Politics

[enrico514]

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[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

For those who think a certain state or the US is immune to debt or can't be touched, a little reminder thanks to our friends in Argentina about to default:

Argentina Default Imminent as Talks Collapse - WSJ

Dick Cheney? Didn't he say deficits don't matter?

 

[enrico514]

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[BobD]

For those who think a certain state or the US is immune to debt or can't be touched, a little reminder thanks to our friends in Argentina about to default:

Argentina Default Imminent as Talks Collapse - WSJ

That would be interesting for those who don't know they've done this before.

 

[Ndaccountant]

Shorter article for everyone to read. Really good points made. The conclusion is spot on, IMO:
"Thoughtful politicians have produced schemes for radical change in almost all of these areas, but their plans—like so much else—have fallen victim to America’s polarised politics. The Republicans stand in the way of loosening immigration rules, while Democrats fear that supply-side reforms are a plot to hurt the average Joe. Both sides hoover up cash from special interests keen to keep anticompetitive regulations in place. Barack Obama, the least business-friendly president for decades, has devoted far too little attention to the problem. So the odds rise that America’s economy will continue to lumber along at an underwhelming pace, and Americans will have no one to blame but their leaders."

The American economy: America’s lost oomph | The Economist

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Ethika Politika's Aaron Taylor recently published an article titled "The Twilight of Conservatism":

It’s been almost 60 years since Michael Oakeshott published his seminal essay “On Being Conservative,” just three years after Russell Kirk’s equally seminal book The Conservative Mind first appeared. In the essay, Oakeshott famously laid out his theory that conservatism is “not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.”

The conservative disposition, Oakeshott argued, is characterized by two things. Firstly, it is a joyful affirmation of things as they are, of the existing order. The conservative mind has “a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.” What is esteemed by the conservative is “the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity.” Oakeshott writes:

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy.

Roger Scruton adds greater specificity to the idea that the conservative disposition is rooted in the enjoyment of existing things, arguing in his work The Meaning of Conservatism that such a disposition is grounded in a primal attitude of piety toward the social order:

We are apt to think of children as having a responsibility towards their parents, a responsibility that in no way reflects any merely contractual right, but which is simply due to the parents as a recognition of the filial tie. This sense of obligation is not founded in justice—which is the sphere of free actions between beings who create their moral ties—but rather in respect, honour, or (as the Romans called it) piety. To neglect my parents in old age is not an act of injustice but an act of impiety. Impiety is the refusal to recognize as legitimate a demand that does not arise from consent or choice.

The conservative disposition originates in the subconscious recognition that the political bond is essentially an outgrowth of the familial bond. It is a “transcendent” bond arising “in the manner of the family tie” and therefore “outside the sphere of individual choice.” It is not a “social contract” entered into by a previously unconnected mass of free and autonomous individuals. It is a “transcendent” bond involving a sense of allegiance “transferred by the citizen from hearth and home to place, people and country.” The ancient Romans in fact had no distinct word for what we now call “patriotism” or love of country and society. The concept of pietas described a disposition that the virtuous had toward their parents, their country, and their gods. It included not merely the intellectual apprehension of duties toward these entities, but an affective sensibility in their regard. Pietas in its fullest sense was a well-ordered passion.

Secondly, Oakeshott argues, conservatism is “averse from change, which appears always, in the first place, as deprivation.” The conservative understands that change is inevitable—indeed change can be necessary and desirable precisely in order to conserve the things the conservative cares about—but even desirable change is appropriately confronted with a certain disposition of mourning. The conservative is aware that even positive change “generates not only the ‘improvement’ sought, but a new and complex situation of which this is only one of the components.” The sum total of the change “is always more extensive than the change designed; and the whole of what is entailed can neither be foreseen nor circumscribed.” Even positive change involves both loss and gain, and the loss of what is loved, even when it is suffered willingly for the sake of a greater gain, always involves mourning.

If Oakeshott is right, then the peculiar enemies of conservatism are not, as often alleged, socialism or liberalism per se. Many socialists, particularly during the early stages of modern socialist theory in the 19th century, were driven by an overriding concern to conserve traditional ways of life threatened by the turmoil of the industrial revolution, with its attendant social chaos and vast displacement of rural populations. Some theorists and statesmen also advanced socialist ideas precisely because they believed that permitting the laborer to take an equitable share of the capital he helped to create was, in the long-term, the only humane way to stave off the threat of a workers’ revolution that would overthrow the entire political order. Moreover, insofar as socialism is simply—as the Oxford Dictionary defines it—“the political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole,” then obviously it is wholly compatible with the conservative disposition wherever particular means of production are already communally owned and operated, or where the change involved in a movement toward communal ownership helps to stave off less desirable changes to the political order.

