Ryan Streeter
Whether we recognize it or not, we as a country are engaged on the front end of what will be a protracted debate about the purpose of government.
Post-2008 Democratic overreach, the November elections, the spending debate, and our deficit debate – underneath all of this is a fundamental disagreement in America about the right role and purpose of government.
It seems that history has passed by the public institutions we spent so much time and money creating.
This can be seen perhaps most acutely in how we as a nation deal with poverty and the loss of opportunity in our most fragile communities.
The outdated nature of our welfare state is an underlying theme of three posts we ran this week in conjunction with The Clapham Group.
Tevi Troy’s essay showed just how outdated our poverty establishment is. While dropping out, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and poor levels of work preparation and attachment are driving poverty, our institutions focus on myriad other problems.
Jedd Medefind reinforced a key point that Tevi made: when it comes to the most vulnerable among us (orphans), our mass solutions have failed. Success comes at the micro-level by focusing on the individual, families, faith communities, and community. This creates challenges for policy and government.
Mark Rodgers kicked off the week by pointing out that it’s time to reformulate what it means to promote opportunity among the poor and disenfranchised. Very little that we are doing seems to be working.
We live in the 21st century with 20th century programmatic responses to vexing problems such as the sources of joblessness, educational failure, and criminality.
As conservatives and liberals debate stagnation, the loss of opportunity, and poverty, it's worth looking at four key differences in how they view these issues: the nature of the safety net, who's responsible for poverty, how we define "justice," and who controls what's possible under our various policy responses.
1. Safety net – what is it?
Left: Money-based, need-based. The left prefers large programs, large income transfers, with little variation in services. This explains everything from the Left’s advocacy of Head Start to ObamaCare.
Right: Community-based, expectation-based. Public funding should not be tied to some ideal amount, but to high standards that communities help define and meet. Service quality will vary by community, which is a good thing. Poor performers get less, not more, future help.
2. Agency – what is the prime mover of poverty?
Left: Circumstance. Institutions, discrimination, the inherent unfairness in market economies are most responsible for people’s poverty. Changing institutions is the solution.
Right: Behavior. Culture matters more than institutions (e.g., families in a community affect behavior more than “the system” or employer discrimination). Individual choices, embedded in communities as they are, open up or close down opportunities. Tying consequences to behavior is a key ingredient in overcoming poverty.
3. Justice – how do we define fairness, equity?
Left: Restrain the upper class. Making the “rich pay” is key, since they are part of the system that they rig to their advantage. This is just and fair.
Right: Elevate the lower class. Removing the barriers to upward mobility and allowing people to advance as far as they can on a merit basis is just and fair. Restraining the upper class in various ways, while not inherently unconservative, does little to remove barriers to the lower class and is therefore not all that related to justice in this regard.
4. Options – who defines what is possible under a given policy?
Left: The designers. The left trusts the experts, the bureaucracy. Liberals don’t really expect ordinary people to make the best choices for themselves. This explains their defense of unions, government workers, regulators.
Right: The doers. Conservatives trust parents to choose schools, patients their doctors, families their insurance providers. Not everyone will choose well. But this is one way of tying consequences to behavior (see Agency above).
The movement, or party, that wins the public's heart and mind in these four areas will have the most success implementing its anti-poverty agenda.
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