Free to do what?

National Review, July 20, 1992 by Tim W. Ferguson

THE CHOSEN THEME for the Philadelphia Society's annual meeting was "The Culture of Statism--Communism Is Dead: Long Live the State!"---a mordant summation of the challenge facing conservatives of all stripes in the Nineties. And the number of different stripes is part of the challenge. At the time of the meeting (the last weekend in April) the Perot Phenomenon was just a glimmer in Larry King's eye, but Pat Buchanan's candidacy had drawn battle lines between conservatives who no longer had their common opposition to the Evil Empire to keep them fighting on the same side. As the Society's president, Daniel Oliver--formerly known as "embattled FTC Chairman Daniel Oliver'--put it in his Saturday luncheon address, the Soviet Union's fall left us free, "but free to do what?" The most basic division is between those who exalt freedom, particularly economic freedom, and those whose primary goal is the encouragement of virtue--a view that traces its lineage to the Founding Fathers: "One cannot imagine Governor Winthrop succumbing to the argument that for reasons of personal liberty and financial abundance the Shining City on a Hill Pharmacy should be allowed to open on Sundays in order to meet the competition in the selling of condoms."

But even those of the Right for whom virtue is a higher priority than economic freedom would argue that "Good government is limited government. In government, less is more." And, for conservatives, the best way to reconcile the different priorities is to insist that as much of government as possible be local.

"Freedom, virtue, prosperity, order, justice, tradition, democracy, limited government, self-restraint--all these are coins the Philadelphia Society was born to handle, and in handling, make sparkle," Mr. Oliver concluded. "What an exhilarating prospect: freed of the Communist threat, we can return to debating first things. Thanks, Mr. Reagan."

The rest of the meeting was devoted to exploring, in one way and another, the questions raised here. How much should conservatives ask government to do? How can we resist its incursions in other areas? And, recurringly, why do people act against both principle and self-interest in meekly accepting an excessive government role?

Joseph Alibrandi--chief executive of the Whittaker Corp., but better known as the spearhead of the education ballot initiative in California--addressed this point in the opening session Friday night: but only after a surprise appearance by Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase, whose work had laid the intellectual foundation for the deregulation that Mr. Oliver had attempted to implement at the FTC.

"NOBEL WINNER FOUND IN RUINS": Coase recalled the headline that appeared when he was finally located in Carthage, after the Nobel Committee had spent several days hunting for him. (It was Reuters, "a profit-making organization," that tracked him down.) "SIDES SPLIT AT PHILADELPHIA SOCIETY" is how another obtuse editor might have tagged the droll professor's stand-up routine.

Mr. Alibrandi sobered the audience up with a diagnosis of the failure of the education establishment to educate, and of the business community to realize how deep the problem goes. Businessmen wanting to do something about the mess, said Mr. Alibrandi, are far more likely to be lured into "feel good" gestures like being "principal for a day," or large pronouncements, like calling for top-down reform for all of America's schools. What Mr. Alibrandi did instead was found ExCEL, which is mounting the ballot initiative to assign half the current per-pupil expenditure in the state, or about $2,500 a year, to school vouchers to foster "creative, competitive innovation." Entrepreneurial teaching ventures will spring up to challenge the education leviathan, in the same way that small Silicon Valley shops have challenged the IBM monolith. Significantly, ExCEL has received entrepreneurial business backing, but the executives of large corporations are holding back.

The same theme was explored in Saturday panels on why statism survives and indeed thrives in business and law. Alan Reynolds, for example, advised that when someone not known for putting the larger good ahead of self-interest seems to be doing so-- look more closely. If a congressman who is normally dead set against free trade is suddenly found supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement, check to see whether the manufacturer that dominates his constituency has a Mexican subsidiary.

On a more principled note, Danny Boggs, a U.S. Appeals Court judge, discussed the temptation, even for conservatives, to weigh the merits of a law rather than its constitutionality. Judge Boggs said he has thought of having a rubber stamp made: "STUPID BUT CONSTITUTIONAL."

Meanwhile, in international affairs, David Boaz pointed out, our concern for "democracy" leads us to elevate majoritarianism over constitutional republicanism.

The closing session is sometimes sleepy, but not this time, thanks to the incendiary Midge Decter. Speaking to the topic of "Culture and the State," Mrs. Decter jumped on a New York Times account of a "rape" of a sixyear-old girl by two boys, age seven. This item, Mrs. Decter suggested, was but gratuitous evidence that in a society saturated by smut of both the mainstream and plain-wrapper variety, "there is nothing left to protect the children from what they don't wish to understand."