Crippling Poverty is Not Service to Family
I agree, broadly speaking, with Ross Douthat’s point that the grand economic argument between left and right is not something that you can “resolve” with “proof” or better empirical results. But I think this conclusion is garbage:
How much do you prize equality and ease of life? The more you do, the more you’ll favor a European approach to the relationship between state and society. How much do you prize voluntarism, entrepreneurship, and the value of lives oriented around service to one’s family, and to God? The more you do, the more you’ll find to like in the American arrangement. Where this debate is concerned, I’m proud to stand with Charles Murray – but I don’t think that we should labor under the false hope that scientific advances are going to tilt the argument dramatically in our direction.
Left out of here is what the right always loves to leave out of discussions of economic policy choices: interest. If you’re poor in the United States and you live in a neighborhood where poor people can afford to live, you will almost certainly be living in a neighborhood that’s much more dangerous than the neighborhoods in which poor Dutch people live. You’ll also find yourself living in a country that’s much less friendly to the interests of people who can’t afford a car than is the Netherlands. Conversely, if a European executive meets an American executive and feels a twinge of jealousy, it’s not for the American’s greater level of “entrepreneurship” it’s for the fact that the U.S. social model leaves top executives much richer than European executives. In Finland, low-end wages are higher than they are in the United States. This is great for relatively low-skill Finnish people. But it also means that there are many fewer mid-price restaurants in Helsinki than in a typical American city, which is bad for the sort of upper middle class professionals (or Americans on a trip) who are likely to patronize such restaurants.
In the US and in Europe, income level is fairly predictive of voting behavior and this is neither a coincidence nor the reflection of an abstract disagreement about the value of “voluntarism.” It reflects the fact that politics is, among other things, a concrete contest over concrete economic interests. In a broad sense, both the American and European models work quite well compared to living standards enjoyed in other parts of the world. But in comparison, the models work differently for different kinds of people because different people have different interests. I don’t think, for example, that America’s high child poverty rate reflects American preference for “service to one’s family” over “ease of life.”
77 Responses to “Crippling Poverty is Not Service to Family”
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March 14th, 2009 at 11:55 am
the value of lives oriented around service…to God
Honestly, how are you supposed to have a rational discussion about politics with someone like this? Leaving aside the very specific and deliberate secular construction of our government, even among believers, even among Christians, the definition of “God” and service to that being is highly and hotly contested.
I’m supposed to get excited that this puerile nitwit took Kristol’s place?
March 14th, 2009 at 11:55 am
ok, i admit it, i don’t especially read douthat, but every time i do, i think “his conclusion is garbage,” so in terms of douthat in particular, this falls into the dog bites man category.
but the notion that the “debate” is about whether you prize voluntarism or ease of life isn’t just a conclusion for douthat, it’s a worldview, which is why i have no interest in what douthat has to say: that’s both childish and stupid.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Yes, and the state is supposed to be the citizens’, rather than something that just landed from outer-space. This is also something that “right always loves to leave out of discussions of economic policy choices,” along with the fact of American political payola. As much as the right talks about an ideal emancipation from government (especially now that they don’t control it), the recent political history of the right shows the exact opposite. Government was harnessed to their interests at everyone else’s expense.
Douthat is free to talk, and we are free to laugh.
.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Shorter Douhat: your poverty is to my advantage. Thanks, suckers.
(And it’s true that only in America would he be on a major newspaper’s op-ed page.)
March 14th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I strongly suspect Euro-style, greater ease of life carves out more time for volunteerism. Also, it would be nice to have some data on entrepreneurship, but I doubt any of the more progressive European countries are slackers in this department. I will grant him, though, that a crappy safety net probably does prompt lots of Americans to cling to their churches.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Give away your labor, sucker, so I can keep more of my own money. Let’s keep pretending that philanthropy obviates the need for equitable tax structures, cause Merka is too dumb to read a chart of GDP growth.
Stay home. Don’t organize. “Activist” is a dirty word. Oh, and we control what “family” means. Welcome to your cage, bitch.
Trade your birthright for a bag of magic beans, hayseed. Luntz told me this would work on your dumb ass, which is why you are only fit to be my slave.
Or the Zimbabwean, because democracy and capitalism are anathema to authoritarian regimes, and your pre-modern metaphysics seem custom-made to make you kneel.
That’ll be $94, please.
.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I read a few posts on Douthat’s blog, and for the life of me, I could not see where various blogs hailed his new position at the NYT’s editorial page.
It’s the same old tripe, lots of self-righteous hanky twisting about abortion and stem cells, the usual money-belongs-in-the-hands-of-the-wealthy simplistic Randian world view. Like all conservatives, he is impervious to empirical evidence and unable to engage in a substantive debate.
