Burying the Liberal / Conservative Hatchet

http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/reforming-big-government/

Long but very good. The bottom line of all this is that the welfare state keeps winning, but only because we aren't paying for it. The bills are increasingly coming due and we will need to face the facts that:

1. There WILL be "welfare" for some lower percentage of the population -- we need to decide on that number.
2. There CAN'T be "welfare for everyone" -- the bumper sticker is "Vote Republican: We can't ALL be on Welfare". But due to Social Security and Medicare, we just THINK that we can!
3. Give the bottom 10-20% Welfare, everyone else has to have INCENTIVES to take care of themselves (and that 10-20%) ... or we won't even have enough economy to help that bottom 20% before long!

But, the article is VERY well written and I've summarized a shorter version. First, the main point of the liberal/conservative argument is presented:

If the expansion of the welfare state is the reason liberals get up and go to work in the morning, its contraction is the reason conservatives do. Almost any page from the writings of Ronald Reagan will demonstrate this point. To pick just one example, Reagan told the American Bar Association in 1983, "It's time to bury the myth that bigger government brings more opportunity and compassion.... In the name of fairness, let's stop trying to plunder family budgets with higher taxes, and start controlling the real problem—Federal spending."

This argument—over the proper size of America's welfare state—has been going on for 75 years. Three things might prevent it from going on another 75, but two of them are unlikely. The first is that one side will score a decisive victory over the other, winning (so to speak) all the arguments and all the elections. The second is that the two sides will split the difference in a way they both feel reasonably happy about. The third, less far-fetched possibility, is that the debate will not be resolved but abandoned—after political and intellectual exhaustion motivates the combatants to redefine what they're arguing about.

Reagan and W believed that they were going to "win the argument", so does BO ... as did FDR and probably Johnson. I too believe that BO will be unable to actually "win the argument" **IF** he plays within the Constitution. What I'm worried about is that he realizes that and is willing to go well beyond the Constitution in control of the media, business in general, mandatory influence of youth, sanctions against religion, etc. Hopefully not. If not, then I think this author is right--reality is in the process of intervening in the argument.

Now, the reality of conservatives inability to contain the welfare state is brought out:

This table reveals that the welfare state battle between liberals and conservatives has been as evenly matched as the one at Little Big Horn between Sitting Bull and Custer. Real, per capita federal spending on Human Resources was 15 times greater in 2007 than in 1940. Whatever else it may tell us, this 1,394% increase is one more demonstration of the power of compound interest. You achieve that huge expansion over 67 years with an annual growth rate of 4.10%, which doesn't sound so formidable.

So, we keep increasing benefits for EVERYONE and expecting less and less people to pay for them ... and we keep borrowing more and more. SO:

The baby boomers' retirement will be the best documented, least surprising policy challenge in American history—and still we are not prepared for it. Herb Stein's Law remains operative, however: if something can't go on forever, it won't. Entitlements can't go on, indefinitely, laying claim to a bigger portion of the federal budget and the GDP. Once the furniture is engulfed in flames we will finally start shopping for fire extinguishers.

We all know that we have had a crisis brewing for a long time, it isn't going away, and there is every sign that we are going to elect BO and make it even worse. How do we get out of this? By changing the argument to something that can maybe work!

Supply-side tax cuts did little to necessitate or even facilitate reducing the welfare state, and there is no reason to believe an explicit campaign for that goal will succeed where Barry Goldwater's failed. Given all that, conservatives need to weigh the costs and benefits of putting liberals' minds at ease by explicitly renouncing the war against the welfare state, the one that's barely being waged and steadily being lost. They could do so by making clear that America will and should have a welfare state, and that the withering away of the welfare state is not the goal of the conservative project, not even in the distant future. What libertarians will regard as a capitulation to statism is better understood as conceding ground conservatives have been losing for 75 years and have no imaginable prospect of regaining.

The political advantage of this concession is that it leaves conservatives positioned to argue for a better, smarter, and fairer welfare state. "Liberalism needs government," says Cohn, "because government is how the people, acting together, provide for the safety and well-being of their most vulnerable members." Very well, but in a society that is remarkably prosperous by global and historical standards, shouldn't "most vulnerable members" be construed as referring to the most vulnerable 5, 10, or 25% of the population—not just the abjectly miserable, let us concede, but people confronting serious threats or problems? Yet when it turns out, time and again, that the effective meaning of liberal welfare and social insurance programs is to elicit compassion and government subventions for the most "vulnerable" 75, 80, or 95% of the population, it's hard not to feel scammed.

It is really more like the "most vulnerable 100% of the population" -- we are ALL at least TOLD that we are going to get the benefits of Social Security and Medicare. The reason for this is that liberals are trying to win the argument by buying ALL of the votes!

Liberals, in short, should take Yes for an answer. 75 years of their rhetoric about defending the most vulnerable among us really has persuaded the American people, who are fully prepared to support, on the merits, government programs to help the needy. For everyone else—the vast majority who are not needy—public programs are not the best or only expression of the public interest in economic security. Government should give them incentives to enhance their own economic security, without paying the freight charges to send their money round-trip to Washington.

I'd argue that the point that is missed is that most liberals aren't even close to only about "helping the needy", they are really about HURTING THE RICH! Many many liberals have decent homes, decent cars, plenty of food, plenty of at least "basic luxuries", BUT, they are locked into envy because "somebody has more" and they are absolutely convinced that is somehow "hurting them" ... the rich are "taking their money" and they are itching for some heavier duty class warfare.

For many of them, they are "economic suicide bombers" that really don't care if their actions hurt themselves worse than the "rich guy", they just want to be sure that he is hurt. Unfortunately, that kind of attitude is going to be MUCH harder to deal with than just the already difficult task of getting conservatives and liberals to give up on the hope for the complete win and vanquishing of the opposition with commensurate boot licking and abject apologies".