In 1965, even high school dropouts were more likely to be in the workforce than is the twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-old male today. And, Eberstadt notes, “the collapse of work for modern America’s men happened despite considerable upgrades in educational attainment.” The collapse has coincided with a retreat from marriage (“the proportion of never-married men was over three times higher in 2015 than 1965”), which suggests a broader infantilization. As does the use to which the voluntarily idle put their time: watching TV and movies 5.5 hours daily, two hours more than men who are counted as unemployed because they are seeking work. Noting that the 1996 welfare reform “brought millions of single mothers off welfare and into the workforce,” Eberstadt suggests that policy innovations that alter incentives can reverse the “social emasculation” of millions of idle men.40 Perhaps. Reversing social regression is, however, more difficult than causing it.
America’s welfare state transfers more than 14 percent of GDP to recipients, with more than a third of Americans taking “need-based” payments. In our wealthy society, the government officially treats an unprecedented portion of the population as “needy.” Transfers of benefits to individuals through social welfare programs has increased from less than one federal dollar in four (24 percent) in 1963 to almost three out of five (59 percent) in 2013. Since the mid-1960s, entitlement payments have been, Eberstadt says, America’s “fastest growing source of personal income,” growing twice as fast as all other real per capita personal income. By 2018, a majority of Americans received payments. This is not primarily because of Social Security and Medicare transfers to an aging population. Rather, the growth is overwhelmingly in means-tested entitlements. More than twice as many households receive “anti-poverty” payments than receive Social Security or Medicare. Between 1983 and 2012, the population increased almost 83 million—and people accepting means-tested benefits increased 67 million. So, for every hundred-person increase in the population there was an eighty-person increase in recipients of means-tested payments. Food stamp recipients increased from 19 million to 51 million—more than the combined populations of twenty-four states.41
What has changed? Not the portion of the population below the poverty line. Rather, poverty programs have become untethered from the official designation of poverty: In 2012, more than half the recipients were not classified as poor, but they accepted being treated as needy. Expanding dependency requires erasing Americans’ traditional distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. This distinction was rooted in this nation’s exceptional sense that poverty is not an unalterable accident of birth, and the distinction is related to traditions of generosity arising from immigrant and settler experiences. Eberstadt argues that the entitlement state is extinguishing this sense and those traditions.42
America, he says, “arrived late to the 20th century’s entitlement party.” The welfare state’s European pedigree traces from post-1945 Britain, back through Sweden’s interwar “social democracy,” to Bismarck’s late-nineteenth-century social insurance. European welfare states reflected European beliefs about poverty: Rigid class structures rooted in a feudal past meant meager opportunities for upward mobility based on merit. People were thought to be stuck in neediness through no fault of their own, and welfare states would reconcile people to intractable social structures. Eberstadt notes that the structure of US government spending “has been completely overturned within living memory,” resulting in the “remolding of daily life for ordinary Americans under the shadow of the entitlement state.” In two generations, the American family budget has been recast: In 1963, entitlement transfers were less than one dollar out of every fifteen dollars; today they are more than one dollar out of every six dollars.43
Causation works both ways between the rapid increase in family disintegration and the fact that, Eberstadt says, for many women, children, and even working-age men “the entitlement state is now the breadwinner of the household.” Eberstadt believes that the entitlement state poses “character challenges” because it powerfully promotes certain habits, including habits of mind. To repeat, these include corruption. Moynihan warned that “the issue of welfare is not what it costs those who provide it, but what it costs those who receive it.” As a growing portion of the population succumbs to the entitlement state’s ever-expanding menu of temptations, the costs, Eberstadt concludes, include a transformation of the nation’s “political culture, sensibilities, and tradition,” the weakening of America’s distinctive “conceptions of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and self-advancement,” and a “rending of the national fabric.” As a result, “America today does not look exceptional at all.”44
The now normal practice of running enormous deficits in all economic conditions is additional evidence that American democracy is fully susceptible to the descent of democracy into looting. It is looting future generations. There is nothing novel about groups (including entire generations) maximizing their interests by voting themselves benefits to be paid for by borrowing—by transferring wealth from future generations to present ones. That temptation has always been inherent in democracy. Why, then, have large peacetime deficits become normal only recently? One reason, said James Q. Wilson, is the declining moral force of the idea of self-restraint. An unwillingness to defer consumption in order to facilitate future benefits has become a willingness, even an eagerness, of voters to “beggar their children.”
