Having read a new "policy manifesto" by my old friend, gay conservative MP Nick Boles, Noah Kristula-Green looks to his British and Canadian conservative counterparts and longs for a similar conversation in the US. Nick, for example, pointed out the bleeding obvious:
Until the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it was generally accepted that free markets provided the most efficient way of allocating resources to different economic activities. But firms like Lehman operated in the ultimate free market and ended up destroying themselves, nearly taking the whole capitalist system down with them.
Any intelligent free-market conservative who hasn't absorbed that fact is in rigid denial. To his credit, Alan Greenspan fessed up immediately. Then this:
We have observed that the countries with the lowest levels of income inequality and the lowest levels of social problem have strong education system which seem to achieve good results for the vast majority of children and not just an elite few.
Yes; conservatism can care for the many, not just the few, indeed has a duty to care for the many. Dreher sighs:
[T]he conservative movement and the Republican Party is so driven now by hidebound orthodoxies that it’s by and large unwelcoming to innovative thinking and creative challenge. This is unconservative, if conservatism is understood as the opposite of ideology, as Kirk had it.
(Photo: Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron addresses guests at the Gay Pride reception in the garden at 10 Downing Street, in central London on June 16, 2010. By Andrew Winning/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 