. Viewed pragmatically, Social Security raises questions about which economics has a lot to say: balancing the tradeoffs between retiree incomes and costs to workers, allocating risk, and so on. Liberal thinking, unlike conservative thinking, actually hinges on the outcome of those questions.

This doesn't mean that conservatives don't believe their own empirical arguments. Nor does it mean that ideologically driven thinking can't lead to empirically sound outcomes. In many cases--conservative opposition to tariffs, price controls, and farm subsidies--it does. But empirical reasoning simply does not drive their thinking. What appears to be conservative economic reasoning is actually a kind of backward reasoning. It begins with the conclusion and marches back through the premises.

Consider the conservative view of health care. Conservatives repeat the mantra that the United States has "the best health care system in the world"--a formulation used endlessly by President Bush. That isn't true by almost any objective measure. The United States devotes a far higher share of its economy to health care than any other country. Yet, according to the most recent World Health Organization study, the United States ranks just 37th in overall health care performance. These massive inefficiencies derive in part from our huge numbers of uninsured. The uninsured end up forgoing treatment until they arrive at the emergency room. Basic preventive care, of the sort universally available in every other advanced country, would avert such disasters--at less cost to the economy and with less suffering and fatality for patients.

The only way to deem the U.S. system the "best" is if you substitute ideological criteria for pragmatic criteria. Our health care system is indeed the best at minimizing the role of government. France, on the other hand, produces better measurable health outcomes at a vastly lower cost. Yet conservatives would consider the notion that France has a better health care system than the United States to be self-evidently false.

The conundrum is that the remedy of smaller government is particularly ill-suited for the problem of health care. The market for medical services does not resemble the market for blue jeans. Among other problems, health insurance firms have every incentive to deny coverage to those most likely to get sick, which makes the individual health insurance market inefficient and prohibitively expensive. Economists call this phenomenon "adverse selection," and it is inherent in the private health care market. It cannot be solved without some kind of government intervention.

For this reason, conservatives have almost nothing to say about adverse selection. When they do write about the topic, they tend to call for bromides like (to take an example from a David Brooks New York Times Magazine essay last year) "reforming the health care system so competition works as it does in every other sphere--to improve value, spur innovation and reduce costs." This is classic backward reasoning: Start with a solution (competition) and then proceed to make it fit the problem. In this case, the author doesn't even explain how to make the solution fit the problem. He simply assumes that it can be done because market forces work everywhere and always.

If liberalism is not the mirror image of conservatism, what is? The more apt parallel is probably socialism. True socialists believe that allowing capitalists to keep some of the fruits of workers' labor is inherently immoral. They also tend to believe that free enterprise does not work very well. But, like the conservative belief that big government doesn't work well, this empirical belief merely sits atop a deeper normative belief. For committed socialists, doing away with "exploitation" is an end in itself.

Contemporary economic liberalism is less of an ideology than the absence of one--a rejection both of dogmatic fealty and hostility to the free market. Franklin Roosevelt famously called for "bold, persistent experimentation." The New Dealers vacillated wildly between promoting competition and squelching it, fiscal tightening and fiscal loosening, putting people to work and pulling workers out of the labor pool. They were accused, correctly, of incoherence.

But incoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him "the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out." Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt's shared ideology as "reasoned experiment" and "rational change" and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.

That definition of liberal obviously leaves a very wide berth. It's wide enough, in fact, to encompass every president from FDR until at least Ronald Reagan. At the time, of course, liberals did not consider Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon their ideological kin. But, in historical retrospect, that is only because the underlying assumptions of the New Deal were so broadly shared. It was impossible to imagine a president who stood outside that consensus, so all the fights took place within it. While those on the right wing of this ideological consensus were more cautious about government activism than those on the left wing, they did not challenge the underlying assumptions.

Eisenhower used the federal government, rather than states and localities, to build the Federal Highway System, and he made no effort to reduce a top tax rate that stood at an absurdly high 91 percent. Nixon declared, "We are all Keynesians now." He raised Social Security benefits and proposed an ambitious national health care plan. Conservatives have since renounced Nixon's economic record, and no wonder. Today it would place him on the left edge of the Democratic Party.

It's not a coincidence that the two most economically liberal Republican presidents--Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford--also displayed the most serious interest in empiricism. Both required their assistants to produce detailed "Brandeis briefs" outlining the essential arguments on both sides of any policy debate. Ford invited Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith into the Oval Office for a free-ranging debate on economic policy.

