Capitalist Tool Time

Steve Forbe is running for president and may well win the GOP nomination. But whaind of road is he traveling?

John J. Pitney, Jr. from the July 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

During the same New Hampshire trip, Forbes toured downtown Nashua, with C-SPAN cameras rolling. At a shoe store, he awkwardly greeted clerks and customers, who seemed more interested in the merchandise. He stopped for a few moments with an 11-year-old girl, saying, "I hope you have a good shopping experience here." She thanked him and walked away. Throughout the visit, he seemed uneasy about getting in the way of market transactions--which, in a way, is a good sign.

The Thinking Man as Candidate

In May 1991, long before Forbes even thought of seeking office, REASON asked him to describe his political philosophy. "I'm pro-growth," he answered. "If that means enterprise zones, I'm supportive, and if it means increasing the earned income tax credit as a way of enabling people to get off the welfare treadmill, I would be for it. That's really the guiding compass: How do you let people develop their talents with a minimum of interference?"

When it comes to broad free-market principles, Forbes "gets it." At the Claremont McKenna commencement, he said: "In times past, we thought of wealth, as land, armies, piles of gold and jewels, and, sadly, slaves. This new era has made clear what has always been true--that the true source of wealth is the human mind, human imagination, inventiveness, stick-to-it-iveness."

Earlier this year, he wrote an obituary for Julian Simon, the economist who debunked dire forecasts about population and pollution. "In an environment of freedom, more people mean more knowledge and, thus, more breakthroughs and inventions. In no small part due to Simon's work, the Chicken Littles were routed." Perhaps looking ahead to a race against Al Gore, Forbes added a caveat: "But Malthusians never stay down. They are at work today propagating a new menace to frighten us--global warming."

Both Gore and Forbes spoke at the Microsoft CEO summit in May 1997, and their remarks highlighted their philosophical differences. Gore compared free-market types to the heartless Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. Today's Tin Men, he said, "have a cold, calculating bead on the facts and figures and theories that measure the rise and fall of markets," and their economic policy "is simply to slash taxes and get the government entirely out of the way." Their approach failed during the Reagan years, Gore argued, and it cannot work in a high-tech age: "The Tin Men offer no prescription for upgrading the skills of workers or for sparking innovation."

Forbes offered a different vision, calling the tax code "a real dead weight on the economic life in America." Whereas Gore proposed a federal plan to wire classrooms to the Internet, Forbes reached deeper: "Technology won't make a fundamental difference in education as long as the old monopoly is running it." He backed a variety of reforms, including school choice, to "blast those systems open."

Within the party, Forbes is scarcely alone in endorsing such policies. His rhetoric, however, suggests a more sophisticated understanding of government power. When other Republican leaders mention the Cold War, they usually limit their discussion to President Reagan's successful fight to bring down the Soviet Union. That part is true enough, but Forbes stands apart from the others in noticing that the struggle also had a dark side. In a speech at the Cato Institute last year, Forbes said that the Cold War had harmful effects on social and political life. National security, he said, gave the federal government a rationale for enlarging its power over education, research, transportation, and many other fields. By the early 1960s, people concluded that if the government could win two world wars and contain communism, it would do other good things, too. "And thus we got the War on Poverty, Jimmy Carter's moral equivalent of war on the energy crisis, and the war on drugs. War, real or metaphorical, has been the motif of this century." (We'll shortly return to his stand on the drug war.)

Forbes has repeatedly stressed the moral dimensions of his economic beliefs. You don't succeed in business through coercion or deceit, he said in his Claremont McKenna address, "You succeed in business by providing a product and service that people are willing to buy voluntarily from you." He has also discussed the need for honesty and integrity at the highest levels of politics. Many libertarians have praised this line of argument. As Edward Crane, president of the Cato Institute, has written: "I applaud Forbes's decision to include a call for moral leadership along with his libertarian policy proposals, ranging from the flat tax to school choice to Social Security privatization."

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Forbes told the Heritage Foundation, are the "moral basis of a free society." Government's role is to secure those rights--in the order that the Declaration lists them. "Switch the order--putting happiness before liberty, or liberty before life--and you end up with moral squalor." From this belief, Forbes has derived some positions that have pleased social conservatives while disturbing many of his libertarian allies.

Abortion and Drugs

Speaking to the Christian Coalition last September, Forbes got a rousing reaction when he said of America's national creed: "Remember, life begins at conception and ends at natural death." Many news reports quoted that line, but by itself, it carried less significance than reporters thought. They forgot that Forbes had used similar language in the 1996 campaign: "I believe that we should protect life from conception to natural death."

Pleasantly surprised social conservatives speak of Forbes's "conversion experience" while pro-choice Republicans complain about a sell-out to the religious right. In fact, he's been more consistent than either side thinks. On February 10, 1996, he said on CNN's Evans and Novak program: "I think that we have to bring public opinion along each step. I think we can start with a consensus by banning abortions in late pregnancy--barring a life-threatening emergency--barring abortion for purposes of sex selection, no mandatory government funding, parental consent in the case of minors." Robert Novak asked him if he would support a constitutional ban on abortion, provided that public opinion came along. "I wouldn't oppose it, if you have the culture with you," Forbes said.

That's largely his position today, but he has made some adjustments that have major political consequences. When the constitutional issue resurfaced during an Evans and Novak interview earlier this year, Forbes's answer suggested a crucial shift in tone: "I believe in life. I want that constitutional amendment."

Whereas he once downplayed abortion, he now emphasizes the issue. Earlier this year, he even supported a Republican National Committee "litmus test" on partial-birth abortion, which would have denied party funding to candidates who didn't oppose the procedure. (Many anti-abortion Republicans, most prominently Rep. Henry Hyde, opposed the test for dividing the party.) "We should not fund a Republican candidate who opposes partial-birth abortion bans unless there are special circumstances, as determined by a majority of the 165-member RNC," Forbes told The Washington Times. He added that there "may be circumstances, such as support for Rudolph Giuliani in New York, where you might want to make an exception."