“And when I hear “We can’t afford it” it really means, “I don’t want to pay for it. I’m a winner, and to hell with the losers.”

Really?

Let’s be honest. The entire federal transfer of wealth system is corrupt. Let’s forget about ‘saving’ it. The system itself is corrupt.

Make largesse for the indigent a function of the state, where it’s always belonged. Surely, as ‘conservatives,’ that’s the only moral response to the issue?

Before this very good thread becomes consigned to the oblivion that awaits it once if falls off the front page of the website, let me attempt to distill what I take from the apparent contrast in arguments between the two sides of this thread.

It seems to me John and Jack appears to see the problem of entitlements in technical terms, ie. how to get the right services to the right people, whereas they have not been particularly responsive to arguments coming from the problem of entitlements in terms of its effects on virtue.

So perhaps reason number 15 should be the following:

15. A tacit technocratic view that has a blindspot for the virtuecratic problems of the entitlement state.

Hope this makes it into you’re next post.

Thanks again to everyone for this very good exchange.

A friendly (admittedly pedantic) final point: “to cite” = to reference, to quote; “to site” = to locate (from a Latin word, situs, I think, hence our word “situation”). Forgive me, I’ve been grading papers the past few days … .

I guess you know where I stand on that issue, and my guess is that most conservatives would agree, that gov’t has some role in providing for the real needs of people who have no other recourse. The next decision point is how you structure these programs to mitigate abuses.

I’m no expert, but from a quick internet search, the official rate of welfare fraud right now is 2-3%. So let’s assume it’s under reported and double that and say it’s 6%. Is that a problem? Yes.

Are there some in the remaining 94% that technically qualify but who are not really “needy”. Well, maybe, so make some adjustments to the qualification criteria. But don’t dismantle the whole system. It’s doing good things for people who do really need help that their families and churches cannot provide. And even the parasitic relative on unemployment benefits runs out of them and then must deal with the real world.

We live in a society, supposedly one with a Christian ethos. When I hear some conservatives speak, particularly Christian conservatives, it’s shocking to me that the society they seem to want is shaped more by Social Darwinist ideas than Christian ones. And when I hear “We can’t afford it” it really means, “I don’t want to pay for it. I’m a winner, and to hell with the losers.”

This is not a question of left or right ideology, but of coming up with practical solutions to real human problems.

I don’t know, but it seems for some of the commenters here that the potential for abuse is so prominent in their thinking about entitlements, that they diminish the real good they do for people in genuine need. Would it be better for families, churches, and local communities to be able to handle these needs?

Yes. Face-to-face is always better than the impersonal bureaucracy. And there are plenty of organizations that do this face-to-face work, but ask those who do this work for the churches and other private-sector charities, and they will tell you that the scale of the problems far exceed their capability to deal with them.

The problem is scale, and unfortunately the scale of the problems requires large organizations to deal with them adequately. The constitution was constructed for a country with 5 million people, not 330 million. Some adjustments are required, don’t you think?

I very much concure, with some qualifications, with your first post, especially this observation that you make:

“If there’s a principle that should obtain here, it’s the principle of subsidiarity. It recognizes that the most important stuff is going on at the bottom of the hierarchy, and that the people there should be left alone with as little interference as possible from higher levels of organization, but when the resources at the lower levels are exhausted or overwhelmed, the just society or any society with humane instincts, finds a way to pool its resources to help out.”

And you may be surprised to find that a lot of the discussion occuring among thoughtful conservatives such as Douthat in his talk which I link to, are discussing the role of government in precisely the spirit of subsidiarity.

Since, at this point I’ve more than exceeded my quota of words for this thread I’ll just point out that the difference between the conservative application of this principle versus the liberal appearts to be two, both of which Douthat treats very effectively.

1. A state that has the resources to support the kind of services associated with a proper application of the principle of subsidiarity requires economic vitality which, historically, only free markets have been able to sustain.

2. But a pure Free Market model is inadaquate by itself since, as you note, the cultural effects of the Free Market only undermine societal cohesion, and so there must be a recognition for the importance of such cultural virtues as prudence, dilligence, compassion and an acknowledgement that we need institutions to support the flourishing of such virtues so that we have a Free Market that is practiced by a society with the necessary virtues that will make a society and a government both prosperous and compassionate.

Douthat sites the two antogonists from Capra’s “It’s a wonderful life” as examples when he states that by a Free Market society grounded in virtue we’re talking about a society with more George Bailey’s and fewer mean old Mr. Potter’s.

With that, I’ll await Kate’s next post.

I agree with Paul that this has been one of the good thread’s, and am glad Kate plans on conintuing this discussion in a future post.

Pseudoplotinus, thank you for all that which is useful and more than I can take in right now.

Jack, do I have to choose? Both threads are part of my thought, although I confess I only mostly know what I think about all of this. Subsidiarity as defined, yes, its origins, possibly not. I like the idea of an orderly world and yes, local concerns ought to be seen to locally where the concern is most immediate. Based on my understand of my local government, there is a repetition of effort in public assistance with decreasing satisfaction as responsibility rises up the chain. “They don’t care!” is the cry on the ground. “Why should they? Who are you to them?” is my inevitable response. I’ll bet Chris Christie, while grateful for all the help he can get, sees better results with locals helping themselves and each other.

I am supposed to be on the road right now, going to help an artist sell her work at a show. Paul, I am glad you like the conversation; I do and will do another post considering all of these responses so we can continue the discussion.

Not that you all aren’t welcome to keep discussing this while I’m not watching. Complexity in the problem invites a variety of perspectives on a solution. I hope America (in the specific political sense of elected government and not just in some inchoate form here and there inn the blogosphere) finds a good answer or, in Bob’s terms, the doo will merely deepen.

There seem to be two arguments advanced in this thread: 1. Entitlements corrupt the soul. 2. Entitlements are well intentioned but they are not affordable. I take it from your remarks, then, that you fall into the second camp. Am I correct?

If so, is it not interesting that a Democrat in the White House during the 90s balanced the budget and left a surplus and that the Republican that succeeded him created the debt to which you refer by cutting taxes while at the same time starting two unnecessary and morally ambiguous wars? And all this justified by Cheney’s dicta: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” Remember Medicare Part D?

Should I assume, then, that as a matter of principle you dissociate yourself from the Republican Party, or at least its fiscal policies, which by its track record in office, regardless of its public image and its campaign propaganda, has proved it clearly does not care about running up huge debts.

I think that there are fairly strong arguments that this we-can’t-afford-it trope is a conservative self-fulfilling prophecy, fulfilled by the wanton fiscal irresponsibility of Republicans when they are in power.

So you misunderstand my point if you think I am blaming capitalism. I accept it as our reality as late moderns or early postmoderns, and I certainly don’t think that a command economy is an attractive or viable alternative. I’m for a mixed economy along the subsidiarist lines I described earlier. We determine what that mix should be through honest debate and the democratic process.

We can argue particulars another time, and certainly the devil is in the details, but I’m curious whether the principles that ground your arguments exclude subsidiarity. I assume you are familiar with the concept and its origins.