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Ayn Rand v. Paul Ryan
The Ayn Rand Institute is disappointed in Paul Ryan. Here the House Budget Chairman goes to all the trouble of rolling out an anti-poverty plan, and he somehow forgets to obliterate the safety net. What gives? Does Ryan remember nothing from the Ayn Rand reading of his youth? Someone delete the Summa Theologica off his iPad ASAP!
Here is ARI’s Don Watkins:
If you’re going to have a welfare state, it’s obviously better to have one that minimizes the incentive to stay on welfare, and from what I’ve seen, I suspect that a Ryan welfare state would be marginally less destructive than our current patchwork of so-called anti-poverty programs.
But of course that assumes we should have a welfare state. … The real question is not whether we should have a “safety net” or not. The question is whether we should have a coercive welfare state. What I find offensive about Ryan’s … whole approach is that it doesn’t regard the rights and well-being of those forced to pay for the welfare state as worthy of much, if any, consideration. Instead, it starts by observing that some people are in need and jumps immediately to the question of what welfare state programs would most help them.
But that’s immoral. Just because there are people out there suffering and Ryan wants to help them doesn’t give him the right to concoct schemes that treat you and me and everyone who pays his own way as a means to Ryan’s supposedly noble ends. What about my goals and priorities? What about my right to pursue happiness? What about yours?
If you’re someone who finds that kind of reasoning — “Taxation is theft!” — appealing and persuasive, then of course you will dislike Ryan’s anti-poverty plan and the safety net it wishes to reform. I really have no interest in engaging in that sort of dorm-room argument. What I do have an interest in is living in the real world, one where Americans, as a society, have long committed to making sure everyone is fed, sheltered, educated — even if that requires government action and taxpayer dough. The useful questions are ones of determining a limiting principle and sustainable funding. As Yuval Levin has described one conservative approach:
The federal government’s role in the provision of social services should be minimal, and largely limited to helping the states and the institutions of civil society better carry out their missions. It would still have some role as an investor (in infrastructure and education, above all), but this too should be strictly targeted to essential public needs that the private sector would not meet, and block-granted to the states whenever possible. Government at all levels should also look to contract its remaining functions out to the private sector where it can, both to improve efficiency and to avoid harmful conflicts between the government’s obligations to the people it serves and its obligations to the people it employs — conflicts that have been rampant in our time.
And as Arthur Brooks, AEI’s president, puts it:
One of the things, in my view, that we get wrong in the free enterprise movement is this war against the social safety net, which is just insane. The government social safety net for the truly indigent is one of the greatest achievements of our society. And we somehow want to zero out food stamps or something, it’s nuts to want to be doing something like that. We have to declare peace on the safety net.
Perhaps someday ARI and like-minded libertarians will be able to persuade their fellow citizens to think and vote otherwise. But I don’t see that Overton Window opening any decade or generation soon.
Anyway, it is a stubborn fact that the safety net has cut US poverty, material deprivation, in half since the 1960s. Unfortunately, in too many cases, poverty is a trap. As the Manhattan Institute’s Scott Winship notes in “Room to Grow, “… upward mobility among young adults who grew up poor is no higher today than it was in the mid-twentieth century.” That problem is what the Ryan reforms — from welfare to education to prison — mean to address.
Published in General
“What I do have an interest in is living in the real world, one where Americans, as a society, have long committed to making sure everyone is fed, sheltered, educated — even if that requires government action and taxpayer dough.” – Elizabeth Warren
No, that was James Pethokoukis actually.
It’s sad to see how deeply the classroom propaganda took.
Why is Ryan focusing on the problem of ‘poverty’ at all? I’m not dissapointed in Ryan because I had no special hopes for him. The Republican who tries to ‘help’ people with governmental solutions is a fool. That’s what Democrats do, or try to do, and it creates more problems than it solves. Poor people won’t vote for a Republican, even a ‘compassionate’ one like Ryan. Democrats won’t like his plans, they will feel threatened. This is a dead end.
