Having grown up in Brookline, Massachusetts, the Boston suburb where JFK spent his childhood and Ralph Nader received a larger percentage of the vote than George Bush in the 2000 election, I was pretty much your standard liberal Democrat prior to attending college.
It seemed so obvious that the country would better off if liberals were in charge. If the rich didn't have so much political clout, we could easily provide healthcare, quality education, and a basic standard of living to all people. My exemplar of a corporation was something closely resembling Enron. It seemed plain and simple that guns caused deaths and should be highly regulated, if not outlawed. I resented the religious right for trying to outlaw abortion and make gay rights obsolete. The bottom line was that I wanted to help people. I wanted the world to be a more compassionate and livable place.
I came to college expecting to migrate even further to the political left, following in the grand tradition of college students since days of yore. At my first activities fair, I signed up to join the College Democrats and Students for Choice. I spent the pre-election fall semester adorned in Gore/Lieberman pins and voted a straight Democratic ticket in the 2000 election in the state of Missouri. The only regret I had about this decision was that I realized I should have voted for John Ashcroft for Senator – little did I know he'd end up as Attorney General after losing the race.
You're probably expecting me to say that I realized the error of my ways and did a 180 on all my political views, but that is not entirely the case. I still support gay rights, civil liberties, and maybe even affirmative action under certain conditions. Where my position changed was in realizing that the principle of freedom needed to extend into the fiscal arena as well as the social one in order for a society to achieve both justice and prosperity. I found a political framework that was compatible with my desires for liberty, economic efficiency, and a higher standard of living for the poor.
Arriving at this new philosophy was a process that took several years of reading, listening, and observing the world around me. The most important lesson I learned was that well-intentioned policies that sound sensible often have unintended consequences. An example of this principle that liberals are usually amenable to is the War on Drugs. Just as signing into law more severe drug penalties not only failed to reduce drug use but resulted in more crime and more crimeless people thrown into jails, so is the case with many government policies aimed at achieving greater social welfare.
There are unfortunately far too many examples of this to document in one article. There's the luxury tax that was enacted by George Bush Sr. shortly after Americans earnestly read his lips promising no new taxes. While the tax was projected to raise $31 million in revenue, it ended up raising only half that much because rich people simply stopped buying yachts and furs and substituted into other goods or bought these goods overseas. According to a study done for the Joint Economic Committee, the tax destroyed 330 jobs in jewelry manufacturing, 1,470 in the aircraft industry and 7,600 in the boating industry. The job losses cost the government a total of $24.2 million in unemployment benefits and lost income tax revenues. Note that the people most affected by the luxury tax were not the rich, but workers and manufacturers in these industries.
After taking economics, I learned that situations like this were commonplace, and that all taxes resulted in a net loss of wealth to society. Not only that, these taxes were very often unnecessary and ineffective in doing what they purported to do.
Take consumer protection laws, including ones we take for granted like FDA regulations. As John Stossel discusses in his new book "Give me a Break," these regulations are most often the result of political maneuvers on the part of big business to restrict new competition by making the cost of entering the market very high. Likewise with the FDA, thousands of people each year are prevented from accessing drugs that could improve their conditions because the drugs have not gone through the costly and lengthy process of getting FDA-approved.
Are such measures necessary evils? I've come to believe not. Sure, in the absence of regulations some people will sell bad products or even bad medications, but they do that anyway, as those of us who receive daily emails about penis enlargement, breast enhancement, hair-replacement therapy, and miracle diet drugs can attest to. But the companies that are legitimate have a vested interest in developing their brands through selling safe and effective products.
In the same way that Consumer Reports and Underwriters Laboratories exist to help buyers make informed decisions about everything from cars to electronic appliances, under a free market we would see a lot more of these organizations, particularly in the arena of healthcare, where consumers have a vested interest in making good decisions. Those of us who preferred to wait 15 years until sufficient testing had been done on a drug could do so (such testing could easily be done by private agencies, and the risk of bribery would be no more high than it is now under the government system), while those of us who were willing to bear the risk could do so as well.
I could go on for ages about the ways in which government policies make people worse off, especially the underprivileged: zoning laws, the government-granted AMA monopoly on the licensing of physicians, farm subsidies that help American farmers at the expense of third world farmers, corporate welfare, and the list goes on. Even in areas like education and healthcare, I have come to believe that free markets are the answer. The only answer.
I realized that I condemned corporate corruption and waste while taking no notice of government corruption and waste, which is by all accounts a far more common problem. I realized that free markets coupled with property rights are the greatest antidote to poverty. I realized that while I'd learned about Marx in four separate classes during my time in college, there were a myriad of brilliant pro-freedom economists, philosophers, and historians who would never be mentioned in the classroom.
To be honest, my change of opinion was not only an intellectual one, but an aesthetic one. I learned through careful empirical observation that the men who talked the most about the importance of women's liberation were often the ones with a vested self-interest in creating sexually liberated women, (read: Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy), and that I was better off sticking to the old-fashioned guys who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment but held the door for me.
I learned that many liberals were willing to turn the other cheek when a Democrat was waging war or bombing a country that was no threat to the United States, but were quick to label the Republican a warmongering fascist.
I learned that I'd overcome tremendous obstacles to get where I was, even though I wasn't an impoverished Black lesbian.
I learned that many liberals on my college campus were far less interested in tolerance and diversity when it came to points of view different from their own, and that intellectual honesty usually took the back seat to political correctness.
But on a positive note, I learned that Washington University is probably one of the best schools in the country to be a conservative student. Not only are there three separate right-wing organizations and a thriving conservative/libertarian newspaper, but the conservative students are extremely thoughtful, intelligent, and perhaps most importantly, vocal. I am so proud to have been a part of this movement, and my leadership in these organizations has brought me into contact with amazing opportunities and people.
I learned, in my four years of college, that liberals need not have a monopoly on compassion for the underprivileged. Those of us with true humanitarian yearnings will look to freedom as the answer.
May 4, 2004
