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In his article, “Roots, Limits, and Love,” Mark Mitchell captures the sentiments of Front Porch Republic fans, who have been crucial to the internal debate within conservatism in recent years. I genuinely admire people on the “crunchy con” side of the conservative spectrum, who remind us that politics should start with human beings, tradition, and localism—not the cult of talk-radio.
But by linking economic “growth” to Big Government, Mitchell unwittingly cedes the debate to the Keynesians. That is, he makes the common assumption that economic progress is a top-down affair and that technocrats have the knowledge to drive prosperity. Of course, Mitchell is by no means advocating for technocrats. But by adopting the same anti-market language about “sustainability” and “infinite growth” that’s popular among the Washington Left, he winds up yielding to the bureaucrats’ word view.
On economic issues, I take the more classical-liberal stance that Big Business is actually the product of a more centralized regulatory regime (i.e. Big Government), which erects barriers to entry for smaller, more local firms. As the sluggish economy of Obama years have illustrated, growth and Big Government are not synonymous. Rather, legitimate growth happens when government gets out of the way.
Mitchell might be interested in Charles Johnson’s label of “Anti-Capitalist Libertarianism.” Like Mitchell, Johnson is suspicious of the pro-capitalist Right and the socialist Left. He advocates, instead, for genuine free markets:
‘[A] free market’ is not just the same thing as businessmen being left alone to do whatever they please; that it means ownership and economic freedom for everyone, and may well encompass forms that may look nothing like conventional corporate enterprises or business-as-usual today; that it is quite possible that many critics of “capitalism” may be pointing to very real social evils, while misdiagnosing the causes; and that many of the evils most commonly ascribed to ‘capitalism,’ and thus blamed on the free market, really are not the results of market activities, but the results of “capitalism” in quite a different sense — in the sense of government-backed commerce and politically-enforced corporate privilege.
The true conservative fuses a respect for history, prioritizes a truly free-enterprise economy, and works to resist authoritarianism. The result, hopefully, is the kind of local, humane economy that Front Porch Republic envisions.
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