Similarly, although liberalism is incompatible with conservatism if by liberalism is meant the philosophical theory that the political bond originates in a “social contract” rather than in pietas—and that humans are not fundamentally political animals but only contract to live in society for their individual benefit—certain forms of political liberalism are nevertheless compatible with the conservative disposition. The conservative’s enjoyment of existing things extends to his enjoyment of his traditional liberties, which will be all the more jealously guarded precisely to the extent that political liberty is recognized to be what it is: the end result of a long historical process involving much blood, sweat and tears, and not a “natural” state to which humankind reverts whenever the political garden is left untended.

The real foes of conservatism are not socialism and liberalism, but the reactionary and innovating mentalities. Neither the reactionary nor the innovator share the joie de vivre of the conservative mind—its natural inclination to rejoice in and savor what is. They are restless and tormented if things are not in a state of perpetual flux, if “progress” is not being made either backward toward an imagined age of innocence, or forward toward an imagined age of future liberation. If nothing is changing, then nothing is happening. Reactionaries and innovators eschew what Oakeshott calls the conservative mind’s “cool and critical” attitude toward change, advocating instead a radical overhaul of society and its refashioning in the image of a golden age which is either imagined to have existed in the past or lusted after as a possible future.

Several indications, however, point to the fact that the “conservative” as described by Oakeshott, Kirk, Scruton, and others is in danger of becoming an extinct species, and that we are in fact living in the twilight age of conservatism.

Firstly, although the conservative political movement is alive and well, it is at best tenuously linked with what I have described here as conservatism, and more often is in outright opposition to it. Today all politics, including what passes for conservative politics, is almost completely given over to the thirst for innovation, and the conservative movement is increasingly characterized by a quaint mix of reactionary and innovating opinions and sentiments. Of particular note here is the bewitching of the modern conservative movement by the ideology of the market. For, in the final analysis, what is this ideology if not a vast scheme to upend existing institutions and completely remake society in the image of a free-market Brutopia in which the enjoyment of existing things will be ruthlessly suppressed in favor of devotion to the laws of never-ending “economic growth?” As Oakeshott points out, the activities and enterprises to which the genuinely conservative temperament finds itself most readily disposed are “activities where what is sought is present enjoyment and not profit, a reward, a prize or a result in addition to the experience itself.”

Secondly, there is the fact that many of the things that conservatives have traditionally been disposed to savor and rejoice in—the family, the nation state, the arts, religious institutions, local communities and their lovable idiosyncrasies—are now themselves in a process of disintegration. The conservative mind is not, as some contemporary moral psychologists have argued, simply a physiological state that occurs haphazardly as a natural variation in the brains of some members of the human species. It is a specific cultural product. As the conservative journalist Peter Hitchens has pointed out, genuinely “conservative politics and sentiments exist only in those unusual countries where contentment is—or rather was—a natural state of being.” Where existing things are not such as to be worth rejoicing in, there will simply be no conservatives rejoicing in them. Conservative pietas exists only where there is a social order worthy of invoking the sentiment of piety. Elsewhere, there may be reactionaries, or free market ideologues, or military juntas, or some kind of “right-wing” politics. But there will not be conservatism.

If genuine conservatism is to survive, then, it cannot succumb to the modern politics of misery that characterizes almost all political discourse today, including on the Right—a discourse that proceeds by presenting a list of bitter complaints about what is wrong with the world and then offering in response to its own grievances either a selfish assertion of “my rights,” or else a vision of a social utopia that is all the more depressing because everyone knows it is pure fantasy. This does not mean that we cannot be keenly aware of what is wrong with the world. But conservatism must rediscover a greater sense of what it is for and a sense of enjoyment for such things. It must recover the conviction articulated by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (who himself wrote during an age of flux and decline) that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” and that “though the last lights off the black West went,” there still “lives the dearest freshness deep down things”—little “things” that are very much worth conserving amid the ruins. Misery may be infectious, but joy is more so.

 

[Bluto]

Ethika Politika's Aaron Taylor recently published an article titled "The Twilight of Conservatism":

Really good post.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Ethical Politika's Artur Rosman recently interviewed (ND prof) Patrick Deneen and published it in an article titled "The Neoconservative Imagination":

Rosman: What in your estimates drives the Neo-Conservative reading of Catholic Social Teaching? Why do they cling so fast to capitalism as the great white hope?

Deneen: Many of the estimable figures whom we might identify as Catholic neo-conservatives, who tend to stress morality in the realm of sexual ethics while taking a more laissez-faire view of economics, came of age intellectually and otherwise during the Cold War, and much of their worldview, in my view, is shaped by that great contest. Catholics rightly and necessarily opposed the basic premises of Communism, but as a result—forged in that particular historical cauldron—many came to conclude that the only economic alternative was more or less laissez-faire capitalism. They have tended, then, to read the Church’s teachings on sexual ethics to be inviolable, but Catholic social teachings regarding economics to be a set of broad and even vague guidelines—even, in one instance, warning that one must read only some sentences of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, not others.

