|
| After the Flood | | Date Created: Nov 29, 2005, 11:01 AM |
The following is an essay in the latest issue of The American Spectator. It's by Tom Bethell who is a senior editor of The American Spectator. Here's his bio from beliefnet.com
Tom Bethell is the Washington correspondent of The American Spectator. He was born and raised in England, attended Downside School, a Benedictine foundation, and graduated from Oxford University in 1962.
Every month for over 20 years, he has written an article for The American Spectator. A collection of his journalism was published under the title "The Electric Windmill" (1988). His most recent book, "The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages" (1998), recently came out in paperback.
He has also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution and has written an essay on Karl Popper. Karl Raimund Popper: The Philosopher and His Papers.
I couldn't find his essay online so I'm reprinting it here. It summarizes my position nearly exactly which is surprising to find in the American Spectator and by a religious based conservative. It goes to show you that true conservatives aren't run by religious belief soley and they have a libertarian streak.
AFTER THE FLOOD
Reflections on New Orleans from a former resident.
"Hurricane Katrina made one thing clear: the federal government has devolved into an all-purpose caring agency with no limit to its role. The Constitution, specifying and restricting the federal government's powers, is a dead letter. Harriet Miers vowed to "strictly apply the laws and the Constitution," but the Court has made it clear that the Constitution means whatever five justices at any given time say it means, and Congress has not objected to that presumption. Until it does the Court will continue to go its way.
Today, any and every crisis demands the same response: more spending. Liberals ought to be jubilant because their philosophy -- more government as the solution to all ills -- is accepted de facto by both major parties. George Bush and Ted Kennedy are in broad agreement. Early in his first term, when Bush greatly increased the tax flows to government schools, it was uncomfortably clear that he assumed that if children were being "left behind", an insufficiency of tax monies was the reason.
At some point, someone in a position of leadership is going to have to say out loud, in response to whatever new crisis has been trumped up: solving it isn't the job of the federal government. We need leaders with the courage to assume that there is untapped support for common-sense positions that are rarely or never articulated for fear of offending progressive opinion.
Katrina started out with images of the liberals' preferred victim class engaged in unprovoked smash-and-grab raids on Canal Street in New Orleans. To state the obvious, they were taking advantage of the breakdown in law and order. But there was no shortage of excuses on their behalf. They were hungry. They needed new sneakers because their old ones were soaking wet. The weather had discriminated against them.
Soon enough the supposed victims wanted to know: Where are the programs? Where are the first, second, and third responders? Where's the care? Where are the people who look after us, tell us where to go, provide us with transportation, blankets, bedding, shelter, hot meals, diaper-changing service, medication, crisis counseling? Hullo-o... Anyone at home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Needy people down here are being neglected by the President of the United States.
Just to fantasize, wouldn't it be great if just once in our lives we saw the President get up on his hind legs and say: "Take responsibility for your own lives! Get off your butts! No one else can do it for you! learn to swim, or sink beneath the waves!"
Oh, the howling that would ensue -- the howling and the cheering. An unapologetic response is what we want to hear.
But it was the liberals who turned the tables. Bush had waited too long -- a full 48 hours -- before showing that he cared. He has prided himself on being compassionate, so this was a painful moment for him. To make amends he would have to unloose another flood -- of money. Soon, he became little more than a straw in the political winds. Then, sensing the weakness of his position, the liberals started howling for tax increases. Time for more government!
Why do they believe in government so much?
Why does President Bush?
David Wessell wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "President Bush has presided over the nationalization of airport security screeners, the creation of Homeland Security bureaucracy, the largest expansion of Medicare since President Johnson signed it into law and a 20 percent increase in all federal spending, adjusted for inflation, even before the cost of responding to Katrina." Not to mention his faith in more money as the all-purpose lubricant for government schools.
Not all Republicans believe in ever-increasing government, of course, and possibly one or two Democrats don't either. The problem lies in the structure of government itself once shorn of constitutional checks. Federal revenues when they reach Washington are what economists call a "common-pool resource." They resemble a pool of oil underneath a number of surface owners, any or all of whom may drill for oil without restriction. In the case of federal spending, the only requirement is that 50 percent of the legislators sign on for any given siphoning operation.
On Capitol Hill, the problem is actually worse than that because there is no requirement that there be anything left in the reservoir. Deficit spending is unrestricted. Legislators can "drill for dollars" even when the pool is empty, passing out to recipient classes money greatly in excess of the revenues collected.
The prudent or thrifty legislator who refuses to participate -- votes "no" on a new spending measure -- merely leaves the untapped goodies to be soaked up by others with fewer qualms. Even if a large number of Republicans had opposed new spending post-Katrina, Democrats would easily have found sufficient waverers to reach a majority and Republicans as a whole would have been demonized as the Uncaring Party. The system has built-in bias toward profligacy.
Most voters don't understand these things, one reason being the systematic misrepresentation of the issues on television. Legislators are praised for their generosity when they vote to spend other people's money but are reproached for meanness when they decline to take that easy path.
When government departs from its traditional task of defending life, liberty, and property, and assumes responsibility for things that the individuals can (and must) perform for themselves, it functions only in make-believe fashion. Paper jobs are created. Job descriptions are written, workers are hired, a payroll established, civil service regulations applied, and then at the end of the month checks are dished out. But they are real checks! They don't bounce.
As far as the economy is concerned, it's like driving a car with the brakes on. The drag gradually undermines previous reform. In England, Tony Blair has in many ways tried to preserve the Thatcher reforms and he understands that socialism is an economic disaster. Yet his government has added more than 800,000 employees to the public payroll since 1997, "their salaries and pensions almost all paid for through taxes," as the London Spectator reported recently. That's equivalent to 4 million new government jobs in the US.
The bias toward spending arises because all voters (in the same tax bracket) are charged at the same rate, no matter who represents them in Congress. Big spenders are therefore rewarded and the frugal are penalized. In a better-ordered world, the big spenders would be condemned as irresponsible opportunists, not praised as generous and compassionate. All the incentives work in the same direction -- to encourage "yea" votes on spending bills.
One solution would be to add up the dollars that each legislator votes to spend, and to "bill" the taxpayers in his district accordingly. It would solve the fundamental problem: the absence of ratio or proportion between the amount a legislator spends and what his constituents would be "charged." If this idea were to be enacted, which of course it won't be, spending would collapse overnight.
A second reform would involve returning to an earlier time when the franchise was restricted. That's not going to happen either, but it should be discussed. Voting is not a human right. A voter is, pro tem, an officer of the state and should have to pass a civics test before being registered to vote. The drift continues in the opposite direction -- most recently a push to declare that convicted felons are qualified, for example, or even to allow current prisoners to vote (rather too obviously designed to increase the Democratic rolls).
I arrived in this country with no money in my pocket, moved to New Orleans, and lived there for a number of years. There were two hurricanes. (Betsy, in 1965, was a direct hit.) I never took the view that Americans are entitled to reach into taxpayers' pockets because their income has fallen below a certain level, yet that presumption is now widespread. Politically, for four decades, the country has been on a path of decline. Get the bums off the public payroll!
When order has been restored in New Orleans I'll contact a few of my liberal friends still living in the city and I'll report back here if they have anything interesting to say. "
|
|
|
|
|
|
