LAS VEGAS — Nearly two hours into the Liberty Ball that closed
out
FreedomFest, Thomas Jefferson, Ben
Franklin, John Adams, and comedic foil Roger Sherman
interrupted the pop-lite meanderings of the colonial
attire-festooned house band to perform “The Spirit of 76.” The
first half of the musical skit, wherein the Founders argue over
who will write the Declaration of Independence, earned its share
of laughter and applause, but nothing to quite match the roar the
met
Steve Forbes as he ascended to the stage as General George
Washington, eyes twinkling above a mile-wide smile despite the
marshmallow-y brace around his neck.
Washington grouses over the lack of a teleprompter, then
casually muses there was “never a good war or bad peace,” a
phrase which Franklin, of course, immediately vows to “borrow.”
“Throw me a royalty,” Washington shoots back before Forbes
steps out of character to ad-lib to the crowd, “We’re
capitalists. Some habits are hard to break.”
Indeed, they can be, although in other quarters — *cough*
Congress *cough* — the free-market and individual
liberty tendencies have been abandoned with the sadly predictable
ease of a political class that increasingly views the skeptical
individual as more hurdle than constituent.
Forbes, however, is ready neither to say “die” nor
“regulate.” The stint as George Washington capped a weekend of
appearances during which (coincidentally?) the publisher,
two-time presidential candidate, and unrepentant champion of
laissez faire often sounded like General Forbes.
“What is happening in America right now is an aberration,”
he declared at one point. “This is the last stand of
statism.”
Forbes is no Ivory Tower chieftain. I sat in on at least a
half dozen small — some very small — breakout sessions
at FreedomFest that Forbes tiptoed into as inconspicuously as
possible, sitting and listening in seemingly placid, thoughtful
reverie, offering the occasional gracious nod when a speaker’s
voice rose a register as she noticed him in the third row or a
well-wisher approached to chat or someone asked him to sign a
copy of his (wonderful) new book,
How Capitalism Will Save Us — a tome which, much as I
love Hayek, many newly aroused/engaged tea partiers would likely
find considerably more accessible (and, therefore, enlightening)
than
Road to Serfdom, at first contact, anyway.
Forbes could easily have stuck to the featured luncheons
and the big room. Instead he got down with the hoi polloi and dug
into the fecund grassroots minutiae. Whenever you saw him
traipsing the halls of Bally’s Resort and Casino between events,
it was never without that singular smile leading the way. And
when he spoke, it was never without the sort of good humor,
passion, and feisty intellectual verve that will be utterly
necessary if we hope to salvage anything from the
ever-strengthening assault of the state.
“I NEEDED BACK SURGERY, AND I FIGURED I better get it while
it’s still legal,” Forbes cracked at the outset of his Friday
morning keynote speech, jabbing a finger up at the thick neck
brace for emphasis. And then he warned us that explicating the
“severe headwinds” the American economy faces would require
wading into the theoretical weeds a bit.
“Monetary policy is not the most exciting subject in the
world,” he cautioned. “You say monetary policy in polite company
and people’s eyes start to go heavy and they nod off. If any of
you are single, on a bad date, and want out, talk about monetary
policy. You will never see that individual again.”
This default conspiracy of silence has, unfortunately, led
to what Forbes called a great “myth of the modern era”: that
government can create money. “Governments can print paper,”
Forbes said, “but real money is created by real people doing real
things.” Manipulating interest rates and overheating the Federal
Reserve printing presses, he said, “juiced” the housing bubble,
encouraged currency speculation, incentivized bad banking and
consumer decisions, and is now injecting uncertainty and
volatility into an economy that hardly needs it.
“Weak money means a weak recovery,” he said. “If cheap
money, ladies and gentlemen, was the way to wealth, today
Zimbabwe and Argentina would own the world.”
While It’s the meddling, stupid doesn’t seem
likely to take off as a political rally slogan anytime soon,
Forbes makes a better case against returning to the “failed
policies of the past” than the current occupant of 1600
Pennsylvania Ave ever has.
“In ancient times you had to barter,” he explained. “Three
thousand years ago if I wanted to sell a subscription to
Forbes magazine or an ad, what would I get? Maybe a
bottle of wine, I don’t know what quality, or a sheep? Maybe goat
cheese or something? Maybe a camel. Then I’d have to figure out
how to turn a camel into something I could pay my writers with.
