• William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, New York: Encounter Books, 2010, 280 pages, $23.95.
Don’t get me wrong. William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State is an excellent book, not to mention a very important book as Republicans at both the state and federal levels seek to reverse two years of Democratic policies that have brought our country to the brink of insolvency.
But it’s a difficult book to review, because it tells conservatives something they’ve known for quite some time: There simply are never enough government entitlement programs to satisfy liberals, no matter the circumstances.
Voegeli sums it up himself as he takes The New Republic to task for writing in 2005 that “there’s a compelling case for the government spending a great deal more money than it does now.”
Voegeli counters the assertion “would be more persuasive if, during a century of publication — through recessions and booms, war and peace — The New Republic’s editors had encountered even one set of circumstances that convinced them there was not a compelling case for the government to spend a great deal of money.”
But though Voegeli’s message is not necessarily a new one, it never hurts to be reminded of the motivations of one’s adversaries, especially when conservatives are more determined than ever to reverse the damage they’ve done.
Much like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Never Enough delves deeply into “progressive” intellectual thought over the last century. The usual suspects show up: Woodrow Wilson, the “most important progressive” who criticized the “blind worship” of the Constitution; Lyndon Johnson, whose Great Society aspired to free Americans from the “soulless wealth” that had engulfed the country; and, of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the father of the modern welfare state, who offered up a second Bill of Rights guaranteeing the right to — among other things — a job, shelter, and medical care.
Voegeli writes, “It’s difficult to see how FDR’s list should or even could be expanded, because it’s hard to come up with candidates for the list of economic rights that FDR failed to mention.”
Just as conservatives today might hold onto the long-gone notion that the 1936 presidential election still could be reversed, liberals have long held onto the equally fantastic notion that Americans still can get another New Deal.
Undeterred by the post-World War II economic boom, liberals set out on a course to redefine poverty at higher and higher levels of income and wealth that continues to this day.
Voegeli tackles the debate over taxing the “wealthy” head-on, just in time for the Congress to confront the scheduled expiration of Bush-era tax cuts in its lame-duck session.
For liberals, the math is easy: Tax 2 percent of the population in order to make the other 98 percent happy.
But remember the title of the book: Never Enough. Voegeli makes a solid case that liberals never will be satisfied in the levels of taxation applied to the rich, and when it becomes impossible to squeeze any more money from the wealthy, punitive taxes inevitably will be imposed on the middle class.
“The liberal ‘principle’ that people with higher incomes should pay higher taxes is as vague, flexible, and therefore, useless as every other liberal principle,” Voegeli writes.
Never Enough, however, isn’t just a diatribe against useless liberal principles. What about the guys on the other side of the aisle, the guys still hoping to reverse the 1936 election — or, for that matter, the 2008 election?
No matter how they’ve cried, cussed, and gotten red in the face, Voegeli faces the fact that conservatives have failed to retard the growth of government over the last 75 years.
More disturbing for conservatives, Voegeli debunks the myth that the hero of the conservative movement — Ronald Reagan — was less than successful. (Full disclosure: I have a well-worn Reagan T-shirt sitting in my dresser.)
Voegeli seeks to understand “what did and did not happen in the Reagan era.” What did happen was that welfare state spending grew by less than 1 percent per year, an exceptional achievement compared to other presidents, but, as Voegeli notes, “it is still a positive number.”
Reagan embarked on a “starve the beast” strategy, which is a variation on the “chicken or the egg” question. When hoping to rein in government, do you cut programs in the hope that lower taxes will follow, or do you reduce taxes in the hope that government spending will adjust accordingly?
Reagan gambled on the latter, with the very modest increase in welfare state spending resulting in deficits. Advocates of supply-side economics eventually tabled cutting government programs, counting on new revenues flowing in, making cuts unnecessary.
Unfortunately, that strategy — which Voegeli describes as National Review’s “Option A” — didn’t pan out, resulting in the deficits that marked the Reagan era. In the end, Voegeli concludes, “conservatives lost the game but covered the point spread” during the Reagan era.
So what’s the answer as the political tug-of-war continues? Should conservatives hold out hope that liberals ever will address the question of exactly what would be enough?
“Conservatives will have discharged a significant portion of their duty to protect our experiment in self-government if they can induce liberals to fulfill their duty by treating this question seriously — or make them pay a political price for refusing to,” Voegeli concludes.
Based on what I’ve seen from liberals who’ve been in control of our country for the last two years, I would say the latter is the only option. November 2010 signaled a start; now it’s time for conservatives to press on toward 2012.