Dont Frighten The Horses - Road to the Middle Class

ANALYZING the British local elections of last week Charles Moore conducts a seminar in the politics of the twenty-first century. He is talking about the consequence of the ascendancy of New Labour under Tony Blair, but everything he says applies to our own Democratic Party.

The brilliance of Tony Blair is that—even though schools don’t educate and government health care doesn’t work and the nation is overrun with immigration and surly youths have turned the streets into a battlezone—people don’t think that anything can be done about it.

While New Labour has been throwing money at schools and health care they have been enormously increasing the size of the public sector. And in that public sector there are “privileges in employment and pensions which are quite beyond the reach of the rest of us.”

But it is not just the public sector that has been increased.

These changes enormously increase the political class. Again as in other parts of the EU, thousands of people can now have entire, well-paid careers working for political parties in commodious offices. They start as staffers to the elected; then they get elected on list systems over which the voter has no control; then, if they are lucky, they become MPs.

Of course, in politics as in the Church, many are called but few are chosen. No problem. If they can’t become elected officials,

they can get jobs as regulators and governance experts and special advisers or even-better-paid versions of the same thing in Brussels. The power of party political patronage is now 18th-century in its abuse, but thoroughly 21st-century in its enormous size.

Sound familiar?

But here is the corker. Despite all this huge government failure: services that don’t work, government workers that don’t work, huge taxes, endless meddling and regulation, if you propose to change it the voters get scared and go running back to their incompetent welfare state party bosses and ward heelers.

So just like America’s Republicans, David Cameron cannot propose sweeping changes that will end forever the dull failing mediocrity of the lefty welfare state. Oh no.

[O]ne longs to advise Mr Cameron to proclaim an arresting analysis which breaks decisively with all the dreary Continentalism described above, but I am sure that at this point it would not work. He is right that the Tories are still "in recovery" rather than fully accepted. If they try to be clever, dangerous, bold, they will just frighten people.

This is what is so maddening. We know what to do about the welfare state. The science is in. It has been for at least a generation. Abolish the government pension programs; they never work because the politicians always over-promise. Abolish government health care. It doesn’t do much for life expectancy. Abolish government education. It doesn’t really do much educating.

But anyone who advances the modest agenda of ending government programs that don’t work is ruthlessly stigmatized as a madman. It just isn’t fair.

Actually the voters are right. As much as the political class loves bold, persistent experimentation, the voters instinctively understand rapid change is not for them. They know, the ordinary people, that they are the folks that get left with the mess when the suits move on.

So the way to reform the welfare state out of existence is by baby steps, with a little reform here and a minor privatization there.

As Senator Everett Dirksen used to say forty years ago, a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

It’s just like the antarctic Shackleton expedition a century ago. When they took the sled dogs out to kill them, they took them out individually and applied the coup de grace out of site behind a hill.

That way the other dogs wouldn’t get nervous.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.