abstract: Pat Buchanan has been a true, rock-ribbed conservative: pro-Christianity, pro-individual liberty, pro-free enterprise, anti-Communist, anti-big government, anti-abortion. He's not repudiated these views, but he's seriously muted most of them. He's replaced conservative rhetoric with socialist rhetoric.

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by Andrew Sandlin

As an unwavering Christian conservative, I've been profoundly appreciative of Pat Buchanan's bold, conservative stance for many years. Precisely because of this appreciation, it's been painful to observe his words and actions the last few months. First, he bolted from the Republican Party to Ross Perot's Reform Party. Why he abandoned the GOP is at least understandable, if perhaps unwise; why he embraced the Reform Party is not. The Republican Party is seriously, perhaps terminally, ill; nobody in the National Reform Association would dispute that. Further, it has been caring less and less for Buchanan's views. Still, it has a significant contingent committed to the basics of conservative, pro-liberty truth, though, admittedly, the influence of this contingent seems to be shrinking.

By contrast, the Reform Party has, from its inception, distanced itself from "social issues," the very topics that have been Pat's bread and butter for 30 years. The Reform Party is about changing the political system and hampering free trade, not in recovering the moral fiber of the nation, the program Pat is all about--until recently, that is.

Lo these many years, Pat has been a true, rock-ribbed conservative: pro-Christianity, pro-individual liberty, pro-free enterprise, anti-Communist, anti-big government, anti-abortion. He's not repudiated these views, but he's seriously muted most of them. He's replaced conservative rhetoric with, to be blunt about it, socialist rhetoric.

Pat has been a stalwart advocate of the Ten Commandments, especially, "Thou shalt not kill." On the strength of this biblical commandment, he has courageously battled against abortion. I thank God for his stand. But there are other commandments, including, "Thou shalt not steal." I wish Pat would take time to explore the implications of this commandment as it relates to his position on the free market and international trade. In the area of trade, his position is essentially national socialism.

In a recent joint news conference where he accepted ultra-left-winger Lenora Fulani's endorsement and welcomed her to his campaign, for instance, Pat said, "You will be hard pressed to find a farm in America today where the family farmer is getting the price for his commodity to equal the cost of his production...." This sounds like Marxist reasoning, plain and simple. It's an implicit advocacy of the theory of the "just price," that sellers should get for products what it costs to develop them and get them into the marketplace. It is a cornerstone of Marxist economics. True Christian conservatives know differently. Products and services are worth what people will pay for them. Further, Pat declared:

My campaign is committed to a living wage for every family. What does that mean? It's not an outrageous concept. It goes back a long way, in my tradition [Roman Catholicism]. A hundred years, as a matter of fact, if you go back to some of those encyclicals. It means that one member of the family, one spouse, a husband or wife, ought to be able to earn enough to enable the entire family to live in decency while the other spouse, if they choose, stays home with the younger children or raises the children, as was true in my household, or the one I grew up in. And that's not so wild a dream, but it's our dream.

To recover a single wage-earner family is a great objective, especially if it means moms can stay home and rear their children. We could do this if we drastically lopped the tax rate. But Pat says nothing about tax reduction. In fact, he has said nothing about tax reduction in a long, long time (unless it is a tax reduction compensated by an increase in tariffs; that's not a true tax reduction; it's the substitute of one tax for another).

And just what does it really mean to be "committed to a living wage"? Does it mean to push for slashing taxes so families have fatter paychecks, thereby eliminating the pressure toward a two-wage-earner family? Or does it mean almost the opposite, coercively redistributing wealth to guarantee this arbitrarily devised "living wage"? The first constitutes pro-liberty capitalism, the second pro-slavery socialism. State stealing is still stealing.

