Two recent cases show the Supreme Court’s limits and the Left’s
lack thereof. Decided as the Court’s session closed, the cases
struck at the bases of the Voting Rights Act in Texas and
affirmative action in New Haven, Connecticut. They also laid bare
the foundation of all the Left’s programs: a lack of limits. This
pervasive absence in the Left’s agenda is more disturbing than
any particular program: a willingness, if not eagerness, for
unchecked government.
In the Texas Voting Rights case, the Supreme Court stopped just
short of overturning the entire underlying statute. In the New
Haven firefighters’ complaint of reverse discrimination, the
Court ruled for the plaintiffs and against the city, which had
thrown out the results of an exam inconveniently failing to
deliver the diversity it sought.
Interesting on their own, the cases are even more revealing of
the Left’s broader lack of limits to its actions. This broader
trait is most often overlooked because our gaze is focused on
particular programs. Yet the Left is as much defined by its lack
of limits as it is by its taxing and spending. In the end, its
policies become truly egregious precisely because it sets no
limits to its goals.
In many of the Left’s programs, the lack of their limits — an
end date, the total cost, the number of people qualifying, even
the actual goals to be achieved — are all explicit. Take funding
for the arts. Despite the arts existing without public funding,
the Left deems forced funding necessary, with no mention made
that a time will come when it is not. However, there are many
areas in which the public feels uneasy about government
intrusion. Here, the lack of limits on such intrusion is
implicit.
In both cases, the Left’s programs are intended to go on forever
— like the dangling carrot leading a mule, the goal is forever
seen, but never attained. Once they have intruded in an area,
programs will not only continue, but continue to expand.
This lack of limits is endemic to the Left, because it eschews
market solutions. As a result, there is no external regulator to
government in its paradigm. In contrast, conservatives believe in
markets — that private citizens, free to pursue their own
solutions, are the best regulator of their own conduct, affairs,
and resources. Within a market, the interplay between the
public’s demand and a good’s supply governs the extent any
activity is pursued. Where markets already prevail, the goal is
minimum interference. Where markets could exist, they are to be
encouraged.
The Left dismisses the validity of such outcomes — ultimately
dismissing the public’s values themselves. However, the question
remains: If not the markets, what? What are the boundaries on the
Left and its actions, other than the Left itself and its
opinions?
The Left’s opinion on limits is like Justice Potter Stewart’s on
pornography: “I shall not today attempt further to define the
kinds of material but I know it when I see it.” The problem is
that the Left forever fails to see them. When it comes to taxing,
to spending, to redistributing wealth, the Left cannot and will
not say when is enough or where to end.
The Left is forever focused on the failings of the free market.
Unfortunately, we tend to allow the markets to be put on the
defensive — despite the obvious benefits they provide throughout
society — without questioning the alternative. What is the
Left’s external regulator to government power? Its own good
intentions should not be a comforting answer.
However one feels about markets, it is inescapable that they
offer the Right something that the Left’s paradigm does not: an
external check on government’s power. This is not an argument on
market’s economic efficiency, which is already proven by simply
looking at where markets do not exist. It is an argument for
markets’ political and governing importance as well.
This argument is not new. It was propounded decades ago by Nobel
economist F.A. Hayek. In his 1944 classic work, The Road to
Serfdom, he argued: “…the ‘substitution of political for
economic power’ now so often demanded means necessarily the
substitution of power from which there is no escape for a power
which is always limited.”
It is not enough to say we will limit government — even if the
saying is codified in the Constitution — without actually having
a mechanism for limiting it. The continual confrontation between
government and markets goes well beyond economic and social
issues. It goes to the very basis of government and liberty
itself.