Beyond the discrete historical situation that contributes to the biographies of some individuals, something else should be noted. I don’t doubt at all the genuineness, seriousness, and in many cases persuasiveness of some of the views of Catholic neo-conservatives. But we should not discount that part of the reason for their prominence in contemporary conservative circles is that they fill a very important political niche in the American political marketplace, and in particular, a niche within American conservatism. Since the effort to forge a conservative “fusion” going back to the 1950s—one that sought to combine anti-communists, social conservatives and libertarians, and saw dawning political promise with Barry Goldwater and fruition with the election of Ronald Reagan—there needed to be a way to bring various social conservatives into a “political bedfellowship” with libertarians, especially economic libertarians. One needed a marriage of Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek. What was needed were spokesmen among various social conservative constituencies who could represent and galvanize the socially conservative part of the electorate without frightening economic libertarians. While this niche was relatively easy to fill when it came to Protestant social conservatives, it was always going to be tougher with Catholics. The “niche” that beckoned was for a Catholic social conservatism that would stress especially sexual morality and would be willing to de-link those concerns from economic considerations. One could be conservative on sexual morality until one was blue in the face without ever threatening the libertine claims of market capitalism. This “niche” was going to exist regardless of anyone in particular who filled it, and for those who did end up filling it, there was funding, positions in prominent think-tanks, influence and prominence as an incentive and reward. These voices play an important role in modern American conservatism, and we need to consider the particular set of political imperatives and networks that ensured that this form of Catholic neo-conservatism would become the dominant political voice among more traditional Catholic voices.

One last point: I think we might reasonably conclude that advancing Catholic teachings about sexual ethics, divorced of the broader teaching that addresses (for instance) economics, proves to be a weak reed. If we think about the last thirty years, during which there has been some amount of Republican electoral success and even at times ascendancy, we might ask what has been more successfully advanced—a society governed by sexual ethics or free-market economics? We can point to some successes of the former, particularly the growing disapproval of abortion among young people (though coupled with their overwhelming approval of same-sex marriage, we might wonder whether the uptick in disapproval of abortion is actually a kind of logical Lockeanism—don’t deprive people of rights, if you’re crazy enough to get pregnant). But, I think it’s obvious that it’s an economy that runs on short-term profits, assisted by deregulation of Wall Street, and the process of economic globalization and deracination that has clearly been the “winner” (and, arguably, has been the environment that has been so supportive of a more broadly libertine culture). So, I would say that this “niche” has been highly useful for economic libertarians, while actually fostering the conditions that have contributed to the ineffectualness of the sexual arguments of the Catholic neo-conservatives.

Rosman: Would it be fair to say that the post-communist narrative you’ve outlined has something in common with much older altar and throne arrangements that proved so disastrous for the Church? What I mean is: It seems, for the most part, that capitalism is triumphant (puts food on tables, brings medical advances, and so on), so there’s a hurry to throw some holy water on it in order to bask in its success. What are the live-options (if any) available to the Church besides grabbing the hems (and power) of a triumphant capitalism?

Deneen: That’s an interesting formulation, but in fact I think the sprinkling of holy water on The Market, as you put it, is in fact born of opposite tendencies to some of the motivations that informed “Altar and Throne” arrangements, which—for all their pathologies—were informed by the Augustinian recognition that the Cities of Man and God, while distinct, were “mixed” in complicated ways in the Saeculum.

What is more striking to me is the way that many Catholics of the stripe we are discussing are strenuous in their insistence that, on the one hand, the public square should not be stripped of religion and morality, but that the Market should have a wardrobe like that of Lady Godiva. This view lies behind the crude but revealing criticisms on the Right of Pope Francis’s occasional but pointed criticisms of an amoral Market, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Larry Kudlow and Judge Andrew Napolitano insisting that the Pontiff stick to doctrine and cease discussing economics—as if the Catholic Church has had nothing to say about economics for, say, the last century if not longer.

I’m not an economist, so I don’t have an extensive list of recommendations for “live-option” alternatives, but a good place to start is for Catholics to re-engage with the economic tradition known as “Distributism” that was developed in the earlier part of the 20th-century by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. This approach insists that an economy must be understood to be subordinate to the human telos, and so ought to be organized with a view of supporting ends the family, stability of communities, self-direction and widespread ownership, subsidiarity and solidarity. In all these areas, our economy today ends up fostering their opposite. Our economy supports and encourages an increasingly childless workforce and fungible bonds, tenuous relationships to place and community, a dessicated “culture,” centralization and monopoly and crony capitalism, and a debased utilitarian calculation of value and success.

