Could Republicans Reverse The Ratchet - Road to the Middle Class

GO AHEAD America, some Republicans argue. Vote for Obama. Then when you suffer buyer’s remorse we can reverse the lefty follies of an Obama administration.

But can we reverse the follies? Writes Mona Charen:

[T]here is a one-way ratchet in public policy. Liberal reforms are never undone. How hard have conservatives tried to eliminate the Department of Education or subsidies to public television? Would they have more success uncreating a new nationalized health care system?

Why is that? Why can’t we make Social Security into a genuine savings program? And why does Medicare keep growing and growing?

The short answer is: women. To women, you can’t have enough security. You can’t have enough health care. You can’t have enough education. That’s where the ratchet comes from.

This doesn’t just come from liberal politics. It comes from our nearest relative, the chimpanzee. In chimpanzee society, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the males engage in border wars and defense of territory. The females utilize the resources in the territory—principally food—to bear and raise the young. The more territory, the more food. The more food the more and healthier the young.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the females would be instinctively programmed to use all the resources available in the care and feeding of their young.

So it must be in human society. And analysts have noted that big government really starts to take off once women get the vote.

We conservatives musts ask ourselves: When we advocate to reduce the size of government, are we helping or hurting women? So far, women have tended to vote for more government because they always vote for more resources for their families. Presumably they believe that government is a better guarantor of resources than husbands, and maybe they are right.

But that’s not the whole story.

We know, from observation of the effects of the welfare state, that it has problems. It is pretty clear that the more you sync your life up with the government the more that your family (probably reduced to the mammalian minimum of women and minor children) is likely to suffer from social pathologies.

The question that conservatives must start to ask is fairly straight forward. Is this what women want? Do women accept the rise in social pathology as a necessary cost of getting all the education, health care and welfare resources they need? Or do women want something better?

Until conservatives come up with an answer to this, there will be no chance of reversing the liberal ratchet.

You say that conservatives already have an answer? That the whole point of conservatism since Burke has been a celebration of the little platoons, the integration of resource provision into free and voluntary community? OK. Then let’s get the message out.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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

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