A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Because at times, ranting feels good. Moreover, ranting can point the way towards the truth.

Consider this article concerning the Republican race in Michigan. As we know, Michigan is experiencing a one-state recession and the candidates are trying to speak to Michigan's economic needs. One would think that Mitt Romney would use his hard-won credentials in the business world to work and introduce free market solutions (a.k.a. "the only solutions that have a sand castle's chance in an earthquake of working") to Michigan's problems.

Instead, Romney says this: "What I'm critical of is the absence of a federal policy designed to strengthen the U.S. automotive sector and manufacturing general."

Great. Mitt Romney earned all those millions in the private sector. He learned all there is to learn--both in the classroom and in the real world--about the need for free markets to bring about prosperity. And his solution to Michigan's economic problems is--wait for it!--the introduction of a federal industrial policy. Statism lives.

I really wish that Romney chose to run for President as a technocrat rather than as an (unconvincing) philosophic small-government conservative. It is one thing to verbally pay homage to Reagan and his legacy. But that kind of flattery rings hollow when a candidate deviates from the philosophy of small-government in order to get votes--as Romney does habitually and repeatedly. If Romney ran as a technocrat, he might have been able to go to the public, tell them that he knows what works from having seen what he saw in the business sector, and that he would take that experience and apply it as President. Sure, that might not appeal to the Reaganites, but it would at least have the virtue of being honest. Romney would not have to contort himself into ridiculous positions trying to live up to the demands of a governing philosophy with which he was never comfortable. Instead, he could let his supposed inner nerd--remember, this is the man who loves numbers and details and never lets us forget it--run wild on the campaign trail. He would be more comfortable that way. And we would be more comfortable as well. I hate to reprise the ideology-trumps-competence another former Massachusetts Governor employed when running for President but in Romney's case, it would be a tremendous improvement over what his campaign gives us now.

Instead, Romney talks a good game when it comes to the free market and the power of capitalism but he never delivers the policy goods. His endorsement of industrial policy is just one example of this failure to live up to his own rhetoric. There are others as well. In 2002, Romney sought to increase the excise tax for SUV's. He pushed for the excise tax increase the following year, prompting Democrats to call his plan "a good Democratic idea."

In addition, Romney hiked gas taxes by 2 cents per gallon, bringing an extra $60 million per year into Massachusetts state coffers. Now, to be sure, economist Greg Mankiw--who I respect a great deal and who advises the Romney campaign--has called for a carbon tax. But Mankiw's proposal would be revenue neutral; the carbon tax would be made up for by tax cuts in other areas and would only serve to alleviate a negative externality--the excessive consumption of fuel and its effects on the environment. (For the record, the carbon tax proposal I endorse differs from Mankiw's as it would be tied to to the three-year average change in global tropical temperatures with futures markets in the temperature indicator and the futures price helping to set the tax. If there is an average change in global tropical temperatures, the tax would increase only commensurate with that change. If not, it wouldn't. And revenue neutrality could be maintained per Mankiw's calls.) But Romney did not work revenue neutrality into his tax plan. Instead, his tax took money out of the pockets of consumers.

Even worse: Romney supports a cap-and-trade system and advocated one in 2003, a stance that Mankiw himself rightly deplores. Cap-and-trade is an utterly regressive system; as Mankiw explains, the cost that comes from plants retrofitting their equipment will be passed on to consumers. Since this is a cost that will be imposed by the private sector, it will be exceedingly difficult--if not outright impossible--to get government to offset the cost through some kind of tax cut that goes to the consumer. Romney's record includes the worst of both worlds--a reliance on gas and vehicle excise taxes without tax offsets in other sectors and a reliance on cap-and-trade, which only serves to take more money out of the economy.

