The Pity Party (33 page)

A debate about means, though, entails a debate about the effectiveness and risks of alternative paths to the end: material progress, individual fulfillment, etc. There's still plenty of raw material for good debates, in other words. Conservatives, for example, object that liberals' history of the past century is one long post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument: the government launched noble, high-minded initiative X; desirable development Y ensued; therefore, X caused Y. This account ignores the possibility the progress occurred for other reasons.

The abatement of social problems in the absence of government programs established to relieve them, in particular, would call into question the programs' value. Thus, legal scholar Richard Epstein points out that child labor, Exhibit A in every argument for the necessity of an activist government to protect us from predatory capitalism, declined steadily when the economy was lightly regulated. In 1890, 6.4 percent of the labor force consisted of children between the ages of ten and fifteen, according to the Census Bureau. That proportion shrank to 6.0 percent in 1900, 4.3 percent in 1910, 3.3 percent in 1920, and 1.4 percent in 1930. This steady decline occurred despite the Ellis Island wave of immigration, which brought unprecedented numbers of the world's huddled masses to these shores. In 1916 Congress passed a law prohibiting the interstate sale of merchandise that children had been employed to manufacture, legislation struck down by the Supreme Court in 1918 on the grounds it exceeded the federal government's constitutional power to regulate commerce among the several states. (The Court overturned that precedent in 1941.) The decline in child labor, then, occurred despite the absence of federal legislation (and the states' very limited efforts) to curtail it. There were similar, measurable advances in those pre–New Deal decades toward a life with more leisure and opportunity: shorter workweeks, higher incomes, increased life expectancy. “The obvious explanation for these improvements,” according to Epstein, “is that increases in technology and productivity redounded to the benefit of all, just as the ‘obsolete' analysis of Adam Smith had predicted.” Such prosperity undercuts progressives' “tendentious . . . view of social progress,” which “equated active government with good government.”
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When such equating does not rely on doubtful causality to connect liberalism to progress, it depends on tautologies. But declaring a public policy successful is meaningless if all the tests it passed are ones it could not possibly have failed. The liberal project consists in large measure of having the government give people stuff—money, goods, and services. And it cannot be denied that when the government gives people stuff, the people it gives stuff to wind up with more stuff than they had before the government started giving them stuff. I once sat in the audience for a campus forum on the welfare state where a heckler challenged a guest speaker opposed to it: “Does your mother like getting Social Security?” The necessary corollary of the assumption that such a rhetorical question weighs heavily against an austere social welfare policy is that the only government programs we may rightly curtail or eliminate are ones whose intended recipients scornfully refuse the proffered benefits.

This way of thinking has more prominent advocates. Journalist Peter Beinart, for example, argues that Barack Obama finally secured passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 because he “turned a theoretical debate into a tactile one.” The tactile Obama succeeded when he came around to emulating his great Democratic predecessors. Franklin Roosevelt, Beinart records, waved aside a question about how he would explain the political philosophy behind his Tennessee Valley Authority with the answer, “I'll tell them it's neither fish nor fowl but, whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.” Lyndon Johnson was also tactile. Because he “had seen his Hill Country neighbors bent and broken by arthritis as the result of decades of near-medieval labor,” LBJ “wasn't interested in what Friedrich Hayek said.” He enacted Medicare and Medicaid because “[h]e knew that in the real world, government-funded subsidized health care, like government-subsidized electricity, didn't enslave people; it freed them.”
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We should not be surprised when arguments relying on unfalsifiable propositions turn out to be un-false. But neither should we be persuaded.

Modern political debates concern, above all else, how to augment, widen, and perpetuate the prosperity that, as Deirdre McCloskey argues, sets modern societies apart from the entire human experience before the past two centuries. The 1.5 percent economic growth rate McCloskey discerns since that inflection point would, if it continues, mean that America's $50,700 per capita GDP in 2012 would grow, in real terms, to $101,400 in 2059 and $202,800 in 2105. Long-term trends, even highly reliable ones, are not laws of nature, so this future cornucopia is not guaranteed. Economists discuss the backward-bending supply curve of labor: at some point those businesses with the happy problem of too many orders to fill realize that offering their employees bonuses and incentives to work overtime becomes counterproductive. Employees eventually stop signing up for additional shifts when their already elevated incomes permit them to consume the next increment of wealth in the form of more leisure time. If, as prosperity grows, the backward-bending supply curve becomes a more general phenomenon, the 1.5 percent growth rate will be increasingly difficult to sustain, assuming no society reaches the point where it can just turn on the prosperity machine and give every adult an open-ended sabbatical.

Therein lies the essential cultural contradiction of capitalism, made famous by sociologist Daniel Bell in his 1976 book of that title. An ethic of thrift, discipline, and deferred gratification generates unprecedented prosperity, he argued, but the prosperity then generates an ethic of consumption, indulgence, and instant gratification, which makes continuation of the economic expansion increasingly tenuous. It will be noted that for all the elegance of Bell's thesis, the four decades since its exposition offer more empirical evidence to challenge than to support it. Americans who want to ascend from poverty, or fear descending to it, seem to be working as hard as ever. Globalization means that more and more people performing fungible labor are competing with workers from around the world, many of whom immigrate to compete for service-sector jobs.

