The Growth of American Government: A Morphology of the Welfare State
Nash, George H.
Trol!ope's Barch,:s,~': ~ 7bwer~, the best relatively new book t ~c,,e read- all year is Thomas M~nn's Dr', F,_.;~stus, ~,nd the best recently published b<~ok I h~=ve read all year is Saul...
...In 1969 federal domestic expenditures reached $72 billion--180 years after George Washington became President...
...With relentless determination the Soviet Union is advancing toward what Freeman succinctly calls "decisive military superiority...
...In a book laden with charts, tables, and fascinating statistics, Freeman examines this phenomenon, its consequences, and implications...
...Above all, he attributes the reorientation of governmental expenditures since the 1950s to "the ascendancy of a view of politics which regards the redistribution of wealth as the principal purpose of govern...
...Between 1952 and 1972 governmental outlays for education rose 705 %, for social services and public welfare 1169...
...I can think of few other current books which assemble so much significant information and commentary in such a concise and practical form...
...Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Spm'ngtime...
...it" is merely "conducted less obtrusively...
...Between 1952 and 1972 the portion of the federal budget allocated to defense was reduced by one-half, while the portion devoted to domestic services tripled...
...Moreover, one American out of every four currently "obtains his livelihood," in Freeman's words, "through workless pay from the various social welfare programs...
...Twenty years later, even during the extremely costly Vietnam War, defense spending had plummeted to less than onethird, while domestic services had grown to more than one-half...
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...In fact, it has often proven "counter-productive" and has exacerbated the very problems it was supposed to cure...
...And yet, to this day, Freeman declares, "the existence of a relationship between the magnitude of expenditures and educational quality" has not been established...
...Natl...
...Almost simultaneously the Foreign Report of the Economist predicted that the USSR will attain strategic superiority over the United States within six months...
...The merits of the book are few, and are rather obscured by the consistent emphasis on aesthetic sensibility as a substitute for artistic percipience...
...Freeman particularly stresses the importance of John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Affluent Society, published in 1958...
...If Freeman's explanation of the dynamics of the welfare state is correct, then the future of America is problematic...
...Yet Freeman's book is more than a chronicle of the "growth os American government" and more than a critique (from a conservative perspective) of our tax system...
...And as Freeman implies, equity and equality are not identical (at least not in the minds of most Americans...
...Roger Freeman helps us to begin with the facts...
...What, Freeman wonders, are the prospects for a republic in which government extracts from the individual an increasing portion of his resources and thus his ability to order his own life...
...Still, the contemporary appeal of abstract egalitarianism is undeniable, particularly among the young and the articu...
...A serious masterpiece that is good for the soul...
...In 1952, at the height of the Korean War, defense spending accounted for two-thirds of the federal budget...
...Meanwhile, in this same period, governmental expenditures for domestic services multiplied by 645 %. And while the United States has been undertaking domestic experiments of stunning magnitude, there has occurred, in Freeman's words, "a decisive shift in the balance of military power...
...But each of Spender's remarks betray the opposite sensibility-fragmentary and diachronic: the tradition is seen as "an organic system of relations established in the past which adapts itself in an evolutionary way to new conditions through objective procedures taking place in the mind" of the living...
...W'uty, highly informative, throughly documented, caustic.., demolishes the myths, distortions and outright falsehoods of the anti-nuclear crowd...
...What have been the consequences of the staggering dispersal of public funds and the elephantiasis of the welfare state...
...Since 1952 the number of AFDC recipients has increased more than five times--from two million to eleven million--and AFDC has become "a major nutrient in the breeding grounds of...social ills," a "cancer on society, planted and nursed by the federal government...
...In the middle decades of the twentieth century', America has seen the explosive emergence of the welfare state--probably "the most significant govermnental development of its time...
...Today there is one American on a government payroll for every four persons in private industry...
...Equating equity with equality (as Freeman puts it), the devotees of egalitarianism strive not for equal opportunity but for equal results--through government and hence through politics...
...The contemporary voices become illustrative symptoms of the state of the civilization...
...What has happened...
...Perhaps those outbursts of satiric invective by Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God and The Roaring Queen, will in the long run remain our most accurate account of the Bloomsbury group and its pretensions...
...They appear to assume that political apportionment of worldly goods will be readily accepted as legitimate because the entire society will presumably have participated in the political process...
...But beneath this malaise, I suspect, lies a popular yearning not-for grandiose redistribution of incomes or worldly equality of results but for equity, for fairness...
...At which point, one might add, someone would probably propose the nationalization of chocolate factories...
