WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Alexander Salter

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Alexander Salter is a professor of economics at Texas Tech University and a signatory of the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles. He is the author of more than 150 academic and popular articles and has authored four books. He joins WRFH to discuss an op-ed with RealClearPolitics titled, “Conservatives, Not Progressives, Are Freedom’s Champions,” arguing the progressive agenda fundamentally undermines the core principles of freedom and personal responsibility that are essential to America's identity.From 09/13/24

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, and I'm Quinn Delamator. With me today is Alexander Salter, Professor of Economics at the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, and the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at Texas Tech's Free Market Institute. Thank you so much for being with me today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Oh, of course. So a few weeks ago at the Democratic National National Center, Convention, progressives tried to claim that they are the true protectors of Americans' freedoms, not Republicans, and you disagree with that. And you're also a signatory of the freedom

conservatism statement of principles, as well as the author of many works on this, including your recent article on Real Clear Politics titled Conservatives, not Progressives, are Freedom's Champions. So you're very passionate about this. Could you tell me about the misleading claims of progressives in their recent attempts to rebrand as freedom champions? This really is, I think, an attempt to pull the wool over the public's eyes. All the language that we're hearing about freedom and patriotism and historic Americana, that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense in the context of progressivism. This is a political philosophy and a political movement that for more than a century

has been explicitly devoted to taxing, regulating, monitoring, surveilling, controlling, nudging, all about top-down social control, largely divorced from the historical traditions of order liberty that we have in American institutions. So I can understand why progressos would want to try this right now. I can understand the rhetorical appeal. But for anybody who knows anything about the history of this movement, it just does not pass muster. Yes, for sure. So what do you think are some of the different fundamental philosophical philosophical differences between progressives and conservatives and their approaches to liberty. Conservatives, especially freedom conservatives, are devoted to ordered liberty.

It's the freedom that supports virtue. It is not a freedom to do whatever you want. It is not a freedom to pursue vice. Instead, it recognizes that liberty is a necessary component of a flourishing life, a life well lived. And American institutions, including our historic commitments to checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism. All these things are institutions which support liberty as embodied in our natural rights. Progressivism, in contrast, is explicitly devoted to eschewing these things. Instead of representative government, they want an uncontrolled bureaucracy, perhaps with an energetic president making law for himself. They want the judiciary to rubber stamp and say that the Constitution means whatever progressives happen to want it to

mean. Rather than any conception of a concrete commitment to natural rights as historically understood by Americans, progressivism says, no, we're not in favor of that. We're in favor of a managerial society run by an intellectual and bureaucratic elite because we ultimately know it's better for you and we're going to use the levers of government to give it to you. This is not speculation and this is not invective. You can look all the way back to Woodrow Wilson, my president of the United States in the early 20th century, who explicitly said, look, the American system is obsolete, checks and balances don't work, separation of powers hasn't done anything but make government irresponsible. We need coherent, unconstrained executive authority to manage society's problems from on high.

Congress, that can sort of be a national sounding board for values, the judiciary that should help us pursue modern enlightened administration. Perhaps you can look at this and say in some sense that that project makes sense, the only I'm certain of is this is not what America has understood to be the order of liberty. This is not the foundation of our nation. Right. Yes. Could you give me some concrete examples of how you've seen conservatives really do well at this and championing that liberty in some ways that progressives have tried but honestly failed in our current society today? I would look at the freedom conservative statement of principles. That's probably the best place to find, in my opinion, a coherent philosophical agenda for carrying forward the best reformist traditions within conservatism to make sure that we can actually restore ordered liberty in the 21st century.

Reform is not revolution. Reform takes principles as given and tries to make sure our existing institutions and policies better reflect those principles. Progressivism, in contrast, wants to completely discard the principles and do something else entirely. So when I look at the Freedom Conservative movement and I see a group of scholars, intellectuals, journalists, activists, former politicians and public servants who are devoted to restoring federalism and actually giving state and local governments a meaningful say over important public affairs, to control the growth of spending, to make sure that we have the strength militarily to defend ourselves, to do all the things that we expect a coherent, government to do founded on the idea that government's job is to protect natural rights. That's what I see in freedom conservatism. In progressivism, though, I see something completely different. Just look at how Vice President Harris understands freedom. In recent weeks, she's called for price caps on groceries, price controls. That's not going to get you anything other than bare shelves. You're not going to

find anything economically accomplished other than creating shortages there. Look at her tax proposal. raising individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, taxes on unrealized capital gains, this is a surefire recipe to dry up and impede the functioning of capital markets. And if you want economic growth, if you want material flourishing, you need a robust and efficient capital allocation sector. How about her plans to subsidize home purchases for new home buyers? If you give one family $25,000 to buy a new home, yeah, they're probably much better off. But if you offer that to a great many families, to the entire housing market, that's not going to do anything except drive up prices and make a housing crisis that we already have even worse.

