Beautiful piece E.D. Lots of great points, so i will just choose one:

Re: How to get private capital flowing gain?

I work for a Fortune 500 company and without revealing too much, we are basically just tightening the hatches to ride out this storm. We're cutting back on expenses like crazy (everything from corporate travel to bonuses to matching stock contributions). Our company is very conservatively run and we keep a big war chest. So we will ride this out like we have other recessions. A lot of companies are doing this (not to mention a lot of families). So it's going to take a powerful incentive to get these companies to risk spending in uncertain times. The only way I see to get capital flowing again is to provide really fantastic incentives. That's where the government has to get more creative than just throwing money around.

I was reading an article yesterday by Bill Gates and he was talking about a little-known law that gives incentives to drug companies to provide cheap drugs to other countries. The way the government rewards this is that is agrees to have the FDA fast track approval of one other drug for each milestone they meet. By getting their drugs approved faster, these companies can start realizing billions in profits far earlier than they would have. And it doesn't really cost the government anything.

Gates refers to this as 'creative capital'. So what we're doing is still asking companies to invest, to take risks, etc but we try to offset at least some of this through the power of the fed.

To take this down to the more micro level, my wife and I just purchased new windows. We consider it an investment in our home with a return in the form of lower energy bills and hopefully greater appeal to buyers when we sell. This investment put $2000 in the pockets of a local window company, meanwhile we will see a nice tax credit for putting in energy efficent windows. So the govt loses a certain amount of tax revenue but sees a larger amount invested. That's a good scenario in my book.

Mark: Libertarians promoted vouchers first. Fair enough. This may be more evidence that a constantly-evolving parlimentary style of coalitions, centered around issues, would be a better route to take. Libertarians could caucus with liberals on issues like SSM and perhaps immigration, while caucusing with conservatives on education (common approaches / different goals).

Mark:

I agree that conservatism, at least classical American conservatism, tends to not be an agent for change. So then the question is whether or not it is worthwhile as a leading ideology? If it can't implement change, then it would seem its role remains, as you put it, anti-radicalism, or rather, to pump the brakes now and then or to grab the wheel when liberals push too far/too fast. I guess in a culture where we like to have clear leaders and clear subordinates, what would this say about the power structure in Washington?

I'm also thinking about certain other issues like education, where i believe conservatives are actually leading by offering more serious alternatives like vouchers and charter schools. This seems to contradict the reality that both you and I admit to which is that conservatives are usually not out front on these kinds of issues.

Ross Douthat would certainly argue that conservatives can be agents for change as well, with some of the innovative family-centered policies he is suggesting.

From Mark (seems this comment was ripe for reply):

"No. True conservatism is not about recreating long-dead traditions; it is about preserving existing traditions. If SSM were to be legalized today, 100 years from now the appropriate conservative position on SSM would be to preserve it if there were a movement to eliminate it."

Maybe this is where my notion of a Progressive Conservatism verses a static 'Father-Knows-Best' type of conservatism comes into play. I would argue, and Disraeli and T. Roosevelt did as well, that forward movement is inevitable. The contrast between conservastism and liberalism, in my mind, is simply on the pace of change and if it takes old norms into account or throws them out whenever a new idea comes along or there is a crack in the wall of contemporary social barriers.

My position on SSM, to use your example, is that the basic power of marriage i.e. two people taking responsibility for one another and building something that is stronger than its individual pieces, is something we should offer to more people, not less. So that is forward progress I guess. The conservative in me though says let's be really careful as we expand access and watch the results closely. We have our 'traditions' for a reason and I think conservative restraint is what keeps liberals from mashing the accelarator to the floor every chance they get.

To paraphrase something I heard recently....traditions are not good because they are old, they are old because they are good. Thousands of years of mostly man/woman marriage seems to imply something beyond bigotry and close-mindness. I just want to listen to that voice as well as the new ones.

I'm much more scared of Google taking over the world. The products they keep building tools that alter my actual behavior. Google Reader has completely changed the way I use the web in a short period of time and the unlimited mailbox size of Gmail has me still holding on to emails from 3 years ago. I've become a digital packrat!

Kudos to Mark! Ross Douthat just wrote about this on his blog. Will and Ross are two voices that I respect a lot. Big ups for getting their attention.

From Mark:

"So the differences between an open-minded liberal and an open-minded libertarian should ultimately be resolvable, because both liberals and libertarians generally share a similar vision of a morally just society, even if some policies advocated by either group arguably fail to achieve or even outright undermine these goals."

Doesn't that statement describe the basic differences between any two well-intentioned parties ? I would contend that all kind-hearted socialists, conservatives, labor, green, you name it desire a 'morally just society'. Maybe I completely misunderstand libertarianism but I don't see how their vision of 'morally just' is any closer to liberalism than conservatism.

I rarely pretend to be an economic expert but I really like the 'Bad Bank' idea. I would prefer though that the govt create a federalized bank that would purchase the toxic assets and then would have the patience to figure out how to sell them and make a profit.

It's interesting that as a movement, we conservatives have been so self-limiting in size and scope. What I find even more ironic is that Reagan is so often held up as the ideal, yet he would most likely be aghast at the way the GOP big tent has shrunk since he left office. We will keep trimming off the perceived cancers growing on our movement until the primary organism bleeds to death. The coalition that President Obama built was an impressive one, but I believe a fragile one as well. Surely some disaffected groups will peel off over the next four years, but if the GOP is not there to accept them, who will?

Fantastic post. When I think of liberal arts grad programs I think of that quote from Randy Pausch's 'Last Lecture' about how the walls we come to in life are not meant to keep us out, but to force us to prove how much we want something. I like that line in the philosophical sense, but I think there has been a sort of conscious and unconscious collusion on the part of many in the liberals arts to erect those walls as a way of keeping liberal arts majors out of the job market.

Once upon a time, if you had a BA or a BS there were a lot of open doors after college. Now that's just the first small step. The point is that this entire culture has been created around the 'grad-school experience' as you accurately point out. Your undergrad professors start preparing you for it with romanticized tales of late-night drinking and thankless work for tyrant professors. You are told it's completely normal to have 2-3 jobs while in grad school. No one tells you to avoid the lure of easy college loan money (if you have loans to pay off you might take a corporate job rather than asking for a liberal arts career). I always picture those who actually have good jobs in the liberal arts field as being extremely ticked every time a kid makes it through the gauntlet they created and asks for a decent-paying job. That's why now those jobs that use to be found for those with a Master's are slipping towards requiring a PhD. One more brick wall to filter out those job seekers.

I'm not bashing the notion of grad school either, but the reality is that most people with liberal arts degrees end up in completely un-related jobs. I have a BA in history and anthropology and after giving up on grad school in the short term I took a corporate job for way more money. 9 years later the thought of taking a 75% pay cut to pursue my dream is painfully depressing.