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The new New Deal
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Sociologist and professor Dalton Conley says that the Democrats need a new New Deal, and it should look nothing like the old one. Not because it was bad, but because it won’t work in our current culture. Back then:
Government and big business had an understanding, famously embodied by the line, “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Employers, in turn, agreed to pay their (male) employees a living wage and provide generous benefits. Men, in turn, had an obligation to provide for their dependents. To complete the sequence, the state would step in if any of these links broke down by providing a minimal level of support in the case of unemployment, death, desertion or disability.
These days, though, families are splintered, and that kind of deal won’t hold up. Conley suggests in this essay new ways the Helping Hand of the Government can come forward and help Americans in health care (the government should form health insurance cooperatives and assign the uninsured to a group), education (the government should form investment accounts for retirement savings), education (the government should make universities make their courses free online), and so on.
The New Deal ushered in the era of Giant Government, and any kind of new New Deal would only anger the beast and make it bigger. But Conley addresses real problems. It’s his solutions that frighten me.
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Soul searching
And the longer we fight effectively addressing these problems, the more intrusive the response is going to be.
Health care should be easy: everyone needs it and should have it. Fighting this issue only leads to more intrusive forms of solution as the problem becomes more critical over time. The emerging model is government as insurer of last resort with subsidies for those who require it.
If you look at this model, it suggests that over time this will become the insurer of first resort: in effect a single payer plan.
I suggest that if this is our path, we should structure a designed single payer plan rather than let one happen by default.
As with our energy policy, however, the American public seems very reluctant to look ahead.
“These days, though, families are splintered, and that kind of deal won’t hold up.”
That kind of deal would be impossible today as it seems a large part of the culture doesn’t even understand the ethics behind such an agreement—let alone having the desire to implement one. Few, even within some families, exhibit the needed responsibility, stemming from a genuine concern for the welfare of others, to make it possible. It’s “all about me” rules.
HSK: It’s his solutions that frighten me.
Chill, Harrison. The Breakthrough Institute recognizes your needs for value and identity, and won’t push hostile interests against you. The Breakthrough Institute knows you are not an essentially rational creature, coldly calculating in your self interest, so it conforms to the way you reason in different circumstances. “His” frightening solutions are nothing more than your need for security and prosperity. Benefitting from a half-century of research into why you believe as you do, Harrison, the Institute will inspire you instead of scaring you.
HSK, Pat Buchanan has written about an America where businesses would have to pay a “family wage” you alluded to. It would get my vote.
If boards of directors are only concerned chiefly with high returns on stockholders investments, you would have a hard time pushing the family wage and benefits packages however.
SAWGUNNER
As you know, standard Republican doctrine rejects such proposals. “We don’t need bureaucrats in Washington to tell small businesses and entrepreneurs, the engine of American prosperity and freedom, who much to pay their employees, blah, blah.”
As a left-wing, pro-business advocate of the market economy, I’ve got to admit that Republican doctrine makes sense, up to a point. So let me offer a counter-proposal to yours. Why don’t we let business do what it wants within market constraints (I’d even dismantle the corporate income tax) but errect a back-stop of citizen-financed social programs related to health care, retirement security, education, and income support?
Airbus and Toyota don’t need to spend money on health care as do Boeing and GM. Adam Smith might recognize what Republicans call “socialism” as a rational division of labor.
PS: Obama’s proposal to lower corporate income tax rates should send shock waves through the Republican establishment because of its implications for the progressive personal income tax, which is the only tax Republicans truly care about intensely (including the “death” tax).
While it is fun to speculate on how to order society, the bigger challenge comes in deciding whose order. Ambition for power is the addiction of humanity. I will always support a devolving of power from authoritarianism, but into what morality is that power devolving? Sadly, as Conley points out, society is becoming more dissociative.
