By Andrew C. McCarthy

Charles Krauthammer has come to my rescue. You see, I’ve been on the receiving end of some spirited reaction since asserting in last weekend’s column that what we commonly call the Republican establishment — i.e., not all individual Republicans but GOP leadership — “is more sympathetic to Obama’s case for the welfare state than to the Tea Party’s case for limited government and individual liberty.” The statement may have been provocative in the sense of expressing a truth that people on the political Right prefer not to talk about. But it was not controversial because it is indisputably true.

This week, Dr. Krauthammer, Washington’s most influential expositor of mainstream GOP thought, obligingly spared me the need to prove my point. He gave as clear an account of the modern Republican conception of “conservatism” as you will find. Fittingly, he did it on the program of progressive commentator and comedian Jon Stewart. Today’s smartest Republicans, self-aware enough to know their core views deviate significantly from those of conservatives in the tradition of Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, are more likely to say what they think to Jon Stewart. His audience is apt to be receptive, maybe even won over, by a mature progressivism portrayed as what conservatives really think. It is not likely to go over as well with, say, readers of National Review.

Stewart claimed that conservatives are anti-government. Initially, Krauthammer appeared to reject this caricature, replying, “The conservative idea is not that government has no role.” But, alas, when he got around to what the proper role of government is, Krauthammer sounded more like Stewart than Buckley.

To begin with, he largely buys the caricature. It would have been credible, he told Stewart, to have argued that conservatives were anti-government “in the Thirties, when conservatives opposed the New Deal.”

That’s just wrong. Conservatives who opposed the New Deal were not anti-government. They believed, as they believe today, in constitutionally defined, limited government. And “limited” does not mean “small” — where the Constitution assigns the central government an authority, such as national security, it must be as big and strong as necessary to execute that authority.

Having accepted Stewart’s central premise — namely, that what Stewart called the “responsibility of governance” embraces the massive, centralized welfare state — Krauthammer pronounced that today’s conservatives unquestionably accepted

the great achievements of liberalism — the achievements of the New Deal, of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. The idea that you rescue the elderly and don’t allow the elderly to enter into destitution is a consensual idea [accepted by] conservatives, at least the mainstream of conservatives.

With due respect to Charles, no, the New Deal and the centralized welfare state that is its progeny is accepted by the mainstream of Republicans. What Charles describes, moreover, is as fanciful a portrayal of what the New Deal did as it is of what conservatives believe.

Conservatives, including most of those who were against the New Deal, are not opposed to social welfare for the truly needy. We believe, however, in the constitutional framework, which reserves the promotion of social welfare to the states and the people. Social-welfare policy is not one of what Madison described as “the few and defined” powers delegated to the central government. It is, instead, a paradigmatic power of the sovereign states because, as Madison elaborated, it “concern[s] the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” The Constitution thus enables Congress to tax and spend for the general welfare — on public goods, related to Congress’s carefully enumerated Article I powers, that benefit all Americans; not on redistributionist schemes that fleece some citizens for the benefit of others.

This is not just sound constitutional federalism, it is good policy. Private charity is reliably based on need; it will target the people whose straits are truly dire. Government, to the contrary, is a poor delivery system for social welfare because redistributions of wealth determined by politicians using the compulsory force of law are inevitably made based on political considerations — buying votes — rather than need.

If welfare policy is made at the state level, there are important disciplines in the equation that can prevent the programs from bankrupting the state and unduly punishing productivity. Economic conditions vary widely in a nation of our size, so welfare programs are best designed and run at the local level, by elected officials directly accountable to the people who live with the consequences — officials who can easily alter the programs if conditions change. States know they are in competition with each other, and if wealth redistribution is too onerous in one state, people and businesses can move to others. States and localities also may not print money, and they have incentives (and often constitutional requirements) to balance their budgets that do not exist at the federal level. At the state level, there can be a sensible balancing of “internal order, improvement, and prosperity.”

This is not so at the federal level, as the last 80 years have affirmed. Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are not, as Krauthammer contends, “great achievements of liberalism.” They are prosperity killers — and inevitably so. In part, this is because they have little if anything to do with what Krauthammer describes as the “consensual idea” that “you rescue the elderly and don’t allow the elderly to enter into destitution.” If that were the idea that we all agreed on — and assuming for argument’s sake that we similarly agreed that destitution was a concern of the central government — we would establish a transparent welfare program. That is, we would define what “destitute” is and enact a tax commensurate with what was necessary to provide reasonable relief — structured in a manner that gave people incentives to avoid or escape destitution.

