From a perceptive (because he agrees with me) obituary for economic conservatism in Salon, here, by ex-neocon Michael Lind:
In today’s debate about the economy, populist liberals, centrist neoliberals and libertarians are represented. One group is missing from the American economic debate: economic conservatives.
The economists and economic pundits who are usually described as “conservatives” in the U.S. are really libertarians, or, if they are more moderate, right-neoliberals. While genuine conservatives are anti-utopian in temperament, most right-wing economists in the U.S. [today] share the utopian belief that many if not most public services and publicly regulated utilities can be replaced with competitive private markets. ...
The once-influential conservative historian Russell Kirk dismissed libertarians as “chirping sectaries” and declared that any genuine conservative would sooner be a socialist than a libertarian. From Kirk’s Burkean conservative perspective, libertarians or classical liberals were crazed, hyper-rationalist, utopian radicals, like Marxists.
