Shorter Stephen Harper: “Don’t steer by the map – look at the damn road!” (But save the map for later.)

This comment, to the faithful of Canada’s youngest political party, is peculiar:

Harper warns Tories to avoid 'ideological' governing

STEVEN CHASE AND BILL CURRY
Globe and Mail Update
November 13, 2008 at 10:15 PM EST

WINNIPEG, OTTAWA — Stephen Harper warned party diehards at a jubilant Conservative convention Thursday night that the Tories must avoid an ideological approach to governing as the economy loses steam.
It was a timely caution. On Friday and Saturday the Conservatives are set to debate changes to policy that risk exposing divisions in their party. And the Harper government is increasingly at risk of running a deficit and under pressure to bail out industries – both measures that its Reform and Canadian Alliance predecessor parties abhorred….

It could be worse. For all his faults, Harper does have one great strength – he’s smarter than George Bush. From the Times of London:

As he sought to deflect European calls for more regulation, President Bush told world leaders flying into Washington yesterday for an emergency meeting that the global financial crisis did not signal the failure of the free market.

Speaking on Wall Street last night, he said: “Government intervention is not a cure-all. While reforms in the financial sector are essential, the solution to today's problems is sustained economic growth. The surest path to that growth is free markets and free people.”

His comments were a veiled warning to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who are pushing for a drastic restructuring of the world's financial regulatory systems...

Most of the papers let this pass without comment – the same old, same old utterances of a delusional lame duck. The whole November 13 address to Wall Street may be seen here: http://www.standardnewswire.com/news/622323592.html)

Smart guy Felix Salmon has a look.

After that, Bush gets downright disingenuous:

We must recognize that government intervention is not a cure-all. For example, some blame the crisis on insufficient regulation of the American mortgage market. But many European countries had much more extensive regulations and still experienced problems almost identical to our own.

Yes, George -- because they bought American mortgages! But he's not done with this theme:

History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market - but too much. We saw this in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because these firms were chartered by Congress, many believed they were backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. Investors put huge amounts of money in Fannie and Freddie, which they used to build up irresponsibly large portfolios of mortgage-backed securities. When the housing market declined, these securities plummeted in value. And it took a taxpayer-funded rescue to keep Fannie and Freddie from collapsing in a way that would have devastated the global financial system. There is a clear lesson: Our aim should not be more government - it should be smarter government.

Oh, come on. The problem with Frannie wasn't "government involvement in the market" -- it was government deliberately exempting Fannie and Freddie from the capital-adequacy rules which applied to everybody else, and thereby encouraging them to maximize the amount of leverage they took on -- all in the name of "encouraging homeownership". What we needed was precisely more government: a Frannie regulator with teeth, and a government which refused to let nominally-private corporations lever up to obviously-dangerous levels. The implicit government guarantee wouldn't have been a problem if it wasn't for the amount of leverage involved.

Go and read, the whole piece is good.

But back to Harper.

Harper, I think, is smarter than Bush mostly because he can’t get away with being dumber. He recognizes that it is harder to get away with pure unsupported ideological pronouncements, much less addresses like Bush’s to Wall Street, in Canada. Of course, Bush is heading into retirement, while that is not part of Harper’s agenda.

When the Canadian economy, at least insofar as it intersects the US economy (which is quite a lot) is going down like a one-winged albatross and the next four or five months or even years are going to be pretty rocky, Harper calls on his people to “avoid 'ideological' governing”.

This is sensible. We have just seen ideological governing; and not just a demo, but a full-dress, orchestral, lights and cameras, all elephants on stage production of Aida with extra peacock feather fans and participation by audience members (mainly being trampled by the elephants). This particular ideology has not been served well by its consequences, except in the bankruptcy litigation sector.

No sane Canadian is going to stand for more ideological governing of this sort until they have recovered from the last round, built up their savings and gotten their jobs back, and Harper knows it. Unlike the USA, Harper could get kicked out of the PM spot any time. He has to show at least a little discretion.

Here’s the big question. If Harper’s “ideological governing” can only be done when things are going well and people have money to spare, but must be abandoned when financial times are bad, then in what sense is that ideology an accurate road map to financial success?

If I can use my driving style only on empty parking lots or open roads in fine weather, but must adopt another style under more demanding conditions, then doesn’t this tell us the fine weather driving style is wasteful and imprudent?

An ideology is only as good as its outcomes. And this winter we are seeing the outcome of eight years of unfettered financial markets and regulators with conflicted interests or inadequate resources.

So get ye to a summit, and get out the fetters. Meanwhile Stephen, when you get back from the G20 perhaps you and your fellows should re-examine the ideology car for weak brakes and dicky steering.