Jeb Bush offers up an interesting op-ed in today's WSJ, in which he endorsed Congressman Paul Ryan's "smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: 'The right to rise'":
We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck. ...
The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.
David Frum replies, however, that " if we are to recognize this new 'right," don’t we have to begin by thinking seriously about ensuring that Americans have the capacity to make use of the right?," and opines that:
Life chances seem to be mostly set in the first 5 years, if not the first 2. That’s where leaders who are serious about the “right to rise” should be focused.
At a minimum, we ought to be asking: how do we minimize avoidable physical and mental disabilities? The first environment human beings encounter is also probably the most radically unequalizing: the womb. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, pregnancy before age 17 or after age 35, malnutrition, obesity are all risk factors that can stunt human potential even before the child is born. The womb environment is more radically unequalizing in the United States than in most other developed countries. The World Health Organization estimates that 10.6% of North American children are born prematurely as compared to 6.2% in Europe.
Given the direction in which Frum's politics are drifting, presumably he's contemplating expanded government mandates and new positive "rights" to things like health care access.
If so, however, such policies would be wholly inconsistent with the conservatism Frum claims to still embrace. As I noted in an old post on Ronald Reagan's philosophy, conservatives place a strong emphasis on the distinction between positive and negative rights:
Reagan was a proponent of negative rights; most notably, Reagan espoused the right to be left alone. In contrast, what Saletan calls liberty is really a set of positive rights -- a right to an education, a job, etc....
Contrary to Saletan's argument, positive rights cannot be achieved without limiting the liberty of individuals. During the Cold War, for example, totalitarian regimes justified their (egregiously bad) humans rights records by stressing how they achieved positive rights the West left to the vagaries of the market place. Yet, they did so through totalitarian regimes characterized by central planning that proscribed both freedom of contract and private property.
Modern defenders of positive rights, as the following discussion makes clear, claim that such rights can be achieved without a police state:
"Defenders of positive liberty say that there is no need for it to have such totalitarian undertones. ... For example, if the state asks the citizens what they want instead of making that decision for them, positive liberty can be guaranteed without any hint of totalitarianism."
Yet, notice that even here we see the potential for the tyranny of the majority. If the majority thinks all employees should be paid a living wage, the freedom of individual employees to take a lower wage and of individual employers to offer a lower wage is circumscribed. Again, we often see the same sort of disregard for private property and freedom of contract in nominal democracies as in totalitarian regimes.
Kindly go read the whole thing.
I think -- and I stress the word think -- Jeb Bush understands that the "right" to rise is really a way of talking about the net effect of a set of important negative rights that ought to apply to economic life. He wrote that:
Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings.
But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.
Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."
In most cases, the something politicians end up doing constructs economic freedom, raises costs, and discourages growth. I told part of that story in my essay, Corporate Governance and U.S. Capital Market Competitiveness, in which I argue that:
During the first half of the last decade, evidence accumulated that the U.S. capital markets were becoming less competitive relative to their major competitors. The evidence reviewed herein confirms that it was not corporate governance as such that was the problem, but rather corporate governance regulation. In particular, attention focused on such issues as the massive growth in corporate and securities litigation risk and the increasing complexity and cost of the U.S. regulatory scheme.
Tentative efforts towards deregulation largely fell by the wayside in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Instead, massive new regulations came into being, especially in the Dodd Frank Act. The competitive position of U.S. capital markets, however, continues to decline.
This essay argues that litigation and regulatory reform remain essential if U.S. capital markets are to retain their leadership position. Unfortunately, the article concludes that federal corporate governance regulation follows a ratchet effect, in which the regulatory scheme becomes more complex with each financial crisis. If so, significant reform may be difficult to achieve.
Making the right to rise effective thus requires a renewed focus on negative economic rights that limit the power of government officials to respond to demands that they "do something" with new regulations of business.