Fenced

Fenced by Andropolis

There’s an old story which illustrates the heart of what I consider to be conservative political philosophy.

There’s a road with a fence down the middle. You come to me and say “let’s get rid of this.”

My response is, “tell me why it’s there, and maybe I’ll let you remove it.”

You should never, ever, make a policy change unless you can say why the policy was enacted in the first place. You should never, ever, make a policy change unless you are able to make the argument for not changing it.

This is a constant problem. People want “reform” (the most debased word in the political lexicon, since most reforms aren’t) but they never seem to understand the costs of change.

When you reduce capital gains taxes you push money into the secondary securities markets and reduce consumption demand. You make the rich richer, and people who work for a living comparatively poorer.

When you get rid of estate taxes you will increase the amount of money that living people have to pay in taxes and help create a class of rich people who never earned their own money.

When you reduce the progressivity of the taxation system overall you reduce growth in demand for general goods and services and increase the demand for financial products and luxury goods.

When you reduce funding for public health you increase the spread of STDs and you create a pool of people who will act as carriers for infectious diseases, thus making even rich people more likely to suffer from and die from disease.

When you make it impossible for rich people to cut large checks to politicians, and don’t allow public funding, you make fundraising take up much more of the time of politicians and require many more compromises, not fewer compromises. They wind up owned by more people, not fewer people.

Examples are endless.


The rule of “reform” is that it moves in cycles. First the rich are taxed lightly. Money concentrates in their hands, the economy financializes, real economic activity grows more slowly than before, the poor and middle class borrow themselves into bankruptcy. The economy crashes. Taxes are shifted to being highly progressive, demand improves. Once things are good for long enough that those who remember are dead or retired (once the Lost Generation lost power) it begins to seem “unfair” to tax the rich so heavily. They get rid of most of it. The economy financializes, real economic activity grows more slowly than before, etc…

In businesses the same things happen. Some manager decides costs are too high and outsources operations. Costs are reduced, and he gets a promotion. The new manager discovers service is worse and that anything extra he wants done costs a lot of money and requires contract renegotiation. He decides that the loss of control is costing them more money than its worth. He brings the operations back inside the company. Control increases, the amount of money being generated increases, but costs also accelerate. He gets promoted. A new manager comes in. He notices that costs are too high….

Those were cyclical examples. Sometimes things aren’t cyclical. Sometimes they’re just bad and lead to bad places. When Spain financialized its economy, it never recovered, because by the time it was clear that there was a problem that the next treasure ship wouldn’t solve, the middle class had been destroyed to the point where it couldn’t be rebuilt. All that was left were poor people and rich useless people living on “incomes.”

When GM and Ford decided that they were finance companies, when they decided to stop being controlled by men who had been engineers, and have suits control them, they let their engineering cultures decay. Now, building lousy cars that aren’t worth what they cost to build, they keep trying to dig themselves out by new financing schemes, by promotions, by cost cutting… But the problem isn’t their financing, the problem isn’t their sales force, the problem isn’t primarily their costs (they could get rid of their pension obligations, their health obligations and cut wages in half and they would just go bankrupt slower), the problem is that they have a lousy engineering culture. And none of what they’re doing is designed to fix that – it’s all spreadsheet management, running around trying to change the numbers in the cells on management’s excel sheets. Which doesn’t make better cars.

Before you make changes, always ask yourself “why was the old system created? What problems was it meant to solve?”

You’ll save yourself endless grief and wasted time if you do. And every time some politician tells you he’s going to “reform” something, ask yourself what the benefits of the old way of doing things were. Make the case for keeping it. Then compare and decide if “reform” is really reform.

Related posts:

  1. Lieberman Contradicts Himself, Lies About Deficits, Threatens to Kill Health Care
  2. Taxing the Rich Will Make Them Go Galt! Um, No
  3. Earth to CBO, Senate Finance and WaPo: “It’s the Economy, Stupid”
  4. Humana Sucks Money Out of Medicare Advantage
  5. Principled Conservatism: American Conservative Union Caught Whoring Itself Out to Highest Bidder