Is Big Government Here to Stay?
As an historian, I am amused to hear GOP journalists predicting that the “people” will soon be kicking out big government. We’re not going to repeat the mistake of the generation that voted in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Voters will not stray a second time in November. Instead they’ll rally to the Republicans, who will return power to the private sector.
There are three glaring problems with this scenario. One, those who have constructed it have no intention of rolling back the state, or even those additions to it that were introduced since the 1930s. Neither Glenn Beck nor Jonah Goldberg would favor rescinding the key legislation of the 1960s, which vastly extended Washington’s anti-discrimination surveillance and which placed entire regions of the country under scrutiny because of past voting discrimination. Moreover, the entire conservative establishment went ballistic when the GOP candidate in Nevada voiced her objection to the Department of Education (created by Carter and then expanded by Reagan). Anyone reading the movement conservative press would think the Department of Education was part of the original Constitution. It was set up to pay off Democratic teachers’ unions but became a source of patronage for both parties.
Two, it is simply infantile to talk about abolishing the New Deal. Both national parties endorse the existence of a government many times greater and more intrusive than the one Roosevelt built. As a critic of the welfare state, I’d be delighted to go back to the government FDR bequeathed to us. The U.S. in the 1930s was not engaging in social engineering on the level that it does now. Further, my tax burden would have been much lower in 1935 than it is right now. No matter who wins in November, we’ll be living under a government vastly larger than the one that existed under Roosevelt or even Lyndon Johnson. In the 1960s, a middle-income family of four paid about 16 percent of their earnings in taxes. That family tax burden is now at about 36 percent and is continuing to grow.
Three, there is no indication that “the people” want to dump big government. Our two senatorial candidates in Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey and Joe Sestak, are running even in the polls. Sestak seems to be a very liberal Democrat, while the Republican Pat Toomey is running as close to the center as he can possibly get. Toomey avoids divisive social issues like immigration while focusing on the fiscal extravagance of the Obama administration. He is especially tough on the medical plan that the Dems passed and which has failed to win broad support. But Sestak, who supports that plan and further income redistribution, is running neck-and-neck. This disproves the idea that the people, at least in the Keystone State, are rejecting big government—let alone the entire welfare state.
What GOP boosters studiously ignore is why the welfare state is so popular. It educates the young and through its growing political control, socializes or re-socializes adults. It not only sends us Social Security payments but also uses its power, including control of the public purse, to get us to act the way it wants. Government oversees education and behavior by how it distributes or withholds money and by how it enforces anti-discrimination codes. Public intervention in what used to be the private sector has grown furiously since the 1960s. What the New Deal brought forth pales in comparison to how public administration has exploded in the last 50 years.
Equally important, the volume of disposable income available to American families is now several times greater than what it was 50 years ago. Americans have become used to living with lots of gadgets and frills, and they expect government to furnish them with the services they don’t want to make allowances for, e.g., paying their medical expenses and the costs of their children’s education. Significantly, as fat and intrusive as government has become since the 1950s, it has taken less from taxpayers than the growth of their buying power has added in the same time period. Those regions with the highest incomes, such as Connecticut, are also the most receptive to government growth and control.
Finally, our present unemployment rate does not indicate rampant national poverty. The 20 percent unemployment rate that confronted FDR in 1932, and which fell by only 3 percent five years later, was truly grave. In the 1930s and as late as the 1950s, there were almost exclusively single family incomes, an arrangement that the New Dealers tried to preserve because of their relative social conservatism and their desire to keep the unemployment rate from rising. Despite this difference, people today are as eager as they were in the 1930s to have the government look after them. What I’m noticing is not a call to rescind the New Deal but unhappiness with how little the government is doing.
Perhaps someone can run on “We don’t need 51 departments of education, we don’t need 51 highway departments, we don’t need 51 departments of agriculture…”
Or maybe a balanced budget amendment will pass requiring downsizing.
Or maybe we’ll keep spending like maniacs until we default on our debt. This last one seems most likely.
Unfortunately, Paul, you right on target as usual.
BUT I think we ought to act as if you weren’t and
advocate repeal of ALL legislation since Wilson’s
progressive era. We can realize the monster is there
but we don’t have to intellectually accept it.
We need to be forthright in opposing Title 2 of the
64 Civil Wrongs Act as well as the EEOC, Fair
Housing laws and affirmative discrimination.
I started getting social security five months ago,
three months after I turned 65. I have been discriminated
against as a white male for three years now in looking for work
despite a solid corporate finance management background.
And the government created anti-business climate here in Oakland, California. No, I have no guilt in taking my earned SS check.
Even Ayn Rand thought people foolish to turn down unemployment benefits. In fact she wrote that the people
who opposed the program were the only ones deserving of receiving the checks.
We have to advocate, advocate, advocate all the time
in the best possible way to educate people regardles
of the inane vagaries of fickle opinion.