It’s too bad that a conservative, no matter how mediocre, gets elevated to the highest levels, whereas on the left, great writers and clear thinkers like Yglesias or Digby, informed research like Ezra Klein or the folks at TPM, or media criticism at Media Matters are relegated to the hinterlands.
I just can’t ait to read through the comments thread (I always sort by Reader’s recomendations) at the NYT. I don’t think he knows what he is in for.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
To the degree that American childhood poverty is a function of absentee and non-supportive fathers (which it is to a considerable degree) then the problem is those fathers’ preferences for ease of their life over dedication to their families.
What is unforgivable is not that American children live in poor families it is that as a consequence they go hungry and lack proper care of all sorts including medical.
Between the Left’s idea of just giving money to the parents and the Right’s notion of let them eat cake lies a reasonable solution and venue: schools, including preschool, where children can be cared for n the fullest sense.
Unfortunately when it comes to schools neither the teachers’ union dominated Left nor the starve the beast Right seem willing to actually put the needs of our children first.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Cases like this are where good ol’ fashioned ideology critique becomes useful, because “ideology” is exactly what Douthat is peddling here: a mystified, intellectualized view of the world that has the effect of disguising actual social relations.
But yes, we should be glad that Douthat took Kristol’s place at the NYT. Simply because Douthat is sincere. You don’t get anywhere having a conversation with a self-conscious bullshit artist. You *might* get somewhere having a conversation with someone who is merely deluded.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Who knew that the volunteerism, service to god, and devotion to family are traits inconsistent with prizing equality and ‘ease of life’?
America is really in deep shit if great institutions like Harvard produce idiots that spout this nonsense. It’s in deeper shit if idiots like this are rewarded by a newspaper that was once one of the greatest.
(By the way Matt, your post is all over the place. Are you trying to convince us, with this guy, that Harvard education is not worth the $200K?)
March 14th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Re: Honestly, how are you supposed to have a rational discussion about politics with someone like this? Leaving aside the very specific and deliberate secular construction of our government, even among believers, even among Christians, the definition of “God” and service to that being is highly and hotly contested.
Jim, I don’t think Ross was arguing that the (American) state does or should encourage people to serve God in one particular way- he’s arguing that the government should be small so that it leaves as much space as possible for people to serve God in their own ways. This isn’t a point of view that I would really agree with, but it isn’t the same one that you are disagreeing with, I think, and it isn’t incompatible with the ideals of Jeffersonian liberalism.
I think one can certainly argue that Swedish or Danish society, in spite of being largely agnostic/atheist, certainly embody many values that Christians would/should cherish. (On the economic and environmental fronts, of course, but also on the sexual one- rhetoric aside, the Swedes do have fewer abortions, and fewer children raised by one parent, than the Americans). I think that Pope Benedict would find a good deal more to decry and complain about in Dallas, Texas than in Oslo or Helsinki. So I do think Ross is out to lunch on this one.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
When they’re not schlepping sacks of coinage and jewels by ox cart to their Stalinist masters in the capital, the former viking fellows are apparently volunteering (at a 6% higher rate than their American counterparts).
March 14th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Then how come you were so chummy and polite to Douthat on those blogcasts that you used to do with him? One of the reasons that the wingnuts got so much traction in the media is that the progressives were too polite to call bullshit to their faces in such direct language. So we end up with Cokie Roberts stroking George Will’s neck on television as he spews his crap and she is considered the counterbalancing point of view because her Dad was a Southern Democrat. Matt, you gotta call these guys out more. DeLong is now going after Mankiw pretty well when he was too polite while Mankiw worked for BushCo. Anyway, you are the younger generation in this dance of public intellectuals, you need to seize the high ground now. The condition of the country is such that you can take that ground and shoot down at them for many years. But you have to keep shooting, but not with just laser guided bullets but big enormous bombs that ensure a lot of collateral damage to their movement.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
But yes, we should be glad that Douthat took Kristol’s place at the NYT
No, we shouldn’t. The good thing about Bill Kristol is that no one pretended he was anything other than what he was – a right-wing hack. Douthat is still a right-wing hack – a tireless shill for the robber barons, religious crazies and warmongers that comprise the base of the Republican Party – but because he uses big words every now and then and stares wistfully into the distance while demanding that women and gay people be denied basic liberties, he’s a “smart conservative” and a “public intellectual.” Fuck him.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
That’s what I’m wondering as well – how much of these are assumptions on Douthat’s part? Does he actually have any data to support his claims on voluntarism and entrepeneurship?
March 14th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
… you will almost certainly be living in a neighborhood that’s much more dangerous than the neighborhoods in which poor Dutch people live.
Low crime in poor neighbourhoods is not necessarily indicative of the European welfare model. Look at Clichy-sous-Bois or other poor, high crime, immigrant suburbs and they do just as poorly with their unwashed masses as we do. We just happen to have many more.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Linus,
Thanks, that’s an interesting statistic. One I’m not surprised by, but one that runs contrary to a lot that the American right says.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
LOL another “you’re with us or you’re European/socialist/with the Devil/with the terrorists” argument.
