Responsabilitatea conservatorismului sau de ce e bun falimentul

Ieri, filosoful conservator Roger Scruton a conferenţiat în România la invitaţia Institutului de Studii Populare (la linkul acesta găsiţi şi înregistrarea dezbaterilor). Câteva dintre lucrurile spuse cred ca sunt foarte importante pentru actuala dezbatere despre soluţiile la criza financiară şi graba de a arunca în stânga şi în dreapta cu stimuli financiari.

“A particular industry, like the motor industry in America, becomes successful and expands. Trade unions use their power to claim privileges which burden the industry with expenses that it cannot easily meet. But easy credit ensures that the product can be sold, Americans being for the most part happier with a General Motors car than with a cheap import from Japan. Suddenly easy credit ceases. For people are only as reliable as their jobs and their virtues. All credit depends upon trust in those things, and will vanish when trust vanishes. The result is a sudden failure of the motor industry.

A conservative response to this situation is to say that it was irresponsible of the motor industry to depend on credit purchases; it was irresponsible to build, on the frail foundation of other people’s promises, an industry which depends upon the continual production of luxury goods. It was particularly irresponsible to build the business in this way, in the face of competition from others who produce cars for a more reliable and less heavily mortgaged market. And it was also irresponsible to give way to union demands for shorter working hours, higher salaries, and elaborate pension rights, at a time when the industry was facing aggressive competition from abroad. If people behave irresponsibly, conservatives believe, then they should bear the cost of their actions. This is a fundamental moral intuition on which much of conservative thinking depends.”

Trei principii evidenţiate de acest exemplu:

1. “States have a tendency to invest in failure. The experience of communism has probably brought this principle home to you. One of the most interesting features of communist economies was the absence of a law of bankruptcy, or procedures for compelling loss-making industries to shut down. A system of ‘economic arbitrage’ operated, to ensure that all existing industries were maintained in being by fictitious economic transfers, even if their sales were non-existent. This meant that the state never had to face problems of mass unemployment, nor did workers have either the incentive or the possibility to transfer to some other, more interesting or more lucrative job. The principal motor of any large economy – human enterprise – remained stalled within the system. And meanwhile the state itself was investing all its resources in subsidising industries without products, or industries with products for which there was no real demand and which were, in real economic terms, failing or bankrupt. Yet the logic of the Keynesian approach to the credit crisis is precisely the same: to invest in industries which are failing, and because they are failing.”

2. “The industries that are queuing up for subsidies in the present crisis are precisely the ones that are already subsidised, and which are most vulnerable to sea-changes in the political and economic climate”

3. “The whole subsidy process has the effect of detaching actions from their consequences, and undermining our sense of who is accountable and why. If the taxpayer can be called upon to pick up the cost of your mistakes, and if no real penalty attaches to them, you are liberated from the need to take precautions and to act responsibly. Your actions have been, in an important sense, ‘demoralised’. And this is one of the root causes of the wider demoralisation of modern societies, that the escape routes from liability are too well charted, and that the government proves always to be the friend of those who transfer their costs.”

Un argument conservator interesant este adus de Roger Scruton şi în relaţie cu sistemul de educaţie, dar despre asta în altă postare...