5 Top Conservative Books

The website FiveBooks has a great symposium on significant conservative works. I'd encourage everyone to read the whole thing, and the interesting interviews with the voters about their votes. The panel of voters is all-star quality (included are Gov. Mitch Daniels, Karl Rove, David Frum, etc) and the ultimate results of the voting are nothing to argue with as well.

The top 5 vote getters are:

5. Free to Choose - Friedman

4. The Federalist Papers - Hamilton, Madison, Jay

3. Democracy in America - de Tocqueville

2. Witness - Chambers

1. The Road to Serfdom - Hayek

Turns Out a Market Economy is Cooperative

NRO's Jonah Goldberg has an excellent column on the the market economy. Here's the meat:

"Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner.

The latest proof of Hayek’s insight can be found not only in the economic winter that goes by the label “recovery summer,” but in the crown jewel of the stimulus known as “cash for clunkers,” which subsidized car purchases that would have happened anyway. That’s a major reason the auto industry just had its worst August in 27 years. Meanwhile, lower-income buyers are seeing used-car prices soar thanks to the artificial scarcity created by destroying perfectly good “clunkers.”

But that’s a small point in the grand scheme of things. According to progressives, the financial crisis discredited “market fundamentalism” and created a burning need for a more cooperative society where “we’re all in it together.” It’s an ancient argument, with many noble intentions behind it. But it rests on a misunderstanding of one simple, astounding, irrefutable fact. The market economy is cooperative, and more successfully so than any alternative system ever conceived of, never mind put into practice."

Goldberg is exactly right. And he barely scratches the surface of how Hayek deals with the subject. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek spends time talking about how central planners operate under a false premise-- they seek to control that which they did not create, the market economy. Ultimately, according to Hayek, the inevitable result is failure.

Taxes Evaporate the Economy

The current debate over extending the Bush tax cuts is a classic demand-side economic argument. On one side, Conservatives are promoting across-the-board extensions to, among other things, encourage the wealthy to make capital investments. The other side, lead by Obama, says demand is best served by lowering taxes on the poor, who are more likely to spend, and raising taxes on the wealthy to fund government 'investments' in the economy. The idea is that tax cuts for the wealthy rob government planners of capital needed to guide the country out of recession.

On the surface, the liberal theory seems to work.  Not a week goes by without Obama visiting a clean energy company made possible by government largesse.  At each stop, Obama stands in the factory in front of the cameras repeating the mantra: government expenditures are pulling the economy out of the ditch. 

To answer Obama's liberal vision, we turn to the late French politician and free market economist M. Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) and his classic Essays on Political Economy.  Admittedly, Bastiat lived during a time when political messaging wasn't as sophisticated--before big government types learned to call taxing and spending 'investment'--but the argument put forth below is strikingly relevant today.

"Have you never chanced to hear it said: 'There is no better investment than taxes.  Only see what a number of families it maintains, and consider how it reacts upon industry:  it is an inexhaustible stream, it is life itself...'

In order to combat this doctrine, I must refer to my preceding refutation.  Political economy knew well enough that its arguments were not so amusing that it could be said of them, repetitions please.  It has, therefore, turned to the proverb to it own use, well convinced that, in its mouth, repetitions teach.

The advantages which officials advocate are those which are seen.  The benefit which accrues to the providers is still that which is seen.  This blinds all eyes.

But the disadvantages which the tax-payers have to get rid of are those which are not seen.  And the injury which results from it to the providers is still that which is not seen, although this ought to be self-evident.

When an official spends for his own profit an extra hundred sous, it implies that a tax-payer spends for his profit a hundred sous less.  But the expense of the official is seen, because the act is performed, while that of the tax-payer is not seen, because, alas! he is prevented from performing it.

You compare the nation, perhaps to a parched tract of land, and the tax to a fertilising rain.  Be it so.  But you ought also to ask yourself where are the sources of this rain, and whether it is not the tax itself which draws away the moisture from the ground and dries it up?

Again, you ought to ask yourself whether it is possible that the soil can receive as much of this precious water by rain as it loses by evaporation."1

1. M. Frederic Bastiat, Essays on Political Economy, (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1874), 58-59.

Reagan's First Inaugural

We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding -- we’re going to begin to act beginning today. The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

All of us together -- in and out of government -- must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable with no one group singled out to pay a higher price. We hear much of special interest groups. Well our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries, or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we’re sick -- professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the People.” This breed called Americans.

The rest here.

Reagan, 1964: "A Time For Choosing"

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

The rest here.