...BOOK REVIEW The Growth of American Government: A Morphology of the Welfare State Roger A. Freeman / Hoover Institution Press / t8.95 George H. Nash When Herbert Hoover left the Presidency in 1933, the federal budget was less than five billion dollars...
...For in the eyes of the welfare statists, the mechanism of the free market is inherently fortuitous and unfair...
...Instead, the truly noteworthy proliferation of government since the Korean War has occurred among states and localities...
...We might expect a discussion of poetic, of structure, of shifts in tone or intent, or of changes in perception of the overall function of the poem...
...In the field of housing and urban renewal, the federal government between 1948 and 1968 destroyed 3.5 times as many units as it built, yet still the program continued...
...George Eliot, Afiddlemarch...
...There would soon be a national shortage of chocolates...
...How many critics of the supposedly insatiable "militaryindustrial complex" realize that the annual budget of the Department of HEW now substantially exceeds the budget of the Department of Defense ? In the course of analyzing recent trends in government spending, Freeman scrutinizes America's system of collecting public revenues as well...
...If one includes the expenditures of all levels of government, the figures become even more astonishing...
...24 The Alternative: An-American Spectator December 1976 lower brackets, not the higher...
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...While the federal government has become enmeshed in "uncontroUable" social programs, its fundamental responsibility for the common defense seems increasingly unmet...
...What will be the ultimate consequence of the extraordinary restrvcturing of our federal system since the 1950s...
...He observes, for example, that despite all the inveighing agaln-~t tax "loopholes," most tax-free income in the United States resides in the George H. Nash, author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since' 1945, fir currently writing a biography of Herbert Hoover...
...Of the most important, the most crucial aspects of Eliot's work, his experiments with language and with the updating of sensibility, there is not a word--aspects which we would expect another poet to be most concerned with and to be able to tell us most about...
...In fact, Freeman observes, federal domestic spending actually increased more than fifty percent faster in the first term of President Nixon than in the comparable periods under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...
...ment...
...They aim to overrule, through the political process, the rewards and punishments of the free market...
...To take another example from the same discussion: reviewing a catalogue of some "secondary voices" he remarks, "such voices are symptoms: symptoms of attitudes, reflexes, neuroses," which are "the results of the state of the civilization to which deeper voices, voices of the Biblical and Greek world, bear witness...
...domestic services took nearly all of the rest...
...Description is everywhere substituted for analysis: the eventual opening ("April is the cruellest month") is "arresting...
...Spender's ostensible purpose in writing-as signified by what the book contains--is to explain T.S...
...High school and college debating teams would especially benefit from such a sourcebook...
...The evidence that he presents is disconcertingly ominous...
...The severance of merit from reward has facilitated the imposition of government-sanctioned job quotas and discrimination, with an attendant residue of inequity, hypocrisy, and bitterness...
...Proof that a masterpiece need not be serious...
...work of art among them...
...BOOK REVIEW T.S...
...We have seen the welfare state, and it doesn't work...
...Who has initiated and sponsored the "revolution" in government during the past few decades...
...But this conceals the real purpose of writing such a treatise which soon reveals itself as showing that the author can be just as much an aesthete as his subject...
...the results, says Freeman, have been negligible...
...With what effect...
...There is one voice--the voice of the poet in the poem, who suffers...
...Far from painting a Galbraithean picture of social service deprivation at the hands of a bloated Pentagon, Freeman reveals that the opposite would be a more accurate portrayal...
...An examination of an especially noble conservatism...
...But it must be admitted that he seldom lapses into such contradictions...
...The reader already acquainted with Eliot, and with the better literature that has grown up around his work, will find little or nothing new in Spender (with the possible exception of some of the remarks in chapter ii, "Education, Harvard Style" and in chapter xi, "Politics") and nothing of consequence...
...The necessary assumption is that poetry is after all a matter of refinement and sensibility--an attitude shared by most Bloomsburyites-and consequently, aside from his exquisite taste, that there remains really no reason for regarding Eliot!s as serious art in the sense he and Pound and Lewis used the term...
...Year after year money allocated per pupil has increased, while "learning achievements" (as measured, for example, by college board test scores) have been declining alarmingly...
...Between 1964 and 1972, in just eight years, federal expenditures for domestic services multiplied an astounding three times (from 45 to 131 billion dollars...
...Indeed, "the evidence is overwhelming that there is little if any cost-quality relationship in the schools...
...The more the sphere of politics intrudes into our lives, the more arbitrary and demoralized our social order seems to become...
...Instead we get a ballet of banalities about "the quest" and "the need for redemption...passionately realized in Eliot's poems...