Don’t do a weasely Rand Paul act.
Anyway, thanks again for your usual very perceptive
analysis, Paul.
If we measured unemployment today the same was as it was measured in the 30′s, the unemployment rate would be just under the 20% today. That’s like comparing 80 degress to 40 degress and not mentioning that one temperature was measured in fahrenheit and the other celsius.
Also, unemployment has nothing (or very little) to do with poverty. The first few years of the depresssion, as the unemployment rate was skyrocketing, the living standards of Americans were also increasing at the expense of big business and Wall Street. The bankers got their man, FDR, to change that.
The problem is it has been one giant Ponzi scheme since Wilson. We also had the luck to have wars where we bombed the economic competition back into the bronze age, then supplied their rebuilding efforts.
Up until 1970, it was do you want a free lunch. During the 1970s we debased the currency but pulled out of the crash dive.
Demographics post-pill make it even worse.
All the above things might be popular, but they are unsustainable. The choice will be between comfortable poverty in a welfare state, or freedom and wealth with small government.
“Two, it is simply infantile to talk about abolishing the New Deal.”
As a historian, you should check out the “Great Society”.
In 1965, Dr Martin Luther King proposed a government compensatory program of US$50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited that “the money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils”.
The Great Society brought about Civil Rights legislation, Medicare, Medicaid, Vista, the Peace Corps, the Economic Opportunity Act, Community Action programs, Model Cities programs, Food Stamps, Head Start, Teacher Corps, Bilingual Education programs, National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio, Urban Mass Transit Act, Consumer Protection and Truth in Lending acts, and MANY MANY environmental protection acts.
Historians with an agenda, will salute the “new deal” as if to hide the fact that it was only a short time ago (1960′s thru 1980′s) that we tried most of what the current administration is doing, and it failed miserably.
Obama knows this. Race-hustlers and political opportunists are the ones who ignore these facts, and talk about “the new deal” and “FDR and Truman”.
One striking phenomenon with American history, which I myself find extremely hard to explain (and which I’ve briefly discussed in personal correspondence with Professor Gottfried), is how readily Americans still propagate the rhetoric of small government, personal freedom, the nightwatchman state etc. Even when the American reality is otherwise, the rhetoric is still there. This has never been the case in Australia, or, I suspect, in Canada.
Nor is this rhetoric a mere reaction against Great Society social engineering. Sir Walter Crocker, the Australian ambassador, was already noticing it when he lived in America during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies. The more completely robotic most Americans’ existence, Crocker found, the more they talked like Tom Paine.
“In Lincoln’s day”, Crocker wrote (Australian Ambassador, Melbourne University Press, Carlton [Victoria], 1971, pp. 142-144), “the American tended to be an individualist, standing on his own feet, spending most of his time out of doors, and the Puritan backbone was still the backbone of the country. By 1950 he tended to be a clerk, whatever his job was called, inhabiting city flats [apartments] and living on processed foods and canned entertainment. … Crime had become so familiar that there was a very dangerous tendency to excuse it or to explain it away. The commentary was of a symptomatic fatuousness, such as that ‘it is costing us billions of dollars a year’ or ‘the kids are shook-up’ or ‘we also have the highest rate of church-going’. (Americans have a high rate of church-going but at least some of it is because the churches tend to be social clubs responding to people’s loneliness and their craving to belong to something.)”
Over to you Americans!
Didn’t most of us (in the US) abdicate when the sex-offender-ex-president neutered himself on the world stage, and rendered the US helpless to it’s enemies? And didn’t we further abdicate when we let him state that it was OUR opinion that nuetered his ability to protect us against extreme muslims?
Didn’t most of us abdicate when George Bush refused to lift he veto pen? When he made his case for war, and most of us ignored the howls of pain from the crowd that neutered their arguments by their own lies? When Tony Snow said you have to be “overly angry or racist to not want amnesty” for illegal aliens?
So too, then, that same bunch of us abdicated when Obama stole the “TARP and stimulus money”, took over regulation of energy and financial and military and privacy; all the things that the Great Society had added on to the New Deal, plus a few of his own invention.
Now watch the screams of pain by the race-baiters and career politicians and the dupes of the left. Look for screams of “racist”, and “no ideas”, and “return to Bush”, as we, the abdicators, wake up and take back control.
Help us purge ourselves of the real racists, career politicians, and thieves as we try to sweep ALL INCUMBANTS (on a national level) from office, like the toilet scum that they are. Help us to resist the temptation to keep “just maybe our own guy” (in my case Tom Coburn), as we sweep DC clean.
Whether Americans truly want big government or have been slowly addicted to big government by the political class pushers against their best instincts is debatable.
What isn’t debatable is that Americans can no longer afford big government.
The political group that has the best plan to deconstruct big government as the neocon and neoliberal pushers continue to sell their poison to a emaciated body politic will inherit the politically healthy.