Ramesh Ponnuru: The Dead End of Liberalism
[Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor for the National Review.]
The chief obstacles to new liberal policy victories these days are past liberal policy victories. As a matter of political philosophy, contemporary liberalism may exalt government, but in practice, it enfeebles it.
No group of voters has resisted the president’s project of transforming American health care more than senior citizens. Their health care was already transformed, by Medicare. That program is one of Lyndon Johnson’s great liberal achievements, but also a major source of funding for Obama’s health-care initiative. The old beneficiaries, in both senses of “old,” don’t want to give new beneficiaries a cut....
Contemporary liberalism both presupposes and desires a government that is flexible, competent, energetic. It wants and needs a government that can mobilize society’s resources to accomplish a long list of difficult tasks, including the reduction of economic inequality, the education of children, the protection of the environment, the elimination of unjust discrimination, and the safeguarding of consumers — to name just a few. Yet in operation, it weighs down the government with interest groups that first make it inefficient and inflexible and then make it impossible to reform....
Social Security is an instructive case. In terms of redistributing wealth from rich to poor, the program is only very modestly progressive if it is so at all. The overwhelming majority of funds that go into the system from upper-middle-class people go right back out to upper-middle-class people. (Ditto for other economic groups.) The program’s goals could be much more efficiently served by splitting it into two programs. A mandatory savings program in which people had to make conservative investments could prevent most people from retiring in penury, while a small transfer program could help those who can’t amass enough savings. That efficiency would not just enlarge the private economy; by saving money, it would make it possible to increase types of government spending attractive to liberals.
Social Security’s seeming irrationality has a rational basis. That basis is political. It was designed so as to hide its redistributive elements, on the theory that a purely and visibly redistributive program would not have the necessary popular support. FDR called it an “insurance policy” that kept “individual accounts” for each contributing worker. If a program for poor people were funded out of income taxes, that program would be under threat at budget time. Instead, everyone gets benefits, and everyone feels that they have paid for their benefits with their contributions and are thus entitled to them. The program’s resultant popularity has benefited liberal politicians for decades....
“No menace of socialism threatens the United States,” conservative scholar Michael Greve has grimly written. “Socialism implies a seriousness of purpose and a willingness and ability to impose order, none of which is in evidence.” Again, the health-care overhaul has shown the pattern. What began as an effort to reorder important parts of American society became a series of bargains and shakedowns in which progressives could not tell which groups would be their clients and which their targets from week to week. The progressive project remains obnoxious to liberty, and it retains, in some sense, its ideals. But it lacks a coherent and determined purpose. More and more, liberalism has become a grift.
Read entire article at National Review
The chief obstacles to new liberal policy victories these days are past liberal policy victories. As a matter of political philosophy, contemporary liberalism may exalt government, but in practice, it enfeebles it.
No group of voters has resisted the president’s project of transforming American health care more than senior citizens. Their health care was already transformed, by Medicare. That program is one of Lyndon Johnson’s great liberal achievements, but also a major source of funding for Obama’s health-care initiative. The old beneficiaries, in both senses of “old,” don’t want to give new beneficiaries a cut....
Contemporary liberalism both presupposes and desires a government that is flexible, competent, energetic. It wants and needs a government that can mobilize society’s resources to accomplish a long list of difficult tasks, including the reduction of economic inequality, the education of children, the protection of the environment, the elimination of unjust discrimination, and the safeguarding of consumers — to name just a few. Yet in operation, it weighs down the government with interest groups that first make it inefficient and inflexible and then make it impossible to reform....
Social Security is an instructive case. In terms of redistributing wealth from rich to poor, the program is only very modestly progressive if it is so at all. The overwhelming majority of funds that go into the system from upper-middle-class people go right back out to upper-middle-class people. (Ditto for other economic groups.) The program’s goals could be much more efficiently served by splitting it into two programs. A mandatory savings program in which people had to make conservative investments could prevent most people from retiring in penury, while a small transfer program could help those who can’t amass enough savings. That efficiency would not just enlarge the private economy; by saving money, it would make it possible to increase types of government spending attractive to liberals.
Social Security’s seeming irrationality has a rational basis. That basis is political. It was designed so as to hide its redistributive elements, on the theory that a purely and visibly redistributive program would not have the necessary popular support. FDR called it an “insurance policy” that kept “individual accounts” for each contributing worker. If a program for poor people were funded out of income taxes, that program would be under threat at budget time. Instead, everyone gets benefits, and everyone feels that they have paid for their benefits with their contributions and are thus entitled to them. The program’s resultant popularity has benefited liberal politicians for decades....
“No menace of socialism threatens the United States,” conservative scholar Michael Greve has grimly written. “Socialism implies a seriousness of purpose and a willingness and ability to impose order, none of which is in evidence.” Again, the health-care overhaul has shown the pattern. What began as an effort to reorder important parts of American society became a series of bargains and shakedowns in which progressives could not tell which groups would be their clients and which their targets from week to week. The progressive project remains obnoxious to liberty, and it retains, in some sense, its ideals. But it lacks a coherent and determined purpose. More and more, liberalism has become a grift.