Over at the Action Institute blog, Jordan Ballor captures the essence of the Nanny Government ideology that started with liberals but has come to affect conservatives, including George W. Bush under the title of “compassionate conservatism” and most of the leading contenders for the Republican nomination for president.
Ballor cites a speech given by a character in a new TV show who is portraying a Republican senator in the “John McCain style”:
And one day I realized that politics is about the privilege and the honor of taking care of people, of making certain that the weak are protected, the poor are sheltered, and the hungry fed.
Ballor responds:
In such a view, it is the task of government to “take care of people,” periphrasis for a nanny State if I ever heard one. Indeed, politics are about sheltering the poor and feeding the hungry, taking care of people who obviously can’t take care of themselves. It’s not about empowerment but about infantilization.
Contrast this with a rather different view of politics, as portrayed in the words of Lord Acton, one that doesn’t arrogate politicking to the status of the highest possible human endeavor:
There are many things the government can’t do—many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people. It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people. It cannot convert the people.
In Acton’s view, the highest purpose for the government is to promote and protect liberty, which is itself only a precondition for virtuous living.
Replacing God with the State
Technorati Tags:big government, culture, liberalism, Lord Acton, Nanny Government, politics
I’ve been trying to explain my aversion to a Nanny State as I have been blogging about government mandates for the new HPV vaccine. If the safety profile holds this is a good vaccine. Choosing to have your daughter receive it is a reasonable and valid choice. However, the public health consequences of people choosing not to receive the vaccine do not merit government intervention to require the vaccine the way we do for measles, mumps, and diptheria. Yet fear that someone will not make the “right” decision drives the push to make this a government concern. Sometimes, we need to let adult Americans act like adults.
The road that begins with compassionate conservatism will end with benevolent totalitarianism.
When government (in its many manifestations) dictates what people can eat, how parents may raise their children, how many smoke detectors should be in private homes, etc., along with an almost infinite number of laws, great and small, policies, regulations, conditions, etc., then man is no longer master even of his own soul.
And that’s where progressive Catholicism also leads—right into the waiting, hungry maw of Mammon. Like the ancient Israelites, we may only come to appreciate our God-given freedoms once we lose them…and that is not far away given the current state of the world. It matters not much to me whether my master is a late middle-aged junior senator from New York or a jihadist council…the consequences will be strikingly similar.
Uh, there are lots of unproved assertions here too. The Baby Boomers were hardly the first generations of Americans who moved. Migration in large numbers has been a fixture of the America scene since the colonial period. What is rare is stasis. Even in urban neighborhoods, change is the constant theme. The Boomers themselves were the children of the GI and Silent Generations who moved from the cities to the burbs; it was Boomers that partly reversed that direction in certain areas.
The severe multi-year depressions of the 1870s, 1890s, post-WW1 and 1930s were the undoing of the old way. Because the depressions of industrialized society lasted longer and affected more people than the panics of pre-industrial America. The use of public government was in response to the private government by large industrial corporations. That’s basic history of the Progressive era: the speeches and policy statements of the period are rife with the idea that increasingly concentrated private enterprise had taken a stranglehold on the liberties of the people. Understanding that the government is not apart from the market but part and parcel of it can help to figure out why this was a rational response. The public reaction to Walmart today is not so different; if anything, it is far more muted.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
Yeah, right.
I have my share of critiques of Nannystatism, but conflating anachronistic revision of the Good Old Days with The Road To Serfdom is not credible.
There is a very large difference between the migrations of old and the migrations after the advent of the interstate highway system, jet travel and so on.
Even in the moves from the cities to the suburbs the basic communal bonds remained. This is why in Boston, Cohasset became known as the Irish Riviera because of the large numbers of Irish families who all moved from Irish neighborhoods in Boston.
The current form of the migration is—again—different because it is individual and usually crosses much larger distances.
