How And Why To Save The RINOs Like Sens. Flake And Corker ... And The GOP

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) (R) pursued by reporters
on the subway beneath the U.S. Capitol.  Flake
announced  he will not be seeking re-election
after his term ends. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/
Getty Images via the author)

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author: With the announced departure of Sens. Flake and Corker (among others) RINOs, i.e. "Republicans In Name Only," are threatened with extinction. Having the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service place them on the Endangered Species list will not be sufficient.

The RINOs' existence is not, primarily, threatened by predators. Their danger stems from loss of habitat.

The source of this crisis? "Stagnation Nation."

How to cure that and save the RINOs? (And, yes, Sen. Flake has a consistently conservative voting record. It takes more.)

Follow along.

First, though, I as a paleoconservative am a natural enemy of RINOs. That said, in the GOP ecosystem RINOs are the predators and we paleoconservatives are the prey. This goes way back.

If my DNA were tested it would likely show my ancestors to be those peaceful flower children the Neanderthals, the progenitors of full-spectrum conservatives. RINOs, like progressives, descended from the violent Cro-Magnons who have been defaming, and trying to exterminate, us Neanderthals for something like 30,000 years. They're still at it.

No hard feelings. The Cro-Magnons obviously were, and their descendants are, threatened by our paleoconservative Neanderthal Higher Culture. So they seek to extirpate us. Understandable.

You might think that I would celebrate the coming extinction of the RINOs.

You would be wrong.

Ethnic cleansing is a Cro-Magnon Thing. We knuckle-draggers just want to live in peace, prosperity, and in harmony with Nature.

What's really going on?

Predators are a natural part of the ecosystem, especially the political ecosystem. Mitch McConnell has polished off more of us Tea Partiers than I can count.

Loss of habitat, not attacks by predators, is what's killing off the RINOs.

The habitat destruction that is driving RINOs to extinction is the loss of equitable prosperity. RINOs can only subsist inside the American Dream. Washington has been throttling the American Dream for a generation, maybe (with intermittent relief during the Reagan and Clinton eras) two generations.

While not well recognized the situation really is dire. As Roger C. Altman recently wrote in The Washington Post:The Trump election likely signals a new era of extreme voter discontent and improbable national election results. Why? Because the so-called American Dream — that each generation would live better than its predecessor — has ended for most of our citizens. Half of the young adults in this country will earn less over their lifetimes than their parents did. Indeed, the whole idea of rising living standards, which defined this country for so long, is a thing of the past for most Americans. More and more voters realize this and are angry about it.He goes on to lay out a grotesque litany of specifics about what I have elsewhere called our economic "Little Dark Age." Read it and weep, especially when he proposes a Bernie "magical money tree" Sanders presidency as the outcome.

How is DC throttling the American Dream? The byword in the nation's capital describes the two dominant political parties as the Stupid Party (the Pachyderms) and the Evil Party (the Donks). Seems about right.

Steve Forbes, for one, has been tutoring, with the patience of a Bodhisattva, the Stupid Party in this home truth: if America had been growing at gold standard growth rates (and equitably, the rising tide lifting all boats rather than the trickle of growth inuring to the elites) for the last 40some years -- since Nixon "temporarily" closed the gold window -- the power of compounding over time would have created an economy fully 50% richer than we have today.

Possibly more.

As Forbes told Nick Gillespie at Reason in August:Not to get too much in the weeds, but in 180 years where we had the gold standard most of the time, from Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, up to the '70s. We had the highest average growth rates in the history of human beings. Despite all the convulsions and everything that had happened. Since then, it's fallen by at least a third, or 50%. Compounded, if we'd had those growth rates for another 40 years, we'd be 50% larger today.That means the US GDP would be $30T rather than $20T. That means that on average your paycheck and nest egg would be 50% bigger than it is today.

A $30T tax base also would mean that the federal budget, rather than in chronic $600B deficit, would be in healthy surplus (assuming we constrained the drunken sailors on the Hill from squandering it).

The last time we had such growth rates was when Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan -- as he frankly if belatedly confessed -- was emulating the gold standard before abandoning that policy and, with it, "the great moderation" and attendant consistent growth. Chairman Greenspan back then publicly fretted that at the rate we were growing we might pay off the national debt.

Uh oh!

With a gold standard growth rate Social Security and Medicare would be solvent. The unfunded public employee pension crisis would never had existed (and, with restored growth, could yet be resolved). There would be plenty of moolah, at all levels of government, with which to rebuild our bridges, tunnels and roads.

Worker shortages would have us ferociously criticizing Mexico for not sending enough immigrants. (One wishes that America would stop treating dear Mexico as a political piñata.)

The kind of free cash flow that consistently robust growth would yield is a predicate to reforming our health insurance system into a state-sponsored social insurance program along Hayekian lines, making it truly universal and affordable! What lines are those?

As I wrote here:Frederick Hayek's Road to Serfdom is at the heart of the libertarian canon. Hayek, like Krugman, received the Nobel Prize in Economics. Here is what Hayek therein had to say about the very issue of state-sponsored universal coverage:

"Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance—where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks—the case the for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. … [T]here is no incompatibility in principle between the state's providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom."Universal affordable health care, great infrastructure, a solvent Social Security and Medicare, etc., are all things at which that RINOs excel. (Also, sounds like a list of President Trump's campaign promises!) These are Good Things as long as they can be responsibly financed through growth rather than confiscatory taxation.