From 1789 until the 1960s, debates about new government activities were usually about whether it was proper for government to do this or that, such as run Social Security or Medicare systems. Since the 1960s, debate has been solely about how to pay for such things—or how to avoid paying for them by fobbing off the costs on future citizens. The rise of conservatism has not reversed this; it has not even slowed it. This political practice is symptomatic of a cultural change, the supplanting of the ethic of self-control by the ethic of self-absorption. As economists Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane explain, the US political system “cannot govern the entitlement state” that “exists largely to provide material benefits to individuals.” Piling up unsustainable entitlement promises—particularly, enactment of Medicare in 1965 and the enrichment of Social Security benefits in 1972—has been improvident for the nation but rational for the political class. The promised expenditures, far in excess of revenue, will come due “beyond the horizon of political consequences.” “Our politicians,” say Hubbard and Kane, “are acting rationally,” but “politically rational behavior is now fiscally perverse.” Both parties are responding to powerful electoral incentives to neither raise taxes nor cut spending. So, the perils of the entitlement state are (in Hubbard’s and Kane’s words) “safely beyond the politicians’ career horizons.”45
IS “INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT” AN OXYMORON?
As the braided problems of race and dependency demonstrate, it is exasperatingly difficult to clarify what might constitute equality of opportunity for individuals who are socially situated in vastly different familial and other settings. For progressives, this difficulty becomes an opportunity to argue the following: Because everyone is socially situated, equality of opportunity for individuals to strive and achieve is unattainable. Therefore the sensible, equitable way to maximize equality of opportunity is to minimize the degree to which achievements should be ascribed to individuals. Instead, we should think of everyone’s achievements as more or less society’s achievements. So individuals should be taught that equality of opportunity means as much equality as possible in reaping the rewards of society’s success. Because government is the organizer of society, and because society is the shaper of the individual, government is the enabler of striving and thus is the proper arbiter of the equitable distribution of the social product, wealth.
For example, one progressive theorist, Edwin C. Hettinger, has attacked the idea of intellectual property rights by attacking the very idea of individual achievement: “Invention, writing, and thought in general do not operate in a vacuum: intellectual
creation is not creation ex nihilo. Given this vital dependence of a person’s thoughts on the ideas of those who came before her, intellectual products are fundamentally social products. Thus even if one assumes that the value of these products is entirely the result of human labor, this value is not entirely attributable to any particular laborer (or small group of laborers).”46
Something quite sinister is being done here. The banal fact that no person lives or thinks or works in a “vacuum”—the fact that everyone is situated in a society—becomes the basis for asserting a “vital dependence” of the individual on society. This, in turn, is said to justify declaring that there can be no suitable individual property right to intellectual work. The products of such work are, because of the individual’s immersion in society, properly regarded as inherently socialized. So individualism is attenuated to the point of disappearance, and society can claim ownership to whatever portion it feels entitled to of what individuals produce.
In the Soviet Union, “society” claimed ownership of the individual: People wishing to emigrate were denied permission on the ground that they would be taking away education that had been provided by the state. Because the education could not be left behind, the individual could not be allowed to disassociate from society. In effect, the individual could not be distinguished from society. This is where the attack on individualism leads. It begins with the assertion that the conception of democracy “exaggerates the part played by human choice.”47 So wrote Professor Woodrow Wilson in 1889. One can sympathize with the exasperation that caused Margaret Thatcher to exclaim, “There is no such thing as society.”48 There is such a thing, of course, but its existence should not be seen as an excuse for dissolving the individual into a broth of dependencies or regarding the idea of individual achievement as a sociologically unsophisticated oxymoron. This dissolution, and this disparagement of the idea of individual achievement, remains part of the pulse of progressivism. During the 2012 presidential election there occurred one of those remarkably rare moments when campaign rhetoric actually clarified a large issue. It happened when Barack Obama, speaking without a written text, spoke from his heart and revealed his mind:
Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.49 (emphasis added)
The italicized words ignited a heated debate, and Obama aides insisted that their meaning was distorted by taking them “out of context.” But Obama was merely reprising something said a few months earlier by Elizabeth Warren, a former member of his administration who was campaigning to become a US senator from Massachusetts. She said: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.… You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”50
Warren, who was then a member of Harvard’s faculty, was being with her statement, as Obama was with his, a pyromaniac in a field of straw men (as William F. Buckley characterized his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard economist). Warren, like Obama, was energetically refuting propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context and all attainments are, to some extent, enabled and conditioned by contexts that are shaped by government. What made Warren’s riff interesting, and Obama’s echo of it important, is that both spoke in order to advance the progressive project of diluting the concept of individualism. Dilution is a prerequisite for advancement of a collectivist political agenda. The more that individualism can be portrayed as a chimera, the more that any individual’s achievements can be considered as derivative from society, the less the achievements warrant respect. And the more society is entitled to conscript—that is, to socialize—whatever portion of the individual’s wealth that it considers its fair share. Society may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual to keep the remainder of what society thinks is misleadingly called the individual’s possession. Note that “society” necessarily means society’s collective expression: the government. Note also that government will not be a disinterested judge of what is its proper share of others’ wealth.
