I’ve alluded to the regulatory house of cards before, specifically with regard to net neutrality. The basic idea is one of unintended consequences: starting from a state of freedom, the government sees a problem real or imagined and tries to fix it by fiat. Of course, this perverts incentives and makes for new problems, which is then fixed by further fiat. Thus, regulation begets more regulation, and we end up with an ad hoc patchwork of rules – a delicate house of cards that is surprisingly hard to deconstruct without tearing the whole thing down.
To repeat the story from the net neutrality piece, it was obvious by Gorbachev’s ascent to power that the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy had no room for growth. It was facing stagnation and decline into the indefinite future. To revitalize the economy, one of the first things Gorbachev did was ease capital controls. Unfortunately for him, that was one of the bottom cards: capital was immediately whisked out of the country, and the Soviet Union forthwith collapsed.
This is one of the most dire pathologies of government control: it’s extremely hard to move back towards freedom. One cannot “just do it”; it has to be done right. One of the reasons privatization has such a bad name is because in Russia and Argentina, state industries were not really “privatized”, but sold to government cronies (or drinking buddies in Gorbachev’s case). Regulatory patchworks have to be dismantled, if not totally, then with extreme care lest we end up with a lopsided and immediately perverse set of incentives that lead to even worse outcomes.
It goes without saying of course that this is not to be used as an argument against dismantling government control; only that it must be done with care…
Or so you’d think. American conservatives use this logic all the time for exactly that purpose: keep our regulations, we’re used to them.
Immigration is the most obvious example. The most common argument against illegal immigration used by conservatives is that we don’t want them using our government services and leeching off our tax dollars. But wait, aren’t conservatives supposed to be against government services? What better way is there to demonstrate the untenability of the welfare state than to show its insolvency in the face of increased payouts; to show that it is not an extensible system? In fact, I propose that no welfare program will go away until it is on the brink of crisis.
So rather than tackling the root of the issue, conservatives focus on a symptom and propose their own patch (border control) to fix the brokenness of the patches we already have (the welfare state). We’ve got a generous welfare state? Of course the indigent poor want to come here. Duh. But that doesn’t mean the indigents are the root of the problem. Our government determines in the short run the kind of immigrants we attract, and in the long run, what kind of economic actors we ourselves are (In Sweden for example it is common to take a year off after school and live off the generous unemployment benefits – not because of difficulty in finding a job, but because there’s no reason to until the benefits stop). Conservatives in America, far from advocating caution in dismantling as their name might suggest, are actually adding new cards.
This is the fundamental flaw that denies Conservatism the prestige of being a real and consistent ideology. Rather than an ideology, Conservatism (and Liberalism too; but I’ll get to that in a future post) is more of an aesthetic. The house of cards argument is so inconsistent that I suspect it’s not even what the conservatives who make it really believe. More likely it’s a mask for a visceral xenophobia, which is (consciously or unconsciously) suppressed because they know (probably unconsciously) that cosmopolitanism is at the moment more culturally in vogue that parochialism.
Of course, xenophobia doesn’t go away, even if it is culturally suppressed and hidden behind (not so) clever arguments. And some conservatives (the incorrigible, the imperceptive, or those surrounded only by other conservatives) venture into outright xenophobia anyway. The “protect our culture” argument is hardly on the fringes of the movement (as if American culture ever lived up to their ideals, and as if culture could be static anyway). Neither is the subtly racist and/or classist crime argument (which statistically just doesn’t hold water).
So if you’re going to pretend that the house of cards argument against immigration is the real reason for opposition, then Conservatives just need a dose of logic to realize the virtue of free immigration. Otherwise, if you just want to force your cultural preferences on people with the same apparatus that liberals use to force their economic preferences on people, then at least be honest about it. And if you can’t take the marginalization that a stance like that will inevitably afford as the old guard dies off, then just keep quiet on the issue.
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