...Freeman amasses a startling array of statistics to documenthis case...
...It was the youthful intellectuals of the Great Depression, he states, who decisively influenced public opinion and policymaking a generation later...
...Nat...
...It is therefore one of the merits of Freeman's book that he investigates not merely trends but results...
...Between 1952 and 1972 public expenditures on education expanded an incredible eight times--four times faster than enrollments...
...In 1976 the federal deficit alone will be at least ten times greater than the entire federal budget during Herbert, Hoover's final year as chief executive...
...By documenting the emergence and evaluating the record of the contemporary welfare state, Roger Freeman has performed a timely and useful service...
...Today this perception is spreading precisely because of the welfare state itself--a mechanism which has yet to devise a satisfactory rationale for its own distribution of income and rewards...
...But if, as Freeman states, "the growth of government as such" has not been the significant transformation of recent times, what, then, constitutes the "revolution...
...For the Cold War is not over...
...Thanks to the Great Society and the growth of the welfare state, never has our political system been as pervasive as it is today...
...In fact, "there is a law of diminishing returns in social programs...
...The technique then is to draw Eliot down to his level, and to pretend that there's nothing more...
...In 1952 federal grants-in-aid amounted to less than three billion dollars...
...These are provocative remarks indeed--words which challenge the "conventional wisdom" of our public discourse...
...Since 1900 public spending in the United States has increased more than 239 times...
...Civic groups, businessmen's organizations, editorial writers, and other politically conscious individuals should read this work and ponder its contents...
...GEORGE F. WILL Syndicated columnist, Washington Post and Newsweek...
...Spender's book on Eliot provides neither--a pity as the Bloomsbury connection, which Spender had unique opportunities to observe both as poet and participant, could use much more elucidating...
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...Although Freeman does not raise the question, one might ask why the magnetism of this ideology is apparently intensifying at this time...
...Recent experience, however, increasingly belies these expectations...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 27...
...It is a synchronic, simultaneous whole...
...One could continue, but the thrust of Freeman's argument is clear: the idea that sheer indiscriminate expenditure of tax dollars will solve domestic social problems is a myth...
...In an election year replete with cries about tax reform, Freeman's discussion of this topic is apt and instructive...
...Is it because of newly perceived imperfections in a free society...
...The spectacular expansion of governmental activities" since 1952, he writes, "has not produced the promised and hoped-for results...
...To those who implore us to "reorder our priorities," Freeman would reply that we have already done so...
...In the twenty-four years since then they have multiplied twenty tunes...
...Noting that the United States already imposes a higher corporate profits tax than any other nation, he contends that this levy--politically popular though it may be--"punishes the efficient producer, restricts industrial expansion, penalizes capital formation, and adversely affects our competitiveness in international trade...
...The implications of the burgeoning welfare state extend beyond the realm of success or failure for particular social policies...
...Organic" Erie McLuhan is a ~,raduate student in literature at the University of Dallas...
...It took only six more years for this already gigantic figure to double...
...Some skeptics may doubt whether the minions of ideology will be repulsed or converted by an army of statistics...
...All of which may be true enough, but we do, I think, deserve better from another poet...
...Ship to: The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 25 Even more disturbing than Freeman's catalogue of failures is his analysis of the impact of the welfare state on national preparedness...
...ness...
...In a word, "the substance of self-government has been drained...
...Suppose that the federal government simply decreed that chocolates would henceforth cost a mere penny a piece, and no mor...
...9 6 by 9 _9 $5.95 softb...
...Yet these were eight of the most turbulent years of our history...
...Advocates of egalitarianism appear to believe that "social" and "collective" decisions made through political channels will necessarily be more equitable than the judgments of the marketplace...
...As Freeman's book demonstrates, the welfare state is already here, yet the increasing impingement of government on the marketplace has failed to engender a deeper -sense of equity...
...Eliot by Stephen Spender / Viking Press / $8.95 Eric McLuhan One always approaches a book by one poet about another with mixed feelings, expecting either choice gossip or some sort of artistic inside track...
...It is appropriate that he do so, for governmental taxation, like governmental expenditures, now approximates a remarkable 40% of the GNP...
...In the summer of 1976, Lord Chalmont wrote that "the nuclear balance...is being demolished before our very eyes...
...M. Stanton Evans Dr Beckmann's lucid and readable book should be in the hands o f every copeerned American...
...In the area of energy policy, Freeman reports that it was federal actions, not the alleged iniquities of private industry, which have primarily caused the current crisis: "Regulation of the natural gas price at artificially low levels for the past twenty years stimulated expanded consumption of (and conversion ~o) gas while discouraging exploration and production...
