RALEIGH – Conservatives in Washington are grumbling. Oh, and it’s typically colder in winter than summer.
Truth be told, longtime denizens of right-of-center circles in the nation’s capital need no particular reason to grumble. It is in their nature. It comes from decades of frustration at having to watch fecklessly while others wielded power to expand government and, more recently, from frustration at the inability or unwillingness of politicians supposedly committed to conservative or libertarian principles to make significant headway on major issues.
The latest round of grumbling comes mostly from former politicians, such as Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp, who fear that President George W. Bush is taking too much risk in his efforts to enact fundamental changes in Social Security. They and others worry that this administration is prone to overreaching. They think it may be too politically costly to push not just for private accounts but also for recalibrating Social Security benefits to bring them into line with current revenue projections, as Bush appears prepared to do.
In short, they fear that taking action to expand individual freedom (through personal accounts) and contract government entitlements (through benefit changes) will endanger the re-election of Republican members of Congress, and thus the hard-won GOP majority in Washington.
One proper answer to this concern is, so what? I mean that sincerely. Republicans have spent decades trying to become the majority party by articulating what is essentially a limited-government, pro-freedom agenda. If they then fail to enact such an agenda – and we can see from burgeoning federal spending, counterproductive trade policies, and intrusive regulations that GOP leadership in Washington doesn’t automatically translate into sound governance – their supporters back home might be forgiven for thinking that their efforts and dollars have accomplished little.
Engineering changes in the federal government’s largest program – indeed, the single-largest income confiscation and redistribution operation on Earth – would be a very big deal. Private accounts in Social Security have the potential not just to cushion the blow of demographic change for future retirees but also fundamentally to change the nature of the relationship between average voters and national politics. A wider swath of Americans will see their financial futures tied to the fate of corporate earnings, which has all sorts of delicious applications to public-policy disputes.
Indeed, another good answer to the grumbling conservatives’ concern is that they aren’t sufficient appreciative of the risk that opponents of Social Security reform are running. A poll for the Cato Institute shows that most voters under the age of 50 support the president’s approach, including 30 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, the Left appears to be increasingly sensitive to the rather-subversive argument that the current system disproportionately hurts black Americans, whose shorter lifespans upon retirement translate into lower benefits. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who used to be a respected economist, wrote a ridiculously over-the-top piece last week attacking the notion that Social Security accounts would be a major improvement for African Americans, a piece that was widely reprinted (including in the Raleigh and Charlotte dailies) and just-as-widely debunked as ill-informed and nonsensical.
In short, I’d say that free marketeers should be fearful only when politicians aren’t willing to advance their ideas. Mumbling platitudes about big government just won’t cut it anymore.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.