Posted on 07/26/2010 4:08:37 AM PDT by rhema
William Voegeli has bad tidings for advocates of limited government and low taxes: There is no endgame when it comes to the liberal agenda.
If tomorrow, liberals in Congress, state legislatures, and town councils all across the nation raised taxes and increased spending in order to fund every single item on every special-interest wish list, would social-justice nirvana have arrived? No.
Within hours, some liberal would find an unmet need that only a new government program could address.
It gets worse: Voegeli says that despite conservatives' good-faith efforts to halt or reverse the growth of government, those attempts have been largely ineffective.
None of this will be news to tea partyers or like-minded folks. Maybe they haven't expressed these concerns as eloquently and authoritatively as Voegeli does in his new book, "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State," but they have long understood the sentiment.
"Liberalism's irrepressible drive for an ever larger welfare state without limit arises from at least two premises upon which the left no longer reflects: the elevation of compassion to a political principle (albeit with other people's money), and the erosion of meaningful constitutional limits on government on account of the imperatives of the idea of Progress," Steven F. Hayward says in the foreword.
Voegeli follows: "because compassion is an emotional response rather than a moral principle, it defeats every attempt to make wise choices about which sufferers do and don't deserve governmentally dispensed solace."
A benefit might begin for Americans at or below the poverty level. But then what of those just above the poverty level? How can we exclude them? If the criterion is compassion, on what grounds do you stop expanding a program? 200 percent of the poverty level? 300?
The more people covered, the larger the constituency for continuing the program.
And don't even think of cutting the program's budget. Even talk of slowing its growth will be met with howls of outrage. Republicans learned this lesson with Medicare in the 1990s — and turned the tables in the recent health-care debate.
Welfare-state godfather Franklin Roosevelt once suggested that failed programs could be shut down, but that has never happened, Voegeli says.
"There is not one clear instance of a welfare state program that liberals by consensus came to regard as a failure, to be frankly admitted and abandoned," he writes.
Even under Ronald Reagan, who scaled back government somewhat, spending on what Voegeli terms "human resources" grew 0.90 percent. That's far less than under most presidents, but still an increase.
"Reagan's 'triumph' was to yield ground more slowly than any other political leader in the battle that conservatives consider their central mission," Voegeli writes.
Reagan learned that Americans really like those programs they complain about funding. So a Crazy Eddie libertarian approach to government — "Everything must go!!" — isn't likely to be successful.
"In exchange for a lottery player's chance at wiping it out entirely, such conservatives forfeit any prospect of placing the welfare state on sounder footing, financially, functionally, or philosophically," Voegeli says. Thus liberals "will have the unfettered ability to chart its future course."
That message might trouble some tea partyers who equate compromise with surrender or see almost all government programs as unconstitutional. But note that Voegeli isn't saying to give up the fight for liberty, self-government, or free markets. He's just saying that not all fights rise to constitutional-crisis level, and that it's tough to fight when sidelined.
It's important to get in the game now. Crippling deficits have the attention of Americans as never before. Many are open to a serious alternative to the nation's unsustainable fiscal course. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has one, the Road Map for America's Future (www.americanroadmap.org), a comprehensive approach to entitlement, budget, spending, and tax reform. The safety net he outlines is different from the current one, but it doesn't bankrupt the country. The Congressional Budget Office said the plan would "make the Social Security and Medicare programs permanently solvent (and) lift the growing debt burden on future generations ..."
The "Never Enough" crowd naturally doesn't want the limits that Ryan proposes. That's enough of an endorsement for me.
Actually, this article sounds like a revised 60s radical message of “Burn it all down.”
Voegeli aka chicken little.
“Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is.” - George Will
Huh?
“Within hours, some liberal would find an unmet need that only a new government program could address.”
AMEN!
Huh?
“William Voegeli may be the most valuable, engaging and original critic of liberalism writing today. I have been waiting for him to write this book for years. No serious student of contemporary political life will regret their investment in this profound yet eminently accessible work. Never Enough answers questions most people struggle even to articulate.”
— Jonah Goldberg, Author of Liberal Fascism
"Since the beginning of the New Deal, American liberals have insisted that the government must do more—much more—to help the poor, to increase economic security, to promote social justice and solidarity, to reduce inequality, and to mitigate the harshness of capitalism. Nonetheless, liberals have never answered, or even acknowledged, the corresponding question: What would be the size and nature of a welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need new programs, bigger budgets, and a broader mandate? Even though the federal government’s outlays have doubled every eighteen years since 1940, liberal rhetoric is always addressed to a nation trapped in Groundhog Day, where every year is 1932, and none of the existing welfare state programs that spend tens of billions of dollars matter, or even exist.
"Never Enough explores the roots and consequences of liberals’ aphasia about the welfare state’s ultimate size. It assesses what liberalism’s lack of a limiting principle says about the long-running argument between liberals and conservatives, and about the policy choices confronting America in a new century. Never Enough argues that the failure to speak clearly and candidly about the welfare state’s limits has grave policy consequences. The worst result, however, is the way it has jeopardized the experiment in self-government by encouraging Americans to regard their government as a vehicle for exploiting their fellow-citizens, rather than as a compact for respecting one another’s rights and safeguarding the opportunities of future generations."
Often attributed Tytler, but probably not his words:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship.
Compassion is only the pretense. It’s a marketing tool to pull in or silence the ever-shrinking portion of the populace that hasn’t already fallen prey to the something-for-nothing scheme.
I know it’s been around awhile, but Robert Bork’s book “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” handles this topic with extraordinary clarity. Bork would have been a giant on the SCOTUS.
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