Of course, it is unfair to single Romney out. The other two leading Republican candidates--John McCain and Mike Huckabee--have joined Romney in trying to drive free market conservatism out of the Republican Party. McCain has recently gotten on a kick about calling pharmaceutical companies villains in the American corporate structure. I'm sure that some pharmaceutical companies do things that are wrong--large enterprises run by human beings do not have a track record of perfection, after all--but McCain's demagoguery deserves condemnation. Pharmaceutical companies face enormous financial and logistical pressures on the research and development front. If those pressures are added to by a putative President McCain--who apparently has decided to join Democrats in castigating Big Pharma in order to get votes--then R&D will dry up, leaving patients in the lurch. And then, there is Huckabee. My displeasure with his big-government conservatism (which is no conservatism at all), and his protectionist, mercantilist ways are well-documented. But let's give the microphone to Jonah Goldberg, whose lament concerning the state of modern conservatism is at least somewhat well-founded:

The most revealing development of the campaign so far has to be Huckabee's success at displacing [Senator Fred] Thompson as the candidate of the socially conservative South. Thompson's failure to translate the immense excitement about his pre-candidacy into anything better than also-ran status is largely attributable to a lackluster campaign effort. But there's at least something symbolic about the fact that Huckabee has become, in the words of Commentary's John Podhoretz, "the socially conservative Southern pro-life candidate with a silver tongue and a pleasingly low-key affect."

Thompson is a solid, traditional, mainstream conservative. He'd be equally comfortable at an American Enterprise Institute conference, a Federalist Society luncheon or a county fair. Taken at his word, Thompson is a card-carrying Reaganite, favoring low taxes, a strong defense and a shrunken role for the federal government.

Huckabee, meanwhile, is nearly the philosophical opposite. He would even use his power as president to push for a national ban on public smoking. "I'm one of the few Republicans," Huckabee insists, "who talk very clearly about the environment, health care, infrastructure, energy independence. I don't cede any of those to the Democrats."

When Huckabee says that, he means it in the same way that Bush promised not to surrender health care and education (another Huckabee issue) to his opponents when he ran as a "compassionate conservative." As a result, we got the biggest federal government expansion into education in history and the largest spike in entitlement spending since the Great Society.

I recognize, of course, that my excerpt speaks well of the policy positions of my candidate, Fred  Thompson, at the expense of Huckabee. That may be convenient but you know, Huckabee, McCain and Romney had every chance to get the plaudits and laurels that Thompson so richly deserves for his small-government and free market stance. If they want to, they can still get those plaudits and laurels. But time is running out.

Humorously, Huckabee likes to claim a sense of persecution and victimization. No one, of course, knows what terrible insults were lobbed at social conservatives and evangelicals to cause Huckabee to assume political victim status. But he has certainly done a lot to live up to the very charges he has lobbed at his supposed persecutors. Only Huckabee doesn't seek to push social conservatives or evangelicals out of the Republican Party. He just tries to do that to economic conservatives and small-government Republicans. "Deplorable" indeed.

Mark Steyn says it well:

. . . what's going on over on the Republican side? John McCain demonizes Big Pharma -- i.e., the private pharmaceutical companies that create, develop, and manufacture the drugs that all these socialized health-care systems in every corner of the planet are utterly dependent on. He voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, a quintessential congressional overreaction (to Enron) that buries American companies in wasteful paperwork and hands huge advantages to stock exchanges in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

[. . .]

As for Mike Huckabee, last seen comparing his success in Iowa to the miracle of the loaves and fishes (New Hampshire, alas, was loaves-and-fishes in reverse: he took his Iowa catch and turned it into one rotting fish head in Lake Winnipesaukee), in Thursday night's debate he was attacked for raising taxes in Arkansas. "What I raised," riposted the Huckster, "was hope."

Terrific. In a Huckabee administration, nothing is certain but hope and taxes. Did he poll-test the line? Was it originally "What I didn't raise was tobacco"? Or did he misread the line? Did he mean to say "hogs"? Is there any correlation between taxes and hope? If you cut taxes by 20 percent, does hope nosedive off the cliff? Not for those of us who were hoping for a tax cut. And is there any evidence that he "raised hope"? Hope of what? Huck's line is a degradation of FDR: We have nothing to hope for but hope itself.

Charming, ain't it? Remember: This is coming from the party of free enterprise.

But perhaps it won't be for long. Perhaps it's just John Edwards's world and Mitt Romney, John McCain and Mike Huckabee are just trying to live in it.

Which raises a question: What about the rest of us? You know, the ones who still try to stand athwart history, yelling "Stop!"