Bloc Busters

Conservatives' sudden discomfort with markets threatens the GOP coalition

Virginia Postrel from the February 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

So Republicans now have the power to boss people around and destroy the things they love--and they are loath to give that power up. They have plenty of court intellectuals who'll give them reasons not only to keep it, but to exercise it vigorously: reasons why the Internet cannot be left to evolve without federal regulation, for example, and no public school can be allowed to say anything remotely tolerant about gays.

The irony is that cultural--or at least religious--conservatives have at least as great an interest in shrinking the powers of government, especially in the economic sphere, as do yuppie Republicans. As long as fledgling churches and neighborhood minyans are shut down by zoning boards, and anti-discrimination laws are interpreted to forbid Bible verses on paychecks while forcing landlords to rent to unmarried couples, religious conservatives will need Richard Epstein's legal scholarship more than Allan Bloom's attacks on rock music.

And though Bill Bennett now sees the merits of school choice, he was none-too-keen on the notion when serving as education secretary and chief culture czar. Decentralist-come-lately Lamar Alexander also did precious little to advance choice when he was educator-in-chief. Giving parents, rather than bureaucrats, control over where kids go to school is an idea only someone who appreciates freedom and competition would conceive--which is why it came from Milton Friedman. (Who, by showing policy makers how to crush inflation, also did more to restore the possibility of thrift than a thousand conservative lectures on the "cultural contradictions of capitalism" and the erosion of the Protestant ethic.)

When mainstream conservatives were whimpering about the media and trying to use the Fairness Doctrine to force CBS to be nice to Richard Nixon, those boring old libertarians, with their tenacious belief in free speech and free markets, were building the intellectual case to dismantle the broadcasters' monopolies. The conservative voices on talk radio and cable TV can thank scholars like Ronald Coase, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Tom Hazlett for caring about the future and paying attention to something other than the "culture."

Conservatives are wrong if they think such things do not matter, merely because they are the stuff of "commerce" rather than "culture." The "leave us alone" agenda, as David Frum has tried to explain to his fellow conservatives, must succeed before traditional values can have a chance of revival. And that agenda is fueled almost entirely by libertarian thought, libertarian rhetoric, and libertarian conviction.

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