For starters, then, it would be refreshing to see the same energy and devotion exhibited by so many conservative Catholics on issues related to life, religious liberty and gay marriage, to issues related to a proper ordering of the economy. The first thing that one will be told in response is that these latter issues involve a great deal of prudence, and so don’t demand the same kind of energy and exertions as the former, which (in the case of abortion) is intrinsically evil. But I would rejoin that Catholics don’t properly think and act as Catholics if we treat these spheres as if they were autonomous and unrelated; indeed, it seems to me that basic economic arrangements that privilege individual autonomy, materialism, mobility at the expense of community, and an “amoral” market significantly and inescapably contribute to our comprehensively “disposable society” (using Pope Francis’s description of, among other things, our abortion regime). Only when we see similar energy demanding reforms of our economic system in the name not of equalization of outcome, but the telos of human flourishing, will we likely see lots of different and interesting policy ideas of how to foster a more humane economy. But at the moment we are told that the only two options that exist are largely unregulated markets and Statism, both of which Pope Leo XIII denounced in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and which have been rejected as false alternatives by every subsequent Pope, including Saint John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

We live in a curious time in which most people on the Left—liberal Catholics included (starting with Mario Cuomo) – argue that politics should not be in the business of “legislating morality”; while those on the Right—many conservative Catholics included—argue that markets run best purely on motivation of individual self-interest. That is, Catholics follow the American political division that treat one sphere as morally autonomous. Both of these positions are rightly rejected by the comprehensive Catholic understanding that all dimensions and spheres of life ought rightly to be governed by an Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of the Good.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Watch as Nancy Pelosi chases after Pennsylvania representative on the U.S. House floor | AL.com


The incident happened after Rep. Tom Marino, (R-Penn.), chastised Pelosi and other Democrat leaders for not passing laws to regulate the influx of immigrants crossing the country's southern border when Democrats had majority control of the House and Senate.

 

[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

Google Tom Casino Marino. The guy's crooked.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Google Tom Casino Marino. The guy's crooked.

And that justifies the former Speaker of the House chasing him around and forcing security to keep her away from him? This woman needs a psych eval.

"We need to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it."

 

[MJ12666]

Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Watch as Nancy Pelosi chases after Pennsylvania representative on the U.S. House floor | AL.com


The incident happened after Rep. Tom Marino, (R-Penn.), chastised Pelosi and other Democrat leaders for not passing laws to regulate the influx of immigrants crossing the country's southern border when Democrats had majority control of the House and Senate.

Almost as funny as when she compared the illegal immigrant children to the baby Jesus and Mosses. It is amazing when you consider that this woman was third in line to be president not that long ago.

 

[T Town Tommy]

Almost as funny as when she compared the illegal immigrant children to the baby Jesus and Mosses. It is amazing when you consider that this woman was third in line to be president not that long ago.

Plenty of crazy to go around in Washington these days. Pelosi doesn't have the market cornered, but she is the first in line.

 

[MJ12666]

Plenty of crazy to go around in Washington these days. Pelosi doesn't have the market cornered, but she is the first in line.

You got that right.

 

[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

And that justifies the former Speaker of the House chasing him around and forcing security to keep her away from him? This woman needs a psych eval.

"We need to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it."

I didn't say that. All I said was Marino is crooked. Check his story out.

From Wikipedia:
In 2007, Marino resigned from office as U.S. Attorney after a Department of Justice investigation was launched for giving a reference to convicted felon Louis DeNaples, who needed the reference to obtain a license to operate slot machines at his Mount Airy Lodge casino in Eastern Pennsylvania. Marino falsely claimed he had written permission from the Justice Department to issue the reference, and the Justice Department confirmed they did not give permission. Marino resigned while under review by the Department of Justice, and accepted a position as Louis DeNaples in-house attorney for $250,000 per year. Marino's resignation, under Justice Department guidelines, ended the internal affairs probe.[4]

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...NhdREVi3Zs2HtGUkQ&sig2=BhstJyQ5BdoF-T0LI3MFdQ

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

I didn't say that. All I said was Marino is crooked. Check his story out.

I did. He served as a reference to a guy with a questionable background (never convicted of anything) who was trying to build a casino in Mt. Airy. Marino reclused himself. Has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand and was irrelevant.

Marino called Nazi Pelosi and the Democrats out (rightfully so) and she chased after him on the Senate floor. Apparently this doesn't alarm you at all, or at least not to the degree of a Tom Marino.

 

[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

I did. He served as a reference to a guy with a questionable background (never convicted of anything) who was trying to build a casino in Mt. Airy. Marino reclused himself. Has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand and was irrelevant.

Marino called Nazi Pelosi and the Democrats out (rightfully so) and she chased after him on the Senate floor. Apparently this doesn't alarm you at all, or at least not to the degree of a Tom Marino.

