The Road to Freedom:
How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise
By Arthur C. Brooks
Basic Books, 224 pages
The nasty, petty, and seemingly endless campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has featured ferocious sniping between cultural and economic conservatives. Confrontations erupted between indignant true believers, who insisted on emphasizing moral and social issues, and hard-headed fiscal fixers, who saw the only path to electoral victory in exclusive concentration on the perilous state of the nation’s finances. As the general election struggle begins in earnest and Mitt Romney tries to channel both passion and pragmatism, Arthur Brooks’s new book makes a powerful case that economic issues are, at their core, moral issues. The Road to Freedom argues that if we fail to present economic issues in a moral context, conservatives will lose the fight to pandering promoters of what he calls the “statist quo.”
As president of the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington think tank known for its no-nonsense defenses of free enterprise, Brooks sounds surprisingly evangelistic in his demand for placing present-day politics in a moral perspective. “The dogged reliance on materialistic arguments is a gift to statists,” he writes. “It allows them to paint free enterprise advocates as selfish and motivated only by money. Those who would expand the government have successfully appropriated the language of morality for their own political ends; redistributionist policies, they have claimed to great effect, are fairer, kinder and more virtuous.”
Brooks makes a gallant effort to deprive the left of its favorite F-word (fairness) and to arm the right with a potent F-word all its own (freedom). Were it not for the attempt to reference Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 masterpiece The Road to Serfdom in his title, Brooks might have called his book Freedom Is Fair, as he argues that government activism immorally punishes the hardworking and prosperous with burdens they don’t deserve while poisoning the indolent and dysfunctional with rewards they never earned. The wealthy and the middle class alike may suffer from growth-killing levels of taxation and regulation, but, he says, the poor fare worst of all through the resulting culture of dependency and helplessness.
The book’s most fascinating chapter highlights the devastating impact of “unearned success,” citing numerous studies that prove providing more money does little to make people happier unless they perceive that they deserve their new wealth. A famous 1978 project at the University of Michigan traced the long-term status of major lottery winners and found that as time passed, “they were actually worse off in happiness than before they had won.” As in his 2008 book Gross National Happiness, Brooks asks and answers a fundamental question: “If not money, then what do people really crave? The answer is earned success, the ability to create value with your life or in the lives of others. It does not come from a lottery check or an inheritance.” If this is true, then merely shoveling money to the poor won’t make them happy, and if they remain unhappy, the research strongly suggests they’ll remain poor. This logic also argues for the inevitable failure of governmental attempts to stimulate the economy through spending and borrowing, since even such temporary infusions of unearned cash will do little to alleviate the nation’s sour and sullen mood of the moment.
Brooks refuses to give ground on the fairness debate, artfully dissecting the distinction between “redistributive fairness” and “meritocratic fairness.” Because the former idea imposes an abstract scheme with little connection to questions of personal productivity, its embrace produces more cynical and less optimistic societies where the populace sees rewards as random and irrational while doubting the connection between virtue and achievement. Brooks cites a 2005 study of 29 countries by researchers at Harvard and MIT who found that “where taxes are higher and money is redistributed through social programs, people are much more likely to believe that luck, not merit, is the driving force behind success.” In that sense, efforts toward redistributive fairness promote perceptions of chaotic injustice far more than they encourage grateful appreciation of righteous order.
Though Brooks avoids the now unfashionable term, he might privately count himself a “compassionate conservative” because his book features a consistent focus on the fate of the poor. Like Hayek, he acknowledges the need for a safety net to guarantee a nominal standard of living, but he insists that this guarantee must not become “a means to increase material equality, a way to take any but the most grievous risks out of life, a way to pass out rewards to groups based on demographics or political clout, or a source of benefits to the middle class.” He also argues for the profound moral value of personal involvement with private charity, for the benefactors as well as the beneficiaries.
In making his case for the importance of moral arguments, Brooks deploys some startling quotations from unlikely sources. In the midst of his New Deal spending spree, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a State of the Union Address in 1935 that condemned the prospect of public reliance on federal handouts. “Continued dependence on (government support) induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber,” Roosevelt suggested. “To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Neither Coolidge, nor Reagan, nor Charles Murray himself could have made the point more forcefully. In the last days of the Soviet Empire, even Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to rescue and restructure his failing, flailing regime with the language of absolute right and wrong. “A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country,” he hopefully announced. “A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking [are] under way.”
