The Wayward Welfare State / The No-Risk Society
Freeman, Roger A. & Aharoni, Yair
I know very little of writers, but people I do no. You are a good man to ride the river with, Jonathan Ravan. The voyage ends on a note that can only be called near suicidal, and vintage...
...In the absence of information on income distribution, Mr...
...Freeman concludes that every increase resulted in the redistribution--that is the equalization--of incomes...
...Even more importantly, these very standards were enforced upon state and local governments by Congress, the courts, and the federal bureaucracy's policy of "contract compliance...
...It is the maintenance of those ties, not merely the selfishness of the program's participants, that makes any reform of the System extremely unlikely...
...Contemporary politicians, including many conservatives, could do worse than emulate New Dealers...
...of government taxing, spending, and employment from 1952 on...
...Defining risk as every "uncertain outcome that is also undesirable," Aharoni postulates that a "no-risk society" is the aim of all modern government...
...Tile alternative may well be a knife in the ribs...
...The growth of American government, he argues, is deformed in two ways: First, the purpose of welfare policies increasingly has been the "redistribution" of personal income, as distinguished from the amelioration of social ills...
...armies against wars, welfare programs against poverty, public schools against ignorance...
...Franklin Roosevelt, for example, claimed that he came to bring work, not the dole...
...Howe is obviously interested in Kipling, and he has some genuinely intelligent, if elaborately tolerant, things to say about him from time to time...
...Not the New Deal, but the bureaucratic regime initiated by Kennedy and Johnson saps the citizenry of its resources for self-government by raising taxes progressively, by dishonoring honest labor and decent family life in the name of a spurious poverty, and by placing the details of commerce and local politics under the tutelage of federal regulations...
...For another, Raban lacks the survival instincts of a true Huck Finn...
...If, as he claims, "the days of individualism are certainly over," then the era of social responsiblity, of governmental insurance against every misfortune, must be here...
...In many cases, qualification for one program qualified one for another...
...a " t r u s t fund" was even maintained, where their contributions "could pause on the way into their fellow citizens' hands...
...Because these increases were financed by the various progressive income taxes, Mr...
...Like Freeman, Aharoni is concerned that the modern state has destroyed the ideal of personal responsibility...
...S h i t . Why you keeping it in this f...
...Granted, the Viking Portables are at once rather erratic in quality and far more restricted in scope than the freshly edited, all-encompassing Plliade sets...
...Had Bob Kelley been around to observe it, he might well have r e t r a c t e d his endorsement...
...THE WAYWARD WELFARE STATE Roger A. Freeman / Hoover Institution Press / $35.00 THE NO-RISK SOCIETY Yair Aharoni / Chatham House / $25.00, $12.95 paper John Wettergreen Only recently has the welfare state, with all its problems, been established here...
...Schools, for instance, exist to inculcate knowledge, not to counter random ignorance...
...Freeman to quantify than the shift away from arms...
...But now Mr: Freeman is more concerned with the causes of that growth and its consequences for the American way of life...
...Although a majority of reviewers (including the normally sensible Mitchell S. Ross) would love to see him do it again, I wouldn't advise it...
...Unfortunately, Aharoni was not content to evaluate social insurance programs...
...Aharoni explores the vast, and growing, system of "social insurance" in the United States...
...They negotiate the redistributions of entirely relative, private costs and benefits_by a regime that strikes at the heart of American self-reliance...
...These programs receive little public scrutiny...
...Freeman analyzes a variety of income support programs: Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, five work-incentive programs, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, public housing and renters' subsidies (but not food stamps or any agricultural programs...
...Nevertheless, the System was founded during the New Deal, and is preserved today by appealing to some of the most decent sensibilities of the American people...
...Do not police insure against the risk of crime...
...Most people enjoy bearing certain responsibilities, especially naturally moral ones, and even today the Social THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 35 Security System survives on its moral capital, for most citizens would demand its abolition if they calculated only their:private interests in that giant Ponzi scheme...
