The libertarian Tyler Cowen has a blog post up in which he mainly argues that the problem with my book, The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, is that most of the ideas I explore actually aren’t conservative ones. Matt Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld coined the helpful phrase “the incompetence dodge” to describe pro-Iraq war advocates who blame the abysmal prosecution of the war for the failures there while insisting that the idea to invade was still wise. Let’s call Cowen’s explanation for the endless succession of governance failures at the hands of conservative public officials “the ideological purity dodge.” That is, the right-wing Republicans running the government actually failed because they weren’t conservative enough.

Cowen’s critique rather efficiently amounts to roughly three sentences per chapter, so I’ll try to respond with comparable brevity. (His arguments are in the boxes below):

Chapter one: Politicizing the government, and lowering the quality of governance, should not be considered conservative ideas. The incompetence of Bush, a self-professed conservative, doesn't make this so. The Founding Fathers cared about governance, and there have been plenty of bad Democrats. Furthermore when the Clinton administration improved FEMA, it was praised at George Mason and very vocally.

It was the Heritage Foundation, a reliably conservative institution I hope Cowen would agree, that urged Bush upon his inauguration to pack the top levels of federal agencies with as many political appointees as possible so as to “take charge of federal personnel.” Heritage and the conservative movement has long denigrated career civil servants, drawing on public choice theory, and has consistently argued that one of the best ways to “control” government workers is to appoint administrators who would follow the right’s playbook for privatizing, devolving, and cutting public programs. In 2005, reporter Paul Singer of the National Journal called Robert Moffitt at Heritage to ask him about one of the papers he co-authored four years earlier urging Bush to reassert managerial control of government through political appointees. “Reminded of this paper recently, [Moffitt], who has since moved on to other issues at Heritage, dusted off a copy and called a reporter back with a hint of rejoicing in his voice. ‘They apparently really are doing this stuff,’ he said.”

When James Lee Witt transformed FEMA under Clinton from a turkey farm to a model agency (recognized as such by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and, yes, even George Mason), he did so in part by moving experienced civil servants into what had previously been political appointments. Notwithstanding that success, Bush proceeded to follow the conservative movement’s game plan for public management (and I think it’s fair to equate Heritage with the conservative movement), packed the agency with unqualified political appointees who privatized, devolved, and cut. And then we all saw what the results were after Katrina. The same thing has happened throughout virtually every federal department, to similar effect, following the Heritage design.

Chapter two: The Unitary Executive. No way is this a true conservative idea. No way. Checks and balances is a fundamental conservative idea.

Well, as Samuel Alito pointed out, the whole unirary executive concept about executive power began to be formulated in the Reagan Justice Department. Those guys were pretty much all conservatives, wouldn’t you say, Tyler? Then it was nurtured over the years by a number of members of the Federalist Society, another rather conservative institution. Indeed, I think it’s safe to say that only Federalist Society members took the idea seriously. One of those members was John Yoo, another conservative. He ended up in the Justice Department and wrote memos drawing on his interpretation of the unitary executive concept as a basis for bypassing the Geneva Conventions. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, two other reliable conservatives who believe in virtually unconstrained executive power, were made very happy by those memos. Sure, plenty of conservatives think the unitary executive concept as constructed by Yoo goes too far. But the idea, which quite directly led to Abu Ghraib and the widespread use of torture elsewhere (among other encroachments on civil liberties), would never have gone anywhere in the first place had it not been for the abundant and well financed efforts of the conservative movement by way of the Federalist Society.

Chapter three: Iraq. I'll leave this aside for the sake of keeping the comments thread manageable. You'll have a chance to comment on this soon, but not today.

Fine. I can’t wait.

Chapter four: Tax cuts for the rich. Even if you think these were a bad idea, don't blame conservatism. The standard conservative idea is Milton Friedman's nostrum that the real burden of government lies in the level of spending (and how it is spent), not the level of taxation per se.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. If my chapter documenting the connections between the conservative movement, wacky supply-side theorists, the Republican Party, and the bad consequences for the country aren’t enough to convince you, read Jon Chait’s entire book on the subject. Again, only politicians, think tankers, and editorialists who call themselves conservative are constantly pushing for one kind of tax cut after another. No one else is.