The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government—including such public goods as roads, schools and police—is instituted to facilitate individual striving, aka the pursuit of happiness. Of course individuals often collaborate, often through government, to make collective choices that facilitate individual striving. This does not, however, compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much of the results of striving as it judges itself entitled to.
Warren’s and Obama’s statements were footnotes to progressivism’s comprehensive disparagement of individualism and individual autonomy. Progressivism assiduously defends the autonomy of the individual in making lifestyle choices. Remember, however, that in one of progressivism’s symptomatic texts, The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith asserted—he offered no empirical evidence—that corporations’ marketing powers are so potent that corporations can manufacture demands for whatever goods and services they want to supply. If corporations can nullify consumer sovereignty and vitiate the law of supply and demand, this, too, licenses “society,” meaning government, to supplant the private sector as the distributor of resources. If the mass of Americans are a malleable, hence vulnerable, herd, then the herd needs paternal supervision by a protective herder.
Warren and Obama asserted something unremarkable—that the individual depends on cooperative behavior by others. But they obscured this point: It is conservatism, not progressivism, that takes society seriously. Conservatism understands society not as a manifestation of government but as the spontaneous order of cooperating individuals in consensual, contractual market relations. Progressivism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s extraordinary—and creative—complexity. American society, understood as hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily, is a marvel of spontaneous cooperation. Sensible government facilitates this cooperative order by providing public goods (roads, schools, police, etc.)—and by getting out of the way of spontaneous creativity. This is a dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.”
Many contemporary ethicists, however, believe that inequalities of wealth that are produced by exceptional individual productivity arising from exceptional natural aptitudes do not deserve society’s deference or protection. Economist Arthur Okun argued that “society should aim to ameliorate, and certainly not to compound, the flaws of the universe.”51 But is the unequal distribution of abilities a “flaw” in “the universe,�
� aka reality? A flaw is a defect, a detraction from perfection. But what, then, would be a perfect universe: Absolute equality not just of conditions but of abilities?
Surely before one can reasonably—or, more to the point, responsibly—declare that there is a duty to “ameliorate” some social condition, one should attempt to calculate the consequences of trying to do so. To ameliorate is to make better, so Okun was trying to win his argument by semantic fiat rather than evidence: He was assuming that what he prefers would make things better. But would it? This is, to a large extent, an empirical question, unless one stipulates, as self-evidently true, that all inequalities deriving from the unequal distribution of capacities are unjust, regardless of their social consequences. What would be the results of Okun’s egalitarian policies? What if tolerating extraordinary rewards accruing to those with extraordinary natural gifts will make an entire society more affluent? Henry Sidgwick, the nineteenth-century English philosopher and economist, has been validated by subsequent experience: “I object to socialism not because it would divide the produce of industry badly, but because it would have so much less to divide.”52
People who receive great natural gifts from the lottery of life might not in any obvious way “deserve” them. But, then, someone born with a heart defect or a susceptibility to arthritis does not in any meaningful sense “deserve” those flaws. There are two arguments for leaving people free to exercise, and reap the results of, their (perhaps superior) capabilities. One is utilitarian: This freedom is conducive to social abundance, and the greatest happiness for the greatest number. See Sidgwick, above. Or heed John Stuart Mill on industry and frugality, from which society, as well as industrious and frugal individuals, profits: “Industry and frugality cannot exist, where there is not a preponderant probability that those who labor and spare [sic] will be permitted to enjoy.”53 The second reason for respecting the right to the free exercise of inherited capacities is the argument for individual freedom: There should be a presumption in favor of protecting the right of the individual to develop and exercise his or her capacities, and to enjoy the fruits thereof, and a presumption against conscripting the individual into subordination in order to serve politically determined notions of equity.
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