First off, the “American arrangement” is a mixed economy and has been since inception. The question is simply what mix we want, or alternatively where to draw the line of government involvement. In any case, I give him an automatic ten point deduction for using God to try to promote his politics. We all know that God is on everyone’s side (though interestingly enough Jesus would probably not have much nice to say about the GOP platform).
At any rate, here are a list of things I value that lead me to endorse a mixed economy where, logically enough, the government takes care of overall well-being and the free market decides on the rest:
-equal opportunity (aka education)
-innovation (a free market)
-hard work (a free market with price incentives)
-full employment (this one’s important. Idle hands make the Devil’s work, you know.)
-compassion (social safety nets)
Some of these things are at times at odds but our goal is to strike a harmonious balance, for example between social safety nets and work incentive. It’s not easy to get both but it’s not impossible either, if you genuinely try.
I wouldn’t go quite that far. If you’re in a French immigrant suburb, for instance, there’s a nonzero probability of witnessing a riot…
March 14th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
The good thing about Bill Kristol is that no one pretended he was anything other than what he was – a right-wing hack.
Sure. A thoroughly discredited opposition is great, in the short term.
But one-party government can’t last forever — so over the longer term, we need a *sane* opposition. Minimally sane! An opposition that aspires to practice “analysis” — even if they do it badly — and doesn’t believe it’s just a trick invented by liberals.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
I have no idea what Douthat meant by the “to God” comment, and he just threw it in there without backing it up in any way. Of course, it isn’t surprising to hear conservatives claim that god is on their side.
But I’m not buying Hector’s explanation.
I really don’t see the American government and god struggling in a zero-sum game. How do high levels of childhood poverty serve god? How do parents working multiple jobs and having less time with their children serve god? How do millions of Americans without health care serve god? If god is on Douthat’s side, then I’m proud to be an atheist.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I always like to point out that it’s entirely possible that God does exist and that his words and will are indeed recorded in the Bible but that he’s actually an evil deity trying to trick us all into worshipping him. Actually, if you read the old testament it almost seems like he’s not even trying to cover it up… This is somewhat like the characterization that Hitchens gives of God as a ruthless totalitarian.
I wonder what percent of believers vs. nonbelievers get taken in by Nigerian prince scams…
March 14th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Low crime in poor neighbourhoods is not necessarily indicative of the European welfare model. Look at Clichy-sous-Bois or other poor, high crime, immigrant suburbs and they do just as poorly with their unwashed masses as we do. We just happen to have many more.
Gordon Gekko: the claim was not that the Europeans “do just as poorly” as Americans. The claim was that their poor on average face less crime. Do you disagree with this? Anyway, having “many more” (poor people as a percentage of the total) will, I think, tend to push the overall rate of crime up, forcing both poor and non-poor to face higher rates of crime. It’s just that the non-poor possess a more robust capacity to insulate themselves from crime. Also, I don’t want to derail this thread, but surely Europe’s much more stringent and effective policies with respect to deadly firearms also play a role.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
One other thing. We should be pleased to see conservatism evolve in Ross’s direction: that’s to say, a primarily cultural direction, which favors small government mainly because it has convinced itself that small government embodies various abstract ideals.
The real problem we face is not conservative ideology but plutocracy: people who own the media, are disproportionately represented in public debate, effectively own large chunks of the legislature, and favor whatever policies help them amass more cash.
It wouldn’t be difficult to reach compromises with a Right that genuinely cared about “voluntarism, entrepreneurship, and the value of lives oriented around service to one’s family.” It’s well-nigh impossible to reach a compromise with naked plutocracy.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
over the longer term, we need a *sane* opposition.
A sane opposition is not on offer, certainly not from Ross Douthat. The GOP politicos Douthat has been most enthusiastic about over the past few years have been Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal. The man isn’t any saner or intellectually honest than Bill Kristol – he’s just a different flavor of hack.
Liberals need to stop engaging with “sensible conservatives” like Douthat – who are anything but – and start engaging with the Left. Sanity is never coming to the Republicans, but we can hope that something like it will eventually come to the Democrats.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Re: I really don’t see the American government and god struggling in a zero-sum game. How do high levels of childhood poverty serve god? How do parents working multiple jobs and having less time with their children serve god? How do millions of Americans without health care serve god? If god is on Douthat’s side, then I’m proud to be an atheist.
