Conservative or Not?

Here are some excerpts of a recent speech from a Republican Presidential candidate. Would you consider him conservative or not, based on these excerpts?

If I’m President of this country, I will roll up my sleeves in the first 100 days I’m in office, and I will personally bring together industry, labor, Congressional and state leaders and together we will develop a plan to rebuild America’s automotive leadership. It will be a plan that works for Michigan and that works for the American taxpayer.

…Detroit can only thrive if Washington is an engaged partner, not a disinterested observer. The plan is going to have to include increases in funding for automotive related research…

…Washington should not be a benefactor, but it can and must be a partner…

If we’re going to be the world’s greatest economic power, we also have to invest in the future. It’s time for us to be bold. I will make a five-fold increase – from $4 billion to $20 billion – in our national investment in energy research, fuel technology, materials science, and automotive technology. Let’s invest in our future.

As you know, research spins out new ideas for new products, from both small businesses and large businesses. That’s exactly what’s happened in healthcare. We spend what $30 billion a year in NIH, and we lead the world in healthcare products. In defense, we spend even more. We lead the world in defense products. We also spend money in the space industry. And we lead the world in products coming out of space. Look how industries in these other states that have those advantages that thrive from the spin of other technologies, from our investment there. So if we can invest in healthcare, and defense, and space, why not also invest in energy and fuel technology right here in Michigan?

Michigan can be a laboratory, just like other states – a drawing board, from which we can invent the future…

The auto industry and all its jobs do not have to be lost. And I am one man who will work to transform the industry and save those jobs.

Conservative or not? My answer, and who gave this speech, after the jump.

The quotes are from a speech Mitt Romney gave two weeks ago at the Detroit Economic Club.

As for my question, well of course those quotes aren’t conservative. They aren’t anywhere close to conservative. Government as an “engaged partner” with business, expressed by millions of dollars in taxpayer money? Government making an “investment” in private industry?

Conservatives talk a lot about something called “first principles”. They are the bedrock foundation on which conservative thought is built. The very first of all the first principles is best expressed in a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.

What Romney is promising – his desire to “work to transform” a private industry and “save those jobs” – is in exact opposition to that principle. It is, instead, a hallmark of liberal progressivism that goes back past American politics into the odious coercive and controlling governments of Mussolini and Hitler. That is not to say that Mitt Romney is a Fascist or a Nazi, but he certainly can not claim that merging government and business is a conservative stance. It is anything but. Indeed, we conservatives would be wise to steer in the opposite direction taken by the liberals and their intellectual forefathers. Once such a “cooperation” begins, it is a very small step to go from there to control. After all, if government is wise enough to make investment worth tens of millions of dollars who is to say it’s not wise enough to direct those investments, to decide in what areas that money should be invested, and to finally tell the businesses exactly what to do with the money?

Do you see how quickly this can move from a benign “partnership” to full-fledged government control of business? And make no mistake, that is exactly what the Democratic candidates want in the end. Barak Obama has asked Congress to hold hearings on how much companies pay their executives. He has introduced legislation to force companies to decide executive pay in a particular way. Hillary Clinton would use the bully pulpit of the Presidency to “inveigh against the current level of executive pay” (and it’s no coincidence that she wants to emulate Teddy Roosevelt in that regard, as TR was a notorious meddler in private industry). She has openly condemned the private contract entered into between a mortgage company and its CEO and calls his salary a “reward”.

Mitt Romney’s ideas aren’t as coercive as those of Clinton or Obama. They are, though, the beginning of the path that very quickly leads to there the Democrats want to go. They certainly aren’t conservative ideas and they have no place in the platform of any Republican candidate for President.

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Category: The 2008 Horse Race, The Economy and Your Money