...That devaluation explains Mr...
...the blind and the maimed became those with certificates of disability...
...To counter this new spirit, Aharoni takes pains to demonstrate that social insurance really only redistributes property from those who take responsibility for their own lives to those who do not...
...After a long dry spell, Penguin Books took over principal responsibility for the Viking Portable series some six years ago, updating a few of the old classics and commissioning several new volumes: an excellent Nabokov, a very good Shaw, a plausible Graham Greene...
...Worse still, this change was accompanied by a loosening of laws and administrative practices which had once required proof of genuine and otherwise irremediable need as a condition for receipt of benefits...
...Actually, we know that armed services were c u t for Welfare programs in 1969, 1970, and 1971, because that is what our p o l i t i c a l leaders said they were doing...
...The real trouble started, however, not when welfare benefits began to expand, but when the goal of welfare policy became redistribution...
...Now *Woollcott's skills as an anthologist, as it happens, were far more considerable than his generally unenthusiastic reviewers cared to admit...
...Nevertheless, thefact remains that, in constant dollars, the federal government in 1978 spent 4 p e r c e n t less for defense and 822 percent more for domestic services than in 1952...
...But none of the Portables are less than serviceable, while some (Morton Dauwen Zabel's Henry James, for example, or Bernard DeVoto's Mark Twain) are veritable masterpieces of compression...
...The kid sniffs Raban's pouch and backs off in disbelief...
...When President Reagan pledges himself to preserve " t h e social safety net for the truly needy," he is actually proposing to reverse twenty years of social policy...
...a Dorothy Parker anthology, Edmund Wilson summed up those features which have distinguished the many excellent volumes of the Viking Portable Library to this day: '~[T]he format of this volume . . . is appropriate to and worthy of the contents...
...If he is to write another travel book, for s a f e t y ' s sake, let it be about French cookery...
...As You Were is an admirably compact "traveler's library...
...and at least one, Malcolm Cowley's famous Portable Faulkner, was chiefly responsible for a largescale revival of interest in the output of a formerly neglected author...
...If they really were insurance, only chance--as distinguished from anything intrinsic to the programs--would keep them from going broke...
...Because such programs tend "to hide the distribution of economic costs and benefits, to shift the burden of risk, and to influence the allocation of r e s o u r c e s / ' Aharoni calls them "invisible government...
...Freeman makes his case in overwhelming detail, of which I can give only a whiffhere...
...Nor were New Dealers wimpy...
...Woollcott's words) " a variety of reading m a t t e r . . , reprinted on thin paper in a pocket-size volume for the convenience of men who are mostly on the move and must travel light...
...and, similarly, almost anyone out of a job for almost Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Invisible government conceals the selfishness of the irresponsible by the sham of social responsiblity...
...Of course, the public's support for Social Security has been short-sighted: No government program can make everyone independently wealthy...
...The volume, called As You Were, contained (in Terry Teadmut is jazz critic for the Kansas City Star...
...They fought, not only in two wars and half a war in Vietnam, but above all on the hustings for the public's support of their programs...
...In a review of the first Portable...
...Consider the clearest example of Aharoni's invisible government and Freeman's redistributive welfare state: the Social Security System...
...In this way, two public pretenses essential to the legitimacy of Social Security were maintained: First, citizens were encouraged to believe that they were building their own retirement incomes...
...You trying t.o get yourself killed...
...And, as recently as the presidential campaign of 1964, even liberal Democra,s sneered at the notion that the central government ought to provide cradleto-grave security for everyone, howJohn Wettergreen teaches political science at San Jose State University...
...According to Freeman, the "seeds" of the change from the welfare state to the redistributive state were planted during the New Deal, when the radically egalitarian notion " t h a t all shortcomings in human beings or conditions are the fault of society'and environment," not of individual choices, was planted in the brains of those "who later became the shapers of public opinion, the makers of public policy decisions, the educators of the next generation...