Justin,
I don’t think high levels of child poverty do serve God, and I don’t think God is on Douthat’s side on this issue. (Nor do I think God is particularly fond of the United States and its Government, but that’s a story for another day). I was trying to explicate Douthat’s view, not my own.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Also, FWIW, even nowadays Europeans probably have a lot more family and social cohesion than Americans do (and that is likely even part of why they have a more social economic structure). It’s odd that promoters of family values would oppose ‘paternalism’.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
We should be pleased to see conservatism evolve in Ross’s direction: that’s to say, a primarily cultural direction, which favors small government mainly because it has convinced itself that small government embodies various abstract ideals.
This is not evolution. Conservatives have been framing their plutocratic policies in culture-war terms since the time of Reagan, if not earlier. Ross Douthat adds to this formula besides youth and a Harvard degree.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
In true cowardly form, Douthat’s form does not allow comments. Apparently the word of Ross is immutable.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Re: I always like to point out that it’s entirely possible that God does exist and that his words and will are indeed recorded in the Bible but that he’s actually an evil deity trying to trick us all into worshipping him.
Anonymous,
Yes, that’s what the Marcionites and Manichaeans thought, among others. (I.e. that the god of the Old Testament was an evil demiurge, and that Christ was the son of the true God). There’s a lot that’s appealing about that conception. Ultimately it fails, I think, given the parallels and common themes between the two Testaments. But we would be well advised not to take the Old Testament word-for-word, as true/inspired in _every particular_. We should remember that it makes sense, and derives its purpose, only insofar as it prophecies Christ.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Anonymous,
Douthat’s blog did allow comments, until it got hijacked by a bunch of racists, if I recall correctly.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
More like since 1776 (though that was before the GOP). The difference is back then they actually had a point since the world was a lot smaller and less interdependant. Irresponsible individualism made a lot more sense then.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
It wouldn’t be difficult to reach compromises with a Right that genuinely cared about “voluntarism, entrepreneurship, and the value of lives oriented around service to one’s family.”
But the Right doesn’t care about this. And neither does Ross Douthat! These have never been anything to the American Right other than slogans and symbols to use to beat their opposition. Ross Douthat doesn’t actually care about “the family,” he just wants to define “family” in an incredibly limited, reactionary way to exclude various classes of people he’s been taught to hate. He doesn’t give a shit about “entrepreneurship,” he just uses the word as a sigil against the evil socialist bugaboo of Godless Europe.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
When pressed, Catholic fundamentalists will concede that even if, empirically speaking, greater access to birth control and comprehensive sex education reduced the rate of abortion, they would still be against such policies. They’re not interested in the outcomes of their policies. They have a vested interest in ensuring that “going through the right motions” are promoted.
What people like Ross are concerned about isn’t easing human suffering or using our national wealth to raise the public’s quality of life. They’re interested in a society where everyone has incentives to act in the way people like Ross want them to act– even if the final outcome is one in which fewer people can ultimately act that way, overall. It’s all a veneration of process rather than results.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
The claim was that their poor on average face less crime. Do you disagree with this?
If Maine had conservative policies and still had the lowest crime rate in the US you wouldn’t credit the policy? You would first try and control for demographics and other factors that might give you an omitted variables bias. Liberals get this when it comes to comparing US to Europe’s negatives but not when we are talking about their positives.
So, can you say Europe’s liberal policies are really what gives them a relatively better bottom class? I don’t know but if you compare the very worst European suburbs and the very worst US suburbs, crime rate, unemployment etc. are largely the same. Maybe they do a better job for the less poor or maybe they just have less poor to begin with. Some better empirical evidence and analysis is needed.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Hector writes: “Douthat’s blog did allow comments, until it got hijacked by a bunch of racists, if I recall correctly.”
That’s right. Racists who were followers of Steve Sailer, whose hate site Douchehat linked to for most of his tenure at the Atlantic. In other words, Ross invited the racists in and he was on their side.
But then he’s a 100% loyal GOP bootlicker, so he’s accustomed to the company of racists. Note that to this day he has never explained his affinity for Sailer – he dropped the link to Sailer’s site without comment, most likely because he was afraid such an association might come up when his BIG OPPORTUNITY came along. What a gutless wonder he is.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Low crime can also be a result of high encarceration rates (assuming that there is not much of a revolving door). But nobody encarcerates like we do.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
justinf Says: How do high levels of childhood poverty serve god? How do parents working multiple jobs and having less time with their children serve god? How do millions of Americans without health care serve God?
#21 anonymous Says: I wonder what percent of believers vs. nonbelievers get taken in by Nigerian prince scams…
You almost got it. Douthat forgot a word, it’s supposed to read, “to serve God’s messengers.”
Poverty, illness, and despair keeps the priests, televangelists, megachurches and internet scam artists in business.
If you’re hungry or sick, just pray or send away for the $50 prayer handkerchief or give away Bibles to the indigent – and if you’re burdens aren’t lifted, just pray some more!