DeNaples plead no contest to taking government money for a flood cleanup and never doing the work.
He also lied about his mob ties.

Read the book "The Quiet Don" about mobster Russell Buffalino. DeNaples whole story is in there along with Marino.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

DeNaples plead no contest to taking government money for a flood cleanup and never doing the work.
He also lied about his mob ties.

Read the book "The Quiet Don" about mobster Russell Buffalino. DeNaples whole story is in there along with Marino.

OK! So Marino was a reference on an application for a mobster who took gov money and didn't do the work. Great.

That doesn't take anything away from his argument and his calling out Nancy Pelosi, and I guess her reaction to being called out on the Senate floor doesn't bother you nearly as much as this Marino being guilty by association.

Dems could've rewritten immigration law as we all know it in 2009 and 2010 with control of House, Senate, and White House and chose not to. Now they're playing politics and the race card with it as an issue.

 

[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

OK! So Marino was a reference on an application for a mobster who took gov money and didn't do the work. Great.

That doesn't take anything away from his argument and his calling out Nancy Pelosi, and I guess her reaction to being called out on the Senate floor doesn't bother you nearly as much as this Marino being guilty by association.

Dems could've rewritten immigration law as we all know it in 2009 and 2010 with control of House, Senate, and White House and chose not to. Now they're playing politics and the race card with it as an issue.

Exactly.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Exactly.

Dude...you're either missing the point of my post or ignoring it altogether. John Gotti could've gone on the Senate floor and called out Pelosi and he would've been right on this topic. And then she lost her shit.

 

[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

I couldn't care less about their argument on the House floor.

I was talking about Tom "Casino" Marino and since he's a Republican, you just shrugged off his shady dealings.

 

[connor_in]

1) I think you guys are discussing two different things tied to the same people/event. Leppy goes: Look how nuts Pelosi goes when called out! Ultimate goes: That dude that called her out is dirty! Leppy goes: But look at how unhinged she gets! Ultimate goes: That guy is tied into criminals!

2) I think if you want to have a discussion of people in goverenment who are dirty or tied to others who are dirty, then I think you guys ought to purchase IE a new server, because that list is going to be long, cover all parties, and be nearly neverending.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Matt Zwolinski just published an article in Cato Unbound titled "The Pragmatic Libertarian Case for a Basic Income Guarantee":

From the perspective of anyone concerned with limiting government and encouraging individual responsibility, the contemporary American welfare state is a disaster. According to a report by the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, welfare programs at the federal level alone cost more than $668 billion annually, spread across at least 126 different programs. Add another $284 of welfare spending at the state and local level, and you’ve got almost $1 trillion dollars of government spending on welfare - over $20,000 for every poor person in the United States.

Not only does the U.S. welfare state spend a lot; it spends it badly. Poor Americans receiving assistance face a bewildering variety of phase-outs and benefit cliffs that combine to create extremely high effective marginal tax rates on their labor. As a result, poor families often find that working more (or having a second adult work) simply doesn’t pay. And still, despite massive expenditures by the welfare state, some 16% of Americans are left living in poverty.

Wouldn’t it be better just to scrap the whole system and write the poor a check?

In what follows, I will make the case for a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) as a replacement for the current welfare state. There are a number of distinct ways of arguing from libertarian premises to a BIG, some of which I have discussed in the past. In this essay, however, I will focus on what I take to be the strongest and most persuasive libertarian argument. I will argue that a BIG, even if it is not ideal from a libertarian perspective, is significantly better on libertarian grounds than our current welfare state, and has a much higher likelihood of being achieved in a world in which most people reject libertarian views.

I begin in the next section by explaining what I mean by a BIG. I then proceed to set out four reasons why libertarians should support a BIG over the current American welfare state. I close with some reflections on libertarian ideals and political compromise.

A Basic Income Guarantee

For purposes of this essay, I will use the phrase “Basic Income Guarantee” quite broadly to refer to a wide range of distinct policy proposals, including Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax (NIT), Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott’s proposal for a Stakeholder Grant, the Thomas Paine / Henry George inspired idea of a citizen’s dividend, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, and Charles Murray’s 2006 proposal for the government to write a $10,000 each year to every American citizen over the age of twenty-one. There is, of course, quite a bit of variation among these plans in terms of cost, payouts, implementation, and so on. Despite these differences, however, they all have in common two important features.

First, they involve a cash grant with no strings attached. Unlike other welfare programs which encourage or require recipients to consume certain specific kinds of good – such as medical care, housing, or food – a BIG simply gives people cash, and leaves them free to spend it, or save it, in whatever way they choose.

