A column for the politically stranded conservative
These days, I feel like a politically stranded conservative, and I know I’m not alone. I could blame it on one presidential candidate or another, but it’s more than that. The issues aren’t as simple as the talking points we hear on television. I see that clearly, but I can’t really explain it in 140 characters or less. In fact, it’s tough to do it in an entire column.
Free markets produce the best outcomes for a society. People lie all the time in their politics, but they almost always show what they truly value by how they spend their money. That means thriving marketplaces are a really effective way to move goods and services around our economy. That’s about as interesting to talk about as watching paint dry, but it’s really important.
At the same time, capitalism isn’t inherently good in the moral sense. A capitalist system — just like all the other economic systems — is only ever as fair and just as the people who use it. We muck it up when we game the system to favor certain businesses and people over others. Then we wreck it further when we use government to “correct” the marketplace to favor someone else. Often, our intentions are good, but we frequently end up substituting our personal priorities for those of someone spending their own money.
The Environmental Protection Agency is basically a bureaucratic Rolodex. The Rolodex did a lot of good work sorting contacts until technological advances caught up. The Rolodex still works, but we recognize it isn’t the best way to sort our contacts anymore. The EPA has clearly served an important function, but it’s increasingly imposing significant economic costs in exchange for incremental environmental gains. It’s past time for an environmental policy overhaul.
But most politicians on the right aren’t really thinking big about environmental changes. In fact, it’s hard to talk about conservation at all as a conservative, without people looking at you like you might have been in the sun a little too long. How the conservation ethic is lost on people literally called “conservatives” is simultaneously hilarious and tragic. We can do better, but we’re simply not taking the environment as seriously as we should.
Our immigration system is a comedy of errors. Border security is porous, to put it mildly. We haven’t yet figured out how to connect our available domestic labor force effectively with varying market demands. Most importantly, we don’t appear to have a clear strategy about whom we’re welcoming to America, what they’ll do when they get here or the number of immigrants that makes the most sense for our nation. Those are legitimate questions to address, rather than evidence of an irrational xenophobia.
It’s also important and exciting to embrace people who genuinely want to be Americans. How amazing is it that our country remains so awesome that people from all over the world want to leave their homes and take a shot at a better life in the United States? We shouldn’t fear immigrants; we should fix our system so it works effectively.
The status quo in Washington must end. From a purely economic standpoint, the federal government’s budgetary path isn’t sustainable. That’s not a partisan idea. We can trim into discretionary and military spending all we want, but we’re eventually going to have to handle the sacred cows of mandatory spending like Medicare and Social Security. That’s not fun, but it’s a fact most politicians conveniently avoid.
Yet I’m not one of the burn-it-downers who thinks the answer to the leadership failure and lack of solutions coming from Washington is to destroy the government. Nobody starts a necessary repair or renovation to a home by setting it ablaze first. This isn’t an Etch-a-Sketch; it’s a multitrillion-dollar government and still a beacon of hope in the world.
If you’re a politically stranded conservative these days, stick it out. There are a lot more of us than we realize. It’s just harder to get media attention when you’re not shouting or punching people. It’s not politically expedient to admit that our problems aren’t solved by simply picking one side or the other, but it’s honest.
Perhaps most importantly, I’m an optimist. It’s in my son’s smile at the baseball field. It’s the look in my wife’s eyes as she works with the boys on the piano. I find it in the friendly exchanges with my colleagues in the media who don’t agree with a single one of my policy perspectives. There’s a lot of hope for the future, even if the political arena is presently a mess.
As a wise man once said, “let us go forth with good cheer and stout hearts – happy warriors out to seize back a country and a world to freedom.” There’s simply too much at stake to give up and let our smiles devolve into fists of rage.