The MegaMillions has better odds.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Finland is full of Finns. We could copy their tax system and their welfare policies and we wouldn’t be Finland. That’s because we are a country that’s one third black and Hispanic. That means will still have much more crime and worse government services (because of affirmative action hiring policies) than Finland.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I think this is also a deliberate bit of propaganda:
Notice here how ‘equality’ is made to be a stand-in for ‘anti-competitive’ or ‘anti-capitalist’. Well, no, the people I know make the usual pragmatic who gets how much of what arguments. What they want is an efficiently functioning labor market so that if their productivity goes up by, say, 20%, so do their wages. An efficiently functioning labor market that really does reward people for their efforts or talent, instead of merely saying that it does to justify the compensation of the likes of Fuld, Mozillo, et al.
Iow, what they want is what the capitalist, free-market types claim that they are for. Do that, and the second-order effects like massive inequalities and poor social safety nets don’t matter nearly so much.
The God-bothering stuff just seems nonsensical to me. What Douthat is claiming ‘conservatives’ want is what we already have. Of course if what they really want is to impose their views on the rest of society with the force of law . . . isn’t this exactly the opposite of what they’re claiming?
March 14th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Ok, I dont really have the time to address this issue – I have plans to celebrate part of my heritage by drinking; surely Douthat can sympathize.
But as an individual whose main interest and purpose (and job) concerns inequality, this is why I hate and never read this douchebag.
The facts about inequality and most of the remedies are pretty clear to anyone interested. However, rather than accepting or trying to refute them, he invokes the tired tropes of American exceptionalism (a splash of god here, some good family values there and a dash of entrepreneurship to top it off). Unfortunately, none of these variables was really responsible for the golden era of the American economy (i.e. 50s-early 70’s). While family stability played a role, it was more a product of its time and directly related to economic security. Douthat cant grasp this because he has no interest in it.
Instead, he’d rather invoke the dangerous specter of Europeanization and declare solidarity with Charles Murray. For anyone interested, which precludes Douthat, there is an amazing body of literature that squarely destroys Murray’s race baiting pseudoscience. Fortunately, Mr. Murray will meet his maker soon, much like his comrade Hernstein, and rot in hell. Proving that God has little need for social parasites.
Hopefully Douthat realizes this before he uses his bastardized breed of Catholicism to further degrade our country and himself. I have no need for him and look forward to not reading his vapid columns in Pravda.
March 14th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Moe Larry and Jesus,
Again, Ross made a mistake. He was in his mid-20s at the time, an age when many people make bad choices. Though, apparently, not you?
March 14th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I just don’t agree with anything the man wrote. I lean progressive NOT because I have a philosophical belief about the role of government versus human drive. Quite honestly, I don’t think there is a connection between the two.
The idea that Republicans or so called conservatives make policy decisions in the REAL WORLD on the basis that they know which government programs will diminish human drive, charity, or entrepreneurship is flat out ridiculous and troubling because that suggests that even if a government program will work, they will oppose the program based on that illogical philosophy.
Politicians, business owners, and regular people living in the real world have to weigh MEASURABLE or at least known pro’s and con’s about what to do or what not to do.
Now admittedly any governemt action can have unknown consequences, but how can we govern on that basis?
March 14th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I like Ross a lot, but I don’t agree with his point here at all, though for what sounds like a different reason than Matt. One could just as easily argue the opposite – that a robust safety net allows one to dedicate oneself more fully to one’s family, to volunteerism, and to God (if that’s your thing). Economic stressors that arise from the lack of a safety net would be negatively correlated with things like volunteerism, giving to charity, and family stability, wouldn’t they?
March 14th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Conservatism = me first, progressivism = country first.
Update your campaign slogans, everybody.
March 14th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Well, frankly, I don’t recognize much of the Europe I know in Murray’s speech. My extended family in the UK has plenty of examples of entrepreneurial spirit — my sister’s husband started and runs a successful accountancy firm in England, and my brother’s wife is in the middle of negotiating a deal with an American firm for outsourcing the management of scientific journals and bringing up to 15 part time jobs into her local community.
Even my parents, after early retirement, didn’t just sit back and live off government handouts (their pensions). They opened a popular Bed and Breakfast which they ran until they were almost 70.
Sure, Brits tend to be happier with less when compared with Americans — smaller homes, smaller cars, fewer cars, fewer gadgets, etc. — in exchange for shorter working hours and longer vacations (Americans still only get 2 weeks/year for the first decade of employment — and every time they switch jobs — that’s simply insanity in this day and age). But it’s a trade off we are happy to make.
And in the long run, the European model will likely prove to be the more sustainable one. There is absolutely no way the rest of the world could live like the Americans do and still have enough resources to go around.
March 14th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Re: But it also means that there are many fewer mid-price restaurants in Helsinki than in a typical American city
Huh? Why? I can se that there’d be fewer five-star, uber-pricey restaurants since there are fewer mega-rich plutocrats. But why fewer restaurants for middle class people when there’s no shortage of customers for such establishments?
