More on what is wrong with conservatism

Stong conservatives cannot run effective competitive companies. Here is Alan Wolfe's explanation for that:

"Conservatives fail because those who hate government cannot run it very well – the theme of my recent article in the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly. But then there is also what can be called conservative management theory. Conservatives have strong ideas about how organizations ought to be run – and those ideas invariably make them run badly.

One such idea is that no information hostile to those in charge should ever leak out. The result, however, is that no good information ever leaks in. The smaller the number of decision-makers, the less the knowledge on which decisions are based. It is not good to keep a tight ship if the ship always sinks.

Conservatives love to proclaim courage a virtue, and a manly one at that. But loyalty to the man at the top, another conservative management idea, encourages fawning among all those below. If you want to fill an organization from top to bottom with chickens, give medals of freedom to as many people as you can.

Finally, conservatives view organizations in exactly the opposite way they treat markets. The economy, they insist, works most efficiently when spontaneous decisions emerge from the uncoordinated actions of millions of anonymous consumers. But when they run organizations, they insist on formal organization charts, aim to leave nothing to chance, and treat all decisions as authoritative. Their theory of the private sector is borrowed from Adam Smith. Their approach to the public sector owes far too much to state socialism."

This set of beliefs about appropriate leadership also applies to fedual leaders. They focus all power on the leader and resist any review, any checks-and-balances, and any outside news organizations from telling anything negative about the leader or the organization. They will spout a lot about "morale."

The fact is that good organizations work very hard to get both positive and negative information from the lower ranks to the higher ones. Those organizations who do not fail in competitive strategies over long period.

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[See also Conservatism as a philosophy has failed America.]