Dom
Veterans moved long distances after WW2 in ways that effectively atomized families. Growing up where I did in the 1960s among families of such veterans, most people did not have extended family nearby at all. This was not the work of the Baby Boomers at all; the Baby Boomers were the “victims”, as it were…
And the parents of those veterans often were people who moved from Europe to the US; so there were multiple generations of broken extended families in a row. I am not even counting the history of migration from the East to the West and from South to North (the latter being notable among black Americans during and after both World Wars).
Not denying Americans migrated before the 1960s. That would be silly since the history of America is migration.
I’m saying it became easy, almost to the point of whim, to pull up stakes and move, individually or by family. Compare moving in the age of rail or covered wagon from Boston to San Diego to moving the same places today.
Dom
And it is the current market, not the government, that pressures this approach: people have to pull up stakes when there is so much “creative destruction” on a large scale. So don’t blame that on the government, of all market actors here. I have had many close friends who’ve had to move across country as the enterprises in their industries have consolidated and contracted significantly. It’s perfectly natural for people to use the only other tool they have at their disposal—their vote—to ameloriate the large market forces on their lives. That too is part of the market in the larger sense.
Taxes and government regulation have a huge effect on business and enterprise and jobs. Even the Boston Globe, in its articles on the population drain in Massachusetts, can’t ignore that those play a huge role. I read several articles recently in which doctors and business owners and high-tech workers all said they were moving to states where the taxes were lower and/or where their industry wasn’t so heavily regulated.
Many factors play into the ebb and flow of the economy, but you cannot deny that government has been playing a massive and increasing role. In 1940, the average American paid 17.6% of his income in local, state and federal taxes. In 2006, that has rise to over 30%. And that doesn’t include all the fees imposed by government bodies either (tolls, licenses, etc.)
On top of that, Massachusetts is among the worst in the nation, in terms of tax burden, ranking sixth. You can’t tell me that big government doesn’t have a massive and increasing effect on people’s behavior.
[The data is from the Tax Foundation.]
Here’s another form of the same story, as posted by Renee in another post:
I think people are fighting with their feet. When society doesn’t support marriage this is what happens…. From the Lowel Sun
So if we have a great “benefits” system, i.e. government mandates why are we losing so many young people? Because they can’t afford to live here? Why can’t they afford it? Why is the cost of housing and living expenses so high? Could it be property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes added on top of decreased salaries due to benefit regulation and fewer jobs available because of a poor business environment?
Yeah, if people actually understood that it was in their best interest to vote against massive government giveaways. Unfortunately, conservative voices have been drowned out in Massachusetts and elsewhere.
Massachusetts ranks middling in terms of income tax burdens. Sales taxes are middling too; we have no county or city taxes, unlike most other jurisdictions. Property taxes are lower here than places like NH, NY, CT and NJ; my parents pay 2x what I do in the amount of property taxes in another state for a similarly sized house in a similar economic municipality. Other states have far higher “fees” et cet. The myth of Taxachusetts has gotten old old, courtesy of Prop 2 1/2 a generation ago (where there WAS indeed a crisis of taxation here). It’s not a light tax state, to be sure, but it’s not nearly as bad as we’d prefer to melodramatize. People get sticker shock moving elsewhere when they’ve drunk too hard from that cup of melodrama.
What is true is that property values are very high. Due to (1) relatively low supply of developable land, (2) land use restrictions that are largely designed to keep current owners’ housing value UP and (3) the (misplaced in my view, but I don’t have children in the school system…) desire to keep school systems competitive. You want to reduce costs: build up areas with dense high-rises and apartment complexes. And current abuttors can watch their property values stagnate or fall. That’s the real market/government dynamic in play in Massachusetts and other older developed areas.
But the tax whine is growing stale.
Finally, when income taxes and similar non-tax imposts decline, the net income growth similar attenuates; business have to offer employees compensation based on overall net benefit—the costs of taxes and benefits are grossed up regardless of their level. That’s basic economics, too, one that is often conveniently forgotten for rhetorical purposes.