The New Deal and its Great Society successor programs, by contrast, are frauds designed to create permanent dependency on government (and fealty to the party of government). They pretend to be insurance programs, not for the destitute but for all Americans, who pay “contributions” and “premiums” into “trust funds” and derive an “entitlement” to “benefits.” By loading everyone onto the gravy train, even if that meant the poor and middle class would subsidize the rich and near rich, progressives hoped to ensure that no one would object to the arrangement — people would just expect to get theirs in due course.

Unlike transparent, accountable welfare programs, however, these “entitlements” never had a sound relation between what was paid in and what was to be paid out. The government, meanwhile, raided the “trust funds” for its sundry profligacies, so the accounts we are deceived into thinking we are paying into — and which would be there for us, compounding interest, if these were not government redistribution programs — do not exist. The result is unfunded liabilities that, even in rosy-scenario analyses, exceed $60 trillion dollars over the next 75 years — around 400 percent of GDP. (Senate Republicans estimate that Obamacare adds another $17 trillion to that tab.)

It is pointless to try calculating a more realistic (i.e., much higher) figure because it is inconceivable that what has been promised could ever be paid. As a retirement program, Social Security is a lousy deal for “beneficiaries.” As health-care programs, Medicare and Medicaid (and soon, Obamacare) combine farcical market practices with poor-quality treatment. And even if these worsening problems could be remedied, the federal welfare state’s central flaw is incorrigible: In the absence of any constitutional grounding, supporters contend that retirement insurance and health care are fundamental rights that the central government must guarantee, not commodities subject to the assumptions of ordinary commerce (i.e., individual choice, controlled by one’s personal resources and priorities). Inexorably, this results in the one-way political ratchet that plagues all redistributionist schemes: Our permanent political class’s sustaining itself by promising more benefits to ever more people and demagoguing all who resist or attempt even the slightest reforms.

There is, furthermore, an equally destructive corollary. Once one accepts the premise of federal control over these matters of social welfare, there is no principled case against federal control over any matters of social welfare. Every aspect of life becomes potentially subject to central-government regulation. And so it has, through a metastasizing federal code and bureaucracy that regulates everything from cradles to graves.

In the Framers’ construct, the states would experiment and compete, developing best practices — or at least practices that best suited the conditions and sensibilities of the local communities. By contrast, there is no disciplining or escaping Leviathan. And if, as is inevitable, federal officials expand their outlandish schemes and promise favored constituencies more than they can deliver, they just borrow or print ever more money: Government borrows from its tapped-out self, monetizing its debts, degrading our currency to reward sloth and punish thrift even as it steals from future generations.

What Dr. Krauthammer calls “the great achievements of liberalism” have undermined the Burkean intergenerational trust at the core of conservatism. As I argued a couple of years ago, in jousting with Pete Wehner, another very smart, mainstream Republican who seeks to redefine conservatism to accommodate the modern welfare state, conservatives revere an enriching cultural inheritance that binds generations past, present, and future. It obliges us to honor our traditions and our Constitution, preserve liberty, live within our means, and enhance the prosperity of those who come after us. The welfare state is a betrayal of our constitutional traditions: It is redistributionist gluttony run amok, impoverishing future generations to satisfy our insatiable contemporaries.

The Republican establishment aspires to preserve the Washington-based entitlement culture. Charles Krauthammer thus suggested that Jon Stewart look to Paul Ryan as the best exemplar of today’s “conservatism.” It made perfect sense. Representative Ryan, as I’ve observed before, has supported creation of the Bush prescription-drug entitlement (adding trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities to our burden), TARP, Keynesian “stimulus” spending, and the auto-company bailout.

Ryan’s proposals are markedly better than Obama’s. Though AWOL on Social Security, he would restructure Medicare to allow younger people the option of transferring into a federally supervised private voucher system. He would also preserve Medicaid, but block-grant it to give states more spending autonomy. And he’d reduce the rate of projected federal spending such that we’d add “only” another $3 trillion to the national debt over the next eight years — less than half as much as the president proposes.

