A vital assumption of conservative thought is that a certain tidiness
in economic arrangements is desirable, from several points of view.
That tidiness contributes a knowledge of what it is that a community
is up to, which knowledge is indispensable to realistic appraisals, in
turn essential to informed judgments, in turn a prerequisite to en-
lightened democracy. The maxim used to be: "There is no such thing
as a free lunch." Professor Milton Friedman, a top libertarian theo-
rist, has revised that maxim in deference to the sophisticated objection
that any voluntary exchange (I give you my butter, you give me your
shoes), presupposes an incremental mutual benefit which, in rigid
philosophical terms, must be thought of as "free." He reached back
to a far older maxim: "Always look a gift horse in the mouth." The
meaning of which is that the "free" lunch one's children receive at
school may be "free" in the highfalutin sense we have identified, but
is not "free" in the sense most people believe it to be. Someone paid
the dairy for the milk; and if the tax base is broad, as it most clearly
is in the United States, that person is more likely than not, the eco-
nomic razzle-dazzle having been unscrambled, you-know-who.

It is, then, a matter of importance to know the net economic mean-
ing of what we do because a knowledge of the truth is important.
Secondly, it is important to know what is the economic truth in
order to observe the canons of equity. The presumption, in conserva-
tive thought, is that that which is yours, is yours. There are myriad
reasons why, and myriad circumstances when, a part of that which
is yours should be taken from you—whether to go to the government
because the government performs certain indisputably essential serv-
ices in your behalf (for instance paying the police and the army) or
to other people—because said other people are otherwise forlorn.
The circumstantial arguments quite expectedly rage as to whether
this or that is a necessary function 'of the government under these
criteria; whether this or that person is indeed helpless; whether the
kind of help this person demonstrably needs might not be made
available by voluntary, rather than by coerced, contributions to his
welfare. It is the presumption which is important to bear in mind,
the presumption that what is the individual's is his, unless the
evidence clearly supports that it needs to be taken from him—in
which case it should be taken from him by impartially designed laws
unanimated by class prejudice. Here the presumption touches the
metaphysical, i.e., in its insistence that the individual's property is
to begin with a part of himself; that property is, as Aristotle put it,
one of the "predicables," i.e., attributes, of the human being.

And -- third -- a conservative assumption is that the private arrange-
ment tends to be superior to the public arrangement because (a) it  
is more flexible, permitting an infinity of adjustments based on an
infinity of preferences; because (b) it is less categorical, and there-    
fore less arbitrary; because (c) it is less wasteful, in that it is dis-
ciplined by the competing pressures of alternative modes of activity;
because (d) it is more ingenious, in that it encourages a continuing
competition for a variety of approaches; and because (e) it resists
the natural tendency toward the centripetalization of power in govern-
ment, which is the prime historical oppressor, and needs therefore
constant domestication.

And, finally, the presumption is in favor of the individual measured
as such; i.e., irrespective of his political leverage. Political leverage
tends to gravitate to the wealthy, to the influential., to the organized,
to the (upper case) Minority. The presumption, under the rule of
law, favors the individual irrespective of his political power, whether
exercised through the manipulation of his money, of his labor union,
of his race, of his religion, of his ideology. And an individual's right
is no less so because individuals, coming together, might form a
majority. We are increasingly trained to grieve only over the rights
of (certain) minorities.

Those presumptions, in favor of realism (economic truth), private  
property (equity), the private sector (as opposed to the public), the 
individual (as opposed to the bloc), greatly illuminate the problems
that have plagued New York. For instance, it is simply unrealistic
to suppose that New York can hope to take from the federal govern-
ment more than it gives to the federal government. It will not man-
age to do this until it succeeds in building up a preferential relation-
ship to Washington which is antisocial in nature, i.e., effected at the
expense of other cities and other areas whose representatives in
Washington are less influential than New York's—a development
which the Constitution explicitly sought to prevent by establishing
the Senate of the United States.
                                   
Inexplicit redistributionism runs counter to one of the conservative
presumptions. To give to the poor because the poor cannot otherwise
make do is one thing. To give to the poor merely because they are
poorer than you is, by conservative standards, something you should
do on your own behalf, not on your own and also your neighbor's.

To ask the government to do something which might very well be
otherwise effectively accomplished by nongovernmental action argues
against one of the presumptions. It is especially contrary to conserva-
tive presumptions to propose that a higher echelon of government
should undertake a job which could perfectly well be done by a lower
echelon of government (in violation of the principle of "subsidi-
arity").[4] (Is it really necessary to secure federal money for a study of
juvenile delinquency in New York City) ?

There are of course other features of the conservative syndrome,
perhaps not exactly in the rank of presumptions. Call them attitudes
—which bear on municipal problems. Conservatism is, for instance,
notoriously anti-milleniarist; with the result that, to use James Burn-
ham's example, conservatives know that you can't do away with
Skid Row. They know, also, that some human beings, as Albert Jay
Nock stressed in his heuristic lectures at the University of Virginia,
are educable, others only trainable.[5] Conservatives believe that there
are rational limits to politics, that politics should not, in the lofty
phrase of Voegelin, attempt to "immanentize the eschaton." And con-
servatives believe, along with Dr. Johnson, that the "end of political
liberty is personal liberty."

NOTES:
4. A part of Catholic social doctrine, enunciated by Leo XIII and endorsed by every one of his successors. The principle holds that public agencies ought not to undertake a job that can be done by a private agency, and that no higher (i.e., more centralized) public agency should undertake to do something a lower public agency can handle.

5. Albert Jay Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1932).

"This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.

The Sharon Statement

Adopted in conference at Sharon, Connecticut, on 11 September 1960.

In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.

We, as young conservatives, believe:

That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual's use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;

That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

That the genius of the Constitution- the division of powers- is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;

That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;

That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;

That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;

That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace; and

That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?