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| Lefties Want to Get Paid To Blog | After Pelosi, time for some thinking |
Thinking Beyond the Welfare State
by Christopher Chantrill
April 08, 2007 at 4:45 am
AS TONY Blair heads for the exits conservative Brits are thinking about what the Conservative Party should offer against the high-tax high regulation, badly-run public services of New Labour Britain.
Iain Martin has a go. From Tony Blair’s expected successor, Gordon Brown, we can expect “a bit less of the same,” the refrain of Clinton and Blair. He’ll continue with the welfare state only it will be better managed.
High taxation will continue, our Armed Forces will be overstretched and real reform of public services postponed.
Conservatives need to offer the genuine alternative to this slow death by unreformed government bureaucracy. They need to offer
a revival of social responsibility, relying on free institutions rather than Labour’s big state... and dramatic improvement in the lives of the poorest, who are currently held back by welfarism, violent crime and woeful education.
This points out the real issue with regard to the welfare state. Suppose the Brits achieved “real reform of public services” tomorrow. It’s unrealistic, of course, because of the power of public service providers to resist any reform, real or otherwise.
That would mean that the public services are organized to deliver public services in the context of 2007. They will still be organized to deliver those services 2007-style in 2017, 2027, 2037, and so on. When, do you think, would they get to be reformed again? Not for a generation, at least. Probably not for 50 years.
But that is the optimistic scenario, assuming that the public services got a full reform today. In reality schools, health care, and welfare will continue unreformed, based on the ideas of fifty or a hundred years ago.
That is why they must be refomed and replaced by free and flexible institutions. Until then the inflexible, unreformable big state will go on being inflexible and unreformable.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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