For a long while you’ve been whining about what a dreadful place Massachusetts is in which to live. What, then, is keeping you in the Commonwealth? I would think you would have decamped long ago for wherever it is where the grass is so much greener(Mississippi? Alabama? perhaps New Orleans?) I work downtown in the financial district in Boston at a well-paying job I thoroughly enjoy. Complaining about taxes is the least of my worries! Why don’t you check out New Hampshire? Close by to you and no income tax or sales tax if I remember correctly. My advice to you: Quit yer bellyachying!
Isn’t that what the nanny state wants, not us to speak up or as some may call it “bellyachying”? Some of us actually can’t afford to move, especially if we own a home already. If we sell our home it would be a financial lost, foreclosures are rising. Salaries aren’t keeping up with costs. The poorest of the poor are barely getting by week by week, it costs to move.
My peers who live with their parents are buying in NH. In three years the assessment of my home jumped over 100k and on top of that they are going to increase the rate! So I’m assuming the increase of young adults has to do with their want to move out of their parent’s basement.
All of our jobs are very well paid, it is the cost of living that kills us. (Car insurance for example) Families are better off making 40k in North Carolina, then making 75K in Massachuasetts.
From Lowell Deeds…..
People are trying to buy homes they can’t afford as an attempt to stay in Massachusetts. It just isn’t working. The idea of living with your spouse in your childhood bedroom isn’t appealing. Also you can see from the stats that a quick rise in equity is actually a bad thing, when people cash out. Re-fi or a line of credit for cash is now acceptable, like it is free money of course which it isn’t. I actually walked out of a signing of a line of credit for our home, when we consider it to pay off some debt with more debt. We just paid the debt (home improvement). It is like prolonging the problem and floating on credit, until you really have to pay up and it’s too much.
I find it ironic my mother always pushed for me to have good credit, because back in her day she couldn’t get it as a woman now I find out credit is not worth it. My mother doesn’t use her’s either.
Government’s primary role is to protect people from being injured and robbed by others. Consequently, the army, police department,and fire department are key government entities and beneficiaries of government taxes. Other government roles also are reasonable, including facilitation of infrastructures (e.g., roads, communication systems) that cross property lines.
Some say that government is given rights by individual citizens. The citizen can delegate to the state only those rights he has himself. If a citizen has the moral right to defend himself, he can delegate that right to the state and the state can form an army or police force to protect him. However, if a citizen with no cows takes one of seven cows owned by his neighbor, is that moral? If it isn’t moral and is stealing, then the citizen cannot delegate this right to the state.
The Catholic principle of subsidiarity is especially applicable. Government can be given authority to do only what citizens cannot do for themselves, and the lowest government entity must assume the major role. Higher government entities are brought in only when lower ones cannot fulfill their work. Most charitable activities must be accomplished as individuals or in union with other citizen groups such as churches and charitable organizations.
Finally, government must always reward good efforts and punish bad activities. If it rewards bad activities, then you can expect to see MORE bad activities. In the 1960’s, the government began to give aid-to-dependent-children to young unmarried women with children so they could live independently. Now 70 percent of black children are born to single parent families, and white families are following this bad trend. What a terrible evil was wrought in the guise of charity!
Dustiam
“However, if a citizen with no cows takes one of seven cows owned by his neighbor, is that moral?”
Under certain circumstances and conditions, it might well be moral under Catholic moral theology.
And, in the US constitutional system, state governments are not governments of merely delegated powers, unlike the federal government.
Liam – I must disagree- If I have 14 cows, and you have none, taking 7 of my cows, in no way, shape, or form is that moral! It would be incumbent on me to GIVE you the cows. What you just tried to justify is quite simply stealing. Now, since i’ve never been forced to steal to feed my family, I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t. I like to think, however, that I wouldn’t steal.