The Nation's Pulse/ The Permissive Right
London, Herbert
T he media have discovered a new political darling: William Weld, the governor of Massachusetts. Here is the quintessential hero for the Deficit-Cutting Era: a fiscal conservative and a social...
...When urban residents react against high crime rates and begin to assume that their private property is only temporarily in their possession, businesses will leave the city, jobs will flee as well, and the tax base will erode...
...Here is the quintessential hero for the Deficit-Cutting Era: a fiscal conservative and a social liberal...
...If the Welds in the Republican Party have their way, Empower America will resemble Enervate America, and all discussion of fiscal conservatism may have to be modified to incorporate a liberal social agenda...
...Teaching the public to appreciate a linkage between tax policy and social policy shouldn't be hard...
...But I'm convinced that all his reforms won't amount to a hill of beans in a welfare environment that keeps expanding its client base...
...Yet the social liberals generally do not connect his warning with the enormous public expense, now in the multi-billions, to sustain these children and deal with the crime they disproportionately commit...
...When poor women have children out of wedlock, an enormous burden gets placed on society in the form of remedial education, high crime rates, drug abuse, and the full range of aberrant behavior...
...Conservatives have yet to fire a shot...
...Until then, one should be wary of fiscal conservatives and social liberals applauded by the New York Times...
...G eorge Bernard Shaw once said, "Taking from Peter to pay Paul always meets with the approval of Paul...
...There is even William F. Buckley, who argues that the abortion question should be removed from politics...
...As Schumpeter, Weber, and Daniel Bell pointed out, capitalism depends on the requisites of moral rectitude...
...CI...
...As graffiti on, a subway wall noted: "If you lead the high life, someone will pay for you to be a low life...
...The keep-these-matters-in-the-bedroom wing of the party is in the ascendancy...
...New York Times editors have been no less effusive in their praise...
...Their agenda is not all it seems...
...When governors do not criticizethis behavior or dismantle the bureaucracy that enables it to occur, all their fiscal proposals ultimately come to nought...
...S ince the 1960s, state and federal governments have spent more than $3 trillion attempting to address social problems in inner cities with little if anything to show for' it...
...But they haven't put the two together...
...Similarly, liberal lawmakers sponsor mandatory helmet laws for motorcyclists, but I would argue that this problem should be addressed with insurance rates high enough to discourage such behavior...
...From all that has been written, he may be perceived as Moses leading the Republican Party to the promised land on Pennsylvania Avenue and rewriting the political Talmud to say markets work, but social issues should be kept in the bedroom...
...If it isn't possible for most individuals to sustain a high standard of living and control expenditures while holding libertine attitudes about sex, morality, and discipline, why should it be possible for societies...
...History, of course, has proved him right...
...Governments always have a reason for high taxes...
...Perhaps in the not-too-distant future a fusillade will be heard from them...
...He will raise taxes to address social problems which will not be reduced or solved with additional expenditures...
...It can certainly be demonstrated that sex education programs and condom distribution have not decreased sexual promiscuity and illegitimacy, but have added to the cost of education...
...But low taxes and low morals usually lead to high taxes and low morals...
...It is astonishing that anyone can ignore the relationship between the tax burden and permissive social attitudes, but myopia is a widespread affliction...
...But, in fact, welfare-state capitalism accommodates the very behavior that militates against employee output...
...The culture war is not over...
...Similarly, the economy is affected by family breakdown and social anomie...
...The public is waking up to the fact that urban streets aren't safe despite increases in spending on police protection...
...If employees aren't punctual, use drugs, and engage in anti-social acts, then performance on the job will be adversely affected...
...For example, liberals were appalled when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said the effect of illegitimacy in the black community would undermine the family by causing young women to be married to government instead of husbands...
...And there may be some linkage—usually denied by rigid avatars of the First Amendment—that malicious rock lyrics and perverse film and television scripts can influence young minds into malicious and perverse acts for which the rest of society pays...
...Adopting a live-andlet-live view of society will harm theeconomy and constrain the application of fiscally conservative policies...
...If people were to think about this linkage, it wouldn't take much persuasion to convince them that the phrase fiscal-conservative-and-social-liberal is oxymoronic...
...Lest I create the impression that I see Weld as a Republican Jed Kennedy, let me emphasize that I think he was both right and courageous in leading the charge for spending restraints and tax cuts in Massachusetts...
...What these advocates neglect to point out is that government is promoting a social agenda through welfare policy, the schools' curricula, and arts subsidies that have taken social issues from the bedroom to the streets...
...The Wall Street Journal, relying on economic data, described him as the most effective governor in the country...
...Clearly an indeterminate point could be reached at which the social costs of permissiveness require government intervention, although in most instances I prefer family guidance to the heavy hand of government...
...A libertine who accepts illegitimacy will at some point have to assume fiscal responsibility for feral children who commit much of the crime and force society to bear an unwanted financial burden...
...Weld is not alone...
...Theoretically, in a free-market environment such problems would be addressed by firing the miscreants...
...Surely there is a lesson here for Republicans who want to rebuild their party...
...There are libertarians, who believe the government should restrict its activity to defense matters...
...At the moment John and Mary Q. Public are bewildered by behavioral permissiveness and upset by high insurance rates designed to discourage irresponsible behavior...
...Capitalism can produce wealth and wealth can produce social permissiveness, which in turn can undermine the behavioral requisites on which capitalism depends...
...during a downturn...
...W by has no one pointed out that fiscal conservatism and social liberalism are incompatible...
...Think of Paul as government and Peter as the taxpayer...
...President Clinton is likely to be an unwitting ally in this educational process...
...People should be discouraged from smoking because the costs to society are high, but that discouragement can often come in forms other than legislation...
...But Republicans are seemingly jumping on this bandwagon and concentrating on the economy to the virtual exclusion of social issues...
...The very people who would "keep these matters in the bedroom" covertly promote a social agenda through the Children of the Rainbow curriculum, bias bills designed to appease homosexual activists, subsidies for artists which are often employed for a radical agenda, condom distribution in the schools, and multicultural textbooks...
...There are neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, who claim the cultural wars are over and our side lost...
...It can be demonstrated that, in this era of AIDs, buggery and hypodermic drug use come with risks, not only for consenting adults exercising their free will, but for the rest of us who have observed high insurance costs, hospital expenses, and tax rates...
...Stupid...
...It is predictable for Democrats to concentrate on the economy...
...Educational expenditures grow at a rate twice that of inflation and still those students reading at grade level goes down as a percentage of the whole and the number of students scoring above 1200 on the SATs (verbal and math scores combined) goes down relatively and absolutely year after year...
...This is a classic case of the cultural contradictions of capitalism...
...I'm not telling Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett who card-carrying members of their new group Empower America should be, but when Bill Weld is considered a charter member, it gives me pause...
...Some educators—and I agree with them—contend that these courses and condom programs actually increase promiscuity and illegitimacy and add hidden costs to the society...
...In fact, latitudinarian social behavior promoted and abetted by social liberals in both parties has led inexorably to an ever growing government expense to address the problems permissiveness has caused to flourish...
...Here is the New York–Los Angeles scenario...
...As a consequence of illegitimacy, government expenditures will inevitably increase...
...The fiscal conservative and social liberal, however, says we can have low taxes and a permissive social environment...
Vol. 26 • May 1993 • No. 5
