The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Troubleshooting ‘Beyond the Welfare State’

Posted on | March 22, 2011 | 14 Comments

by Smitty (hat tip Monty at AoSHQ)

Yuval Levin’s essay at National Affairs is quite well written, and well conceived. Furthermore, it’s a more reasonable conversation starter than I would produce, because it accepts the historical fact of the welfare state as a given, and proceeds to argue the case from there.

Monty moves in the direction I’d go, emphasis mine:

But one thing has become clear in the western nations since the welfare-state started in earnest after World War II: it spreads like kudzu, it encompasses and infantilizes ever-larger percentages of the population, and it beggars even the richest and most powerful countries. Leave aside questions of morality and efficacy for the moment — it is dreadfully clear that the main problem with the welfare-state is that we can’t afford it. No one can, no matter how rich or powerful.

This is the paradox of the welfare state: it will surely ruin us if left to run unchecked, yet so many people now depend upon it that we can’t stop.

However, I submit that a fuller analysis will be crucial to doing two things:

  1. Coming up with a remedy. You can talk about the flooding all day long, but you aren’t patching much until the leak is isolated.
  2. Obtaining buy-in to implement that remedy. Everybody hates change, especially when it involves pain, even though we all know that our welfare state buzz ends with a mother of a hangover.

On my to-read list is Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. A brief summary mooched from Volokh:

The book argues that the Madisonian system of separation of powers has eroded beyond recognition and been replaced with a system of executive primacy (which others have called the “imperial presidency”) in which Congress and the courts play only a marginal role. Most scholars who have recognized this development have called for a return to the Madisonian system, but we believe that the rise of the executive has resulted from a recognition among political elites that only a powerful executive can address the economic and security challenges of modern times.

Not a thesis to make anyone happy, on the left or right.

How in the world is this collapse into an Imperial Presidency tied to the welfare state?
My theory is that the 1913 trifecta of:

  • Implementing the income tax (Amendment 16),
  • Turning the Senate into the Big House with every state composed of two ‘districts’, and diminishing the States as such as political entities (Amendment 17),
  • The godforsaken Federal Reserve (Ugliest Legislative Christmas Present Ever)

These three items were the core seeds of DOOM. Later chestnuts like the New Deal, National Security Act of 1947, Great Society, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 are also bricks in the wall.
Among the problems to be worked in parallel are:

  • A large collection of weaklings who think dependency on the State is a feature, not a bug.
  • A national debt that we should start measuring in Astronomical Units, for all anyone can conceptualize the actual amount of money.
  • The notion that running a peacetime budget deficit is both somehow not a bug, but is in fact a Really Good Feature.
  • A vast standing bureaucracy, that, if Wisconsin is an indication, will cheerfully see the country sink in progressive debt flooding rather than let a shoring team get in there and patch anything.

Back to Levin, he is more interested in broaching discussion than going to the mat with ideas (emphasis mine):

Conservatives should therefore not expect to ever simply win the argument. Our challenge, rather, is to dominate the argument — to offer the vision that implicitly sets the tone for our common life. The key to doing so is the emergence of a policy-oriented conservatism, one able to make gainful compromises not because it is ambivalent about its own aims or tentative in its commitment to them but because it knows exactly what it wants — a thriving free society with a market economy, strong families, a devotion to country, and a commitment to the value of every life — and knows that this can (indeed must) be obtained gradually, by a mix of persuasion and proof. Such an approach must always remain grounded in the principles of American life — the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, of the Western tradition and of classical liberalism. But it must also translate those principles into policy particulars. In our politics, battles over ideas are won in practice, not in theory.

Recent decades have offered some examples of such an approach — from welfare reform to the urban policing revolution — but they have been too few and far between. There are good reasons to hope that just such an approach is now emerging more broadly on the right, and good reasons to encourage and foster its emergence.

