The Welfare-Warfare State

Continuing with yesterday's theme David Brooks chirps in on the problems we face and the institutions that need to be reformed.  Oligarchic corporations are one half of the problem but the other is comprised of the redistributionist-government worker complex: those who receive benefits of government spending and those who make their livelihoods as tools of that redistribution.  This is not to say that these institutions or the people who run them are evil (as the left-wing trope would characterize calls for reform) or that they should disappear (another oft-proffered straw man) but a call for sober assessment and reform. 

 The members of the Obama administration have many fine talents, but making adept historical analogies may not be among them.

When the administration came to office in the depths of the financial crisis, many of its leading figures concluded that the moment was analogous to the Great Depression. They read books about the New Deal and sought to learn from F.D.R.

But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.

According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections.

Everything else is building up for the Iowa caucuses in a week and the news is slow in anticipation. 

If you're looking for something a little more intellectual let me recommend this classic essay from 1967 which identifies the problem not as the "welfare state" or the "warfare state" but the "welfare-warfare state" which rewards corporations and the self-appointed guardians of the poor at a cost to society as a whole.  It is as timely today as it was 44 years ago.

The Great Society is the lineal descendant and the intensification of those other pretentiously named policies of 20th-century America: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier. All of these assorted Deals constituted a basic and fundamental shift in American life — a shift from a relatively laissez-faire economy and minimal state to a society in which the state is unquestionably king.[1]

In the previous century, the government could safely have been ignored by almost everyone; now we have become a country in which the government is the great and unending source of power and privilege. Once a country in which each man could by and large make the decisions for his own life, we have become a land where the state holds and exercises life-and-death power over every person, group, and institution. The great Moloch government, once confined and cabined, has burst its feeble bonds to dominate us all.

I think I'll break the monotony with some creative destruction to fix a closet and the floors in one of the bedrooms: pictures to follow.