Living like a liberal isn’t easy. Just ask Matt Labash, who
tried it for ten days — doing his best to break none of the 538
commandments found in the book: 538 Ways to Live Work and Play
Like a Liberal.
To take one example, the book tells you to question the source
of the foodstuffs at your local grocery or supermarket. Labash
manned up to the task. Seeing a big pile of Chiquita bananas on
display at a Trader Joe’s, he grilled a stock clerk, who played it
safe by referring him to a manager named Sunshine.
“Say, Sunshine,” he said. “You guys stock Chiquita bananas here.
Don’t they lop off their workers’ hands to keep them in line?”
“I’ve heard something like that,” she laughed nervously. “But I
really couldn’t tell you specifics — though you should check our
website if you’re curious about labor conditions.”
At first glance, it might seem that all Labash got from his
valiant and sustained effort of trying to think and live like a
liberal was a brilliantly funny cover
story in the Weekly Standard. But his story also clues
us into an important reality.
Most of us who aren’t liberals are caught up in the same dreary
game of thinking it is necessary to go along with the liberal
playbook in many matters. We do it without even thinking about it.
This is how Labash described the scene at the Weekly
Standard:
Many of his other liberalizing-the-workplace suggestions I skip,
because we already do them. We already recycle. We don’t have
plastic water coolers. We already have environmentally friendly
toilets… Krebs [i.e. the author, Justin Krebs] says to
relax the office dress code. But if our dress code were any more
relaxed, we’d be wearing cut-offs and half-shirts to work, making
us look like some sort of neocon Mountain Dew commercial.
Our acquiescence to liberal norms allows liberals to think that
they have already won the cultural war and have only a mopping up
exercise to do before getting back to the kind of raw political
power that they enjoyed at the outset of the Obama
administration.
This allows the president to act in a magnanimous way — like a
cat playing with a mouse that has no chance of escape. In such a
mood Mr. Obama went out of his way to sing the praises of free
enterprise in his speech on Wednesday to the Associated Press.
Perhaps you didn’t know that Barack Obama might be the second
coming of Milton Friedman or F. A. Hayek. But this is straight from
the official transcript of his speech:
As president, I’ve eliminated dozens of programs that weren’t
working, and announced over 500 regulatory reforms that will save
businesses and taxpayers billions, and put annual domestic spending
on a path to become the smallest share of the economy since Dwight
Eisenhower held this office. I know that the true engine of job
creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington,
which is why I’ve cut taxes for small business owners 17 times over
the last three years.
So I believe deeply that the free market is the greatest force
for economic progress in human history. My mother and grandmother
who raised me instilled the values of self-reliance and personal
responsibility that remain the cornerstone of the American
idea.
Let us pass over the nettlesome facts — beginning with the fact
the assertions that this president has championed regulatory relief
and done anything remotely serious to cut spending is patently
false. There can be no gainsaying the fact that this president has
presided over the biggest increase in the federal budget in the
past 60 years — along with the biggest increase in the size of the
nation’s debt load since World War II. There is also the
inconvenient fact (in Al Gore-speak) of the longest and weakest
recovery from an economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The interesting question is: What did he have to gain from
telling an audience of newspaper editors and reporters of his “deep
belief” in free markets?
Surely, this was another chance for him to bask in the glow of
admiration that he enjoys whenever he speak to the mainstream
media. He knew that this audience would like the rhetorical
contrast between his being willing to speak up for free
enterprise and their (his Republican rivals) incessant
criticism of his record of economic overreach and ineptitude.
Most of the savants in the news media (and I speak with the long
experience of someone who spent a dozen and half years at major
newspapers and magazines) were happy to think: If Mr. Obama can
find something good to say about free enterprise, why can’t they
find something good to say about Solyndra, high-speed rail, and all
the rest? Why can’t Mitt (or Rick or Newt) be more like
Barack?
Of course, the interior monologue that I have invented also
suggests that same reporters and editors who were cheering Mr.
Obama’s remarks at the AP dinner were very much inclined to think
of his paean to free enterprise as part of the eyewash that is
needed to keep moderates and independents from worrying too much
about the perilousness of our current economic course.
Later on this speech, Mr. Obama went on to rail in his usual way
about “trickle-down economics” and the ever-present tendency (as he
sees it) for the rich to prey upon the poor under conditions of
economic freedom. You will never hear this president mimic Milton
Friedman in talking about how free enterprise succeeds precisely
because it is based on the principles of open competition and
voluntary exchange — as opposed to government planning and
coercion.
But was the earlier talk of his belief in free enterprise just
eyewash?
It was nothing but eyewash if you think the president was
“accommodating” free marketing thinking in almost the same way that
he “accommodated” leaders of religious institutions who objected to
the mandate that they had to offer free contraceptives and
abortion-inducting drugs as part of their health care plans. He
dealt with that by ordering insurance companies to make these
benefits “free” to anyone who wanted them.
In doing so, he added insult to injury — imputing that a cost
that might be too great for many people to bear on their own would
also be one that insurance companies could afford to give away at
no charge with passing along the cost to other consumers regardless
of whether they wanted this benefit for themselves or not.
But maybe there is more to it than mere eyewash when Mr. Obama
sings the praises of free enterprise.
Perhaps it is more in the nature of an aide to digestion.
As Winston Churchill famously noted, “It is the habit of a boa
constrictor to besmear the body of its victim with a foul slime
before he devours it.”
