These Republicans Not Only Failed To Drain The Swamp – They Spread It

One of the many promises Donald Trump made during his term as president was to drain the D.C. swamp. It was a great term that was elastic enough to contain whatever hated item/person/institution/practice the crowd wanted, yet catchy enough to fit on a bumper sticker.

It's also turned out to be utterly meaningless, particularly when one considers just how little has changed in official Washington. And in many ways, how it's gotten much worse. As Mario Loyola writes in RealClear Policy, among the most diehard defenders of the swamp are the Republicans who promised to drain it:

Their fatal error is to think that creating cartels for American companies helps American workers and puts ‘America First.' It is the same misdiagnosis that leads people to blame the Rust Belt and dying communities of Appalachia on globalization and free trade when the real culprit was progressive regulation and taxation that chased both capital and labor away.

Hence the spectacle of supposedly anti-swamp Republicans shilling for every special interest racket with lobbyists in Washington. Consider the Jones Act, the sugar program, and the ethanol program, to name just three. These programs, all of which would be criminal violations of the antitrust laws if the government wasn't part of the conspiracy, are simply frauds on the public. To defend them on ‘made in America' grounds is to aid and abet a fraud against working class people who don't realize they're being taken advantage of.

The entire piece is a bracing read that skewers the right for its steady march toward statism. The quibble I have is with its citation of Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek and his famous essay “Why I am Not a Conservative.” Loyola writes:

In it [Hayek] described the conservatives of landed aristocracy and autarchic nationalism, who preferred crown monopolies to competition, and tariffs to free trade. Like the socialist, he wrote, that “conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes.”

That conservatism was discredited by the Great Depression whose trade wars it did so much to exacerbate – and by the world war that followed. Hopefully, this time around the conservatism of constitutional government and free markets can win the argument without such a costly demonstration.

This makes an enormous assumption about conservatism in the U.S. today: that it exists at all.

Maybe it does still exist, in pockets, or a “Remnant” as Albert Jay Nock once described it. If so then someday, perhaps, a conservatism that really does embrace limited, constitutional government and free markets – rather than a Republican version of legal plunder – will be able to offer an antidote to the statist claptrap the major parties peddle today.

Just don't count on it happening any time soon.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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