A Nation of Moochers (29 page)

Imagine instead if a politician made his or her case this way: “We need to raise taxes so that achievers are forced to share their rewards with society’s moochers.”

The Content of Our Character

This is not, however, the worst. Rawls’s denial that we deserve to be rewarded for our personal characteristics ultimately robs us of individuality; in search of a theory of “fairness,” we lose our personhood. In a critique of Rawls, David Schmidtz addresses Rawls’s claim that we can’t give an individual credit for being a person of good character. “Jane’s character is not something that happened to her,” writes Schmidtz. “
It is her.
” (Emphasis in original.) “Thus, if we say exemplary character is morally arbitrary, it is people not merely character that we are refusing to take seriously.” Giving people credit for what they achieve and what they are “is the essence of treating them as persons rather than as mere confluences of historical forces.”
⁸

Thus, notes Schmidtz, when we say Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of a time when his children would be judged by the “content of their character,” he presumably was not envisioning a time when the nation would regard their characters as “accidents for which they could claim no credit.”
⁹

Nor would such a world be fairer or more just. If we accept that we have no inherent right to the income or property we have justly and fairly acquired because our success is the result of random historical and social chance, who decides what we deserve? Congress? Philosopher kings? Or Ivy Starnes?

This brings us back to Rawls, who argues that society should maximize the position of the least well off. Rawls is a complex thinker and I won’t attempt to deal with all of the interpretations and variations on his philosophy, except to point out that it is a non sequitur to argue that arranging a society to the best advantage of the poor is advanced by the welfare state.

What if it turns out that income redistribution creates economic and social conditions that make the poor less well off?

The Miracle of the Private

Life in the West is not merely easier than it was two centuries ago, it is exponentially better; the quality of our housing, diets, and medical care have all improved so dramatically that the scope of the transformation is sometimes hard to grasp. In economically developed countries, income per capita is 1,600 percent of what it was two hundred years ago. It is, Rich Lowry notes, the “miracle of the modern world.”
¹⁰

At the beginning of the nineteenth century all but the wealthy lived virtually a subsistence existence. “The average human consumed and expected her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to go on consuming a mere $3 a day,” writes historian Deirdre N. McCloskey. “It had been this way for all of history, and for that matter all of prehistory. With her $3 a day the average denizen of the earth got a few pounds of potatoes, a little milk, an occasional scrap of meat.”
¹¹
Much of the world remains that way.

What changed for countries like ours was not a regime of confiscation and redistribution (although that was tried), but the unleashing of the creative energies of individuals and enterprises who sought a better future through work, production, trade, and enterprise. They flourished as long as those qualities were rewarded and encouraged to thrive rather than regarded with suspicion or seen as milch cows for schemes of social improvement.

Oddly enough, this has been a lesson learned, unlearned, and relearned throughout history. The concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” for instance, goes back to Aristotle, who noticed a basic human trait: “For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.”

If responsibility is diffused among many, it is always someone else’s problem. Aristotle understood the dynamic, familiar to every communal enterprise: “Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.…”
¹²

Unfortunately, the lesson has been lost on two millennia of social planners, who continue to be baffled by the (completely predictable) failure of their well-intentioned collective schemes.

But the flip side is just as important: When the collective farm is privatized, when individuals are left free to pursue their own prosperity, remarkable things happen. People begin to work harder, more creatively, faster, smarter, and the entire community is enriched. If what Aristotle described is the “tragedy of the commons,” the reverse ought to be recognized as the “miracle of the private.”

There will continue, of course, to be pockets of poverty and there will always be those who may through no fault of their own not be able to participate, but it is precisely because of the shift of responsibility and reward to the individual that we can create the surplus wealth that has made the condition of the poor in the United States so markedly better than the life experienced by the poor throughout much of the developing world.

As the experiment of the last sixty years ought to have made abundantly clear, the transfer of cash can have quite the opposite effect by distorting incentives, undermining the culture, breaking up families, and destroying neighborhoods. Despite spending trillions of dollars we still have vast swaths of dysfunction and dependency, especially in central cities. This suggests that simply expanding the welfare state does not solve the problem of poverty; that increased dependency has not worked to help the poor as much as it has helped advocates feel better about themselves. Far from bettering the condition of society’s least well off, redistribution can actually worsen their lives and dim their future prospects.

Why?

Policies that expand or encourage more dependence do not better the conditions of the poor because they undermine the conditions that hold the most promise of economic advancement and personal fulfillment. Poverty cannot be solved simply by providing more money because poverty is not simply a matter of dollars and cents: It is also a product of culture, spirit, and character. Treating poverty as simply a matter of economics runs the risk of cash transfers that destroy the very values and incentives that provide the best hope for the poor to get out of poverty.

If a main cause of poverty is lack of jobs, then a society should be structured to provide the maximum opportunities and protections for the poor to obtain those jobs. Conversely, policies that slow the creation of such opportunities—no matter how compassionately meant—do not ultimately help the poor.

