In the end, I gather what [William] Voegeli proposes is a hypothetical bargain. If liberals will agree to some finite limit on the welfare state, conservatives should agree to try to make the best of it by making design changes (such as means testing) that maximize the benefits of the welfare state relative to its costs.
... I certainly doubt that liberals would accept such a hypothetical bargain. Consider another hypothetical bargain that is popular with market-oriented types. We'll let you (the liberals) decide how much to spend per capita on education, if you will let us (the market-oriented) determine how it is spent (i.e., using vouchers). I have never come across a liberal who liked that bargain. They cannot imagine depriving children of government's expertise in education.
... Indeed, I would suggest to Voegeli that the welfare state is not the root of the disagreement between what I call the Established Church of Unlimited Government and the heresy of limited government. The root (or better yet, the soil) includes what Daniel Klein calls "The People's Romance," in which the state is infused with mystical qualities. It also includes what I might call "The Progressives' Romance," in which technocrats and social scientists are infused with mystical qualities.
Relative to the soil of magical thinking about the state and about technocratic expertise, the welfare state is merely the largest weed. ... But I am not convinced that trimming the weed would be a sufficient achievement for libertarians/conservatives, given the soil.
His point is that to many, liberals appear to want to spend as much money on the welfare state as possible. But to Kling - and to me - what they really want is the ability to apply their expertise in solving all of society's problems, and whatever the welfare state costs to allow that is purely incidental.
He continues:
To illustrate, consider another hypothetical bargain. Suppose that liberals offered to keep the combination of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid below 15 percent of GDP and overall Federal spending below 20 percent of GDP indefinitely, in exchange for which they would be given free rein on other policy issues. That is, they could dictate energy and environmental policy, enact unlimited "nudges" to try to change what people eat or how they invest, impose regulations to address what they perceive as inequities in the work place and in access to credit, and so on. Should we accept that bargain?
5-10 years ago, I was a libertarian who was very much preoccupied with the absolute size of the government and especially of its taxes. In the meantime I have dropped that preoccupation to the point that I now don't really care about that at all. Instead, what bothers me more is the incessant "dictation" from the government on every issue. No matter what is going on, there is always a call for a government solution. Oil prices are up? We need an "energy bill". Stock or housing markets dip? We need a "financial overhaul bill". Cars not selling? We need a government rebate. It's never ending.
In fact, I would take the exact opposite to Kling's hypothetical bargain. I would offer the left almost any percentage of GDP they want if the money would be given in lump sums to all people with no government attempts to tweak society with the who and why of the payout.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing doesn't excite people to vote the way railing against high taxes does, and so the Right has no incentive to change its rallying call. And as Kling suggests - and I wholeheartedly agree with - the left has no interest in our money without also having the power to tell us what hoops we must jump through to get some of it back.
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