...Roger Freeman-Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, adviser to Presidents, and authority on public finance--believes that the United States has witnessed "nothing less than a revolution in the nature of government" during the last twenty-five years...
...Nevertheless, in appraising contemporary social policy and the claims of egalitarianism, we must begin somewhere...
...No wonder Freeman concludes that a "revolution" in public spending has transpired and that "the nature of the federal government underwent its most significant change ever between 1952 and 1972...
...Whether the benefits of governmental spending wiU someday compensate us for these losses is an "open question...
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...One of the few exceptions to my (and Emerson's) rule not to read a book that has not been out for more than a year...
...Any passage or chapter will serve to demonstrate...
...It is true that in the twenty years since 1952 governmental outlays for defense increased 68%, but much of this expansion, particularly in recent years, has been absorbed by salary increases and retirement benefits...
...To Freeman the "overpowering fact" for 1952-1972 has been a monumental change in the nature of governmental activity, particularly at the federal level: a "sudden and unprecedented explosion" of programs and expenditures for domestic social purposes...
...Spender knows better than this...
...Walter Berns, The First Amendment and the Future of Ameriaan Democrcwy (just out...
...The Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), for instance, has been "a nightmare and a plague on the body politic...
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...Books that puff these themes and approaches already clog the shelves (we can be thankful that the age is now passing in which bright young assistant professors are expected to complete their journeymanship by "doing a book" on each of the moderns...
...The chapter on "The Waste Land," for example, is written with Valerie Eliot's disclosure of Pound's collaborative emendations in view...
...Freeman demonstrates that the aggrandizement of domestic social programs has largely taken place at the expense of appropriations for national defense...
...Today it is eighty times higher...
...Cecil Driver, Tory Radical: The Life of Richard Oastter...
...The result, says Freeman, has been the creation of "a vertical functional autocracy which supersedes the selfgovernment of local communities...
...Eliot's poems and prose and fundamental aesthetic...
...Such solemn contentions by highly respected observers add a profoundly sobering dimension to Freeman's study of the growth of American government...
...In this year of the Bicentennial, America faces an arresthag fact: "social services and income distribution" have become"the core function of the United States government...
...Ralph de Toledano Technically informed, lively and polemical analysis compares the risks o f nuclear power to those o f its alternatives, concluding that it is safer than any other form o f large-scale energy conversion yet invented...
...These are fairly conventional descriptive cataloguings, and a reasonable prelude to a deeper discussion --but they represent virtually all that Spender has to offer on the subject...
...Freeman's words were written over a year ago, but they acquire new resonance almost daily...
...Almost every person one meets can recite an authentic anecdote about the abuses of the "System": medicaid mills, welfare frauds, food stamp cheating, OSHA regulations, "affirmative action," and many more...
...In Freeman's judgment, the impact of the welfare state on individual freedom has been "direct and negative...
...Nevertheless, year after year demands for more money for the "impoverished" educational sector grow ever more importunate, even while education has already surpassed every other sphere of governmental expenditure...
...The same descriptive superficiality characterizes the rest of his remarks on Eliot's artistic endeavors...
...Increased input," Freeman observes, "does not yield a greater output from a certain point on...
...At the moment it is not, I think, a dominant or irresistible impulse...
...This is a good year in which to be reminded that subtle people have their place in democratic government...
...In an age increasingly suspicious of giant corporations, Freeman boldly condemns the corporate profits tax as "probably the most economically damaging tax in our system...
...And so we encounter a seemingly accelerating cycle of cynicism and resentment...
...The "collective" allocation of resources by political means is now widely considered m be at least as objectionable as the free society it strives to replace...
...Perhaps not...
...For it is evident that the defenders of a free society today confront not simply an issue of social policy, but a passion, an ideology: the ideology of coercive equality...
...Or could it be that the ideology of equality is gaining adherents in proportion to the triumph of the welfare state...
...But we expect from a Spender something that qualifies as serious rather than what one gets from one who "is promising...
...Could it be that the very evils which egalitarians ascribe to a free society--the alleged unfairness of rewards and rule of chance-are in fact increasingly visible defects of the welfare state itself...
...Surprisingly enough, this has not been the case: federal spending and employment have not been exceeding the growth of the nation's economy since 1952...
...Since 1952 the proportion of national resources allocated to defense has been cut in half...
...In 1932, while President Hoover was still in orifice, total governmental expenditures (at all levels) comprised less than 20% of the Gross National Product...
...Meanwhile, Freeman remarks, the United States has become "the most crimeridden country in the world...
