Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (16506)	11/17/2003 12:58:13 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793623

Here is the "Wall Street Journals" answer to Buchanan's column. THE FIFTH COLUMN Hong Kong Phooey Pat Buchanan takes a shot at prosperity. BY WILLIAM MCGURN Monday, November 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. When Pat Buchanan starts squawking about "Hong Kong values," you can bet he's not referring to a hankering for shark fin soup. Just in case there might be any misunderstanding, the words appear in a story headlined "Wall Street Journal vs. America." It is these "Hong Kong values" whose malignant influence he detects behind the Journal. To which yours truly pleads: guilty. In a certain, sound-bite sort of way "Hong Kong values" makes for a colorful stand-in for "alien," "materialistic" and "amoral" all rolled into one. That only a man completely unacquainted with what these values have meant for real people could ever invoke them as a pejorative is almost beside the point. As with so many other Buchanan locutions, it has less to do with what the words might actually say than as the nearest rhetorical club in his ongoing battle for the conservative soul--which by his own account here he seems to believe his side is losing. With good reason. For all his talk about the "Buchanan brigades" that supposedly lie just over the hill, this is a man who took a Reform Party that captured a respectable 8% of the popular vote in 1996 and drove it down to less than half of 1% in 2000. Which points to two material facts for those of us who do worry about our increasingly naked public square. First, that those in the Reform Party who did buy Mr. Buchanan's economics could not bring themselves to sign onto his social conservatism. Second, that the social conservatives who accounted for Mr. Buchanan's original base in the Republican Party did not follow when he left. So how do you get from here to blaming "Hong Kong values"? The answer is simple. And it's been the root of the Buchanan message since the 1992 New Hampshire primary: Blame the Bushes. In Mr. Buchanan's highly original reading, Bush père got in trouble not by famously reneging on his read-my-lips-no-new-taxes pledge but by embracing--you guessed it!--"the Hong Kong values of the Wall Street Journal." Likewise his son, whom we are told has now fallen under the same spell. As flattering as that may be, the real story is somewhat more complicated. After all, here at Hong Kong Values Central, we generally frown upon such things as steel tariffs, farm subsidies and spending like a drunken sailor. In Mr. Buchanan's mind, no doubt, "Hong Kong values" is not so much about any of these specific differences but about a shared ideology that elevates profits over people. But those who lived and worked in Hong Kong in its glory days (and there are a number of us here) knew it as something far more elevated: a dynamic testament to the unparalleled peace and opportunity delivered by the marriage of open markets and the British common law. It's easy to write this off as the triumph of greed and the law of the jungle. But in the 1950s, when Mao's revolution sent millions teeming into this tiny colony where they clung to the hillsides in their desperate shacks, the Free World speculated whether Hong Kong would go under. Even the colonial government lost its stiff upper lip for a time, dedicating a gloomy chapter in its annual yearbook to what it called "A Problem of People." Yet scarcely three years later Her Majesty's representatives had the grace to acknowledge that the very refugees they feared might seal Hong Kong's doom in fact ushered in an economic renaissance. Already I can picture the headline in the next American Conservative: "'Mexican immigrants in shanties beneficial to U.S. economy,' says Wall Street Journal." That might be fun to write. But the very different lessons we would take from this slice of Hong Kong history is only incidentally about our differing views of immigration. The more fundamental divide is over our belief--the market's belief--that human beings are assets and not liabilities. At least they have proved so in societies of ordered liberty rooted in private property. Of late the fashion has been for the faction motivated by classical liberalism and that motivated by traditional morality to forsake a winning coalition in favor of countervailing edicts excommunicating the other for its allegedly corrupting influence. The truth is that, notwithstanding real differences, the two strains complement one another. Libertarians occasionally need reminding that the market requires virtues and a rule of law that it cannot itself create. Less well appreciated is that social conservatives likewise need the injection of optimism that comes from a market-based appreciation for what man might yet, even in his fallen state, accomplish for himself. For if the perennial temptation of the left is utopianism, that of the right is despair. Everywhere Mr. Buchanan looks, he sees American decline and another Bush sellout. Yet to take the most contested social issue of the day, the one around which the original Buchanan base was constituted, it's telling that it was the Republican Party of this President Bush that passed and just had signed into law the first national restriction on abortion since Roe v. Wade. While it was Mr. Buchanan who, with his eye on $13 million in matching government funds, jumped to a party founded on the proposition that social issues shouldn't even be discussed. In his riff against "Hong Kong values," Mr. Buchanan believes he is attacking a form of rationalism that elevates efficiency over morality. But the morality divorced from economic efficiency he proposes in its stead will only serve, as it so manifestly has in his own case, to marginalize conservatism back to where it was before the founding of National Review and the rise of Ronald Reagan: a losing catalog of resentments. Mr. McGurn is the Journal's chief editorial writer. opinionjournal.com