But people with little fear of poverty also work very hard. As David Brooks argued in
Bobos in Paradise
, published in 2000, the new “bourgeois bohemians” arrange to have their arugula and eat it, too. Instead of using their earning power to enjoy more leisure and perform less labor, they synthesize the two (and acquire the collateral benefit of social status) in careers where work “becomes a vocation, a calling, a métier. In the 1960s most social theorists assumed that as we got richer we would work less and less. But if work is a form of self-expression or a social mission, then you never want to stop. You are driven by a relentless urge to grow, to learn, to feel more alive.”
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It remains to be seen whether we will ever be confronted by the cultural contradictions of capitalism, and how we'll respond if we do. In the meantime, we
are
confronted by the contradictions—cultural, economic, and political—of the liberalism that sets out to secure the nice parts of capitalism while eradicating the harsh parts. The liberal contradiction I've emphasized in this book, especially the previous chapter, is caring compassionately about victims of suffering situations while accepting complacently government programs that discharge their core mission—alleviating that suffering—ineffectively and inefficiently.

The main political reason this contradiction persists is that neither conservatives nor liberals have the capacity and desire to solve it on their own, or to negotiate a deal yielding a more successful welfare state. Conservatives embrace laissez-faire, a policy of having the government stand aside while individuals act upon their inclinations. Their argument is not that laissez-faire guarantees results better than any imaginable alternative, but that it's likely to produce outcomes better than any
available
alternative. If philosopher-kings, supremely wise and just, routinely directed government interventions in the economy, the liberal case would be very strong. It proves very little, however, when liberals contrast actual market failures with hypostatized government successes. The journalist Harold Meyerson, for example, wrote that “systemic failures,” like the financial panic of 2008 or Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, show “the human capacity for mistake and self-delusion, not to mention avarice and chicanery,” thereby proving the need for “active, disinterested governmental regulation.”
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It's an argument that excludes the possibility that government officials, such as those at the Securities and Exchange Commission who spent sixteen years finding nothing amiss in Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, might also be mistaken, deluded, or avaricious.

Given the correlation of political forces, conservatives are understandably reluctant to enter into discussions about how government can better perform activities they don't think it should be doing at all. Liberals, for their part, are understandably reluctant to address the shortcomings of the programs they have brought into existence if their adversaries will use such candor to demand repealing the programs, rather than to discuss reforming them. (Liberals have other reasons to leave well enough alone regarding their programs' efficacy. The Democrats are the party of government in two senses: as the home for the advocacy of activist government; and as the coalition that includes large numbers of government employees and dependents. Most measures that would make activist government work better would also complicate the lives of those employees and dependents, which means powerful constituencies within the party resist rather than welcome all such reforms.)

Attempts to break this stalemate have been rare. Liberals believe that activist government has one major flaw—there's not nearly enough of it—which, if corrected, would remedy any minor flaws it might have. Thus, Obamacare was supposed to be the corrective for Medicare's deficiencies, chief among them an incentive structure thought to benefit health care providers financially more than it benefits health care recipients medically. The corrective for Obamacare's deficiencies, in turn, is supposed to be single-payer health insurance—that is, Medicare for all.

Furthermore, liberals' worldview gives them no political reason to seek a deal with conservatives to make the welfare state work more efficiently and effectively. Unless liberals are in a position to dictate the terms of any such agreement, it will entail concessions, ones likely to reduce or reorganize the welfare state, as did the 1996 welfare reform law. But if liberals
are
in a position to dictate terms, they don't really need an agreement, and are certainly not interested in making the 1996 law a template for future policy making. Such anomalies aside, liberals in general don't believe they need to negotiate with conservatives over the size and operation of the welfare state. To be a “progressive,” after all, is to believe you're on history's side and history is on yours. What history wants, according to its liberal oracles, is government programs that make life freer, less cruel, more leisured, and so forth. If a particular historical contingency, such as the Reagan presidency or the tax revolt, seems to be thwarting the realization of history's deepest desire, the zeitgeist will eventually reward liberals who wait for it to assert itself.

For this reason, conservatives believe that discussing domestic policy with liberals is, in general, as futile as discussing foreign policy with the Soviet Union: both adversaries take the posture that what's theirs is theirs, and what's yours is negotiable. Conservatives do from time to time send up trial balloons, all of which work from the premise that the perversity of spending more and more to eliminate poverty, even as poverty shows no sign of disappearing, calls for a wholly different approach. In
Capitalism and Freedom
Milton Friedman advocated a negative income tax: the government would pay people a percentage of the difference when their income fell below some specified level. Determining that percentage and income level would be a straightforward assignment for a deliberative democracy. That is, having agreed that we want to set a floor under the standard of living of every person in the community, the question would be the amount we think we can afford and our willingness to impose the necessary taxes on ourselves for that purpose. Citizens' sense about what the established rules of decency render necessary to the lowest rank of people would inform those deliberations; studies by experts purporting to speak and act on victims' behalf would not.
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In Our Hands
, Charles Murray's book published in 2006, offered a detailed plan for implementing a negative income tax. It called for having the federal government give every American age twenty-one or older, and earning less than $25,000 a year, an additional $10,000, no strings attached. People who earn more than $25,000 but less than $50,000 would see their $10,000 stipend reduced by 20¢ for each dollar they earn in excess of $25,000, up to an earned income of $50,000. Thus, someone with an earned income of $30,000 would receive $9,000 more from the federal government, a neighbor with an income of $40,000 would receive a payment of $7,000, and someone making $50,000 would receive $5,000. There would be no additional reduction for those making more than $50,000, so someone with an earned income of $500,000 or $5 million would also receive $5,000. (Murray's plan doesn't speak to tax policy, so the $5,000 grant to the affluent, under the existing or any imaginable tax system, would really amount to a tax rebate.) The government grant would go to individuals, regardless of their marital status or domestic arrangements. A couple consisting of two people each making $25,000 would receive $20,000 from the federal government, $10,000 apiece. A couple consisting of one person making $50,000 and one with no earnings would receive $15,000, $5,000 for the person who's in the workforce and $10,000 for the one who isn't.
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