Second, a BIG is an unconditional grant for which every citizen (or at least every adult citizen) is eligible. It is not means-tested; checks are issued to poor and rich alike (though on some proposals payments to the rich will be partially or fully recaptured through the tax system). Beneficiaries do not have to pass a drug test or demonstrate that they are willing to work. If you’re alive, and a citizen, you get a check. Period.

A Pragmatic Libertarian Argument

No libertarian would wish for a BIG as an addition to the currently existing welfare state. But what about as a replacement for it? Such a revolutionary overhaul of the welfare state would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment, both to insulate debate somewhat from the pleas and protests of special interests, and to make it considerably more difficult to renege on the deal afterwards. Charles Murray has given us a rough idea of what such an amendment might look like:

Henceforth, federal, state, and local governments shall make no law nor establish any program that provides benefits to some citizens but not to others. All programs currently providing such benefits are to be terminated. The funds formerly allocated to them are to be used instead to provide every citizen with a cash grant beginning at age twenty-one and continuing until death. The annual value of the cash grant at the program’s outset is to be $10,000.

Suppose, to indulge in a bit of speculative fancy, that this deal was actually on the political table. Should libertarians take it? Given that it is not on the table now, should libertarians make some effort to get it there? I believe the answer to both of those questions is “yes.” A BIG might not be libertarians’ ideal policy – though more on this later – but it is almost certainly a lot better on libertarian grounds than what we have right now. Here are four reasons why.

Less Bureaucracy

Every one of the more than 126 federal welfare programs comes with its own bureaucracy, its own set of arcane rules, regulations, and restrictions, and its own significant (and rising) overhead costs. A BIG, in contrast, requires significantly less in terms of administrative expense. A program in which everyone gets a check for the same amount is simple enough to be administered by a computer program. And even a more complicated proposal, like Murray’s or like Friedman’s NIT, could largely piggyback off of the already existing bureaucracy of the federal tax system.

Eliminating a large chunk of the federal bureaucracy would obviously be good from the perspective of a libertarian concern to reduce the size and scope of government. But it would also be good from the perspective of welfare beneficiaries. Actually getting signed up for all the various welfare benefits to which one is entitled is tremendously costly in terms of time, effort, and skill at bureaucratic navigation. Many people miss out on benefits for which they qualify simply because they don’t know that the program exists, or what they need to do to draw from it. Getting the benefit of a BIG, in contrast, requires just a single signature on the back of a check. If we’re going to spend money on helping the poor, shouldn’t we make sure that they actually get the help we’re paying for?

Cheaper

Second, a BIG could be considerably cheaper than the current welfare state. How much cheaper depends on the details of the particular proposal. Some, like Murray’s, which involve a progressive tax on the BIG once a certain threshold of income is reached, appear to be considerably cheaper. Other analyses, like Ed Dolan’s, suggest only that a moderate BIG would not cost more than what we currently spend.

Part of the explanation of the relatively low cost of a BIG comes from the reduction of bureaucracy, described above. But another reason is to be found in Director’s Law: If you’re like most people, when you hear “welfare” you think about transfers from the rich to the poor. But in reality, most political transfers benefit the middle class at the expense of the poor (and rich). If the BIG is going to replace the welfare state, then transfers to the middle class such as subsidies for higher education, the mortgage interest deduction, and tax benefits for retirement savings ought to be cut right along with (if not before) SNAP, TANF, etc.

Again, how much a BIG would cost relative to the current welfare state depends on the details of the particular BIG proposal. Various proposals need to be evaluated on their own merits, and of course I do not wish to claim that every BIG proposal will be more affordable than our current welfare state. But neither is there any reason to believe that no reasonable proposal could be.

Less Rent-Seeking

Whenever there exists a bureaucracy with the power and discretion to take from some in order to benefit others, there will also exist powerful incentives for individuals to manipulate that bureaucracy in order to better serve their own private interests. Agents of the bureaucracy itself will seek to expand its scope and budget regardless of whether such expansion serves the interests of its clients. And special interest groups will use various political mechanisms to channel the organization’s resources into their own pockets.

In theory, the welfare state doles out money and other resources on the basis of such factors as need and desert. But need and desert are both philosophically contested and impossible to measure objectively. And so, in practice, resources are doled out to those who can make the best political case that they need or deserve it. And this is a contest in which the genuine poor are at a serious disadvantage relative to the better educated, wealthier, and more politically engaged middle class.

A BIG, in contrast, allows virtually no room for bureaucratic discretion, and thus minimizes the opportunities for political rent-seeking and opportunism. It is, as the late James Buchanan once noted, a perfectly general policy that treats all citizens the same. It is thus entirely ill-suited for use as a method of political exploitation. We should therefore expect to see much less rent-seeking and opportunism with a BIG than we do with the present welfare state, and therefore a more effective transfer of resources toward the genuinely needy as opposed to the politically well-connected.