Here is my question, has a more stable country made for this individualistic mentality? Put differently, has our system of government and economic stability given people their counter-cultural lifestyle where risks are limited thus making a permanent protest culture? When I say protest culture think as broadly as possible (eg. 35 year olds living with parents, job hopping every 2 years, chronic substance abuse, massive consumer debt, get rich quick schemes, following Phish, marching at every civil disobedience rally, etc.).
MAC: what morality . . counter-cultural lifestyle where risks are limited
In other words, you’re asking, what shall it profit a man if he gains the world and loses his soul . . .
Your primary consideration appears to be personal morality. You want our social order to reward virtue and punish vice. Social misery plays a familiar role in both. Sometimes capitalism unfortunately enables bad people to live comfortably, but not if they’re poor, and many more are poor than rich. So overall, capitalism gives bad people their just deserts. Probably it also forces individuals to seek amelioration in religion.
If that’s what you’re saying, MAC, it’s honest. Most conservatives are so horrified by the moral hazards of “socialism” that they refuse even to contemplate the possibility that government might create prosperity. They don’t want people to be prosperous unless they’re also good, and they oppose socialism because it it might work.
You asked a fair question: In the course of fostering prosperity, has the government promoted vice? My answer is, perhaps, but this marginal product of social democracy is manageable and outweighed by a greater good.
American conservatives call government “support” systems a recipe for subsidizing bad behavior and poverty. But look at crime rates and poverty in Germany. The welfare state keeps people out of poverty, but doesn’t pay for comfy lifestyles for the indolent. Pesky social workers come around and scold the lazy for living off the state. People are industrious, though not as hard-working as Americans. They have enviable savings rates, a lot of personal wealth, a quality of life that only the rich in America can attain, and a generally safe environment. If your kids don’t come home on time, you get angry at them but you don’t become terrified for them. Germany also has entrepreneurial billionaires.
You can reply that recent developments have pushed German society rightward toward unfettered capitalism, but I’d argue that amounts to lowering the speed of your big Mercedes from 250 k down to 220 k per hour.
Scroop, your assumption of my primary consideration takes you from the field of question. I am questioning the relationship of community and the individual. I think your response may offer the corollary, but I am wondering where the individual finds him or herself contributing to the community instead entitled to its riches! But to answer your assumption, yes the individual is a moral entity and must be responsible. Let’s look at the other end of your spectrum, the rich must be penalized for their vice of greed though higher taxes, n’est pas?
I tend towards the utilitarian benefits you define. However, I wonder if Kennedy’s inaugural speech is the better path. Europe is despairing the next generation as many governments wonder where the funding for such generous programs will come from.
Mac, you sound like General Petraeus asking for a three month pause and then six months of assessment, and putting off the day of reckoning. The German model has proven itself over 50 years, even absorbing the cost of reunification, yet skeptics have to wait another generation.
People want prestige more than money, and a government check only gives them the latter. People have to accomplish something to get the former. People also want human relationship, which requires contributing as well as taking, virtue, above all. Hunger isn’t the only incentive to work and necessity isn’t the only mother of invention.
After four centuries, Americans still feel like pioneers in the wilderness, afraid a free-loader will make them not survive the winter. Why are evangelicals so given to individualism, when Jesus prayed that his disciples be as one? Maybe it’s not either/or. A strong community may be the key to strong individuals. If your moral duty is to eliminate every last parasite, fine. I wouldn’t, if the purge handicapped the community.
Scroop, I don’t know where you are going with this. Questioning the sustainability of a system is all the rage these days which is all I was doing on the this issue. I agree that it has worked up to this point. My original post questioned whether or not a permanent protest culture (radical individualism) has handicapped the community, to use your words. I think it is a fair discussion to have with out all the name calling and invectives.
Sorry, Mac, I was trying to engage rather than offend, but neither of us is sure where the other is going. It sounds to me that you are prescribing duty, responsibility for others, and respect for tradition as the antidote to decadence and whining. Although we enjoy drinking from the Declaration of Independence, we must become intoxicated with it. Maybe we should sober up with the Ten Commandments? Just guessing.
Sorry, must NOT become intoxicated