Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 14:49:54 -0400 From: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor) Subject: Book Review: "The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American To: freematt@coil.com (Matthew Gaylor)
Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001 12:55:22 -0400 To: freematt@coil.com From: Jim Bovard <jbovard@his.com> Subject: Yanking a Socialist Chain
The Washington Times June 03, 2001, Sunday, Final Edition SECTION: PART B; BOOKS; Pg. B8
HEADLINE: To work for one's living, or vote for it; a review of the questio BYLINE: James Bovard : H.L. Mencken quipped in the 1930s that the New Deal divided America into those who work for a living and those who vote for a living. That division should be supplemented by a new category - those who make a living apologizing for those who vote for a living.
Michael Katz's new book, "The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State," includes all the statistics and factoids for which any welfare rights defender could wish. Mr. Katz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, starts out by lamenting that "today it is social justice that is subordinate to market price." His book never offers a clear, coherent definition of social justice but that is no reason not to vest vast power in politicians and bureaucrats to pursue the socialist Holy Grail.
Mr. Katz rhapsodizes, "Welfare is as old as the Colonies and as American as Thanksgiving. . . . Public assistance has always been inexpensive . . . and its low cost is one key to its staying power." This is news to working Americans who find more and more of their paychecks gobbled up to pay for entitlement payments to one politically-connected group after another.
The author derides the achievements of the private sector: "Official unemployment rates in the United States appear lower than in Europe only because they omit inmates of prisons and jails." Regardless of what the voluntary exchanges of goods and services achieves and produces, Mr. Katz can find some reason to sneer that government regulation could have done better.
Mr. Katz has a knack for quibbling over the biggest boondoggles of the modern era. Consider CETA - the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1973-1982) - a jobs program whose greatest achievement was building an artificial rock for rock climbers to practice on. Mr. Katz insists that CETA's "achievements were substantial" - and then proceeds to give a long list of other government programs financed by CETA. He fails to mention an Urban Institute comprehensive study that concluded that CETA produced "significant earnings losses for young men of all races and no significant effects for young women." But at least it worked out well for the administrators.
Seeking to shrug away the concept of welfare fraud, Mr. Katz writes: "Hidden income to a welfare official is a needed supplement to declining benefits to a single mother. Rather than an objective standard, fraud remains an uncertain and conflict-ridden border erected to contain the costs of the welfare state." Mr. Katz presumably has far less patience for the type of fraud that can occur when taxpayers seek to avoid surrendering as much of their income as the government demands.
It is difficult to understand who, under the writer's standard, would be discouraged from rattling their tin cup at politicians to get government benefits. Mr. Katz laments, "Even today, workers who descend into poverty because they are on strike find themselves among the undeserving poor, ineligible for unemployment compensation or food stamps." Does Mr. Katz believe that union membership automatically conveys ownership rights to nonunion paychecks - thus obliging the majority of private workers to underwrite the costs of a strike by paying for the strikers' food?
Like many leftists, Mr. Katz is especially sensitive over criticism of Social Security. He derides the "misinformation campaign" that supposedly made many people think that Social Security will eventually go bankrupt. The program has an unfunded liabilities of $12 trillion - just the sort of accounting footnote that could make some people suspect it is doomed.
But it is typical of Mr. Katz to fixate on alleged inaccurate criticisms of a government program while ignoring the government's own shenanigans. Social Security illustrates the natural combination of paternalism with political fraud. As the Brookings Institution's Martha Derthick observed, "In the mythic construction began in 1935 and elaborated thereafter on the basis of the payroll tax, Social Security was a vast enterprise of self-help in which governmnt participation was almost incidental."
The Social Security Administration for decades told people that their Social Security taxes were being held for each citizen in individual accounts; in reality, as soon as the money came in, politicians found ways to spend it. Social Security Commissioner Stanford Ross conceded in 1979 that "the mythology of Social Security contributed greatly to its success. . . . Strictly speaking, the system was never intended to return to individuals what they paid." Sen. Patrick Moynihan of New York, accurately characterized Social Security taxes as "outright thievery" from young working people.
Mr. Katz's vision of government as social savior ignores the grubby reality of politics. The essence of the Welfare State is to control some people for other people's benefit, and to allow politicians to decree who wins and loses. The Welfare State inevitably becomes the Political Warfare State. Aaron Director, the economist, formulated a law of public income redistribution: "Any government will redistribute resources to benefit whatever group can take command of its machinery." Each group of citizens must devote more time and effort to protect the tattered remnants of their paychecks, or to sink their teeth into other people's paychecks. "Reciprocal plunder," in Frederic Bastiat's phrase, becomes the soul of political life.
There is more to life than the avoidance of toe stubs, more to life than not paying the bill for your own doctors' visit, more to life than being certified as handout-worthy by the nearest social worker. The Welfare State concept of happiness is based on forced flight from the realities of everyday life - happiness via minimal expectations, submission, and gratitude for whatever benefits one's master deigns to provide - a happiness that is practically the mirror image of human dignity. Unfortunately, Mr. Katz's book never attempts to explain why people should seek their happiness via submission to the government.
James Bovard is the author of "Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion & Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years" (St. Martin's Press).
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