This is not constitutional conservatism. It is moderate statism. Or, to repeat, the current Republican establishment “is more sympathetic to Obama’s case for the welfare state than to the Tea Party’s case for limited government and individual liberty.”

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

I highly doubt many members will get to this point.

That was CONSERVATIVELY entertaining...







It seemed pretty wordy for two sentence summation in the last paragraph, that wasn't new information rather than just re-STATING the STATE of GOP ideals.


Was this particularly insightful for you?

Here is the truth that the Republican Party is faced with. The baby boomers failed to save enough money to fund their lifestyle into their later years. They are afraid they will lose their jobs in their 50's and 60's and do not have a personal safety net. Their homes are not worth what they thought they would be worth and the stock market is like rolling the dice in Vegas. No real investment options that are safe for the avg Joe right now with any real returns above inflation. The $80k avg they have saved buys less and less each year. Real Inflation ,not the govt index, made it impossible to maintain their standard of living. You saw this demonstrated in fla in the last election. Once staunch Reaganites were now afraid they would be at risk without govt safety nets voted out of fear . It seems that conservatives for the most part are only conservative when they are looking down their noses at someone below them. They know we are stuck in an economic cycle that does not favor them for at least the foreseeable future. It turns out the fiscal conservatives were not so conservative after all and they thought the gravy train would keep rolling forever. It is nothing that the libs are doing right but more what the pseudo conservatives did wrong.

As opposed to being just a KKunt.

Republican "conservatism" has meant being socially regressive while spending like a drunken sailor for decades.

Tea Party "conservatism" means being even more socially regressive while expressing not even the slightest understanding of economics or fiscal policy.

Combine the two and you get the GOP.

Good luck.

Fish on...

Todd

Government borrows from its tapped-out self, monetizing its debts, degrading our currency to reward sloth and punish thrift even as it steals from future generations.


THIS

"Was this particularly insightful for you?"
Extremely so. The only thing that was news to me was that Krauthammer had appeared on Stewart.

"It seemed pretty wordy for two sentence summation in the last paragraph"
I don't know how his argument could be made nearly as clearly and concisely as he did without the use of many words, and I did not see any unneeded repetition, or use of flourish.
As far as the summation goes, I would say that the essay eases into the the summation and that the last two sentences that you refer to are simply the very end of the summation.

"just re-STATING the STATE of GOP ideals."
If their was any singular point to be taken from the essay it would be the title, "The Republican Embrace of the Welfare State" but the essay was multifaceted, as it also explained how the Welfare State is failing, and how our social obligations could be better handled.


You make some valid points, however I think as far as the "truth" go's you miss the mark. While it is true that many BBers failed to save enough money to retire comfortably, and that investment returns vary according to risk, and that real inflation is higher than the gov. index, I absolutely don't believe that, "conservatives for the most part are only conservative when they are looking down their noses at someone below them."

A "true" fiscal conservative is, well, fiscally conservative. And no doubt some people will claim to be, whatever they have to claim to be to get the goodies. All should realize that the economic cycle that we are mired in favors none but government, and to escape the quagmire government must be restrained.

There are many facts that support the argument that Liberal policies have done the most to damage the lower socioeconomic class's. And if conservatives have been spending like a drunken sailor, liberals have been spending like a fleet of drunken sailors.

You say that "the Tea Party doesn't have the slightest understanding of economics of fiscal policy". I say that any Democrats that do have an understanding of economics and or fiscal policy and then pursue the objectives of the current administration, are seeking to, *"to create permanent dependency on government (and fealty to the party of government)" without regard to the fiscal and economic consequence that must follow the implementation of their desired policies and or programs.

*source, The Republican Embrace of the Welfare State, by Andrew C. McCarthy

Krauthammer is still not a very pretty man.

I was kidding by offering a play on words and I honestly don't care enough to dissect your article for all the reasons my response made sense, in light of the fact I offered a first response to your cut & paste.

I thought I'd ask you opinion of this recap of how we got to where we are.


Sorry if it seemed obvious to me.

Uh, Rev., I made to this point. Some good stuff, some OK stuff, and some stuff I don't agree with, which is what I'd expect with a McCarthy article.

Good post T.J., maybe because it was Sunday.

One of few I'm sure.

Rev.

Put a dollar between two people and with most their ideology goes out the window. People's lifestyles are threatened right now and I don't believe for a second that political ideology will hold over preservation under such duress.

