Excellent points Ross. The link wasn’t intended as a blanket endorsement. That econmic growth measured in dollars and housing starts, etc., is not a conservative value in and of itself is the point I wanted to emphasize. Population growth (a sterile term) — or rather, fecundity and fruitfulness (the cultivation of growing things), are.
The “risks and shocks of American life” as you put it, are very much in play as a “crunchy” value in need of recovery. As I said, difficulty is one of the primary virtues of crunchiness. I fear that just as Europe attempted to smooth out the difficulties of life through a program of government socialism, American late-liberal capitalism is in the process of trying just as hard to smooth out the difficulties of life through the creation of the therapuetic managerial market-state.