The only coherent definition of freedom that I can see progress as espousing is the positive freedom to specific material things, which might be valuable, but ultimately their policies don't deliver that. In fact, they deliver the opposite material deprivations instead of material flourishing. and they're only capable of delivering on these positive freedoms by undermining the freedoms expressed in our natural rights, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the right to be free from arbitrary force and fraud. This is not our commitment to order liberty that America has historically held, and I think that American citizens would be wise to embrace the conservative understanding and not the progressive understanding. Those are such insightful thoughts. viewers who are just tuning in, I'm Quinn Delamator, and this is Alexander Salter on Radio Free Hillsdale.

So I know that you had brought up the idea of reform. And just looking into the future here, if Donald Trump is elected in November, what are some ideas or suggestions that you think that he should implement to move forward with this reform to better things from where they are now? That is a huge question. I have a long. list of things that I would like to see. I would like to see restraint in the rate of growth of federal spending. I don't think that actual cuts are politically feasible right now, but the nice thing is we can actually get back on a sustainable fiscal path if we simply control the rate at which the federal spending grows. We don't have to make the books balance right away. We can take our time.

The important thing is that we get control over the process. We need to make the tax cuts that we solve the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. We need to continue deregulating. More importantly, perhaps than all of that, is we need to continue devolving power from Washington, D.C. to the states. Federalism is supposed to be experimental democracy. There is no reason that Massachusetts needs the same health care policy as New York, as Texas, as Oregon, as Alabama. The circumstances of time and place are very different in these states. urbanization rates, kinds of jobs that people have, percentages of the population that dwells in urban versus rural areas,

there's no reason to think that health care policy or housing policy or any major policy area is going to work in terms of a one-size-fits-all solution. We need to get away from this idea that Washington, D.C. is where most of the governing that we care about takes place. That is fundamentally antithetical to the vision of the founding fathers. That's not going to work. to get back to a more sustainable small C and capital C constitutional foundation if we actually want to enjoy order liberty in our lifetimes. So kind of going off of that, what do you think of the rise of

the freedom conservatism movement and its focus on safeguarding America's founding principles? I'm a big fan of the freedom conservatism movement. As you noted, I'm a signatory of their statement of principles. Yes. Freedom conservatism distinguishes itself from the sort of new nationalist kind of conservatism that has arisen in recent years. And I am personally skeptical of a nationalist version of conservatism. Now, that being said, I do not think that the national version of conservatism is necessarily outside the bounds of America's historical traditions of order of liberty. In many ways, you can see the debates going on between national conservatives and freedom conservatives as an extension of the debate that we've always had in this country

between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Just because Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed strongly about the nature of the republic that they created did not mean that one was outside the realm of an acceptable opinion. You don't write one off, you don't write one of those two interlocutors off and writing the history of our republic. We've always been having these debates. And so even though I think that many national conservative policy proposals are imprudent, I am not prepared to say there outside the realm of America's historical commitment to order liberty. And that's where the difference is with progressivism. I simply don't think that most of what progressives are calling for today works,

either in terms of policy or in terms of basic constitutional commitments to what makes the American nation unique. So you bring up this idea of these differences and ideology between conservatives and liberals. And just one more question before I let you go. here. What do you think are the effects of cancel culture on society today? I know that that's kind of a broader question, but even just with what you were bringing up with the different, even conservative ideological perspectives, I mean, we have people all over the board here. So what do you think is the major effect of cancel culture today? I don't like the idea of using massive social penalties

to chill speech. I think that we're ultimately going to get better ideas when we can contest over ideas in a free environment. So in order for that to work, people need to be free to voice bad ideas, in part so we can sort out in the public square what the good ideas and the bad ideas actually are. What I see cancel culture is doing

is getting people to censor themselves, to silence themselves, to misrepresent themselves in public. There's a certain lack of liberality in the older, and I would argue better understanding of the word liberal. We should be free to have these debates over important issues without fear of personal repercussions, because otherwise, how are we going to know which ideas are actually going to stand the test of time? We sometimes abuse the metaphor of a marketplace for ideas. And the reason why I'm a little bit skeptical of that metaphor is because there's no real guarantee that good ideas are going to

triumph over bad, marketable ideas, perhaps over unmarketable ideas. But in order to actually figure out which ideas are going to result in the policies that we want, just because we're not going to have the automatic contest, one doesn't mean we don't need to have the contest. We need to have these debates. And if people are constantly looking over their shoulders, if people are constantly saying, I better not say that because I fear I'm going to get in trouble. That's fundamentally unwity of a free nation. Yes, there are some opinions which are odious. Yes, we should not hold odious opinions, but we should not accept a situation where people are in constant fear of voicing proposals for the public good because they're worried that they're going to be social

or professional ramifications for voicing them. That does not conduce to a free nation. That's how you get censorship. That's how you get a monoculture of ideas. That's how you get political fashion dominating sound analysis. I don't think it works. I don't think that it's what the framers had in mind when they wanted to foster a condition of free speech in this country. Well, Mr. Salter, thank you so much for joining us today and for giving all your insight.

We really appreciate it. Thank you. Our guest has been Alexander Salter, and I'm Quinn Delamator on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.