Since the mid-'70s, the GOP has grown steadily more conservative, and therefore less pragmatic. Genuine ideological conservatives, banished to minority status since Eisenhower, briefly resurfaced under Barry Goldwater, and, after falling back again, began to take control of the Republican Party. Conservatives correctly see George W. Bush as one of their own. Bush does frequently depart from conservative orthodoxy, as with his tariffs, farm subsidies, and Medicare drug benefit. Yet conservatives understand that Bush sees these compromises as politically expedient, not a genuinely felt embrace of expansive government. His signature proposals--massive tax cuts and Social Security privatization--both reflect a belief that reducing government is an end in itself. Outside events exert not even the slightest influence on his policy goals. Bush steadfastly embraced his tax cuts as the economy veered from boom and surplus to slowdown to wartime to recovery and deficit.

Meanwhile, Democrats have continuously reexamined their policies in light of changing conditions. Bill Clinton came to office planning to spur the economy with a Keynesian stimulus, but abandoned those plans after fierce debate among his staff economists. Instead he embraced the novel goal of sparking recovery by slashing the deficit in the hopes that lower interest rates would enable sustainable growth. As that policy seemed to work, moderate liberals continued to embrace the credo of fiscal restraint. But, after the economy slid toward a recession in 2001, liberal economists abandoned short-term restraint in favor of temporary tax cuts to encourage spending.

Clinton also recognized the failure of welfare, previously a cherished liberal goal, to accomplish its stated purpose, and he enacted a sweeping overhaul. Many liberals complained, but the main objections centered around the details--certain punitive provisions and the lack of adequate job-creation measures--not the concept of welfare reform.

That Clinton's economic policymakers had great use for empirical inquiry, and Bush's do not, is hardly a secret. One way to see the contrast is to compare the economic summits each president has held. Clinton's 1992 Little Rock economic summit featured a vigorous and open-ended debate between diverse participants, and it helped persuade the Clinton team to alter the economic blueprint developed during the campaign. Bush's summits have been tightly scripted affairs in which supporters testify to the virtues of his policies.

Or compare two memoirs: Robert Reich's Locked in the Cabinet and Paul O'Neill's The Price of Loyalty. Both books chronicle the disillusionment of a former Cabinet member. Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, bemoans the triumph of cautious deficit-cutting over public investment, but his tale is larded with academic policy debates he simply happened to lose. O'Neill, the former Bush Treasury secretary, mourns that administration's hostility to expertise and fact-driven debate. "You don't have to know anything or search for anything," he says of the ideologues in the administration. "You already know the answer to everything. It's not penetrable by facts. It's absolutism."

Part of this difference reflects the cultural predilections of the last two presidents--Bush is the instinctive antiintellectual who likes to go with his gut, and Clinton is the former Rhodes scholar who relished academic debates. But it also reflects the natural tendencies of conservatism and liberalism. Bush's administration gives primacy to political advisers over policy wonks in large part because they have no need to debate their ends, only the means of achieving them.

The next liberal administration, whenever it happens, will not be nearly so certain. Aside from rolling back conservative excesses, its economic agenda will take its cue from external events, and the decisions it arrives at could, in time, be cast aside through experimentation. Ultimately, those policies, whether they move left or right, will be measured against their effect on people's lives, not the degree to which they bring the government closer to some long-ago agreed-upon vision. In time, those policies will be altered yet again to suit a changing world. This is known as progress.

I dissent from some of the article, but it is a thought provoking piece, albeit from one of the more reliablely reflexive but articulate liberals on TNR. I dissent, inter alia, from the notion that liberals are more empiracally driven than conservatives. I find both often impervious to empirical data, depending on the issue. Both can get bogged down in the ideological swamp.

The liberals certainly were to a large degree empirically impervious to the destructive nation of this nation's welfare programs until Clinton to his credit under political pressure triangulated. They tend to be impervious to the imperative that the medical system needs more consumers who police prices through bearing some of the costs directly. No Leviathon can adequately substitute for that. They are often empirically impervious to the need to have a muscular foreign policy, and smite the bad guys, and react honorably to the display of mass slaughter off our shores by sociopaths. They are all too often empirically impervious to the disasterous state of secondary education in this country, particularly among poor kids trapped there. They tend to be empirically impervious to how the tort system soaks the less fortunate through higher prices and injustice. They display rather consistently a non-empirical pigheaded errancy of belief that the evangelicals and persons of vigorous faith pose some real danger to American pluralistic civic values, and to those of us fellow traveler seculars, as I understand those values.

