The conservative philosophy is everywhere under attack. Its fundamental principles are being cast aside as shop-worn and out of date. No conservative presidential aspirant this year could excite even enough Republicans to bear the standard aloft. Walker, Perry, Huckabee, Rubio, Fiorina, Carson and finally Cruz shipwrecked on Trump’s populist shoals.
These principles form the conservative doctrine: Small, limited government; low taxes; robust personal freedom; self-determination for persons, families and businesses; an opportunity rather than an entitlement society; power not specifically granted to the federal government in the Constitution is reserved to the states and the people; judges bound by judicial restraint to interpret rather than make the law; saving our nation from unsustainable levels of national debt; helping the poor and disadvantaged to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty through education and job training; allowing business to create well-paying jobs; and a safety net to help the worthy poor.
Liberal pundits regularly declare the conservative ideal to be dead; they joyously dance on its reputed grave. They say its failure is shown by stagnant middle class incomes, broad underemployment, off-the-grid chronic unemployment and limited upward mobility.
Donald Trump has tapped into the anger and frustration of a broad swath of Americans who have not enjoyed recovery from the devastation of the Great Recession. Whether Trump has any policy solutions for their woes, we cannot tell. But he has said enough to know they are not conservative solutions.
There is nothing like a good job to satisfy one’s needs and hopes. Government should have as one of its core missions to enable and encourage the development of good jobs. A person and a family with sufficient income to live and find fulfillment contribute to society in many, many ways, not the least of which is in taxes to support schools and roads and safety net programs for the poor, the disadvantaged and elderly.
No government aid can provide the benefits, economic and psychic, of a good job. Even the Chinese communists have, with the grossest inconsistency, realized this. They have unleashed the forces of capitalism, and economists estimate that in the last decades more than 300 million Chinese have moved out of poverty by joining the modern workforce.
Conservatism is not dead, though a hundred columnists pronounce it so. True conservatism cannot die, though the multitudes forsake it. American conservatism is firmly rooted in the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Conservative principles are not contrived by selfish capitalists to enslave the masses. These principles reflect the natural laws which immutably operate on all mankind and all nations.
Like the law of gravity, one ignores such laws at one’s peril. Their inexorable consequences may, like a mighty river, be stopped up for a spell, but in good time nature’s force will burst through any barrier and swamp those who changed its age-old course. The fruits of limited government and low taxation always have been and always will be a vigorous business sector, robust job creation and a vibrant economy. No society, no matter how well intended, can long sustain itself on borrowing, unreasonably high taxation and punitive regulation of those who invest and risk capital to create jobs.
A Bernie Sanders-like government, which would punish the rich to help the other 99 percent, though it promise free college, health care and other Robin Hood-like benefits, must ultimately fail because in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “eventually you run out of other people’s money.” We will soon reach that point.
If current trends continue, even the United States of America will exhaust its borrowing power and bankrupt itself. The inexorable demands of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will overwhelm our ability to finance them. The natural consequences of our deficits and astronomical national debt are somewhat masked in this artificial no-interest environment. But the day of reckoning must come. Whether sooner or later, America’s debt-financed trajectory will land it in insolvency, dependency on its creditors, and undoubted de-stabilization of the world’s economy.
We can only prosper as we secure to each person the freedom to set her own course without undue government interference and taxation, and as we avoid enslaving our fellow citizens in well-intentioned dependency. This is the unyielding force and truth of conservatism.
Greg Bell is the current president and CEO of the Utah Hospital Association. He is a former Republican lieutenant governor of Utah.