Mike Konczal: Conservatives don’t get that some problems are public, and it’s hurting them: Noted for August 18, 2013

Mike Konczal: Conservatives don’t get that some problems are public, and it’s hurting them:

It might be useful to remember that one of the leading intellectual lights of the early conservative movement, William F. Buckley, got his start red-baiting the great economist Paul Samuelson… accused [him] of preaching a “brand of collectivism.” Buckley conceded that, when it came to them, one wouldn’t find “textbooks who advocated the overthrow, violently or otherwise of all vestiges of capitalism” but that “approach is not needed to accomplish, ultimately, the same transformation.”… Samuelson would later say “make no mistake about it, intimidation often did work in the short run” when it came to campus management and Keynesian textbooks. So what upset Buckley?… What really upset him was the idea that the economy was now a public issue. As Buckley emphasizes in his own paraphrase of Samuelson, “economics has become a matter of public policy, not individual action…. Let us bear in mind that unemployment is a public problem” (italics in original) because “the individual firm, the individual himself, is powerless to cope with the complexities in times of stress.”