WE FORGET AT OUR PERIL: IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES FOR US ALL

Hillsdale College of Michigan is a small liberal arts college which, in its more than 150 years of existence, has earned a national reputation for fierce independence. Beyond educating its own student body, one of the many services Hillsdale performs is that they publish a real gem of a monthly newsletter called Imprimis. Each civilized issue is a breezy oasis of well-written good sense in the grim desert that passes for academic writing on contemporary issues.

Imprimis topics are wide-ranging. They include: movies and our popular culture (which they find "polluted, degrading, nihilistic and besotted with anti-Christian bias"); Big Government's liberal welfare state ("a failure and a menacing threat to our liberty"); federal taxes ("too high, destroying incentives to work, save and invest"); the rise of radical feminism and the assault on Western civilization ("deplorable"); and the collapse of worldwide communism (at which Imprimis rejoices). Articles or speeches are excerpted from such as former Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick; traditionalist film critic Michael Medved; the late, great author, critic and Christian apologist Malcolm Muggeridge; and from leading economists and writer/academics.

The motto inscribed on every issue of Imprimis is a watchword of the conservative movement:

Because ideas have consequences.

I was reminded of those words again this week when reading that the National Bureau of Economic Standards, whose job it is to make such declarations, has officially stated that we are in a recession that began last July. (The official definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. The fact that such contractions cannot be measured in advance and must be ascertained after the fact to put the official stamp of "recession" on events necessarily means some lag time in the official designation).

Others of us warned for months before July 1990 that the economy was weakening; that such a period was no occasion for government to soak up even higher taxes from the private, job-creating economy; and that a consequence of doing so would be to dump our economy into a downturn of unknowable duration and severity.

Recall, now, the events of late June, 1990. That was the week President Bush announced his surrender to the tax-consuming sharks of the Congress and the rest of the Permanent Washington Establishment. That was the week Mr. Bush jettisoned the silver bullet of his brilliant comeback campaign of '88, the very line ("Read my lips: No new taxes") that so resonated in middle America that he came roaring back to win the White House from an unheard-of 18-point August deficit. (To win after trailing so badly so late is a mountain so steep that it had never before been climbed in American political history).

It was last June, then, that Mr. Bush abandoned his principled opposition to higher taxes the strongest rampart and the highest ground of Reaganism's impregnable fortress. As I wrote at the time, it was terrible economics, and worse politics. And in July, as surely as crops wither in a drought, the recession arrived. Since then, across this great country, more than a million and a half people have lost their jobs.

Because ideas have consequences.

"But we must reduce the deficit," came the refrain from along the banks of the Potomac. The bipartisan, Permanent Washington Establishment remains unsatisfied with claiming $1.1-plus trillion an awesome 25 percent of the nation's wealth. They just want more.

Today, we are six months past the "deficit reduction agreement" that was signed amid bipartisan self-congratulation from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Of course the ink wasn't dry before our swinish majority on Capitol Hill was back at the trough, tearing up the spending restraints, shoving each other aside, angling for the choice morsels. The deficit is exploding as government revenues from a shrunken economy fall short of "projections" by "budget experts."

Because, we forget at our peril, ideas have consequences ...