I’m very fond of Robert Reich, but I think he is fundamentally wrong in discussing how conservatives have public and private morality backwards. Yesterday, he noted that Mitt Romney thinks that banks—in particular, J. P. Morgan Chase—should be allowed to do whatever they want, because the market will figure it out. We all know how well that’s worked historically.
At the same time, Romney thinks that people’s private morality—whom to marry or when to have children—should be controlled by the government.
Reich writes:
Reich is right about this from a policy standpoint. But I don’t think this is how the conservatives elites see it. Instead, they are looking for ways to remove all societal restrictions on what the wealthy can do. Taxes take away freedom from the rich. But abortion rights and even marriage laws do not affect them. They can buy their way around them. If a wealthy man wants to marry another man, he can set up the legal framework to have everything but the title “marriage.” And if he really wants the title, he can just live full time in another country. As for abortion? If a wealthy man wants his daughter to have an abortion, he’ll just fly her to Amsterdam.[1]
The morality of Romney and his peers is that of the aristocracy. The rich are rich because they are better than the rest of us. Therefore, there should be no limits on their behavior. And in general, there aren’t.[2]
[1] Note that this is largely what the Democratic Party has become since President Clinton. The people who fund the Democrats are socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. They still want to screw the poor. They believe in gay rights for rich people. A homeless gay man doesn’t think that his life is bad because he can’t marry another man. And so on among the various Democratic Party constituents.
[2] Here’s a nice video that goes along with Reich’s article: