Are people who disagree with us necessarily evil? Of course not. While advocating, defending, or fighting for our own principles and positions, harboring feelings of animosity toward our opponents is a poison that can rob us of our happiness and health.
When I was in law school at Michigan nearly half a century ago, my criminal law professor shared a statement that I’ve never forgotten. He said that a clever person focuses on how he is different from others, while a wise person focuses on what he has in common with others. (Thank you, professor Kamisar.)
I disagree with Grey’s overall politics. In his article, he laments the removal of Al Franken from the Senate “after he was accused of minor sexual improprieties.” His reason: Franken’s resignation shifted the balance of the Senate slightly toward the conservative side, rendering “abortion rights” less secure. Aha, I thought. Would Grey have defended pro-life Brett Kavanaugh’s right to due process last fall during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings?
Cronyism
There is another recent issue where I find myself in agreement with a large number of people on the left. When Amazon announced that it was abandoning its plan to expand its headquarters into Queens, New York, the left exulted for a variety of reasons, most of them nonsensical and riddled with standard class-warfare boilerplate. Typical of the latter, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) effusively wrote on Twitter, “Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world.”What Ocasio-Cortez called “the power of the richest man in the world” (Jeff Bezos) was no match for the power of the NYC political machine. That’s why Bezos wisely bailed out before his company could be fleeced. That prudent decision is a shame for the thousands of New Yorkers who would love to have been “exploited” (Ocasio-Cortez’s characterization) by one of the many six-figure jobs that Amazon would have created in Queens.
All that having been said, I join with the progressives in celebrating that NYC’s taxpayers will no longer have to be stuck paying for a $3 billion subsidy to a private business. There is no principle of justice that justifies such a lavish privilege being bestowed on any private enterprise, much less a business as large and profitable as Amazon. Such political cronyism is unfair and corrupt.
Tragically, such cronyism is often erroneously called “crony capitalism.” The truth is that there is no such thing as “crony capitalism” any more than there is “liquid ice”; both terms are oxymorons. Capitalism is a social system of economic cooperation, based on private property and voluntary exchanges, in which the government plays the role of an impartial referee while consumers choose winners and losers in freely competitive marketplaces. Cronyism, on the other hand, is a repudiation of capitalism. With cronyism, the government abandons its role as impartial arbiter and instead intervenes to enrich special interests at the expense of everybody else. By its very nature, cronyism is a step toward socialism, because both involve the government picking economic winners and losers.
We conservatives oppose cronyism because it is an assault on property rights and the rule of law. We can join with progressives in denouncing a privilege that politicians give to those who neither need it nor deserve it, and who certainly have no just claim to the wealth of their fellow citizens. If there is one area of public policy where left and right may unite today, it would be around the goal of eliminating the cronyism of corporate welfare.