Re: he’s arguing that the government should be small so that it leaves as much space as possible for people to serve God in their own ways.
Somehow I can’t follow that logic either. Provided you don’t have a government that actually bans (or even just harasses) religion, why does the size of the government matter? Religious faith and size of government strike me as completely disconnected.
March 14th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
I just wanted to add (since no one else pointed it out) that Charles Murray is a racist piece of shit. anyone who “is proud to stand” with him has lost my respect for all time.
March 14th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Kind of a related tangent.
One thing you see all the time is Conservatives say: our system is better than Europe, look at the small houses they live in, the small cars they drive, they have less stuff than us.
Now that the economy is blowing up those same conservatives say: The problem is people bought houses that they couldn’t afford, big SUVs that they couldn’t afford, and a bunch of other stuff like big screen TVs that they couldn’t afford…
Uh see the obvious disconnect? That reality that we’re now discovering is that our so called GDP growth was a bunch of BS. It wasn’t real wealth it was paper.
March 14th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
JonF,
I think the unstated premise of Douhat’s point is that what he likes is that the lack of social safety nets causes people to look to religion. He wants people to have no alternative but to turn to the church for support.
My understanding of the Bible is that God want’s people to come to him because they honestly believe in him not because they are so desperate they have no alternative. You know the old saying that desperate times make people turn to to God, I would guess that God prefers people who choose him freely, but Ross seems to prefer the people who come to faith out of desperation.
March 14th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
“If you’re poor in the United States and you live in a neighborhood where poor people can afford to live, you will almost certainly be living in a neighborhood that’s much more dangerous than the neighborhoods in which poor Dutch people live.”
Not if you are living in a community of poor Dutch-Americans in, say, rural southwestern Michigan.
March 14th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Re: Not if you are living in a community of poor Dutch-Americans in, say, rural southwestern Michigan.
Unless you get caught near a meth lab when it blows up. Trust me, rural Southwestern Michigan has a big meth problem.
March 14th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Douthat’s work on printed page: birdcage liner, doggiepoop receptacle, or similar.
Douthat’s work online: something never, ever to waste a mouseclick on.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Matt:
Why do you always write about how wonderful big government works in Northern Europe, but almost never about big government in Southern Europe? For example, Italy, has Big Government out the wazoo, but, strangely enough, you never seem to mention it as a model for where
In 1980, I mailed a postcard to my parents from downtown Rome on Tuesday and from Vatican City, a mile or two away, on Wednesday. The postcard sent in Vatican City arrived home three weeks earlier.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Hector again: “Moe Larry and Jesus,
Again, Ross made a mistake. He was in his mid-20s at the time, an age when many people make bad choices. Though, apparently, not you?”
If he made a mistake, chuckles, let’s hear it from him, not you. What are you, his towel boy, cleaning up after him?
What reason is there to think it was a “mistake” and not a considered expression of his actual beliefs? He didn’t just link to Sailer – he referred to the prick repeatedly and approvingly.
Even in the Church, Hector, if you want absolution you have to admit you did wrong first. So let’s see Ross explain his mistake. Let’s see him explain why he was a suckfish for a white supremacist for years.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
It was only a matter of time before Sailer put on his white robe and hood and rode his white horse here, I suppose.
He’s gotta stick up for his lil buddy Ross. Isn’t that cute? Honor among racists!
March 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Moe Larry and Jesus,
I have to admit, I try to defend Ross from his critics but it becomes more difficult when he refers approvingly to men like Steve Sailer and Charles Murray. I wish he would stop.
Steve Sailer,
I don’t think you ever answered my question from long ago. If you have all this inarguable proof that one race is genetically dumber than others, then why do you publish it on an obscure website, instead of in peer reviewed anthropology journals?
March 14th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Hector asks the modern-day Julius Streicher a question: “If you have all this inarguable proof that one race is genetically dumber than others, then why do you publish it on an obscure website, instead of in peer reviewed anthropology journals?”
Because he’s totally unqualified to do anything of the sort, Hector, and his “proof” is bullshit and he knows it. He exists only to give aid and comfort to pigs like Rush Limbaugh. But then you know that already.
March 14th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
In 1980, I mailed a postcard to my parents from downtown Rome on Tuesday and from Vatican City, a mile or two away, on Wednesday. The postcard sent in Vatican City arrived home three weeks earlier.
And that story tells us…. what? That 28 years ago, the Roman Catholic Church ran a more efficient parcel and letter service than the Italian post office?
Seriously. WTF are you on about?
March 14th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Moe,
Oh, I know. But I want people who aren’t familiar with Sailer to realize it. “The latter-day Julius Streicher”, I like that.
