Conservative Columnist: It's Nice Work, If You Can Get It

What do conservative ideologues who've made a fortune peddling the free market theories of F.A. Hayek, Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman do when the fruits of their teaching are contributing to the financial ruin of the United States? There's a three step strategy. First, you deny, deny deny that there's anything wrong. You say there is no recession. You say it's a mental recession. You say liberals are just pessimists, 'nattering naysayers' or socialists. You smugly assert on CNBC or the Wall Street Journal that the market is merely undergoing a "correction." Make sure your portfolio is diversified and wait it out.

But as conservatives are fond of telling us, they are realists (as opposed to pie-in-sky-liberals, who naively believe the world could, you know, maybe be a better place). When it becomes clear that there is, in fact, trouble afoot in the economy, you try step two. You do what George Will just did in a recent column. You lecture your fellow Americans that life can't be measured in dollars and sense. You quote your hero Edmund Burke and say we shouldn't be ruled by "economists and calculators." Don't judge your life in terms of "tables, charts and graphs." That indicates a dessicated mind, a narrow mind, a mind which reduces all things to, (Will's words), "the dust of numeracy." Kick back, take a break, read some Shakespeare and savour the joys of what Burke referred to as "the decent drapery of life." That's step two.

Step three? Ignore step two, find a suitable scapegoat for the country's economic woes, and begin reducing all things to the dust of numeracy again by using tables, charts and graphs. It turns out that the next big economic shitstorm on the horizon is - you guessed it, "improvident union contracts" and inflated employee pensions. Cities all across the land are going bankrupt because they can't afford paying the pensions of their retiring public employees. Don't take my word for it, read here. Will has all the numbers, calculated and recorded in all their their dusty and dessicated numericalness. Wouldn't you know it, the problem is most severe in California. And wouldn't you know it, the problem is worsening in -- you guessed it, San Francisco, where all the liberal socialist homos dwell. It seems that policemen and fireman are making oodles of money working overtime. It even seems that a nurse at the county jail made $128,000 in overtime during the first half of 2008, "putting him on track to top his total 2007 compensation of about $350,000."

"Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it in many places," Will snidely concludes. He doesn't mention the cost of living in San Francisco or bother to go into why city employees have to work so much overtime. But don't worry. He's a bright boy. He'll think of something. He'll throw some of his Georgetown interns on the case. So let's see. Get a good job, work hard, work overtime, work weekends, and try to get ahead. Sounds to me like they're doing what conservatives have always taught us liberal whiners to do.

My faith in free markets is restored. I'm racing down to the Salvation Army and buying back my copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I think I'm also going to light a few candles in front of my portrait of Milton Friedman tonight.