Mike Huckabee Should Study Economics

Last week Newsmax reported that Mike Huckabee felt that too many conservatives are too focused on economic rather than social issues. Newsmax's Ralph C. Hallow writes:

"In a sign of lingering divisions on the right, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee blasted last week's Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest meeting of conservatives in the nation, saying it was unrepresentative of the Republican Party as a whole.

"'CPAC has become increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years - one of the reasons I didn't go this year,' said the former Southern Baptist minister, who enjoys a devoted following among Christian conservative voters and who ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008."

I have told my colleagues in New York's Republican Liberty Caucus the same thing I'm going to say to Huckabee. The religious movement cannot go it alone, nor can the libertarian movement. Together they can win. That means that libertarians need to compromise on certain social issues and Christian-oriented Republicans need to respect (compromise is not the right word because libertarian economics is totally compatible with Christianity) libertarians' economics concerns.

During the Bush years big government apologists, who often were really neo-conservatives, adopted Christian rhetoric but advocated policies that subsidized banking and the pharmaceutical industry supposedly in a move toward "compassionate conservativsm". Those of us who are committed libertarians will no longer stand for this. I would rather see Obama in the White House in 2012 than another Republican like George Bush or Mike Huckabee.

So Mr. Huckabee has to make up his mind. Either he will work with freedom oriented Americans, or he will remain a newscaster.

Moreover, the idea that there is anything "compassionate" or "social justice" oriented about Keynesian economics is ridiculous. Anyone who thinks that should contact the Foundation for Economic Education and obtain a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Laissez-faire capitalism provides greater social justice than any other economic system in human history.

Governor Huckabee, it's time to study economics.