Money makes transactions infinitely easier.”
Money, of course, has made Barack
Obama and Nancy Pelosi’s transactions infinitely easier — it’s
very good to be a friend of the palace these days, what with the
massive slush funds they’ve set up. For his part, Forbes chooses
to make a distinction between monies exchanged voluntarily and
those confiscated.
“Taxes aren’t just a means of raising revenue for
government, they’re also a price and a burden,” he said. “Tax on
income, price you pay for working. Tax on profit, price you pay
for being successful. Tax on capital gains, price you pay for
taking risks that work out. When you raise the price of good
things — productive work, risk taking, success — you get less
of those things, lower the price you get more of those good
things.”
Capitalism leading to good
things? Surely ye jest! Isn’t capitalism, in fact, to borrow
a chapter title from Forbes latest book, brutal?
Perhaps to the chagrin of the Ayn Rand acolytes in the
audience, Forbes made a moral argument for capitalism that did
not begin with selfishness or end with a denunciation of
altruism, instead focusing on the “complicated circles of
cooperation and community” free enterprise necessarily spawns;
and the empathy operating in those circles inevitably
engenders.
“In a sense we’re like fish swimming in water,” he said.
“Fish don’t know they’re swimming in water. Most people don’t
know what free enterprise capitalism is all about. The moral
basis of it is that it meets the needs and wants of other people.
In a true free market, even if you are that Hollywood caricature
of a businessman — you know, loaded, lusting for money, taking
pleasure in seeing pelicans drown in oil, loving it when people,
especially children, suffer — even if you are that kind of
person, even if you have a nasty personality, the kind that makes
babies cry and dogs bark when you walk down the street, even if
you’re all of that, in a true free market you don’t succeed. You
only succeed if you provide a product or service somebody else
wants.
“They call capitalism soulless, something that drives the
good out of us,” he continued. “It actually allows us to get
outside of our narrow circles of tribes, ethnic groups, and
families. It breaks down those barriers.”
Forbes also rebutted the statist framing of government as a
choice between “massive government regulation or anarchy.”
“That is a false choice…Yes, you have transgressions like
Bernie Madoff. But just because you have fraud in elections
doesn’t mean you do away with free elections. You deal with the
specific transgressions…Madison was right: if men were angels no
government would be necessary. Manifestly we’re not angels,
except for our grandchildren until they reach a certain age. We
do need laws and government and law enforcement.”
Enacting “sensible rules of the road,” however — i.e.
speed limits, turn signals — was a far cry, Forbes insisted,
from three-thousand page obtuse bureaucratic regulatory bills
that essentially “tell you what to drive and where to drive and
when to drive.”
Like, say, I don’t know…the financial reform bill?
“Only Congress would pass a two-thousand page financial
reform bill and not get anything right in it,” Forbes
said, citing the lack of attention to mark-to-market accounting,
Fannie and Freddie, or too big to fail. “It’s amazing.”
EVENTUALLY FORBES TURNED TO THE damned inescapable topic,
Obamacare. General Forbes is not a fan. He’d rather see the
interstate market for insurance opened up, tort reform, and a
targeted deregulation he believes would turn “a hopeless
liability into a growth industry,” the type of industry where if
you ask how much a procedure costs they don’t “assume you’re
uninsured or a lunatic.”
“Ask yourself, ‘Why do we have a health care crisis?’” he
said. “After all, if in any other part of our lives people want
more of something it’s seen as an opportunity. People want more
software, Silicon Valley would be very happy. People want more
cars, Detroit would be very happy. Why is demand for more health
care seen as a disaster? Why is the fact we’re living longer a
disaster? As I get older I kind of like longevity. It’s nice!…
Food is more basic than health care. No food, no nothing. Yet the
government does not run the farms. If it did we would not have
obesity, we’d all be starving.”
Forbes’s diagnosis and prescription is too detailed to be
done justice in this space — it’s laid out well in How
Capitalism Will Save Us, naturally — but it is worth noting
one example he used of free enterprise in medicine: cosmetic
surgery, which has increased sixfold over the last ten years but
has not seen the same inflation as primary health care — in some
cases prices have decreased due to increased market
competition.
“Not that any of you need it,” he told the crowd, then
quickly added, “That’s called pandering. I tried in
politics, but it didn’t work. That’s why I’m here today.”
The troops appeared extraordinarily grateful that he
was.
