Central Planning

In 2009, a New York Times editor published a book titled The Death of Conservatism; the next year, Republicans picked up 63 House seats.¹ After the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee’s “Autopsy” declared the party had to embrace comprehensive immigration reform and soften its message to survive; the party ignored the advice and won the White House in 2016.² The lesson? Conservative principles don’t need constant reinvention. They need to be better understood, articulated more clearly, and defended with greater confidence. And at their core, those principles are remarkably simple:

Spend less than you earn

A household that spends more than it earns, year after year, ends up going bankrupt. Corporations that manage their money recklessly go the way of WeWork and Silicon Valley Bank.³ Nation states are not exempt from that same arithmetic. Fiscal responsibility isn’t cruelty—it’s a precondition for a stable government. Greece learned this the hard way. After years of borrowing to cover spending, its 2009 deficit came in at more than 15% of GDP.⁴ As a result, Greece lost access to credit markets and needed three international bailouts and the largest debt restructuring in history to stay afloat.⁵ Years of austerity followed, along with soaring unemployment.

Trust the people over planners

Free markets aren’t perfect, but they beat a committee that has never met you deciding what you need. During the 1980s, Soviet central planners were responsible for setting prices and production targets for some 24 million different products,⁶ but they could only build real supply-and-demand balances for about 20,000 of them.⁷ The other 23,980,000 prices and targets were, in effect, made up out of thin air. The genius of a free economy is that those millions of small decisions are decided effortlessly by market consumers, no central committee needed.

Defend the institutions that work

Strong families, safe streets, equal justice, and a culture that rewards hard work aren’t merely conservative talking points. They’re the foundations of a healthy society. Conservatism recognizes that these institutions are worth protecting, not because they’re perfect, but because they have proven to provide the best quality of life for the most people, generation after generation. And that’s ultimately what common-sense conservatism is about: living within our means, trusting people to make their own decisions, and preserving the institutions that allow individuals, families, and communities to thrive. None of these ideas is particularly complicated or revolutionary. That’s precisely the point. Good government doesn’t require reinventing the wheel; it simply requires remembering what makes it turn.

This editorial reflects the views of The Rightist editorial staff.

1. Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (Random House, 2009), expanded from his essay “Conservatism Is Dead,” The New Republic, Feb. 2009. See NPR, “Conservatism Dead? Tanenhaus Says So” (Aug. 2009). Republicans gained 63 House seats in the November 2010 midterm elections. ↩︎
2. Republican National Committee, Growth and Opportunity Project (March 18, 2013), which recommended that the party “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” See NPR, “RNC Report: A Postmortem On Failed 2012 Election” (March 18, 2013), and National Review, “CSI: GOP” (March 2013). ↩︎
3. WeWork, once valued at about $47 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2023 after years of losses from costly long-term leases (Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, Nov. 6, 2023). Silicon Valley Bank was seized by regulators on March 10, 2023, in the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history; the Federal Reserve’s own review called it “a textbook case of mismanagement” (Federal Reserve, Review of the Federal Reserve’s Supervision and Regulation of Silicon Valley Bank, April 28, 2023). ↩︎
4. Greece’s 2009 deficit was revised to 15.4% of GDP by Eurostat in November 2010. See CNBC, “Greece Sees Deficit Above Target After Revisions,” and City A.M., “Greece’s 2009 deficit is revised up for third time.” ↩︎
5. Greece’s March 2012 restructuring of roughly €200 billion in privately held debt remains the largest sovereign debt restructuring on record. See Associated Press, “Nasty, brutish and long: A timeline of Greece’s debt crisis” (Aug. 20, 2018). ↩︎
6. Ian Jeffries, A Guide to the Socialist Economies (Routledge, 1989), p. 15, estimates roughly 24 million distinct items produced and consumed in the USSR. See also Russia Beyond, “How did the Soviet economy work and why did it fail?” (“some 25 million types of products” by the late 1980s). ↩︎
7. Michael Manove and Martin L. Weitzman, “Aggregation for Material Balances,” Journal of Comparative Economics 2 (1978): Gosplan prepared material balances for nearly 20,000 commodities. Discussed in Libertarianism.org, “A World without Prices: Economic Calculation in the Soviet Union.” ↩︎