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Our ideas are better, we're compassionate, and history is on our side. With conservatives running wild in D.C., America needs us.

BusinessWeek, January 27, 2004

After reading last week's column on farming, an old pal sent me an e-mail laying out a libertarian critique of my position (see BW Online, 1/21/04, "Saving the Family Farm, Organically"). Why is the consolidation of the farm economy a bad thing? he asked. Why do we need so many farmers, anyway?

I didn't fire off my initial pointed reaction, which would have been: "These are hard-working families you're talking about in such harsh terms. How would you feel if I asked, 'Why do we need so many 8-year-olds (he has three kids)? What's their economic utility?' Or, perhaps more to the point, if I asked, 'Why on earth do we need so many magazine editors (his profession)?' I sure have my doubts about your economic utility."

LIBERAL SMARTS. Joking aside, the more I thought about this imaginary exchange, the more I realized that it explains why I'm not a conservative. As a business reporter for 25 years and a hater of bureaucracy, I should by all rights be a libertarian like the many BW Online readers who regularly hammer me in critical e-mails. Yet -- horror of horrors -- I'm a leftie instead. Yup, the cat's out of the bag. I'm one of them -- that dreaded bete noire of Rush Limbaugh and conservatives everywhere -- a liberal journalist.

How can I be so stupid, so naiïvely retro in my beliefs? Read on, and you may find some ideas you don't hear much anymore in today's careerist- and conservative-dominated U.S. news media. I think any intelligent citizen should have liberal leanings at this point.

First, let's define our terms. Basically, there are two kinds of American conservatives: libertarians and traditionalists. And, though author and TV talking head Ann Coulter would rather give birth to kittens than admit it, each has something in common with liberals. Traditional conservatives, like liberals, often favor government activism. It's just that they want the government to promote stability and tradition, while liberals want it to promote equality. A good example of traditional conservatism is President Bush's recent proposal to spend $1.5 billion in government money on promoting heterosexual marriage.

MARKET FAILURES. Libertarian conservatives, on the other hand, have an almost religious faith in the power of competition and individual enterprise. To that end, they advocate maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of government in people's lives. This, obviously, is very different from liberalism, but it often leads libertarian conservatives to take liberal-seeming positions. For instance, the libertarian New York Times columnist William Safire is in favor of gay marriage because he thinks government should butt out of citizens' private lives and believes heterosexual marriage might benefit from some competition.

Though I agree with Safire on gay marriage, I think his form of conservatism is even more damaging to the national good than the traditional kind. Traditional conservatism obviously has had a big effect on American values, but polls show that most Americans remain refreshingly tolerant and centrist in their social views. By contrast, it seems to me that an almost fanatical belief in the power of markets -- the basic tenet of libertarianism -- now permeates American thought. And I think a major reason the nation is pursuing so many idiotic policies is that Americans so often substitute blind faith in markets for rationality.

My first problem with libertarianism is that its internal logic is circular. If something isn't working, the solution is always the same: We need even freer markets and even less regulation. If you don't start with a mystical faith in free markets, the arguments fall apart. And to a libertarian, it's sacrilegious to look at the real world and conclude the obvious: That market dynamics alone simply can't solve every social and political problem.

COMMON PROBLEMS. Libertarianism is also based on a fictional model of society that denigrates the importance of community and cooperation to our safety and happiness. It posits a sort of jungle competition in which individuals strive alone for advantage. The problem is that Americans haven't lived that way since colonial times. We're crammed into cities and towns, where we need police and fire protection, roads, and mass transit, and where pollution, crime, and other common problems can blight the lives of individuals.

Libertarians don't acknowledge that the best way to deal with these evils is communal action based on common values (i.e., "liberal" policy initiatives). They also refuse to acknowledge how much society depends on what, in economic terms, are "irrational" sacrifices by others. Examples are the firefighters and police officers who rushed into the World Trade Center on September 11, teachers and nurses who work long hours for relatively low pay, and the soldiers now risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan for the common defense.

That brings us to my third major problem with libertarianism -- that many forces in human affairs (love, hate, tribal loyalties among them) -- are far more powerful than material greed, the motivation to which market theory gives primacy. I fear we're going to discover that the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, where hate and tribalism may trump the market forces we are counting on to peacefully revolutionize those nations.

BUSTED TRUST. Sappy as it sounds, one of the strengths of liberalism is that it admits the power of love, tolerance, and community in human affairs. Traditional conservatism does this, too, of course, though with different values. The trouble is that many conservatives give tolerance short shrift. They also fail to acknowledge all that would be lost if they had prevailed in the past.

Without liberal activists, there would have been no civil rights movement, no equality, or even the vote for women. How many black conservatives would favor returning to the 1930s norms of racial justice? How many conservative women would agree to give up the right to vote? Essentially conservatives argue, "Our predecessors were wrong, but you can trust our judgment this time around." Oh, sure we can.

Yet deep faith in pure market forces -- a belief that unites traditional and libertarian conservatives -- is now so prevalent in American life that it often blinds us to rational alternatives. A good example is mainstream American agriculture's almost wholesale adoption of genetically modified crops. This may -- as its adherents claim -- make all the economic sense in the world. But the plain fact is that huge majorities of people in most foreign nations are suspicious of food containing GMOs and refuse to eat it.

SERVICE ECONOMY? In my view, U.S. agriculture risks being frozen out of export markets around the world. A trade policy based on battering foreigners to buy food they consider poison makes sense only if you believe market efficiency will always trump cultural values -- which it plainly won't.

An even more telling example is the nation's reaction -- or lack of reaction -- to the loss of manufacturing jobs. The U.S. is now steadily becoming the world's first large service economy, with virtually no manufacturing capabilities of its own. Pure faith in untrammeled free-marketplace economics tells you everything's going to be fine, but logic tells you a classic "liberal" strategy -- an industrial policy -- might be in order.

That's because in a war or other major crisis it would be suicide to let all domestic production of essential goods disappear. That's why the U.S. government already owns or subsidizes tank production and shipyards -- we need tanks and ships to wage war. Similarly, it wouldn't be wise to let domestic farming dwindle to the point where we can't feed our own population. And it would be wise for conservatives to get behind some "liberal" policy initiatives, such as promoting alternative fuels and energy conservation.

That probably won't happen because, at least for now, liberal values and policies are in disrepute. As a nation, we're incapable of saying, "Look, let's decide where our common values would lead us and intervene selectively in the market to promote those values." Instead, we'll pretend to maintain market freedom while intervening on an ad hoc basis, as President Bush did when he temporarily protected the steel industry. Dozens of industries will get huge government handouts in the name of national security. And I suspect it will cost a lot more and be a lot less effective than if we just admitted we need an industrial policy. But then, that's a liberal notion, so it must be loony.