New Orleans: Conservative Laboratory

There's been a lot of concern expressed lately by liberal commentators and bloggers that the GOP will use the New Orleans and Gulf Coast rebuilding efforts as an opportunity to test out all sorts of conservative pet ideas that have been floating around for years, everything from school vouchers to tax-free enterprise zones. The victims of Katrina, liberals protest, should not be used as guinea pigs in some conservative social experiment.

I tend to think this concern is misguided and somewhat disengenous. After all, we're not talking about experiments in eugenics here. These are legitimate policy ideas, some of which may be good ones. Others may not be such good ideas, but if so, time and experience will bear that out. And we might even learn a thing of two in the process. The fact is that Republicans control all branches of government. And given that fact, it's about time they stopped talking about their brilliant solutions to poverty and started testing them in the real world. Conservative think tanks are great at churning out half-assed policy proposals that sound good in bullet-point form. But when it comes time to test these ideas, conservatives are often quite reluctant. They are well aware that nothing can ruin a great idea faster than trying to implement it.

If liberals and Democrats believe that these ideas will not work, they need to call the GOP's bluff. They need to make Republicans prove that the ideas they've been touting and campaigning on for years can actually work. As Jacob Weisberg writes in his column at Slate:

Liberals, who have failed to muster any kind
of social consensus for a major federal assault
on poverty since LBJ's day, should welcome
conservatives as converts to the cause. They
should hold back on their specific objections—
some of which are valid, some of which are
not—and let Bush have his way with the
reconstruction. Making New Orleans a test
site for conservative social policy ideas could
shake out any number of ways politically. But
all of us have a stake in an experiment that
tells us whether conservative anti-poverty
ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on
poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we
will all be better for its success. And if it fails,
we will have learned something important
about how not to fight poverty.

I couldn't agree more. I suspect, however, that many Democrats aren't all that interested in calling the GOP's bluff here. Weisberg concludes with the following:

Unfortunately, the conservative war on poverty
in New Orleans probably won't take place in any
concerted way, because Republicans and
Democrats are equally terrified about what
might happen. Conservatives don't necessarily
want their panaceas tried out, for fear their utopia
might not be so dreamy after all. Liberals don't
want conservative ideas tested for a different
reason. They're afraid that some of them might
actually work.

We'll see how things play out in the days and week ahead. I sincerely hope that the Democrats will allow some level of policy experimentation to occur. At some point these conservative ideas need to be tested, or we will end up debating the same issues over and over again forever. True liberals should always embrace empiricism and never be afraid to allow old ideas to be challenged.