Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Hmmm Spreadable Wealth   [Jonah Goldberg]

Ross continues to ruminate on spreading the wealth. He writes:

Another thing on this subject - is opposition to wealth-spreading in principle really now a litmus test for being a conservative? I thought that being on the right meant that you wanted a welfare state that's small in size and limited in scope - that's what I signed up for, at least - and the most just and reasonable way to shrink and/or restrain the American welfare state that I can see is to make it more redistributive, rather than less so. To quote William Voegeli quoting Paul Pierson in a fine essay on the dilemmas of small government conservatism: "If conservatives could design their ideal welfare state, it would consist of nothing but means-tested programs." In other words, a conservative welfare state would eliminate our current network of universal entitlement programs, and replace them with cheaper, means-tested programs that, well, spread the wealth - that spend your tax dollars to provide temporary assistance to the unemployed, underwrite health care costs for the aged and very poor, set an income floor underneath American seniors, and so forth, rather than taking money from the middle class with one hand and giving it back to them with the other.

Whereas if conservatives back themselves into a corner where they're denouncing any kind of redistributionism as pure socialism, they're undercutting their ability to push for this vision of a more means-tested welfare state - because that push, if it ever has any chance of succeeding politically, will have to rely on explicitly redistributionist arguments to succeed. For instance, when John McCain proposed - correctly, in my view - that we should consider means-testing the Medicare prescription drug benefit, he justified the proposal on the grounds that "people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett don't need their prescriptions underwritten by taxpayers." In other words, McCain was proposing a leaner Medicare that spreads the wealth to seniors who can't afford their prescription, and uses Warren Buffett's tax dollars to do it - rather than a more bloated, inefficient Medicare that makes less of a distinction between rich and poor in how it spends taxpayer dollars. I thought that was a conservative proposal. But maybe it's just creeping socialism.

Me: I think there's considerable merit to all of this, even though — not surprisingly — I am less enamored of Douthatian interventionism than Douthat himself (I'm not dogmatically opposed to it either). I do think there's a role for a minimal and means-tested welfare state. But I think what Ross isn't hearing in Obama, and isn't getting in conservative opposition to his spread the wealth line, is the belief that spreading the wealth in and of itself is a good idea. My understanding of the new crusade for more activist government from folks like Ross, Reihan, Frum, Brooks, Yuval, Ramesh et al, was that it was good public policy (and politics) to help certain people for a wide array of reasons. Specific interventions are necessary for specific purposes: improving healthcare, helping families, etc. The fact that some wealth gets spread around is a necessary consequence of these actions, but not a good in and of itself. For example, when congressmen support an unnecessary defense program for the dollars it brings to their district, that's not good public policy right? That's just pork, or "spreading the wealth around." If, however, a happy byproduct of supporting necessary programs is that they create jobs back home, well, all the better. Similarly, if you believe that spreading the wealth around is the point of public policy, you are getting very close to a socialist worldview.

Indeed, Barack Obama made it sound like he thinks spreading the wealth isn't the consequence of good public policy but it is in fact the chief aim of public policy. That was even more clear, I think, when he told Charlie Gibson that he would consider raising capital gains taxes for "purposes of fairness" whether or not they increased revenues. In other words, spreading the wealth is the public policy aim, not the regrettable byproduct of it.

It's entirely possible this is largely a semantic as opposed to a philosophical thing, but I don't think that's the case, which is why I think so many people had an "aha" moment over this Joe the Plumber stuff.

At least that's part of my argument in my column today, by the way.

10/22 09:11 AMShare