...Freeman would probably enjoy an exposure of the fallacies of our energy policy offered some months ago by the governor of Oklahoma...
...Instead the remarks remain on the level of the descriptive and mechanical, e.g.: "Undoubtedly the most dramatically decisive change was the scrapping of the scene with which the poem opened, of Sweeney-like buddies having a night out on the town...
...one of the classic modes of satire (Varronian or Menippean) is diagnostic and illustrative...
...The Growth of Araerican Government is neither a profound philosophical treatise nor a pioneering work in political economy...
...Still, it is a valuable synthesis, an impressive compendium of statistics and analysis which should be widely distributed...
...Outlays for income maintenance and education have reached astronomical heights, yet crime, family disintegration, and delinquency accelerate...
...With customary candor Freeman supplies the answer...
...P.G...
...While the number of individuals below the poverty line has markedly diminished in the last fifteen years, crime (often said to be caused by poverty) has nevertheless soared...
...Freeman begins by refuting a plausible but erroneous notion: that the federal bureaucracy and its expenditures have been expanding at an unusual rate in the past quarter of a century...
...Having quoted one of the focal passages from "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the one which includes" the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new...
...Instead, the advocates of the welfare state seek "to redistribute income and consumption more equally among high producers, low producers, and nonproducers, according to their own sense of social justice...
...Suppose, said the governor, that we regulated chocolate candy in the same way we have regulated natural gas...
...Freeman notes that in just ~renty years (1952 to 1972) the expend;tures of all levels of government in the United States surged upward by a staggering 277 billion dollars...
...The more the welfare state mentality permeates society, the more illegitimate our society is perceived to be...
...late...
...Like most conservative scholars since World War II, Freeman believes that "ideas have consequences" and emphasizes the role of intellectuals in promoting social change...
...Yet the ensuing disillusionment and insidious temptation simply to regard all society as a Great Rip-off may only undermine our social order further, thereby actually enhancing the prospects for 26 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 more drastic ventures in egalitarianism...
...Nationally syndicated columnist John Lofton Shows, in great detail, that nuclear energy is significantly safer than any alternative source o f energy - - including those we are using now...
...Since 1965 the federal government has spent over ten billion dollars on compensatory education programs...
...Moreover, Freeman observes that among industrial states the American tax system actually ranks first in its discouragement of capital formation and encouragement of consumption--all "in a determined attempt to redistribute income...
...there is no indissoluble link between effort and reward, between work and compensation...
...In 1952 the federal government already disbursed 13.4 billion dollars for domestic services...
...Nor does education escape Freeman's careful and critical scrutiny...
...A few more examples...
...According to the proponents of this theory--the theory of the welfare state--a producer has no inalienable right to the goods he has produced...
...How has this enormous reorientation of government been financed...
...It is a book for tourists and the paths it takes are well beaten...
...Certainly there is more wit and judgment, more playfulness and incisive perception in any of Lewis' observations than anywhere in this book...
...The passion for equality of results thrives on a perception that our social structure is capricious and unfair...
...To be sure, there presently exists in the land a widespread resentment against Big Government, the Washington Establishment, and Big Busi...
...The danger of remaining on the surface is that it is too easy to fall into contradictions, as "By putting the prophetic statement first, Eliot makes it prophecy and not social satire...
...DeGaulle's Memoirs...
...Today the figure approaches 40 % and does not cease to climb...
...An instructive, entertaining book that deserves the widest possible audience...
...Yet rarely has this system been more widely regarded as corrupt...
...The share of the Gross National Product expended for national defense and international relations has declined steeply from 14.3% in 1952 to less than 7% today --the lowest !eve1 s~nce the 1930s...
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...Instead, "collective" decsionmaking has generated its own array of vices and injustices: logrolling, favoritism, cronyism, and all the rest...
...Less than one-eighth of this increase went to national defense...
...After all, if the expansion of government An mid-century had been matched by an improvement in the efficacy of government, few Americans would care about Freeman's statistics...
...To what purpose...
...since then this figure has increased more than ten times...
...Spender's comments reveal .that he misses (or bypasses) the point entirely: Eliot's notion of the tradition is that which persisted from Quintilian at least until the time of Bonaventure...
...Time and again, in program after program, Great Society liberalism has failed...
...Trol!ope's Barch,:s,~': ~ 7bwer~, the best relatively new book t ~c,,e read- all year is Thomas M~nn's Dr', F,_.;~stus, ~,nd the best recently published b<~ok I h~=ve read all year is Saul ]3eitow's 2% jerusalem anti Back...
...But before one can predict the future, one must understand the past...
Vol. 10 • December 1976 • No. 3