What can be done to help everyone, rich, poor and middle-class, is cutting as much fat from the federal government as possible. Anything else is playing in the sandbox.
These plans never survive in their original form after they meet with Democrats and lobbyists, so even if this plan is an improvement, that’s not going to be what is implemented after a collision with Congress.
This does not win politically, it won’t make the GOP seem more compassionate, and it won’t result in ‘helping’ people.
The problem I have with the reform movement is not that it doesn’t eliminate it overnight. Anyone who thinks the problem through understands that it will take time to get rid of it as well as time for private replacements to get up and running. There will be some transition involved. The problem is that for many of them reform itself has become the end game. They don’t really have a plan or even care to end the welfare state, just make it smaller and more efficient. That is a fool’s errand because the moment they’re out of power, the Left will just “reform” it back and expand it. Reform is a necessary step to removal but cannot be the end goal itself.
Jim attacks a straw man implying opposition to the existence of a federal safety net is opposition to any safety net at all (state, local, or privately funded). That tells me he isn’t serious about the core problem. It’s the same argumentation used to claim anyone against illegal immigration is against all immigration.
Add me to the list of those demurring with this description.
Ricochet would probably benefit from a post on a field guide to libertarian species — “The Anarcho-Capitalist is often mistaken for the Objectivist, but a close inspection reveals…” — but I’d suggest that the l-word is a blanket term for those whose political philosophies prioritize freedom.
You would seem to be a big fan of scare quotes.
No matter how modest the proposal, Paul Ryan will be demagogued as a neo-Randian freak hell bent on smashing the welfare state by Democrats and their trained media seals.
So why not just go big anyways? Block grant all welfare programs to the states in a lump sum and eliminate the entire DC welfare bureaucracy.
You appear to have this elaborate (yet apparently self-conflicting) zoology of libertarians worked out in your head. How much have you tested it against real life?
As for the statists oppressors familiar with Coase’s work, many of them are Austrian economists, judging by a Google site search of Mises.org. Some are rather fond of Coase, some not. Some even claim to work within the Coasean tradition. At any rate, not everyone on Mises.org is “ignorant” of Coase’s insights.
I grant you the folks on Misses.org might be another story ;-)
Perhaps someone else has done this and I missed it, but here is a link to the (PDF) report ‘Expanding Opportunity in America’ from the House Budget Committee. There is much common sense here, although (perhaps understandably) all in the ‘reform and improve’ tradition.
Most unfortunately, as far as presenting to those deeply skeptical of the managerialist base of modern governance, the final recommendation is to establish The Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making.
No, really.
Are you opposed to randomized trials because you believe that they are ineffective at optimizing programs or because you believe that we should not be attempting to optimize programs?
I say nothing about that one way or the other. I say that it is unfortunate “as far as presenting to those deeply skeptical of the managerialist base of modern governance” that such a concentration of technocracy is the final reform point. You may well reply that such folks are not the target of this presentation, and we could discuss whether more rhetorical bones (at the least) should be thrown their way in a ‘no enemies on the right’-esque strategy. We will probably disagree, but not much.
I am, however, reminded by your question that I must re-read MacIntyre on ‘manipulative expertise’.
Hear, hear.
Well put.
I’m getting the sense from this thread that a lot of people seem to have forgotten the “necessary” part as well.
Have you actually looked at our budget? We are long past any credible claim of necessary and are into debating which form of abuse, exploitation, and wanton greed/malice is more appropriate for really dehumanizing people into machines that poop; so technocrats can get their rocks off on feeling better than the people they treat like subhuman garbage.
You may think I sound harsh, but its really not. It is the ignoble truth about what a society fundamentally premised on taking by violence looks like. The fundamental counter-purpose cannot be resolved by fiddling with how you screw the people you decide are feed-stock for the other moo-cows.