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George Will on the bailout
October 1, 2008 | Comments Off
This is a good one.
We are waist deep in evasions because one cannot talk sense about the cultural roots of the financial crisis without transgressing this cardinal principle of politics: Never shall be heard a discouraging word about the public.
Concerning which, a timeless political trope is: Government should budget the way households supposedly do, conforming outlays to income. But the crisis came partly because so many households decided that it would be jolly fun to budget the way government does, hitching outlays to appetites.
Beneath Americans’ perfunctory disapproval of government deficits lurks an inconvenient truth: They enjoy deficits, by which they are charged less than a dollar for a dollar’s worth of government. Conservatives participate in this, even though deficits fuel government’s growth by obscuring its cost.
The people can emulate the government because credit has been democratized. Democratization of everything is supposedly an unquestionable good, but a blizzard of credit cards (1.5 billion of them, nine per cardholder), subsidized loans and cheap money has separated the pleasure of purchasing from the pain of paying. Furthermore, the entitlement mentality fostered by the welfare state includes a felt entitlement to a standard of living untethered from savings.
Populism flatters the people, contrasting their virtue with the alleged vices of some minority — in other times, Jews or railroad owners or hard money advocates; today, the villain is “Wall Street greed,” which is contrasted with the supposed sobriety of “Main Street.” When people on Main Street misbehave by, say, buying houses for more than they can afford to pay, they blame the wily knaves who made them do it, such as the “nimble” Babbitt.
I continue to make the point that conservatives ought to oppose the bailout not out of some blind reverence for the free market, but because we ought to think twice before rushing headlong to support legislation that may make matters worse, and it will sunk us deeper into debt. There are conservative reasons for supporting the bailout – our economy could sink without it – and I respect that. But it seems that some conservatives have forgotten the first principle of conservatism, which is, well, conservatism. Prudence and caution are other ways to put it. Whatever the case may be, maybe a bit of sobriety is what we all need at this moment.
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