Of course, no policy is perfectly immune to rent-seeking or political manipulation, and others have expressed what seem to me to be some entirely reasonable concerns about a BIG in this respect. But nothing that I have seen has yet convinced me that the problems with a BIG would be worse than those we have now, and there still seems to me to be good reason to think those problems would be considerably diminished.

Less Invasive / Paternalistic

One of the main differences between a BIG and the current welfare state is the unconditionality of the former. Under a BIG, everybody gets a check. Under the current welfare state, only people who meet the various stipulated qualifications are eligible for assistance. The precise nature of those qualifications varies from program to program, but can include not earning too much, not earning too little, not being on drugs, not having won the lottery, making an earnest effort to find work, and so on.

Conditions are put on welfare in order to ensure that assistance goes to the deserving poor, and not to the undeserving. But distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving is difficult business, and requires a variety of invasive, demoralizing, and degrading inspections into the intimate details of applicants’ lives. “Fill out this form, tell us about that man you live with, pee in this cup, and submit to spot inspections of your home by our social workers, or else.”

Maybe the state shouldn’t be in the business of giving out welfare at all. Maybe it shouldn’t be running schools, or highways either. But, as Jacob Levy notes, since it does do these things, libertarians have good reason to demand that it does so in a way that is as “more rather than less compatible with Hayek’s rule of law, with freedom from supervision and surveillance by the bureaucracy, with the ability to get on with living their lives rather than having to waste them proving their innocence.”

The conditional welfare state is not only invasive, it is heavily paternalistic. Restrictions on eligibility are imposed in order to encourage welfare recipients to live their lives in a way that the state thinks is good for them: don’t have kids out of wedlock, don’t do drugs, and get (or stay) married. And benefits are often given in-kind rather than in cash precisely because the state doesn’t trust welfare recipients to make what it regards as wise choices about how to spend their money. This, despite the fact that both economic theory and a growing body of empirical evidence suggest that individuals are better off with the freedom of choice that a cash grant brings. In-kind grant programs like SNAP (food stamps) persist in their present form not because they are effective but because they are the product of a classic Bootleggers-and-Baptists coalition: well-meaning members of the public like the idea that welfare recipients have to use their vouchers on food rather than alcohol and cigarettes, and the farm lobby likes that beneficiaries are forced to buy its own products. Poor people, meanwhile, are deprived of the opportunity to save that a cash grant would give them, and they are forced to waste time and effort trading what SNAP allows them to buy for what they really want.

Utopia is Not an Option

In Libertarian Utopia, we might not have any welfare state all, no matter how limited or efficient. Many libertarians believe that any redistribution of wealth by the state violates individual rights and is therefore morally impermissible. And even those libertarians who do not base their political ideology on a theory of individual rights will worry that welfare states will produce perverse incentives – both on the part of recipients and potential recipients, and in the political processes that sustain and shape government policy.

But we do not live in Libertarian Utopia, nor have any of its prophets yet produced any compelling plan for how to get There from Here. Moreover, most people are not libertarians, and so unless we are willing to impose our views on them by force, we must try to find policy proposals that can command the assent of those who do not share our fundamental moral commitments and empirical beliefs.

From this perspective, the question of social welfare policy becomes less an exercise in ideal theory and more a problem of comparative institutional analysis. The question is not whether a BIG is a perfectly libertarian policy in every way, but whether it is more libertarian than the other realistically available policy alternatives. I believe that the considerations examined above provide us with very strong reason for believing that it is.

But I also believe that a BIG need not be merely a compromise. Even in a Libertarian Utopia, in other words, I think there would be good reasons to provide a social safety net through the mechanism of a BIG. I have written about some of these arguments before, and while constraints of space prevent me from elaborating upon them here, I am happy to do so in the discussion that follows this essay.

For now I will say only that if the idea of a social safety net strikes many readers as obviously incompatible with libertarianism, this is testament to the way in which an excessively narrow understanding of libertarianism has come to dominate our political discourse. For many people, it seems, libertarian thought begins and ends with the ideas of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. And, of course, both Rand and Rothbard were indeed important libertarians, and libertarians from whose ideas I and many others have profited immensely. But while those ideas have played and continue to play an important role in the libertarian intellectual tradition, they do not exhaust that tradition. Once we adjust our eyes to see past the giants of Rand and Rothbard, it is clear that the libertarian intellectual landscape is far more diverse than it first appeared, and far less hostile to the idea of a social safety net.

We can, of course, define libertarianism however we wish, and it is possible to conceive it in a narrow enough way so as to rule out all support for income redistribution by definitional fiat. But any definition of libertarianism that is so narrow as to rule out the likes of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Loren Lomasky, and Eric Mack, to name just a few, seems both historically distortive and pragmatically unhelpful. The arguments these thinkers have advanced on behalf of a (limited) social safety net might be mistaken. But that is something to be established by a careful examination of the substance of the arguments themselves. Arguments about what counts as a “real” libertarian position, especially arguments poorly informed by the writings of seminal historical and contemporary libertarian thinkers, do little to advance the debate.

