Attacking Welfarism

...Liberals and moderates bemoan the debilitating effects of class conflict...

...Irving Kristol, one of the contributors to this volume, has maintained that increasing equality simply leaves the still relatively poor more resentful of the remaining inequalities...

...Where the contributors eschew bombast and get down to specific social problems, they are much better...

...Then, unless we consider social justice "an obsession," we must ask who deserves to get "more...

...Since the theme of the more ideological essays is Britain's welfare profligacy, and since those who oppose the introduction of national health insurance in the U.S...

...emphasize the cost-busting effects such a system would have, one cannot get very excited about the world-historical significance of Schwartz' findings...

...Finally, the sober Lenkowsky essay, mentioned earlier, ends on this note: "Such evidence as can be gathered...

...does not easily fit the notion that the welfare state has contributed to Britain's plight by reducing the incentives to work harder...

...For reasons economic historians have been unable to agree on, England failed to make a truly successful transition from the "first" industrial revolution based on textiles (pioneered in Britain), to the "second" industrial revolution founded on chemicals and steel (mastered by the Germans...

...On the theoretical level, a strong bias against the proposition that increasing economic equality has a salutory social effect runs throughout most of the collection...

...The warning aside, one of the first things any student in a social science methodology course learns is that correlation does not prove causation...

...Surely, Tyrrell does not mean to claim there is no hint of such an argument in Wilson's piece?that Britain's crime experience should in some way warn America from treading the same path...

...The paradox here is that those who do not believe income redistribution will make the poor feel better off are often the same people who champion general economic growth against critics holding that increased income does not mean increased happiness...

...The majority of the contributors deal with England and America, and are insouciant about information that might be provided by the experience of other countries...

...We can only observe that most people, rich and poor, prefer "more" to "less...

...An exception is Leslie Lenkowsky's judicious and balanced essay, entitled "Welfare in the Welfare State...

...One almost suspects Tyrrell commissioned this assuming it would balance the ranting ideological tone found in many of the other pieces, and then had to print it despite its conclusions in order not to be charged with political censorship...

...As for wider international comparisons, this book generally fails to make them too...

...At one point Worsthorne mentions the "contemporary obsession with social justice," and another author comments that when "some oaf shrieks, 'Shoot the bosses!' or 'Make the rich squeal!' " this is the product of "an embittered and unlettered heart...

...It is hardly surprising, therefore, that this collection of essays compiled by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor of the Alternative, a small magazine that first appeared as a student-oriented conservative publication during the New Left's waning days, tries to prove that sentimental, muddle-headed welfarism has done England in...

...Britain's long-term economic decline which began before the turn of the centuryis one of the best documented tales of modern economic and political historiography...

...Yet income redistribution is merely the channeling of more income to the poorer segment of society...

...If his view is correct, one could indict the welfare state for failing on its own terms, regardless of whether the measures it enacted resulted in an end to economic growth or other dire consequences...

...That argument, though, is not as applicable to the United States because of the U.S.' dominant economic and political role in the Western world, and the ocean separating this country from the European nations disgruntled Americans might move to...

...Schwartz has produced an interesting report on the troubles of the British National Health Service, and these boil down mainly to the fact that the Service has been starved for money...

...Marxists point to the loss of empire and conclude that Britain's setting sun demonstrates capitalism's dependence on imperialist exploitation of backward lands...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Author, "Push Comes to Shove," "Behind the Berlin Wall" Britain, alas, is rapidly becoming a political Rorschach blot...

...Britain spends about half as much of its GNP on health care as does (he United States...

...Yet, despite this harrowing fate, Tyrell warns us, there are American liberals who foolishly seek to take the U.S...

...In most indexes, Germany scarcely the Sick Man of Europe heads the Common Market in proportion of resources allocated for welfare programs...

...Lenkowsky points out that welfare spending in England is in fact stingy by West European standards...

...down the English welfarist path, and we had better turn around before it is too late: "The United Kingdom has become the latest version of the Sick Man of Europe and, as the United States has been on a similar diet, one might well ask if this nation is fated to go the way of the United Kingdom, and what, if anything, can be done to duck such a fate...

...Confront a person with that nation's severe economic problems and he will see in them confirmation of his ideology...

...True, there certainly is a limit on how hard a country like Britain or Sweden can try to promote egalitarian efforts among its richer citizens without prompting emigration to places where the better-off are better off...

...Unfortunately, we really do not know if economic growth or income redistribution raises the level of content mentor even how to go about finding out...

...Conservatives blame the welfare state...

...Of the Common Market countries, only Italy and Ireland devote as small a percentage of GNP to social security and medical care...

...Perhaps a more interesting question is whether greater economic equality makes the worse-off feel better off...

...This concern contributed greatly to the Anglo-German hostility that formed the background of World War I. And in the entire interwar period, Britain suffered from high unemployment and low growth...

...In his Introduction, after informing us that he invited Harry Schwartz to write on the British medical care system, James Q. Wilson to write on crime and Lenkowsky on welfare, Tyrrell declares that their findings "would give Beatrice Webb and Norman Thomas hours of uneasy reading...

...If the Great Depression didn't hit England quite as hard as it did other countries, it was because the economy was functioning so poorly in the '20s...

...Along with its extensive social programs," Tyrell intones in an introductory clarion-call, Great Britain "also has about the lowest growth rate in the developed world, a straitened rate of productivity, and, of course, a deteriorating physical plant...

...Already in the decades prior to World War I Englishmen were concerned about their country's relative economic deterioration...

...To establish a causal relation between Britain's welfare state and its present economic difficulties we would at the least have to ask how the economy was doing before the advent of welfarism and how other countries that have adopted similar measures are faring...

...Wilson tells us that there is a growing crime problem in Britain, and discusses what the authorities are trying to do about it...

...Some of the essays in The Future that Doesn't Work offer mere generalizations couched in offensive rhetoric...

...Unemployment insurance as a percentage of weekly pay, moreover, is about the same in England as in other West European nations, and sick pay is less...

...Peregrine Worsthome's discussion of British unions, for example, is a mixture of gross overstatement ("so many trade unionists are now the nouveaux riches and take home wage packets that make them the envy of professional people"), and an argument that is dangerously reminiscent And I use the term advisedly of fascism (the problem with the English middle classes, argues Worsthorne, is their unwillingness to take to the streets against the unions...

...Not really...