As if to forestall just this criticism, Pat stated, "Now, let me say, I'm not and never have been a believer in the politics of envy. I don't believe we ought to take away the money or the wealth of those who have earned it legitimately." But how can you guarantee a "living wage" if you don't cut taxes, or, alternatively, if you don't rearrange taxes to divert other people's money to people who don't get it in the marketplace? Does Pat think high tariffs will do this? High tariffs can guarantee a "living wage" only to state-"protected" industries. They don't guarantee a "living wage" to those people not in state-"protected" industries who must pay the higher market prices that those industries can afford to charge because they are not forced to compete in the marketplace. As Henry Hazlitt showed years ago in his Economics in One Lesson, "protectionism" protects the inefficient or outmoded few by subjecting the vast majority of consumers to pay higher prices for their products or services.

Despite what Pat may say, tariffs are a form of tax, coercive wealth redistribution: they tax consumers in the form of higher prices charged by "protected" industries. Wealth is coercively transferred from the consumer to the employees of certain favored industries in the higher prices consumers are forced to pay. "Protectionism" is the policy of industrial free-loaders who want Big Brother to coerce the rest of us into paying for their inefficiency, obsolescence, or mismanagement. Murray Rothbard assesses the errors of "protectionism" quite well:

As we unravel the tangled web of protectionist argument, we should keep our eye on two essential points: (1) protectionism means force in restraint of trade; and (2) the key is what happens to the consumer. Invariably, we will find that the protectionists are out to cripple, exploit, and impose severe losses not only on foreign consumers but especially on Americans. And since each and every one of us is a consumer, this means that protectionism is out to mulct all of us for the benefit of a specially privileged, subsidized few--and an inefficient few at that: people who cannot make it in a free and unhampered market. (Protectionism and the Destruction of Property, available at (http://mises.org/fullarticle.asp?title=Protectionism&month=1). It is a policy of arbitrary, coercive selectivity and punishment at the hands of Big Brother.

Pat throws down the gauntlet to his conservative colleagues, "I would ask my conservative friends, what in Heaven's name is it we want to conserve any more, if not towns and communities and country?" He apparently thinks that protectionism will do this. If so, he's wrong. The right answer is, "You conserve towns and communities and country by conserving liberty, including enforcement of the commandment, 'Thou shalt not steal'." That means economic liberty.

You don't conserve towns and communities and country by allowing Big Brother to take away people's liberty to purchase what they want in the marketplace at the price they are willing to pay. You don't conserve towns and communities and country by allowing Big Brother to punish efficient, competitive businesses, which want to serve their clients by offering the best products or services at the best price. You don't conserve towns and communities and country by authorizing Big Brother to "protect" the jobs of outmoded or inefficient industries against foreign competition that gives the country's citizens more buying power that, in turn, produces new, efficient industries and thus more jobs at home. You don't conserve towns and communities and country by putting into the hands of the state the power to regulate the economy. But this is precisely what Pat is now advocating.

I agree with Pat's non-interventionism--we should be "doves" when contemplating the military invasion of any other nation's borders and "hawks" when defending our own. This is the older conservative position, far removed from the "neo"-conservatives' mad dash to a New World Order. But Pat is not a consistent non-interventionist. He embraces non-interventionism as a foreign policy, but not as a domestic policy. He correctly wants to keep the state out of every other nation's borders, but, unfortunately, not out of the economy in its own borders. Pat may be militarily non-interventionist, but he's economically interventionist. This is a form of state socialism. The fact that he supports this socialism in the name of patriotism and a strong nation and strong families does not make it any less socialistic.

Pat's national socialism is known as "America First." But raiding the wallets of consumers in order to prop up industries that cannot compete in the market does not put America first; it puts America second to the interests of business elites who want Big Brother to shield them from the market. It is a form of statist coercion, and it is wrong.

Pat is sounding less and less like a conservative all the time. If this is the price of "political reform," let's forget about it. After all, true Christian conservatives are interested chiefly in liberty, not in politics.

P. Andrew Sandlin is executive director of the Chalcedon Foundation and editor of its chief publications, the Chalcedon Report and Chalcedon Symposium Series, as well as former president of the National Reform Association. He has written hundreds of scholarly and popular articles and several monographs, including The Reign of the Righteous. His book The Full Gospel: The Biblical Vocabulary of Salvation is forthcoming. He can be reached at Chalcedon, P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, CA 95251.

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