Not all world-historical figures fare favorably in the review of big government’s growth helpfully provided in The Road to Freedom. The most chilling statement comes from Professor Woodrow Wilson nearly 30 years before his presidency in his 1887 essay “Socialism and Democracy.” Wilson saw little need to balance the power of the state with any sense of inalienable individual rights. “Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals,” he wrote. “Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.”
Brooks concludes with a brief review of current controversies in the interest of “Winning the Moral Debate on the Policy Issues that Matter Most to Americans.” The bullet points here all seem reasonable and thoughtful, but none count as especially bold, original, or inspired. Like most contemporary conservatives, the author recommends a thorough tax overhaul (and, ideally, a consumption tax replacing the income tax) as well as formal caps on federal spending, handing Medicaid back to the states, and raising the retirement age for Medicare. The specific, quotidian policy prescriptions that conclude his volume hardly live up to the rousing and ringing moral declarations that began it, and they expose this fine book’s most conspicuous failing: the refusal to consider practical politics.
Brooks lays out his vivid map of The Road to Freedom without any suggestions on how to persuade sufficient numbers of American voters to board campaign buses to travel that road. For instance, he notes the terrifying fact that the vast majority of Americans already take more money from the federal government in payments and services than they ever send to Washington in any form of taxes. “In 2010, before any of President Obama’s policies were implemented, 60 percent of families received more from the government than they paid in taxes,” he writes. “That number is inching toward 70 percent, as the president pushes through various pieces of his agenda.” But how can conservatives defeat that agenda if doing so means promising the public that they will need to give more and get less? Walter Mondale, the last presidential candidate to run on a platform of shared sacrifice, managed to lose 49 states to Ronald Reagan in 1984.
“Most Americans have withdrawn more from the Social Security and Medicare systems than they ever paid into them,” Brooks acknowledges grimly. “In the coming decades, most people will have to pay in more than they take out, costing tens of trillions of dollars.” But elsewhere in his text he suggests that one sure way to get shot when visiting a retirement community is to tell the seniors the truth—that they’re getting more in benefits than they ever contributed to the system.
Brooks also fails to acknowledge a glaring contradiction in some of the public-opinion data he reports. While a record 81 percent pronounce themselves “dissatisfied” with the performance of the government, and express intense skepticism about the nation’s leadership, similarly commanding majorities pronounce themselves thoroughly pleased with their own jobs, families, neighborhoods and even their economic prospects. In survey after survey, Americans look with foreboding at the sad state of society at large, while expressing gratitude and confidence about their personal situations. They seem to see their own families as tiny islands of decency and prosperity in the midst of dark, churning seas of immorality, dysfunction, and misrule.
This explains the anomalous situation (noted but unexamined by Brooks) whereby citizens want government to leave them alone while wanting the deployment of ambitious social programs (and more spending) to solve the manifold problems of everyone else. The Obama pitch on “economic justice” seems perfectly suited to exploit this divided worldview: promising the 80 percent of Americans who describe themselves as middle class that they’ll remain unmolested and never feel a thing while the president grabs much-needed cash from greedy plutocrats on one end of the income spectrum in order to provide medical care, college scholarships, and assorted benefits to the poor and unfortunate at the other.
As long as the president assures self-satisfied middle-class Americans that he’ll keep away from their door, it will be difficult for conservatives to make a moral case against him. That’s especially true if that case includes calls for “sacrifice” in terms of subtracting benefits or adding taxes. Because most people remain convinced that they’re doing well while the government isn’t, it may actually seem immoral to interfere with the segment of the country that feels it is succeeding in order to rescue an inept political class that’s going down. The people feel a powerful instinct to defend their own values against any effort to remake them in the government’s ugly and incompetent image, whether that effort hews to the right or the left.
The only solution requires a relentless focus on bottom-up rather than top-down change. If conservatives can recast their underlying project as an effort to reform the entire political system through a sudden injection of wholesome, functional, middle-class values, they may yet gain the moral traction they need to build long-term majorities.
