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How Much Conservative Reform Is Enough for William Voegeli?

If I understand it correctly, the thesis of William Voegeli’s book Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State is that left-progressives are national busybodies. No matter how big government is or how much it spends, there’s always something else they’re going to find wrong in the social order and then, naturally, seek an even more expansive […]

If I understand it correctly, the thesis of William Voegeli’s book Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State is that left-progressives are national busybodies. No matter how big government is or how much it spends, there’s always something else they’re going to find wrong in the social order and then, naturally, seek an even more expansive state.

On its face, this posture had struck me as somewhat childish. Why should we expect anyone, left or right, to hold to a predefined notion of ideological terminus — some Calvary-like moment when it might clearly be declared that “It is finished”? Couldn’t the question just as easily be asked of conservatives: How much should government be shrunk? To pre-New Deal levels? Pre-Civil War?

It turns out, to his credit, Voegeli does have a concrete idea of what “Enough” means in practice. He writes in a piece in the current print edition of National Review:

Ever since the late Irving Kristol introduced the concept of the “conservative welfare state” into our political discussions, people have argued about what it means. To some critics, left and right, it’s a contradiction in terms. A useful way to understand the idea, however, is to say that conservatives who want to cut the welfare state down to size want to cut it down to a particular size, one where the programs’ expenditures equal but never exceed the revenues generated by the taxes that liberals have told us the welfare state will require.

Voegeli’s is a reasonable position. If we were building a social safety net from scratch, I think fair-minded liberals would adopt Voegeli’s standard. (In fact, ObamaCare advocates claim they did take this approach — an argument for another day.) The impasse we’re at now is over who should bear the burden of cleaning up the old system — the one whose expenditures depend on increasing numbers of workers. On this score, Voegeli’s standard is quite a bit less helpful.

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