The View From 1776

Charles Murray (Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980) observed that the poor are poor, not stupid.  When politicians provide them ways to live a reasonably comfortable life without working, they won’t work.  When people don’t work, production lags or declines, dragging down the standard of living.  More mouths to feed, less with which to feed them.

We saw the consequences in the 1960s and 70s, epitomized in President Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that we settle down and become used to the social and economic malaise besetting us.  Welfare rolls had ballooned and President Johnson’s Great Society benefits made it a paying proposition for irresponsible males to father as many illegitimate children as possible, abandoning the mothers, rationalizing that unmarried mothers could collect higher welfare payments than would be available to a married family.  Going on welfare became a socially acceptable career choice, actively encouraged by welfare workers in places like New York City. 

Ironically, liberal-progressive icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan forewarned us in 1965 that family life was disintegrating under the hammer blows of the welfare state.  Liberal-progressives paid little heed.  Bill Ayers, Weather Underground terrorist, shortly thereafter enunciated the New Left paradigm: family life is to be subordinated to the idealism of the socialistic collective (or, more often, to self-centered hedonism).

“A lot of the problems that people are going through now have to do with monogamy and its basis in male supremacy...That’s something that just has to be smashed...people have come to see the need to build collectives that can fight, the need to build collectives that are strong and tough, and in order to do that a lot of individualism has to be worked out of every one of us.  Any notion that people can have a primary responsibility for one person, that they can have that “out” - we have to destroy that notion in order to build a collective, we have to destroy all “outs” to destroy the notion that people can lean on one person and not be responsible to the entire collective.”

(From New Left Notes, 9/12/69, excerpted from Bill Ayers’s speech at the Midwest National Action conference held in Cleveland, August 29 - September 1, 1969)

Ayers today is President Obama’s close friend, political supporter, and long-time collaborator in Chicago activities to insinuate radical socialistic doctrine into school curricula.

Beginning in the 1960s, liberal-progressive disincentives to responsible and productive social behavior drove whole sectors of the populace toward indolence, drugs, and crime. Entitlements mentality fostered improvident Federal debt and personal overuse of credit cards and mortgage debt.  People were urged to go into hock for whatever they wanted.  Since then, increasingly fewer people have followed the traditional precepts of working, saving for the future, and spending only on important family needs.

Barton Bennett alerted me to a current example of liberal-progressive disincentives to productive work: In Entitlement America, The Head Of A Household Of Four Making Minimum Wage Has More Disposable Income Than A Family Making $60,000 A Year.

Liberal-progressives seem to have learned nothing from the disaster they created in the 1960s.  Handiwork of Congress, controlled by the Democrat/Socialist Party since 2006, makes unmistakably clear liberal-progressive intent to expand welfare-state entitlements without limit, paying for them with higher taxes on “the rich” and unlimited deficit spending.

The goal of liberal-progressive-socialism, since the beginning of the 19th century, has been socializing society’s economic resources.  Socializing, in that context, means the political state’s control, by ownership or regulation, of all means of production and distribution of goods and services.  The goal is social justice, defined as equal access of all citizens to any of society’s resources.

Socialism speaks of people’s needs.  It confronts, in practice, unlimited wants.  Raise four generations under a socialistic welfare state, as we have since Franklin Roosevelt’s imposition of socialism in the 1930s, and you get a society increasingly dependent upon the political state.  Politics then becomes a process of creating new welfare handouts with which to buy votes.

Nirvana for liberal-progressives is a society in which everyone works for the government. But, if everyone works for the government, or is a dependent of the government, there is diminished incentive to work hard and to strive for excellence.  Instead the labor-union mentality takes over: work only to the minimum standard, keep production costs high by taking as much time as possible to do the job and using as many people as possible to do it.

Personal effort, skill, or merit play no part at all in liberal-progressives’ conception of social justice.  Simply exist and be entitled in a rejuvenated version of medieval feudalism.

In the 1960s, Michael Harrington, a theorist of the Democrat/Socialist Party’s War on Poverty and chairman of the American Socialist Party, wrote, “...there is a need for planning.…What is needed is that the society make use of its knowledge in a rational and systematic way...as a place for coordination, for planning, and the establishment of national standards…only the Federal Government has the power to abolish poverty.” President Obama has taken Mr. Harrington’s views as his own.

Michael Walzer is co-editor of Dissent, the liberal-progressive periodical founded by Irving Howe, then the dean of American socialists.  He elaborated present-day liberal-progressive views in In Defense of Equality, (1973). 

Possession of money confers unfair power to its possessors, he tells us.  Money enables its holders to buy things others cannot have.  Walzer and Democrat/Socialist Party leaders fear that allowing unequal distribution of wealth enables the wealthy to take control of the government.  Exceptions, of course, are made for far-left radicals such as billionaire George Soros.

Walzer writes that there is no justification for the CEO of a major corporation to earn more than a worker on the factory floor.  For his greater role, the CEO is adequately compensated with the perks of his job, such as respect and a corner office.  To implement equality, there must be government administered quota systems to award students opportunities for study in professions such as law and medicine.  Higher grade point averages as criteria for admission to graduate studies are unfair advantages conferred by money that buys superior education.

Walzer also focuses tightly upon freedom, which in his paradigm is a purely materialistic concept allied to the misimpression that the Bill of Rights is a list of entitlements to material goods.  Liberal-progressive freedom is, not individual liberty of action, but access to goods and services produced by others.  Whatever people want should be distributed, without regard to wealth, intelligence, or righteousness.  Liberal-progressive “freedom” cannot exist in a society where wealth is not equally distributed, a theme underlying the rhetoric of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and other Democrat/Socialist Party spokesmen.

Elementary common sense and universal experience tell us that Walzer’s prescription can only result in diminution of skills, competence, performance, and national wealth.

Young people today have never experienced life under a social and political paradigm that much resembles the ethos that gave birth to the United States.  They haven’t read the Bill of Rights or studied its 1776 context, but they have been schooled to believe that it is a catalog listing all their wants, to any of which they are entitled.  Long lost is the understanding that the Bill of Rights is the opposite: a barrier to protect individual liberties against encroachment by the political state.

Obama and his fellow liberal-progressives orate about “investing” in green energy, green jobs, social service, and support for teachers’ unions to perpetuate socialistic indoctrination.  None of this will stop our nation’s drift toward relative poverty and second class status in the world.