Why conservatives should listen to Larry the Liquidator (as well as Roger Scruton)

Larry Garfield was right. If you leave money trapped in dying companies, over-valued property and diminishing cash accounts then tomorrow’s great businesses are starved of the investment they need

“The conservative cause has been polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians.”

There is a strand in conservative thinking for which these words from Roger Scruton contain a central truth about their worldview. We read here the old distinction between liberal and conservative - “it isn’t a policy of sewage” argued Disraeli in pushing for an active government committed to improving the conditions of workers. And, along with this, a sense that the liberal idea of business allowed for internationalism against the interests of the nation and the nation’s workers. Scruton also reminds us that conservatism, in as far as it is any sort of ideology, is founded in what we’d today call sociology (despite that discipline’s almost complete corruption by socialism).

The problem is that the idea of business also matters to conservatives. Disraeli and other 19th century conservatives didn’t criticise liberalism because liberalism embraced capitalism but because liberalism didn’t care about the people. Conservatives liked business and especially the idea of business as integral to community: the shop, the mill, the garage and the pub were all businesses and just as important to the idea of place as parks, libraries and well-maintained roads. The romantic ideal of the conservative business is Jorgy Jorgenson’s New England Wire & Cable Company:

“Well, maybe that's true, but it is also true that one day this industry will turn. One day when the yen is weaker, the dollar is stronger, or when we finally begin to rebuild our roads, our bridges, the infrastructure of our country, demand will skyrocket. And when those things happen, we will still be here, stronger because of our ordeal, stronger because we have survived. And the price of our stock will make his offer pale by comparison. God save us if we vote to take his paltry few dollars and run. God save this country if that is truly the wave of the future. We will then have become a nation that makes nothing but hamburgers, creates nothing but lawyers, and sells nothing but tax shelters.”

New England Wire & Cable is, of course, a fictional company created to provide a gentle comedic platform for a discussion at the heart of capitalism. Do we let that company die, with all the negative effect on the community in which it is based, or do we prevent that closure allowing the firm and its community to continue but knowing that what it becomes is a mere shadow, a zombie. In the film (Other People’s Money), the bad capitalist, a spirit of the ideology of big business, responds to Jorgenson’s hope not just with a reminder that the business is dying - “this company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here. It's too late for prayers” - but with a criticism of the argument that the company benefits the wider community:

"We can't because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?" I got two words for that: Who cares? Care about them? Why? They didn't care about you. They sucked you dry. You have no responsibility to them. For the last ten years this company bled your money. Did this community ever say, "We know times are tough. We'll lower taxes, reduce water and sewer." Check it out: You're paying twice what you did ten years ago. And our devoted employees, who have taken no increases for the past three years, are still making twice what they made ten years ago; and our stock - one-sixth what it was ten years ago. Who cares?”

Today the right of politics finds itself firmly in Jorgy Jorgenson’s camp arguing against Larry ‘The Liquidator’ Garfield and his sort. We are presented with spokesmen for the American government telling us they want Apple iPhones glued together in US factories employing US workers and eager ideologues proclaiming the nonsense that America got rich because it had tariffs. The remarkable improvement in the world’s wealth, health and happiness over the last 40 or 50 years is dismissed as the ‘neoliberal experiment’ and criticised in the manner of the Roger Scruton quotation often using another term, ‘globalism’, filched, like ‘neoliberalism’, from the Marxist academics that our new national conservatives criticise with their next breath.

Like Scruton and many conservatives, my heart is with Jorgy Jorgenson. It feels right for us to keep up the ‘tradition’ of making things, manufacturing feels like real industry such that “...makes nothing but hamburgers, creates nothing but lawyers, and sells nothing but tax shelters…” is a telling jibe. The problem, however, is that my head, as should be so for all conservatives, knows that while lifestyle and community businesses are important, they aren’t the main drivers of economic growth. For that growth we need global ambitions as well as a readiness to allow businesses to die. Larry the Liquidator was right:

“You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw”

To put it how the economists Scruton disparages prefer:

“The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism”

If we stop businesses dying for the sake of workers or community the result is a less dynamic economy and, ultimately, poorer workers and a less thriving community. Yet conservatives, instead of helping manage this process within the bounds of heritage and tradition, opt instead to place barriers in the way of change. Ideas like planning controls, licences, tariffs and quotas are as popular these days with conservatives as they are with socialists. Conservatives have lost sight of the balance, the melding of capitalism and social responsibility that Disraeli taught and which men like Konrad Adenauer implemented: “when the world seems large and complex, we need to remember that great world ideals all begin in some home neighborhood”.

The lesson from post-war Germany was that you could build a dynamic economy with a global scope and sustain tradition, social order and a broadly conservative worldview. It isn’t necessary to throw out open trade, big business ideology and international focus in order to have strong communities, protection for workers and a strong national culture. Yet today’s so-called ‘national conservatives’ lost sight of this in preference for a sort of Peronism with industrial strategies, planning controls, tariffs and import substitution.

Roger Scruton is a joy to read but, if his thinking comes to dominate our conservatism, we become little more than reactionaries fearful of international business and left managing the gentle decline of our nations. We’ll talk about the pub as the heart of the community but miss that the pub exists only because the pub has paying customers. People will tell, rightly, of how the church is central to our national identity but miss that churches aren’t buildings, churches are a congregation sharing worship. Folk will point at the great civic, commercial and private architecture while ignoring that this greatness was made possible by the wealth of people and places. Grand town halls in Bradford, Halifax and Rochdale are there because these places were rich from trade yet we want to turn away from trade.

In the end Larry Garfield was right. If you leave money trapped in dying companies, over-valued property and diminishing cash accounts then tomorrow’s great businesses are starved of the investment they need to create value and wealth. And without that new value and new wealth there won’t be the money to spend on keeping our culture and society from falling into decline. We can’t afford the intellectual vanity of dismissing business and trade - “the ascendancy of economics” - because when we do, the result is decline.