This is a conservative forum, so I will hold my fire about what I think conservatives tend to be empirically impervious too. I don't want to get banned just yet, by putting it all in one place.

Which leads me to another point. Many are confused about what a Neocon is. This article brings to my mind however, that I think it fair to say that a Neocon tends to be a conservative that more than typically obtains for the clan, is receptive to empirical dats, and influenced by it, even when ideologically inconvenient. At least I fancy myself as being one along those lines. Your mileage may vary.

If it were proved beyond a doubt that liberal policies fail to produce those outcomes--or even, as conservatives often claim, that such policies hurt their intended beneficiaries--then their rationale would disappear. It may be hard to imagine liberals advocating capital gains tax cuts as a way to lift up the working stiff. But that's just because there's no evidence to show they do. If the evidence were to change, so would the liberal mindset. The point is that liberalism has no justification other than the belief that liberal policies produce beneficial outcomes.

Oh I think you don't understand the true intentions of the liberal leaders and power players. They are anything but well intentioned

Simply stated, God HAS confirmed basic conservative economic principles. He created a universe that works in a way where cooperation is voluntary and freedom is a key component.

Socialism has works for bees and insects that have no brains, but human beings demand their God given freedom.

Now, there are humans that subscribe to God and therefore are willing to help those who are less fortunate. This is called charity. There are other humans that seek power. They seek to be Godlike. They want to be in control. They are going to be promoters of a system that takes from one, to give to others. Their system has failed every time.

This is long-winded liberal preening with the tactical purpose of urging liberals to look more at the evidence that conservative policies work. Of course, there will be no deus ex machina that resolves factual controversies and properly scores conservative and liberal policies. We have only the tangled and disputed playing out of history, with even much of the bare facts of the past in contention, forgotten, and of uncertain application to the future.

The great split between Left and Right that opened in Western civilization in the Enlightenment will continue because the division is based on philosophical differences that transcend the factual and policy disputes of the day. The traditional American system of government effectively bridged the chasm by providing a restless, energetic, and freedom loving people with a conservative system of limited government. But with the rise of large and intrusive government in the 1930's, American politics became increasingly split along European Left-Right lines -- and that split will be the dominant feature of our political life for any foreseeable future.

I have to say that the author's core argument is absolutely incorrect, contrary to your conclusion.

Lok at this: The point is that liberalism has no justification other than the belief that liberal policies produce beneficial outcomes.

Do you REALLY beleive that liberalism has no justification than the belief that liberal policies produce beneficial outcomes?

Because if you do, you haven't been doing your reading. Go to your bookshelf, pull down and read Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed - Self Congratulation as the Basis of Social Policy". What? Don't have it? Well, there you are, my point is made.

The whole point of liberalism is to make liberals feel good about being on the self-defined liberal side of an issue.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether those policies lead to beneficial outcomes or not. Why do you think it is that they never bother checking?

If God came down and totally discredited ever liberal position to the point of certainty, it would make no difference whatsover. For a liberal, it would only discredit God for God to question his beliefs.

Except about Clinton, bringing down the deficit with a balanced budget. He said maybe in ten years, then he said seven but the Republican Congress did that year and he signed.

He did not instigate welfare reform that is another legislation put together by the same congress.

I don't understand most of the article but it was NOT Clinton the balanced the budget or did welfare reform, he just signed the bills after they were passed.

Yes he takes the credit for them but to me all I can remember that he did that effected the economy is the TAX increase. The demos still say that is why the economy was so great.

This guy's argument is that liberals are pragmatic and do what makes sense at the time. Conservatives are ideologues who do nothing but force dogma that doesn't work, in contravention of reality. The problem is what makes sense at the time for government to do at the time, i.e., what is perceived as a public "good" then, almost never delivers a public good in the long haul.

I would look forward to seeing how conservatives ignore empirical analysis, when historically, liberty and capitalism are the only things that have ever worked to help everyone in their reach. Perhaps in the sense of "solving problems" from the standpoint of "doing something," government works. But as you say, JV, liberals doing something to do something liberal, without regard for that something's actual effect, is all about making liberals FEEL good.