And yet the loss of 50% of our potential economic habitat has created Stagnation Nation. Stagnation is toxic to RINOs, paleoconservatives, and toxic to the GOP as a whole. Stagnation is toxic to Democrats too. It is toxic to the whole political culture.

Stagnation is not healthy for Americans and other living things.

To torture a metaphor here, Washington should be a beautifully balanced wetlands rather than a fetid swamp. What is really wanted here is to flood our habitat with fresh water -- jobs and equitable prosperity -- creating a beautiful Everglades-like wetland (the Everglades being another tragic victim of economic stagnation) in the capital in preference to the Great Dismal Swamp.

Undertaking the romantic but impossible task of "draining the swamp" is, frankly, Quixotic. Flushing it with fresh water is the only way to resolve our predicament.


Yes, size matters. As a "small government" conservative let me point out that there are two ways of making the government "smaller." One is by cutting government spending. That consumes huge amounts of political capital.

The other, more elegant, way is by growing the private sector relative to the size of the government. (You can make a fraction smaller just as well by growing the denominator as by cutting the numerator.)

Growing the private sector generates political capital along with tax revenues, without tax hikes, that can be used to cut tax rates further, pay down the national debt, fix our infrastructure, replace Obamacare, with enough left over squander some on aircraft carriers and other bright shiny objects.

Prosperity is key and primarily comes from two policies: moderate tax rates and good monetary policy. As I previously noted here:As Forbes.com contributor Tim Worstall observed a sentiment to which I very much ascribe: Employment is determined by the combination of monetary and fiscal policy. … Thus it is the actions of the Federal Reserve combined with those of Congress which determines how many jobs there are in America. And nothing else.The GOP -- RINOs and Freedom Caucus members both -- has taken its eye off the ball. Yikes!

So, of course, have the Democrats.

As a practical matter doing, well, anything good is simply impossible in a Stagnation Nation. Do not blame the RINOs -- nor even the Congress -- for a failure to achieve the impossible. We now are stuck in a zero-sum game. Prosperity yields a positive-sum game in which much good can be accomplished.

What to do? The Supply-Side formula of across-the-board lower tax rates and high integrity money has a splendid track record of bringing about the kind of sizzling, equitable, prosperity that would change the political chemistry.

For those who missed it while out working that second job to make ends meet, Steve Forbes, with Elizabeth Ames, laid it out beautifully in Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy—and What We Can Do About It..

For those more drawn to narrative history Lawrence Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic's JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity really is the perfect primer both for policy makers and voters. When I reviewed it, I also observed:Moreover, among the five elements of effectiveness [Peter] Drucker inventories we find this:

"Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done."Priority decisions? There are two "major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results:" good tax policy and good monetary policy.

Yes, I am proclaiming Save the RINOS. Lest I be falsely accused, and not for the first time, of conservative heresy, Sens. Corker and Flake are victims, not heroes, in this epic saga of economic stagnation. Neither has notably sought to make himself into the pivot of policy that would restore a climate of equitable prosperity and thus get Washington out of the rut where it gets "nothing done."

This is neither a mortal sin nor a crime. Yet as the Wizard of Oz said to Dorothy: "I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad Wizard."

The solution? Long ago, at Parcbench, a great little online magazine long vanished from the Web, I proposed that the GOP adopt Tallulahnomics.Nobody, but nobody, has ever put economic policy better than … Tallulah Bankhead. This siren of the silver screen (and, ironically, daughter of 47th House Speaker William Brockman Bankhead) said all there is to say about economic policy: "I've been rich and I've been poor. And Honey, rich is better."

Memo to the GOP presidential hopefuls. We are all Tallulians Now: It is more fun to be rich. Just get with it. End of memo.A reproduction is archived here. And yes, I confess, "I've been rich and I've been poor. And Honey, rich is better." was coined by Beatrice Kaufman. I took the liberty of misattributing it to that wild child, Tallulah, on whom I still crush and who is better remembered.

Apologies, Bea.

So here we are. The key to detoxifying politics is to use government policy to incite a broad wave of equitable prosperity. We know how to do that, the way the world works: lower marginal tax rates equitably applied, good monetary policy (of which the classical gold standard is the gold standard), sensible regulatory policy and free trade.

Will we?

Or will the RINOs, and maybe the whole GOP, maybe even America as a republic, go extinct?

Time to restore the economic habitat in which Republicans of all stripes can flourish. And growth-minded Democrats, too, those who in solidarity with me stand for boosting upward wage mobility. (Wages, like everything, are set by supply and demand. And nothing else. With strong job growth, real wages rise. Anything else is a cheap imitation.)

So: Save the RINOs and thereby ourselves. And, if I may, a request of all RINOs (and progressives).

We paleoconservatives really are the true agents of Peace and Prosperity.

It would be nice, if only for your own sakes, if you would stop trying to exterminate us.
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Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House.

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