...Freeman's major concern: If independence is not prized, it will not be the result of our foreign and defense policies any more than of our domestic policies...
...This difficulty derives in part from the f e d e r a l government's refusal since 1964 to specify how many Americans there are in each bracket of personal income...
...but the fundamental lack of sympathy between author and editor necessarily poses a real problem to the reader looking for a solid approach to Kipling...
...Because these programs were intended--at least, putat i v e l y - t o aid widows, orphans, the blind, invalids, the maimed, innocent victims of economic c a t a s t r o p h e s , and those too old or young to support themselves adequately, Congress could increase their benefits without serious opposition...
...THE PORTABLE KIPLING Edited by Irving Howe The Viking Press, $17.95 / Penguin Books, $6.95 Terry Teachout Alexander Woollcott's final literary venture prior to his untimely death in January...
...As this example illustrates, New Dealers understood that the American welfare state could be founded (as to some extent it is still preserved) upon the principles of self-government...
...In every single year from 1952 tO the p r e s e n t , Congress has increased the dollars spent for domestic services, while in eight of those years, including the war years of 1969, 1970, and 1971, it has cut the dollar amount for defense...
...While lighting a pipe, he is accosted by a kid who mistakes his tobacco for "shit," and Raban for a federal narc...
...This is the second book in which Jonathan Raban has put himself on display as a piece of human driftwood...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 any reason became entitled to public support...
...Thus we came to Tip O'Neill's definition of"the poor": all those who benefit from a sJvernment program...
...second, welfare programs have been financed by cuts in national defense...
...for example, unemployment made one certifiably hungry and sick, i.e., eligible for food stamps and Medicaid...
...For one thing, all misfortunes are riot caused by change, and governments neither use, nor claim to use, insurance programs to govern everything...
...Like its p r e d e c e s s o r , * Roger A. Freeman's Wayward Welfare State demonstrates the enormous growth *The Growth of American Government (Hoover Institution Press, 1975...
...The shift toward redistribution is more difficult for Mr...
...The current season has brought us two brand-new Portables...
...Citizens were thus encouraged to believe that, because of the System, they would never be forced to depend upon their fellow citizens, and especially upon their children and granchildren...
...Until the System's troubles began to become obvious (around 1965), the OASDI payroll deduction was called a contribution, not a tax...
...Bloomington, Indiana Tin California, the formalization of disability has gone so far that law and ad...
...ever poor...
...These sensibilities are ties of mutual obligation between citizens and between generations, without which the preservation of a free society would be more difficult...
...The problems start, logically ~By T. John Jamieson, The American Spectator, August 1982...
...In a bar in the mean, flea-bitten town of Houma, he comes close to finding it...
...1943 was an anthology tailored to fit the needs of a very specific audience: America's soldiers and sailors...
...The volume under review is so much improved that it is an entirely different work...
...just when the Wiir on Poverty was declared, pollThere o r t u n i t v opp " Ameri IH c a I. ticians seemed to lose interest in the numbers of the enemy...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982...
...Beginning in the early 1960s, widows and orphans came to be thought of as .persons living with minors and without another person to support them...
...Disgusted by the seedy commercialism of the New Orleans French Quarter, Raban noses his boat into the bayous in search of a more appropriate conclusion...
...Wilson crusaded tirelessly in his later years for an American-made counterpart to Gallimard's celebrated Editions de la Pl~iade, enumerating the French series' virtues in distinctly similar terms...
...Perhaps Aharoni Could have been more discriminating...
...those too old to work became those over 62 years of age...
...These changes in public assistance eligibility amounted to a public devaluation of independence...
...several of the authors covered by the series do not fit at all well into its stylized single-volume format, and more than a few of the best Viking Portables have been out of print for years...
...In effect, both Aharoni and Freeman contend that the welfare state thrives on the ideal of personal irresponsibility...