Truly, I look to see a revisiting of 1913 with some DC plugs

no_these_are_not_suppositories

Damage control plugs are for those who's prefer to stay afloat

and a large sledgehammer. If centralization is deemed the problem, then de-centralizing will be a component of the solution. Give each State its own bank, like North Dakota, and let them manage their own housing. Let them manage the welfare of their own citizens. Let them tax their own citizens. Let the States figure out if they want to appoint or popularly elect Senators. In short, let the Federal government be federal, and quit treating the country like a single state.
I’d say that is the goal, and then be moderate in the implementation. We can’t unwind a century of error overnight, or even within two terms of the Paco Administration.

 

Bookmark and Share
Category: Ace of Spades

Comments

  • Mork

    People say they hate “welfare” until they are beneficiaries of it. Plenty of Tea Partiers show up to rallies riding their state-subsidized electric scooters.

  • Pingback: UW Prof in NYT: Scott Walker’s not Sen. McCarthy, but he’s a lot like him, really | POWIP

  • http://ak4mc.us/2c/2011/ McGehee

    Define “plenty,” Excrement.

  • Anonymous
  • http://pumping-irony.livejournal.com/ Wilbur Post

    How do you know they were “state subsidized”, Astro-turf?

  • http://theothermccain.com smitty

    The fact that state welfare distorts behavior in anti-liberty ways justifies welfare how, exactly?

  • Mork

    Seems to me that providing mobility for people who lack it is “pro-liberty” in the essential sense.

  • http://theothermccain.com smitty

    Liberty is liberty is liberty.
    “Providing mobility” is one of those delightfully ambiguous terms that might not be completely evil (light rail) but which may just as easily prove an albatross about the neck (entitlements).
    Why can’t I have liberty? Why is some helpy-helperperson perennially attempting to obfuscate simple liberty with some term like “providing mobility for people who lack it”?

  • Mork

    Right. So if you can’t afford to pay for your own scooter, just stay at home. God wants it that way.

  • Mork

    Right. So if you can’t afford to pay for your own scooter, just stay at home. God wants it that way.

  • http://theothermccain.com smitty

    “Right. So if you can’t afford to pay for your own scooter, just stay at home. God wants it that way. ”

    Let’s break that down:
    “if you can’t afford”
    Why can you not afford something? Is there a legitimate lack of equal opportunity? Have you chosen to invest your treasure elsewhere? Has the government decided you should be taxed until blind in order to keep a retirement fund solvent? We have a mix of subjective and objective possibilities here.

    “to pay for your own scooter”
    Is the foot an illegitimate means of transportation? Are bicycles OK? Why does it have to be some high-carbon scooter? Why do you hate Gaia?

    “just stay at home. God wants it that way.”
    Has the subject of this thought experiment prayerfully considered the will of God, and determined to be a hermit? If so, then this result should be a source of joy. But is transportation really a theological concern?

  • Mork

    Derp.

  • Pingback: ‘Derp’ Must Be The New‘Shut Up, He Explained’ : The Other McCain

  • http://twitter.com/IsabelPaterson Isabel Paterson

    The Humanitarian with the Guillotine
    http://mises.org/daily/2739

    What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. And that is precisely the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets his way.
    [...]
    Hence the humanitarian feels the utmost gratification when he visits or hears of a country in which everyone is restricted to ration cards. Where subsistence is doled out, the desideratum has been achieved, of general want and a superior power to “relieve” it. The humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.
    [...]
    Are the needy to vote themselves whatever they want? Are the humanitarians, the third group, to vote themselves control of both the producers and the needy? (That is what they have done.)

    The government is thus supposed to be empowered to give “security” to the needy. It cannot. What it does is to seize the provision made by private persons for their own security, thus depriving everyone of every hope or chance of security. It can do nothing else, if it acts at all. Those who do not understand the nature of the action are like savages who might cut down a tree to get the fruit; they do not think over time and space, as civilized men must think.
    [...]
    The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others. And the good people cannot be exonerated for supporting them. Neither can it be believed that the good people are wholly unaware of what actually happens. But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.

Performance Optimization WordPress Plugins by W3 EDGE