Whole Foods Republicans. Brilliant!

Whole Foods Republicans. The line in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by Michael Petrilli of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution is simply brilliant. Here’s an significant chunk of what he wrote:

        ...yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work. (Not to mention that its founder is a well-known libertarian who took to these pages to excoriate ObamaCare as inimical to market principles.)

        What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There's no law that someone who enjoys organic food, rides his bike to work, or wants a diverse school for his kids must also believe that the federal government should take over the health-care system or waste money on thousands of social programs with no evidence of effectiveness. Nor do highly educated people have to agree that a strong national defense is harmful to the cause of peace and international cooperation.

Actually, I’m more of a Central Market Republican, but the difference is probably slight. As such, it’s almost personally embarrassing to me that I didn’t think of this first. John Mackey may not be on the party rolls per se, but as his writings show, he’s very much one of us—and his headquarters is literally right down the street from me.

Much of the rest of Petrilli’s column is about a dangerous anti-intellectual streak within the party as a whole, so to get firmly on his side, I’ll now dive right in. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was so silly that it probably ended any remaining significance that award had, but the Prize in the Economic Sciences is quite apt here. Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom won for their separate-but-related work in the New Institutional Economics. Ostrom's selection was particularly salient for the cause of human freedom. As I recently wrote elsewhere, in work dating back to her PhD dissertation in political science in 1965, Ostrom has focused on explaining how, contrary to Garret Hardin’s infamous assertion, the commons is actually usually not a tragedy. Rather, her meticulous research into thousands of case studies showed how self-governance by users of common resources quite frequently works, and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t.

That’s a long way from the bossy nanny-statism of the Obamanista crowd in Washington. The collective approach doesn’t require the “public option,” much less the public instruction that thou shalt carry insurance for this-that-and-the-other-thing, or diktats over what terms your mortgage must carry. A little nudging might be tolerable, even useful, as our Tory colleagues in the UK might agree, but commandeering the command heights of what could be the most dynamic sectors of the economy—health care, finance, and the new automotive business—just plain isn’t.

So what does this mean in Central Texas? Travis County has tended, over the past few years, to elect not just Democrats to office, but Democrats with no meaningful sense of the value of taxpayers’ money. Is there any other way to explain how Capital Metro manages to cover just 17 percent of its budget with actual fares from paying customers? Note that this outfit then decided that it needed to add trains that don’t run, much less run on time.

So how did they manage to pull that over on the taxpayers? A great part of the trouble here in Central Texas lies with the lack of credibility that the local GOP has with those Whole Foods Republicans—we are perceived not as offering more sensible ways to manage the commons, but as simply saying ‘no’ to whatever the locally dominant party proposes. That has worked for a long time in Texas’ 14th federal congressional district, but it’s not likely ever going to work around Austin. (Someone tell the governor that he didn’t do us any favors vetoing the three-foot bicycle safety bill.) To take control here, we need the hard work of politics: public dialogue, policy development, and campaign strategy relevant to an electorate that can be shown the benefit of conservative approaches to conservation, and smart ideas about management of public assets.

Across the United States, support for the Obamanistas is plummeting—but without better ideas, we’re so far short on picking up the gains. Simply put, we need Whole Foods Republicans running for office.