Lousy salesmen

Republicans are lousy salesmen for economic liberalism, and that is a shame.

There are few times in recent history when this country has needed clear, eloquent and compelling spokespeople for capitalism more than it does now.

This recession has made it easy for critics of free-market policies to advance their claims in areas that have nothing to do with the housing bubble or the financial crisis. Meanwhile, unprecedented government intervention to stabilize the economy has come with plenty of risk for overreach, much of it already realized.

We are lucky that the American people, while obviously upset with Wall Street and incompetent regulators, are still skeptical of government’s role in the economy. We are also lucky that the Democratic Party, while full of intellectually lazy capitalist bashers, includes plenty of very smart people who are unlikely to descend into empty populism.

But when it comes to having a thoughtful and constructive opposition party, we are not so lucky.

I am not the biggest fan of personal anecdotes, but I find it interesting that I have moved steadily to the right on the economic spectrum, yet I would award almost no credit for that to the Republican Party or most conservatives.

I came out of high school as one of those vaguely socialist liberal kids. That Marxist way of looking at capitalism as just a system designed to defend the wealthy appealed to me, and most of my interest in politics was in fighting some idea of the “establishment.”

I heard Republicans talk about government waste in exaggerated terms. Poverty seemed to be brushed off as a problem of work ethic, and the beneficiaries of entitlement programs were portrayed as lazy freeloaders. Republicans talked about capitalism like it was another culture war issue.

Most of them still do.

I ran across the arguments that shaped my economic liberalism mostly by accident. One of my high school teachers assigned readings from The Economist. I stumbled across one of the smartest intellectuals connected to the Republican Party, a Harvard economics professor named Gregory Mankiw, because he was the author of my economics textbook.

Capitalism was finally explained to me in more normative terms. It was portrayed as the system that gave people the best incentives in a world of scarce resources.

Issues like the minimum wage were finally explained not in terms of people deserving a basic amount of income, but instead in terms of whether or not a price floor on wages did anything more than increase unemployment.

I didn’t become a libertarian, but studying economics taught me a whole different way of looking at the idea of efficiency.

Similarly, Republicans won’t necessarily create die-hard conservatives by better explaining (and understanding) their economics, but they would surely rack up more votes.

I guess the assumption you learn to make when first studying economics, that people act rationally for their own self-interest, really does oversimplify things.