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I'd love to hear a politician say: 'We'll get the second-best minds together on this'
By PJ O'Rourke
(Filed: 13/11/2005)
The British Conservative Party is looking for a saviour, which is understandable - it needs one. But can either of the two Davids, Cameron or Davis, save the Tories? Personally, I'm a Davis man. He's my kind of guy. He's the one who educated himself. It doesn't take much to do what Cameron did, which is to get a good education at the best private school in the country. Davis managed to get himself educated at a lousy state school. That takes commitment.
Cameron appeared on Today and answered the usual question about what he was going to do about some terrible social problem with: "We're going to bring the best minds to solve this one." That was the moment when he lost me. The guy obviously doesn't understand the fundamental truth about politics, which is that the best minds only produce disasters. Scientists, for example, are famously idiots when it comes to politics. I agree with Friedrich Hayek, who said in The Road to Serfdom that the "worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it".
Just once, I'd love to hear a politician say: "We're going to bring the second-best minds together to work on this." The second-best minds are all much more practical people than the first-class guys. More importantly, they are not going to try to do anything very much. They'll fix lunch or take the dog for a walk before they get on to pressing political problems of the day - and by the time lunch is over, it's time to take the dog for another walk and prepare dinner. That's the right order of political priorities. The greatest danger in politics is people who try to do things.
The Conservative Party used to be the party of not doing very much, or at most of only doing things which scaled back government programmes. Conservatives wanted to take government out of people's lives and reduce how much government took from their pockets. But recently, under the influence of Tony Blair, they have started saying that they're no longer the party of cutting back on government: they're really the party of using government to give people things. This is a mistake.
The Tories can't junk all of their economic principles at once. The result is that they end up saying: "We're in favour of giving you all the things the other party say they'll give you - just a little less of them." There's no mileage in that. There are no votes in it, either.
David Cameron looks a lot like Tony Blair did at the same age. He has much of the same manner. The trouble is, Tony Blair has cornered the market in compassionate conservativism. The Tories won't win by saying: "Hey, we're the other compassionate conservatives!" Tony Blair, admittedly, has been ground down by nearly a decade in office. He has started to look like Sir Paul McCartney. Politics is very gruelling. But then politicians deserve it: they deserve to be gruelled. That's the nice thing about picking on politicians: you never have to feel bad about doing it. When you pick on other people, there's an element of human pity that always comes up - but that's completely absent with politicians, which makes it a lot easier to tell the truth about them.
David Cameron's problem is not just that he thinks first class minds have something to offer politics. It's that he doesn't want to tell voters the fundamental truth about economics, which is that getting more from the Government actually means you wind up with less. Ronald Reagan - of average intelligence and spectacular common sense - used to be wonderful at explaining it. He used to say things such as: "The 10 most frightening words in English are: 'I'm from the Federal Government and I'm here to help.' " (The people of New Orleans have recently learned the truth of that one.)
Restraining people from demanding ever bigger hand-outs of other people's money is the chief role of government in a democracy. Alexander Tytler, an 18th century Scottish historian and judge, used to insist that democracy could only last as long as people didn't realise that they could vote themselves as much as they wanted from the public treasury. Democracy has in fact survived that realisation, but only because voters have been persuaded that the other systems of government are so awful that they'll get more under democracy. And they do: in a democracy, everyone steals from everyone else, whereas in all the other systems, a small political elite plunders the population with a ruthlessness and efficiency the people as a whole can never quite manage to do to itself.
Terrible danger lurks in the idea that the government should do more to protect people and give them more of the things they need. France shows you what happens when you base politics on the idea that the government has to give ever-greater protection and benefits to people: the economy simply gets asphyxiated. France's official unemployment rate is 10 per cent; its real rate is probably closer to 40 per cent. Government regulations ensure that business-people can't fire anyone in France. They respond by not hiring anyone. The point being graphically made by those young Muslim men burning cars in the suburbs is that the net result of government programmes to help people is economic sclerosis. These kids can't get jobs. They're effectively locked out of society. So they riot. And in a way, who can blame them?
Contrast that with the position of immigrants, Muslims included, in America. They face prejudice and discrimination - we Americans have taken prejudice and discrimination to new levels - but they also have the opportunity to advance themselves. The government keeps its interference in business decisions at a relatively low level (still too high for my taste, but a lot better than in France). The labour market works: immigrants can get jobs, start businesses, make money, be happy. As a result, immigrants in America don't riot. They are not the cause of America's social and economic ills.
Why have the French institutionalised the idea that you can buy your way out of trouble with higher taxes and more regulations? For, of course, the French have the finest minds. But that's just the problem. They've let the best minds take control of politics. The results have been what they always are once you let the best minds take control: disaster. It's just what Cameron says he's planning to do - and it's why I'm hoping he won't win.
