David Brooks Should Say Something

David Brooks used to be my least favorite columnist at the NYTimes - at least until Ross Douthat got there.  It had seemed to me, however, that over the course of the last couple of years, while the country has moved farther and farther to the right, Brooks has come to fall, rather than on the right side of the political spectrum, somewhere in the center.  His column today in the NY Times, however should leave readers uncertain as to where his political ideology places him.  

Brooks is critical of what he sees as a lack of psychology, emotion, and morality in liberal economic policies.  And many of his points are good ones.  Our conception of economics is far too rational, calculated, and non-inclusive in its regard for humanity.  But I see this as neither unique to the left nor the right.  Brooks claims that conservatives are now making psychological, emotional, and moral arguments against stimulus or stimulus-equivalent policies, but he seems to have taken an exceptionally generous reading of such arguments and falsely attributed them to only one side of the political spectrum.

Let's take the argument that the national debt is too high, and that it creates an unstable economic environment that discourages investment.  I don't think most liberals would disagree with that.  Neither I nor any of my leftist friends would argue that we should be unconcerned with the national debt.  Liberal are merely suggesting that in times of economic crisis, trimming down the national debt is a secondary concern to fixing immediate problems resulting from the ups and downs of the business cycle.  And if we seek to place the national debt argument in a historical context, as did James Fallows of The Atlantic, it is Republican administrations under which the national debt has burgeoned.  

My concern with Brooks is not that he makes bad arguments, rather that the arguments are incomplete.  He attacks liberals without looking at conservatives, without asking what conservative proposals are on the table.  What is the human component behind the flat tax?  Let's tax the poor and the rich equally.  Or what about a national sales tax?  Equality of taxation negates the possibility of equality of opportunity, a concept which is in itself, a moral argument.  

Has Brooks fallen onto the wrong side of the partisan trap?  I had thought him the one man big enough to stand up and say to the Tea Party, "you guys are psycho."  His critique of liberals in an article entitled "The Two Cultures" leaves that hypothesis clearly in doubt.