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February 04, 2005

I Don't Just Happen To Be Republican

Geopolitically, I'm a textbook neocon, although tending toward the cheap hawk scenario. I believe American Imperialism can be a force for post-colonial liberation. Economically, I'm for open borders, open shops, no minimum wages and pollution commodities markets.

I'm for minimalist good government and private elistism when it comes to social policy. I think the American safety net should be infrastructural rather than personal - that is America should not guarantee free health care, rather they should guarantee the country's ability to stop polio and smallpox from ever becoming a problem here again. That safety net should be indexed to a reasonable incremental margin above Western standards moving up and down over time in line with economic performance. The idea that Roosevelt's Great Society should be a permanent endowment does not make sense to me.

I agree with the president that borders should be open and that America should have a net immigrant growth taking advantage of the peace dividend of the 20thC. That is to say until China gets its act together, we should expect to educate Chinese immigrants and grow this country that way..on down the line to Bangladesh. Repatriation is imperial thereby guaranteeing that what works best here is ultimately implemented there - America as global incubator & VC.

That's way more Republican than Democrat, and I think the reason has to do with principled socialism in the Democratic party, which I do not abide. I think the global business model is going to win and destroy the Democrats' economic base and discredit their political theory. The wane of Big Labor and the rise of Undocumented Labor is the indisputable evidence that socialists are on the losing side. Business American Style, complete with its 401Ks, paid maternity leave, stock options, flexible medical accounts, flatter organizations, real-time communications & computing, entrepreneurial quickness, diversity training and other first world innovations are all evolutions of capitalist corporatism and the revolution of business management ala Peter Drucker. The left had nothing to do with it. It was the rise of the Yuppie and the MBA that accounted for American business productivity over the past 25 years, now this is a real investor class. This thing GWBush calls the Ownership Society is real, and the fact that more Americans read the Wall Street Journal than ever before is no accident.

Such things don't just 'happen to be' Republican. It is the real legacy of the Reagan Revolution in contradistinction to the Saturday Night Live vision of America. We can look to our culture and see where the lines are drawn.

I am most impressed with GWBush's open, above board use of the regular Army (and Reserves) in dealing with Iraq. Just having watched Harrison Ford in Clancy's 'Clear and Present Danger', it is amply clear that the American Presidency has been dramatically changed and indeed liberated from hand-wringing secrecy. There is a huge difference between what GWBush had done today (and ironically what Rumsfeld sought to downsize in terms of diversifying the Powell Doctrine) and what Reagan did twenty years ago. Whether it was the nature of Saddam's national threat or the irony of using covert action against terrorist cells, the end result of marching large numbers of American troops to overturn a foreign power is tremendously beneficial for the reputation of America as a nation that does what it says, rather than as a nation that sends 'military advisors' around the globe in pursuit of secret policies. This to me is GWBush's greatest legacy, one that makes America honest and plain.

Domestically, I believe that we should be able to sustain a broad variety of classes and that it is vital that the same old American dream be accessible to an internal Third World. I have a great deal of disdain for the necessity to legislate and otherwise regulate into existence of affordable housing. I think that the political leadership of the nation should be responsible to keep business feet to the anti-trust fire in order to sustain a diversity of mid and small cap businesses that operate on thinner margins in more downscale communities and regions. In other words, instead of small towns in the midwest emptying out because all profits have been sucked out for the sake of mega-efficiency that some lower performing businesses remain solvent and provide steady, if low income jobs.

That means insurance reform, and restrictions on massive capital investments. It means American businesses above a certain level should aim to be globally competitive, not just use their accumulated capital to consolidate and cherry pick smaller businesses for mergers and acquisitions. I understand that this is a constraint on the road up, but it can also force a kind of efficiency downward. Again, to my way of thinking, it is simply anti-trust.

That's all for now, I smell a new tangent coming on.

Posted by mbowen at February 4, 2005 11:48 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Jonathan at February 4, 2005 09:24 PM