I disagree with the author's basic point, but I think he's more or less correct about health care. Medical services simply cannot be distributed on a for-profit basis; the end result would be haves and have-nots, and in the case of health care being a "have not" means sick people lying in the streets, spreading infection and even dying for lack of money for doctors and medicines. The social order cannot tolerate that. People are not going to squat on their toadstools and watch their children die for the sake of HCA's bottom line; they'll simply go to the ER for everything from hangnails to hysterectomies, and then stiff the hospital for the bill. This is already happening. In time, hospital ERs will be forced to either demand money up front for treatment (illegal) or close their doors (which is what they're doing in droves). The end result will be "medical deserts" -- areas where no ER facilities exist due to the universal lack of insurance/funds among the inhabitants. The ERs and hospitals will all be out in the far suburbs, where the white folks with insurance are. Again, this is already happening.

Just as we as a nation decided long ago not to let people starve in the streets, we as a nation cannot have one class of citizen with access to medical care and another class with none. Therefore, some form of universal health care is going to eventually appear. The only question us whether it will be a taxpayer-funded system, or (as such things once were) a system run by religious and/or charitable organizations, or some combination of the two.

I don't want to hear any yap about socialized medicine, either. We have socialized medicine right now. It's called the Emergency Room. The ER at County General HAS to treat whoever presents themselves for treatment, regardless of ability to pay. That's the law. When the patient can't pay, the county hospital district eats the cost, then bills the taxpayers of the district. That's socialized medicine no matter how you slice it. Therefore, if we're going to have socialized medicine anyway, why don't we figure out a better system than the haphazard mess we have now?

I'm not advocating a National Health Service, a single-payer system, or anything specific. I'm simply saying that health care is something people will not do without, even if they have to steal it. That's reality. Unless we are going to rescind the law requiring ERs to treat people regardless of ability to pay, we ARE going to have some sort of socialized medicine. Maybe I don't like it and maybe you don't either, but that's the Real World.

The real world is that when you make more money available to buy an economic good, its price will go up. Medical services and goods are not exempt from this real-world law. Because medical practitioners have a government protected monopoly entrance to the market is severly restricted, exacerbting price increases stemming from ratcheting up demand.

This unintended consequence of trying to bring "affordable" medical services to people that otherwise self-ration is to increase prices for EVERYONE. The only beneficiaries are doctors and other health care providers who are given the keys to the coffers. Meanwhile, since prices are not allowed to function as they should in a market, some other method has to be found to ration access to services. And it will be: favoritism, under-the-table payments, short-shrift, and so on will become commonplace.

Doctors and other health care workers can and WILL lower standards, work fewer hours, pass the buck on difficult cases, and generally make things worse for EVERYONE.

If you don't want people going to the ER, make it expensive or impossible for them to do so.

Bottom line, what we have done so far has made medical care more expensive and less effective. The answer you and other liberals want us to buy into is "more of the same". It won't work. It CAN'T work.

The whole article is a farce because it is based on a premise that is a lie. He, nor the democrats, are liberals. That is one of my pet peeves. They are at best progressives, and more than likely, closet socialists or neo-socialists, if you will.

The basic tenet of liberalism is individual freedom and liberty. True liberalism does not believe in government being used to enact change, progressivism and socialism do. In most of Europe, liberals are considered to be on the right side of the political spectrum. Conservatives have let the left steal a political ideology that is more closely aligned with conservative principles, and bastardize what it truly stands for.

As far as neocons, the best description I have seen, is that neocons are liberal (in the true sense of the word) democrats who did not like the socialist/progressive path they have seen the democrat party heading down since Vietnam.

Liberals are supposed to be open minded to change, which party is showing they are open minded to change and which is defending the status quo ? Education, Social Security, The Tax System, Tort Reform, Medical Malpractice Reform, all things republicans seek to change, but democrats are trying to maintain. Healthcare is the only issue both seek change on, except they want government to control it, which would be turning over 16% economy to the government. Can you say socialism ? The writer seeks to go back in time, rollback conservative policy changes, instead of moving forward to create a new future. Conservatives and republicans are showing they are more liberal than the democrats and progressive left. To them, change is increasing the size of government and it's control over our daily lives.

Al in al, Chait just spews drivel and pablum based on fraud.

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