T.D.

The will to survive is indeed strong. Hopefully enough people will realize that the cure to what ails US will not be painless, and that we can effect meaningful change, of the corrective kind.

By the way my ideology says grab that dollar, and fast.

Not surprising that you would hold this opinion...and not surprisingly, it is incorrect.

Under what Administrations have people made better returns on their investments? Under what Administrations have the deficits increased?

These things are easily found hard facts...not blathering from Krauthammer...and the facts show that under Republican administrations the irresponsible spending and tax cuts for the rich hurt us all, you included, and that those things always improve under Democratic administrations, as they are right now and have been for a few years.

Fish on...

Todd

P.S. That's why the Teapublicans run on bassackward social policies to get the stupid and ignorant to vote for them...they can't run on fiscal policy because they lose on every single front except for telling the fools what they want to hear...that the Democrats want to take all your money and give it to illegal aliens for abortions.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-22...-barometer.html

http://www.examiner.com/article/democrats-or-republicans-who-s-better-for-wall-street-1

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/fin...ock-returns.asp

http://www.foxbusiness.com/investing/201...nder-democrats/

Yeah, I know, stuff like "Bloomberg" and "Fox Business" are part of that liberal media bias, along with "Forbes"...right?

There is no question about it, and there never has been for anyone willing to look at the actual numbers rather than their gut need to affirm their idiotologies...the stock market, our returns on our investments, and corporate profits always...ALWAYS...perform better under Democratic administrations.

Every single time.

You, however, along with the other ideologues here will ignore that bastion of liberal bias...facts...and continue to say that Republicans are better for the economy, investments, and business...right?

Right.

Fish on...

Todd

The Deficit...the thing that right wing fools are blathering about all the time, non stop.

I mean, why wouldn't they? Democrats always run up the biggest deficits, and are destroying the economy and our investments when they do it!

(For the sake of argument here we are ignoring the last point that the economy and investments always...always...do better under Democratic administrations...that shouldn't be hard for you, you've been doing it your whole life already, right?)

Here are more of those troublesome liberally biased things that liberals like to throw out there to confuse the populace...facts.

http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html

The charts there are pretty easy to understand...just look to see if there is a "D" or an "R" in office, then look over to see how much red, or black, there is in the deficit.

Surprised? You shouldn't be...anyone who has every actually paid attention...rather than read Krauthammer or any other C/P that Hank puts up on this site...would just look at the numbers and see that the R's vastly spend up the deficits compared to the D's.

Always.

http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/defic...year-president/

This all goes for personal income growth, as well...under Democratic administrations it goes up for Americans...always...and goes down under Republican administrations...always.

These aren't opinions, they're facts. You can see the facts, and then just decide to hold an opinion that isn't supported by them. I mean, this is America and no can tell you what to think.

They can, however, tell you that you are an idiot if you believe in things that are directly to contrary to the facts...and if you say stuff like this:

"There are many facts that support the argument that Liberal policies have done the most to damage the lower socioeconomic class's. And if conservatives have been spending like a drunken sailor, liberals have been spending like a fleet of drunken sailors."

....then you are an idiot.

Well, not necessarily.

If you actually believe it you are an idiot. You may be a typical right winger and know that you are spouting untruths, but do it anyway because you can't help yourself.

In that case, you may or may not be an idiot.

You are however, undoubtedly a liar.

Fish on...

Todd

The GOP is the party of the very, very top of the wealth pyramid in this country...when wages, investments, and profits go down for the rest of us they don't just disappear...they end up in the hands of the very, very, very, very few.

The sad thing is that somehow they have convinced a goodly portion of you that that very, very, very, very few is the same as "you", and that "you" are being hurt when they are not allowed to fleece us all.

You who believe that are the biggest fuckin idiots.

Those very, very, very, very few also don't care one whit about the 2nd Amendment, religion, abortion, immigration, or social welfare programs, not even a tiny little bit?

Why do they talk about them so much then, if they don't care about them?

Because it's easier to get fools and idiots to vote for them when they tell them that a Kenyan Marxist Nigerian Socialist Muslim wants to take their guns and give them to illegal immigrants who will then use them to shoot Jesus and force everyone to get an abortion.

Those who run the GOP all have sore ribs from belly laughing at the morons and TeaBaggers who are actually out there shilling for them...

Fish on...

Todd