March 14th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Skeptic,
Your asking a rhetorical question aren’t you? You know perfectly well what Sailor means. He means that nprthern european societies work because they don’t have brown people. For his purposes Italians and SPanish count as brown.
March 14th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
For example, Italy, has Big Government out the wazoo
Italy isn’t really a country. Still, you must be fapping away to the racist assholes in the Lega Nord these days.
March 14th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
“For example, Italy, has Big Government out the wazoo”
The FT’s Wolfgang Munchau wrote about this last year: that Italy has a tax burden as high as some Northern European countries and yet doesn’t get the same quality of government for all of that spending.
March 14th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I sense in this commentary from Mr Douthat and the speech by C. Murray some preemptive effort to mitigate the fact that the right is crashing and burning with respect to the empirical argument about effective styles of government, ie “yeah we dismantled the economy, but we had to, because if all of you people hadn’t lost your jobs because the financial markets were under-regulated, your souls would be suffocating under the existential weight of knowing that some high earning minority of your fellow citizens were paying 30.4576849% marginal tax rate or whatever.”
Gag me with a spoon.
These rightwing dudes are, like the rest of us, organisms crawling over the crust of a rock floating through spac, but rather than address the empirical state of their environment and mitigate its harshness they’d like to sit in a cave masturbating to symbolic abstractions — gods, the morality of the state, a life well lived — like five year olds moving GI Joes around on a toy fortress trying to find the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement. And they become so invested in these imaginary arrangements that they work like hell to get the actual world to resemble them, cry and beat their chests and blame others when they fail, and produce franken-states that embody the very things they say they want to avoid — we want to force you democratic voters to be free of coercion! I mean it’s a pretty fragile and deluded ethos that equates bog-standard levels of taxation financing schools, healthcare, and infrastructure with violent incursions against these breathless, Randian intimations of freedom and human agency.
These rubes are holding the rest of us back.
March 14th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
that story tells us…. what? That 28 years ago, the Roman Catholic Church ran a more efficient parcel and letter service than the Italian post office?
Mainly that selling stamps and dispatching letters is one of the Vatican City’s main earners (see also: Liechtenstein) and that the service reflects its importance.
March 15th, 2009 at 12:26 am
“Italy has a tax burden as high as some Northern European countries and yet doesn’t get the same quality of government for all of that spending.”
That just shows that some governments are less efficient than others. I think we should be striving for efficiency in any government, large or small.
March 15th, 2009 at 4:12 am
For real. People bought all that crap on credit because that’s what the free, deregulated market told them to do. They were only following “their own self interest”, as is their duty as good Americans.
March 15th, 2009 at 11:40 am
It’s also not true. A one-income four-member family from thirty-odd years ago had more disposable income after budgeting for necessities than a modern two-income four-member family – approximately $18k for the former versus $17k for the latter.
This wasteful spending meme as been around for as long as I can remember. And, of course, promoted by the usual suspects. The only things that change are the consumer frivolities. Back in the 70’s, conservatives sneered that the poor can’t be all that poor if they can afford TV’s while conveniently glossing over the fact that unless one lives within walking distance of a library, a TV is just about the cheapest form of entertainment there is.
The example I hear today that’s particularly egregious is the sneer at the poor snapping up cell phones as if they were some sort of luxury item. Uh, no. You can buy a cell phone complete with activation card that will last for three months at Walmart for around $60. That’s cheaper than a regular landline where I live. But the reason why this sneer is over the top is that these are the same people demanding that these po’ folk be out beating the streets looking for a job or two or three. Hello? Don’t you sort of need a, you know, phone, for the prospective employer to contact you?
March 15th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Re: And that story tells us…. what?
I don’t know what it tells you. But it tells me that Rome would be better off if it were run as one of the Papal States again.
March 15th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
“. How much do you prize voluntarism, entrepreneurship, and the value of lives oriented around service to one’s family, and to God? The more you do, the more you’ll find to like in the American arrangement”
Well, one uncharitable reading of the above could be”
“volunteerism” If there’s a robust government-managed social safety net, then it’ll be harder to just head down to the church-run food pantry and do charity to some poor wretches, thereby reinforcing our status as beneficent patrons and theirs as recipients of charity. In fact, deprived of a sense of shame and arbitrary largess, they might get to thinking that they’re almost as good as normal people, somehow entitled to look at us face to face, rather than with suitably downcast eyes.* And so on, less unpleasantly – getting together to pick up trash is trickier when there’s quick and efficient municipal street cleaning; neighborhood watch is less pressing with adequate and professional policing, etc.
* This of course is very much not the motivation for many -surely most – of the folks giving time and/or money to help their fellows, but there is a certain type . . .
“the value of lives oriented around service to one’s family” and how does one show service to one’s family if not by frantically working nearly nonstop in order to maintain a tenuous social status and standard of living, and give one’s children enough advantages to not slip from this shaky perch? Time spent together (much less vacations!) doesn’t help them get into college! (Want to help orient lives around service to one’s family? Privatize social security.)
