Spread The Wealth - Road to the Middle Class

CONSERVATIVES have been pushing the Obama-is-a-socialist meme pretty heavily in the last few days.It’s probably the only thing that can pull the election out of the bag for John McCain. A recent Gallup Poll shows that, if you ask the right question, Americans oppose fixing the economy with spread-the-wealth programs by 84% to 13%. As Gallup report it:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

And, of course, the Obama program leans heavily on finding ways to spray money at its supporters through tax credits and the like. (Of course, elite liberals get a look in with a renewed tax credit for buying a hybrid car.)

It’s not so much the spread-the-wealth that annoys me. After all, Republicans spread the wealth to Republicans with tax rate cuts. It is merely an incidental factor that lower marginal tax rates benefits not just Republicans but all Americans.

It’s the subsidies that I don’t like, and the distortions they introduce into the economy. First dollar health coverage. Subsidies for alternative energy. Subsidies for low-income homebuyers. “Free” education.

Everyone wants to help poor people, but how? Subsidies? Welfare? Free this and free that? It all seemed so simple a century ago when social democracy really got started. Everyone agreed on the problem: the poor lacked material resources. Give them the resources, and justice would reign.

It didn’t turn out that way. The poor did not just lack material resources. They lacked “spiritual resources,” as Robert William Fogel put it in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism.

The way that the poor build up their spiritual resources is with religion and with love and with hard work and intact families. The welfare state has been a stunning success in breaking up families and turning low-income young men into feral beasts.

That is why we here at The Road to the Middle Class have just two words for the welfare state: Cruel and Unjust.

Because there is another way.

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

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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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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

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

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

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

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

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