Chapter five: State tax-and-spending limits. The Colorado plan for spending limits really didn't work out so well and Anrig scores major points in this chapter. Major, major points. If you have a revisionist take on this, please do tell us in the comments.

Hey, thanks, Tyler! I’m looking for a place to return the favor, but haven’t been able to find one yet. Keep at it, though!

Chapter six: "Smart" regulation. The regulatory burden has grown, for better or worse, with each administration. Anrig criticizes John Graham and his ilk, but his points boil down to disagreement with the conservative view rather than an indictment of what has been tried. We'd all like to have better regulation, and we can all admit it is very hard to get there procedurally.

Actually, I quite specifically draw connections between the right’s enormously effective efforts to undermine virtually the entire regulatory system and concrete harms to public health, safety, and the environment. Whatever the costs or “burden” of regulations, the right habitually and demonstrably downgrades their positive effects. It would be much easier to “get there procedurally” if the conservative movement and various industry groups weren’t constantly engaging in the kind of “sophisticated sabotage” of the system described in this book.

Chapter seven: School choice and vouchers. The available evidence -- see for instance Caroline Hoxby -- suggests that vouchers are an improvement, albeit much overrated by conservatives and libertarians. However that hardly makes the idea bankrupt.

My book presents abundant evidence that the research showing positive effects from school vouchers invariably is produced by a handful of researchers like Hoxby – most of whom have received support from the pro-voucher Olin and Bradley Foundations -- whose work is subsequently found to be fundamentally flawed. The basic problem with vouchers is that moving low-income children from high-poverty public schools to high-poverty private schools doesn’t solve much of anything. But because the right has invested so much in the voucher idea, it is unwilling to accept the kind of disappointing results that it has been only too happy to pound away it in criticizing public schools.

Chapter eight: Health savings accounts and malpractice reform. Health savings accounts are another tax break for savings and they won't much improve U.S. health care. The malpractice crisis is overrated as a cause of high health care costs. Anrig scores points here, but mostly against wheel-spinning. It is worth stressing that "the right" doesn't really have much of a health care plan at all, and that can count as an indictment.

Well said, Tyler.

Chapter nine: Social security privatization. I've argued that the Bush plan was just bad economics, even from a conservative or libertarian point of view. We already had private accounts in the form of Merrill Lynch, so why put a government-engineered, jerry-rigged structure on top of that?

I’m happy to leave it at that as well.

Tyler concludes by writing this:

The bottom line: Two strong points that can be scored against conservatism or market-oriented ideas, as opposed to the Bush Administration. First, state-level tax and spending limits haven't worked out. Second, "the right" doesn't (yet?) have a coherent health care plan. But the biggest problems faced by conservatism or libertarianism are along the lines of "won't ever be tried," not "we just tried it and it failed."

Clearly, the main issue here is that Tyler’s personal brand of libertarianism, or what he is calling conservatism, is very different from what the actual conservative movement itself has been selling in recent decades. Tyler is right that his personal views wouldn’t get very far in the political marketplace. But, in a sense, that actually gets to the heart of the matter.

The wealthy libertarian and conservative families who financed the right’s various think tanks and advocacy institutions, beginning with Heritage in 1973, recognized that their personal hostility to taxes and regulations wouldn’t fly as a politically plausible platform. The real genius underlying the institutions they created was their success in transforming that rudimentary hostility toward government into a set of ideas that sounded politically appealing – ideas that could be sold on the basis that they would help to make for a better society. So instead of just saying, let’s dismantle Social Security, they concocted Social Security privatization, which would purportedly make everyone better off while “strengthening” the existing system.

But that idea was built on falsehoods. So were the other ideas explored in my book – every last one of which most definitely was hatched and marketed by the conservative movement.