A Few Words About Work Disincentives

So far in this essay, I have said virtually nothing to say about the many possible objections to a BIG. As a philosopher, this makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I am comforted somewhat by the knowledge that there will be plenty of time to explore these objections in the discussion that follows – and almost certainly plenty of prompting to do so by my fellow discussants! Nevertheless, before I bring this essay to a close, I want to say just a few words about what I take to be the most common, and also the most overrated, objection to a BIG.

Many people argue that a BIG will create a strong disincentive to work. From a theoretical perspective, this makes sense. If you lower the cost of unemployment relative to employment, you’re going to get more unemployment. The famous Negative Income Tax experiments of the 1970s seem to lend some empirical support to this hypothesis.

I find this argument unimpressive for two reasons. First, it is not at all clear that a BIG really would lead to a significant increase in unemployment. The actual findings of the NIT experiments were much more ambiguous than they have generally been represented to be in the nonacademic press. And insofar as a BIG allows welfare recipients who start working to keep more of their money than they would under a conditional welfare system, we should expect at least some reduction of work disincentives relative to the current system.

But suppose that a BIG actually would, on net, increase unemployment somewhat. The second response is: so what? Is it so obviously a flaw in the system if it leads more parents to take time off work to stay home with their children? Or college graduates to take a year off before beginning to work? Or if, among the population as a whole, the balance between work and leisure is slightly shifted toward the latter? My point is not that there isn’t any story that could be told about why work disincentives might be a problem. My point is simply that, even if they were guaranteed to occur, they wouldn’t obviously be a problem. Explaining why these somewhat increased disincentives are a problem requires something more substantial in the way of economic, sociological, and philosophical analysis than often seems to have been assumed.

To my mind, there are other, much better objections to a BIG of the sort I have discussed in this essay. How, for instance, will it handle the issue of children? Would a BIG increase native resistance to increased immigration and thereby hurt the truly needy global poor for the benefit of the (relatively) wealthy American poor? And how could a BIG be politically feasible, given the strong investment various interest groups have in maintaining the current system? I look forward to exploring these questions, and no doubt many more that I have not anticipated, in the discussion that follows.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

There's a lot of crazy in DC. There's a lot of corruption in DC. I despise some RINO's just as much as I despise the coastal socialists. But Nancy Pelosi...might be time for a mental check up. I'm not kidding.

In the past month alone she has

1) referred to Hamas as a humanitarian group

2) compared illegal immigrants to Jesus

3) had to be removed from the Senate floor for chasing Marino around

4) referred to Africa as a nation

 

[Ultimate Penn St. Hater]

There's a lot of crazy in DC. There's a lot of corruption in DC. I despise some RINO's just as much as I despise the coastal socialists. But Nancy Pelosi...might be time for a mental check up. I'm not kidding.

In the past month alone she has

1) referred to Hamas as a humanitarian group

2) compared illegal immigrants to Jesus

3) had to be removed from the House[/B ]floor for chasing Marino around

4) referred to Africa as a nation

Fixed it for you.

 

[Ndaccountant]

SIAP

BREAKING: Senate Committee Report Details Environmentalists' Inner Workings - Forbes

 

[woolybug25]

SIAP

BREAKING: Senate Committee Report Details Environmentalists' Inner Workings - Forbes

I don't get what the big deal is? So its okay for big oil, mining, etc to form super PAC's, but god forbid environmental groups (whose sole job is to create change, which usually happens politically) do the same? It's okay for the Koch Bros or Cheney to manipulate the system for their own personal uses, but it's not okay for environmental groups to use legal means to give themselves better positioning?

gasp.

 

[Ndaccountant]

I don't get what the big deal is? So its okay for big oil, mining, etc to form super PAC's, but god forbid environmental groups (whose sole job is to create change, which usually happens politically) do the same? It's okay for the Koch Bros or Cheney to manipulate the system for their own personal uses, but it's not okay for environmental groups to use legal means to give themselves better positioning?

gasp.

I didn't say any of that. Just wanted to post it considering all the talk of the need to clean up financing. Both sides are guilty and it needs to stop.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

People who think ISIS is an Iraq problem are living under a rock. Saw a picture on Twitter earlier of an ISIS flag flying proud...in New Jersey.

This fight will come to us eventually.

 

[Buster Bluth]

People who think ISIS is an Iraq problem are living under a rock. Saw a picture on Twitter earlier of an ISIS flag flying proud...in New Jersey.

This fight will come to us eventually.

I have no fears of anything resembling ISIS coming to town, but I do think we should straight up butcher them over there right now.