“and to God?” since, after all (as mentioned above) economically secure individuals – or at least those who can rely on a robust safety net, and less often face bone-gnawing financial uncertainty, anxiety, and privation – tend to have a much more decorous and abstract relationship to god and god-related institutions (we get back to volunteerism, above) or even disregard them entirely.
(As always, I recommend John Holbo’s Mortal-Kombat-fatality-style takedown of David Frum’s book, wherein he argues that for conservatism, a cringing, crouching risk-adverse conformity isn’t a bug, but a feature.)
More charitably, I’d note that such an (attributed) view isn’t actually entirely wrong. If you follow Linus’ link, the summary and linked paper argues that increased egalitarianism and certain kinds of gov’t policies/features do reduce volunteerism: (some varieties of) increasing public social expenditure, consensus w/ government, democratization, increased equality. (People are more likely to volunteer if the economy (and their situation) isn’t in the crapper,and if there are pro-family support policies, like childcare, parental leave, etc.). Sweden may be beating us when it comes to volunteering, but they’d probably be beating us by even more if they had higher levels of inequality and a disliked government that spent relatively little to help, as long as their was basic stability for a big enough chunk of folks. And a strong social network does seem to correlate with reduced religious fervor and participation, possibly because fewer people are suffering social economic insecurity and general crappiness and because they don’t need to rely on God and/or churches/temples/mosques as alternatives means of (psychological/material) support.
So, part of this does become an empirical issue – if gov’t involvement reduces the power/impact/need of other support systems, does it do as good – or better – a job? (Which dips us back into ideology, for what counts as ‘as good’?). And then of course, the rest is just part of the old debate about whether it’s better to have people yoked to small-scale, parochial, often authoritarian/hierarchical support systems or larger, more distant, but at least theoretically democratically-responsive ones?
March 15th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Dan S.,
Well, to be fair, the world’s poorest countries don’t seem to have a lot of volunteerism either. But leave that aside.
You raise some good, and disturbing points. It’s certainly possible for a welfare state to undermine volunteerism, the family and devotion to God. I don’t want that to happen, and I don’t think it’s necessary that it happens, and I don’t think it always needs to happen. Sweden has a lot of volunteerism, as someone noted above, and fairly stable families, as I noted; and there are some countries in Europe (like Ireland) that are more religious than the United States. Increased individualism, libertinism and secularism are threats that can attend a welfare state: but they’re threats that we can guard against, and if we’re smart about it, avoid.
To me, it comes down to his: if a welfare state is to work, it needs to focus on improving people’s hearts and values as much as their material conditions. A welfare state which is part and parcel of a society that, at all levels, emphasizes obligation, self-sacrifice, and obedience to a moral code, isn’t going to risk undermining individual virtue. Social provision cements loyalty to the state, and if that state is a Christian state, or a state founded on natural law, then it will cement loyalty to Christian (or, alternatively, natural law) values as well. As Peguy said, ‘the revolution shall be spiritual, or the revolution shall not be’. So I think it’s possible for a welfare state- in a genuinely, Christian-socialist state founded on natural law- to be compatible with personal and collective virtue.
Whether this is relevant in any way to the United States, is a separate question. Quite probably not. If your question is whether rights-based liberalism is ultimately compatible with virtue on any kind of social scale, then I’d say probably not.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
So, part of this does become an empirical issue – if gov’t involvement reduces the power/impact/need of other support systems, does it do as good – or better – a job?
Doesn’t it reduce the need for other support systems only to the extent that it *is* doing their job? Nobody would reduce their commitment to non-government support systems because government was trying *and failing* to solve the same problem, would they?
Indeed, if it turns out that there’s nothing a volunteer can’t do that can’t be done as well or better by a government bureaucrat (perhaps even without forcing a prayer down the recipient’s throat at the same time), maybe we need to reexamine the sacred or quasi-sacred status of volunteerism.
Any tax in a democratic society is voluntary at least on the part of a majority; if the majority decides to volunteer collectively through taxes rather than individually, why are conservatives eager to pronounce that choice morally inferior? Taxation has a number of advantages compared to individual volunteering (most notably, a greatly reduced free-rider problem; I sometimes suspect that most conservatives just want someone *else* to volunteer so they can enjoy lower taxes).
March 16th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
sry i just know how to write my name in arabic
) my bad english donot help to type here but really thanks.
March 16th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
sry i just know how to write my name in arabic
) anyway however my english is very poor but maybe i understand what you talk about. thanks
March 16th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
sry i just know how to write my name in arabic
) anyway however my english not that good but i think i get the point. thanks
April 1st, 2009 at 2:47 am
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April 16th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Hello. Act as if it were impossible to fail.
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Thank
Marigold.
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