A Socialist Behemoth?

To Washington Post columnist George F. Will:

George F. Will

Your noteworthy and extremely well-written column of January 6, 2012, appeared online as "Government: The redistributionist behemoth," but in the print edition it was called "The socialist behemoth." The implication of the morphing headline makes the point of the whole column: you think our federal government's policy inclinations are "redistributionist," thus "socialist," thus bad.

As an old-style liberal, I disagree with both epithets.

True, our government has been shaped by progressive policies for more than century. I don't dispute that. But I take exception to your finding this an increasingly degenerate and bankrupt way of doing things today.

I do agree that many of Uncle Sam's longstanding policies have redistributionist consequences, either intentionally or as side effects. Since we started paying federal income taxes a century ago, they have typically been progressive, with the rich paying higher rates than the less affluent. The primary intent has been to sufficiently finance government outlays. The secondary intent has been to distribute the tax burden upward. That, as a matter of simple fairness, leaves more money in the pockets of those who need every dollar they can get.

A bad idea, that? I can't see why.

Is this, as you put it, an instance of government "supplanting markets as society's primary allocator of wealth and opportunity"? It might be so if the top tax rate were downright confiscatory, with every extra dollar taken in by the wealthy vacuumed right out of their pockets, leaving no spare change. But the top rate is now only 35 percent ... far from confiscatory.

You say the redistributionist lust of progressive government "constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of — the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities." Were those "unending, indeed intensifying, pressures" toward ever greater wealth redistribution why we enacted the Bush tax cuts, then? But they favored the entire range of taxpayers, no? They were anti-redistributionist.

Given our country's history, in fact, I'd say that we tend to slosh back and forth between redistributionism and anti-redistributionism. Progressive government's urge to redistribute and equalize does have its checks and balances.

You note that "the elderly are, after a lifetime of accumulation, better off than most Americans: In 2009, the net worth of households headed by adults ages 65 and older was a record 47 times that of households headed by adults under the age of 35 — a wealth gap that doubled just since 2005." But that's an argument for means-testing Social Security and Medicare. It's not an effective argument that entitlements for the elderly are simply bound, by their very nature, to become a behemoth that will one day devour America.

I support means-testing, and I think many other progressives do, too. Means-testing old age entitlements is a tweak we now need to implement.

As for tweaks: you say that our tax code — "government’s favorite instrument for distributing wealth to favored factions" — gets repeatedly tweaked: " ... about 4,500 times in 10 years."

What's bad about that? At least it bespeaks that Congress can do things, despite what so many are claiming today.

Redistributionist government "siphons power into itself," you say. Concomitantly, we see a political culture of increased "rent-seeking." Rent-seeking is, says Wikipedia, an attempt to obtain economic advantage "by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth."

David Brooks

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes in his recent op-ed piece "Where Are the Liberals?" that rent-seeking, run amok, convinces us that "the whole system is rigged."

And, yes, we do hear that kind of talk today. I admit it. But what's the fix for the problem?

We learned in the late nineteenth century that unfettered economic activity on the part of railroad barons and manufacturers' trusts likewise made people feel the system was rigged. The progressive era got its start when the federal government stepped in to bust the trusts.

Sometimes effective progressive government is the fix.

Brooks calls rent-seeking "the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places." And I would agree with him, and with Will, that we now have too much of it — what Brooks calls the Instrument Problem:

Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.

But, I would say, what is needed in not government that is less progressive in its goals. Rather, we need government that is less bureaucratic and more transparent in its methods.

To get it, as Brooks points out, today's liberalism desperately needs "a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years."

So true. President Obama ran on "change we can believe in" in 2008 and won handily. Many, myself included, thought he would become liberalism's Martin Luther. It's not too late for him to do so now. If he does, he could put paid to George Will's "socialist behemoth" argument for a generation or more.