The Wall Street Journal editorial page has revived its long-dormant tradition of having a “house liberal” grace the page with a weekly editorial. Filling this role, once played by Al Hunt, is Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and other books. His column, which appears on Wednesdays, is called “Fighting Words.”
Frank’s inaugural column took on “The Tragic Irony of Beltway Libertarianism.” As a former “Beltway libertarian” myself, I found the column quite interesting, even if it eventually veers off course. It begins:
Consider the poor Washington libertarian. Everywhere else in America his type is an exotic species, a coffee-shop heretic who quotes from “Atlas Shrugged” and steers every conversation toward Ron Paul or gold. Take him or leave him, he doesn’t care. He is his own master.
Not so the Beltway variety. Here, in the very home of the taxing, regulating leviathan, the libertarian is such a commonplace and unremarkable bird that no one gives him a second glance. Here he is a factotum of the establishment, a tiny voice in a vast choir assembled by business and its tax-exempt front groups to sing the virtues of the entrepreneur.
And therein lies his dilemma. Almost by definition, our young libertarian’s job is to celebrate the profit motive from the offices of a not-for-profit organization. He is subsidized, in other words, to hymn the unsubsidized way of life. Rugged individualism may be his creed, but a rugged individual he ain’t.
Frank’s bottom line is that idealistic free market advocates don’t “sell out” their principles when they leave think tanks or other non-profit policy work for high-paying corporate gigs, because Frank believes this is the underlying logic of hte market itself.
Selling out is not a threat to the market order; selling out is how the market gets its way. Just look at the city in which all these remarks were made. Private-sector Washington is one of the wealthiest places in America. Public-service Washington lags considerably behind. The chance of ditching the one for the other is what accounts for everything from the power of K Street to the infamous “revolving door,” by which a public servant takes a cushy corporate job after engineering some extravagant government favor for the corporation in question – or its clients.
The libertarian nonprofits that line the city’s streets often serve merely to rationalize this operation after the fact, giving a pious shine to the policies that are made in this unholy manner.
What Frank seems to overlook, however, is that “private-sector Washington” is only so wealthy because of the public sector. Washington, D.C. is a company town — and the hometown company is immune to recession. And as the government grows, so does the economic value of influencing government decisions. Were Beltway Libertarians to get their way, lobbyists and political consultants would not be worth so much. In such a world, Washington would be quite a sleepy place, and “selling out” would involve finding a productive, wealth-creating job out in the “real world,” not signing up with a Beltway bandit or other hired gun.