...Moreover, these programs are "insurance" only in a metaphorical sense...
...and it is rather surprising that the critics who have lately declared open season on the ill-begotten Library of America, that etiolated attempt at a home-grown Pl~iade Aaaderaique, seem to have overlooked the fact that we already have in the Viking Portable Library a rough but workable equivalent of our own...
...for in 1944, the Viking Press, which published As You Were, borrowed its Woollc0tt-devised format and subtitle--"A Portable Library of American Prose and P o e t r y " - - t o use as the trademarks of a new reissue series which has since become a familiar fixture on the American literary scene: the Viking Portable Library...
...Since the early 1960s, in other words, government has deliberately refused to distinguish between those who are forced tO depend upon their fellow citizens andthose who choose such dependency...
...Today's regime governs invisibly, not publicly, evincing a design upon the democratic right of self-government...
...There is a bracing perversity, it must be said, in assigning to the editor of Dissent the task of assembling a one-volume compilation of Rudyard Kipling's best work...
...For one thing, the seventies are over, Raban's n e u r a s t h e n i a is losing its charm...
...one, Russell Kirk's Conservative Reader, has already been justly praised in these pages.~ The other, however, is a bit of a curate's egg: A Portable Kipling edited by, of all people, Irving Howe...
...There is more to modern politics than risk-management...
...it is as if Bill Buckley had somehow been conned into editing, say, a Portable Gore Vidal...
...A knife is p u l l e d - - ' 'You pull your f- . . . . ' gun on me, man, I'll cut y o u . . . " "Look, please"--and laid against the author's lapel...
...Thus, when a Grand Old Partisan writes to correct, not to denounce or dismantle, the American welfare state, he is reflecting a remarkable change in public opinion...
...and the two long-forgotten Woollcott Readers, tbQugh marred by what Woollcott called his "incorrigibly miscellaneous" literary tastes, nevertheless served to introduce such first-rate works as A Handful of Dust, Cakes and Ale, and A Christmas Garland to a wider American audience...
...Is the price one must pay for the FHA's guarantee of a mortgage a tax...
...Raban has been asked this last question so many times that one begins to wonder...
...Thus, at the same time that the federal government has been trying to do more to improve the American way of life, it has been doing less to defend and Sustain that way...
...Indeed, they do...
...Of course, such figures alone cannot demonstrate that defense was reduced for the purpose of increasing welfare payments...
...They are never sound actuarially...
...It also turned out to have a longer life, in a manner of speaking, than any of Woollcott's more original productions...
...The Social Security System is the largest and best known of these programs, but there are countless others, whether insuring against default on various kinds of debts, or against floods, violent crimes, riots, commercial and crop failures,, wars, airplane accidents, various illnesses and disabilities, unemployment, a'nd death...
...ministrative practice allow drivers' licenses to people who are legally blind and legally quadriplegic...
...stuff, man...
...those too young to work became those unqualified for "good jobs...
...Typically, they are kept "off-budget" by the pretense that they cost the citizenry nothing...
...But these objections aside, one can sympathize with Aharoni's attempt to understand modern government as a giant insurance policy...
...However this might be, "Income support [by the government] . . . multiplied tenfold in constant dollars between 1952 and 1978," while transfer payments as a p e r c e n t a g e of personal income quadrupled...
...The voyage ends on a note that can only be called near suicidal, and vintage Raban...
...As we have seen, one of the tricks in running a welfare state is to conceal the actual costs and benefits deriving from the various programs...
...It is compact, well-printed, and small, easy to carry and handle: the kind of thing that ought to be encouraged, as distinguished from the more ponderous type of omnibus...
...In The No-Risk Society, Yair Aharoni evaluates some of the best concealed programs of the American welfare state...
...A neat little handful of a book much like the pre-Random House Modern Library volumes in outward appearance, it received a wide and appreciative circulation in its day...
Vol. 15 • October 1982 • No. 10
