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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

compassionate conservatism? « Previous | |Next »
June 14, 2006

At a time when markets dominate public policy is compassionate conservatism a return to "shrink-the-state" and roll back the welfare state conservatism? An invasive state disrupts the voluntary bonds between people ---it would kills enterprise, it undermines diversity, reduces independence and increases centralisation---whilst its roll back would allow voluntary, faith and not-for-profit sectors to take over from the state. If the welfare state steps back-----though keep cutting what the state spends--- then a better, kinder, charitable self-help would spring up to fill the void. In a competitive enterprise economy the weak link is the state and the public service.

Is that the compassionate conservative scenario? If the policy scenario is cut programmes or increase taxes then neo-liberalism responds with small government. Michael Warby of the Institute of Public Affairs, goes back to the nineteenth century prior to the development of the welfare state:

What is more, by offering 'free' alternatives funded by taxation, the welfare state undermines other forms of provisions of such services---hence the decline of the working-class Friendly Societies of the nineteenth century. More importantly, the steadily increasing nationalisation of the household steadily encroaches on, and undermines, the traditional role of the family in providing social support, pooling risks and intergenerational support.

Thus the self-reliant society.

On this understanding Myron Magnet says that:

Compassionate conservatives ...offer a new way of thinking about the poor. They know that telling the poor that they are mere passive victims, whether of racism or of vast economic forces, is not only false but also destructive, paralyzing the poor with thoughts of their own helplessness and inadequacy. The poor need the larger society's moral support; they need to hear the message of personal responsibility and self-reliance, the optimistic assurance that if they try ---as they must ---they will make it. They need to know, too, that they can't blame "the system" for their own wrongdoing.

Work makes an individual responsible for herself and her family and thereby provides a road to self-respect and equal citizenship . Workfare doesn't solve welfare's biggest problem: the harm it does to children. it is argued that welfare enables the creation of single-parent families in which children fare poorly, while with the other it falsely pretends to secure the welfare of those children by dispensing money.

So if compassionate conservatism assumes that the marketplace is the best way to deliver value, then how does it address the way that the prosperity created by the marketplace has left many Americans behind and that government has a responsibility to reach out to those who are at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder? The argument is that government has a responsibility, not to redistribute the wealth of citizens but to provide the underprivileged with skills and opportunities to create their own wealth.


| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:32 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

"Compassionate conservatism" was and a forteriori is think tank derived bunkum. My old proposal,- (this was back before Clinton's re-election campaign, when "welfare reform" was a prime issue, so maybe Jan. 1995),- was to leave state welfare programs intact for now, but to enact a two-for-one tax deduction for contributions to local, small-scale, task-specific, self-organized community service projects. There would have to be a magistrature to license such projects according to viability,- (and police fraud),- and probably something like mutual funds to collect contributions from a broader public and assess efficacy, and there would be no discrimination for or against religious organizations provided service provision were unbiased and "universal". The idea was for a kind of reverse "Reaganomics" to develop a tertiary non-profit NGO sector for welfare provision, (which would also be an increase in welfare spending and thus implicitly a general tax increase by default), which would allow for a de-bureaucratization of welfare services, matching service provision to individual and community cases and adapting them to the cross-implications of social cycles that generate social "problems", while allowing for a social-scientific policy experimentation that would find out and replicate what would actually work, even as services would be delivered differentially within communities in a norm-generating rather than norm-imposing or norm-destroying way. At least, that was part of the thinking. Needless to say, no one listened to poor old me.