If another cause of poverty is poor education, we ought to create an environment where the needs of poor children are paramount, as opposed to the entrenched special interests of public education who have used the rhetoric of caring about kids to fatten their own wallets.

If another cause of childhood poverty is family breakdown and illegitimacy, we should avoid policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which encouraged the departure of male breadwinners and incentivized out-of-wedlock births. Policies that render the male breadwinner unnecessary because the state has replaced him with a handout do not make life better for the children who will grow up fatherless; programs that make dependency more attractive than getting a job do not create a culture conducive to the advancement of the poor to self-sufficiency.

Massive debt and excessive taxation (and perverse incentives in transfer payments) can punish extra work, while a stagnant economy, high joblessness, and high interest rates can slow or even block social and economic mobility.

Finally, we need to recognize that mooching simply recycles wealth; it does not generate it. Increasing wealth requires the initiative, innovation, and willingness to work and take risks that are often incompatible with a culture that encourages taking one’s ease at the trough instead.

Chapter 20

STEP AWAY FROM THE TROUGH

How do we begin to dismantle Moocher Nation? How can we encourage Americans to back away from the trough at a time when it seems overflowing with a cornucopia of benefits, credits, pork, and perks, all paid for by others?

The challenge is both political and cultural. Real change requires a transformation of the habit and expectation of dependency. By “blackening the skies with criss-crossing dollars” (to use William Voegeli’s memorable phrase), the moocher state has encouraged even normally independent Americans to line up for their slice, lest they be left out. In a transfer-spending state, individuals rationalize their own dip at the trough by saying to themselves that they are simply getting back some of what they have paid in, and since everyone else is feeding freely it would be foolish not to partake as well.

Retired philosophy professor Kelly L. Ross compares the dynamic to the classic “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which two prisoners planning an escape have to decide whether to keep the secret (and thus jointly benefit from a dash to freedom), or betray the other (and thereby win a reward from the jailers). The basic idea is that if you are a prisoner planning to escape with some fellow prisoners, you have the choice of being faithful to them and benefiting from their plan, or you can betray them and earn what may be a very considerable reward from the authorities. In either case, players of the “game” have to consider whether the other prisoner might betray them first, bringing down a world of woe on his fellow trusting prisoner.

Ross notes that there is a similar moocher dilemma. Even if it becomes obvious that “not everyone can live off of the wealth of everyone else,” and even though it is clear that everyone would be better off if everyone left off seeking to loot others, “it is obvious that the best course for each individual group is to get everyone else to give up rent-seeking [read privileges, special benefits, pork] while they alone covertly continue to collect” their share of the goodies.
¹

He explains:

The fear that others will pursue such a strategy is easily sufficient motivation not to give up rent-seeking [mooching]. No one, of course, blatantly advertises their rent-seeking in terms of their own self-interest. Instead, there are always high sounding, moralistic slogans and rationalizations, arguments that special benefits are necessary because of poverty, compassion, discrimination, racism, the environment, greedy insurance companies, greedy businessmen, etc.

But they are all ultimately claims to government-granted perks, privileges, or simply other people’s cash.

All Together

This suggests that an assault on the moocher culture will require a more or less simultaneous backing away from the trough. No one wants to go first.

Farmers might be more willing to tolerate a loss of their bloated subsidies if they knew that others were making similar sacrifices; corporate welfare is easier to choke off if companies realize that they are not alone in having to shift for themselves. Similarly, the middle class is more likely to accept losses of credits and handouts if they believe that others are also making similar sacrifices.

This may seem somewhat counterintuitive. Practically speaking, incremental changes that chip away at the spending culture seem more realistic; but because of the nature of the moocher state it might be easier to sell a shared return to personal responsibility.

The Cato Institute estimates that the federal government operates more than two thousand separate subsidy programs—fully twice as many as existed in the mid-1980s. This blizzard of criss-crossing dollars includes farm subsidies, entitlements, school lunches and breakfasts, food stamps, housing assistance, corporate welfare, student loans, and health care spending.

As Cato notes: “Each subsidy program costs money, generates a bureaucracy, spawns lobby groups, and encourages more people to demand freebies from the government. Individuals, businesses, and nonprofit groups that become hooked on federal subsidies essentially become tools of the state. They lose their independence, they have less incentive to innovate, and they shy away from criticizing the government.”
²

What would a reform program look like? It would have to be far-reaching, tightening food stamp eligibility and turning off the money taps to corporate America; eliminating middle-class handouts and tax credits while simultaneously cutting unnecessary pork and bloated public employee pensions; and dialing back the entitlement culture by moving Medicare and Social Security to more sustainable systems. (Congressman Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” would be a good starting place.)
³

But most of all, the revolution against Moocherism requires redefining our expectations of what others owe to us and what we owe ourselves. Put bluntly, we need to restore some of the stigma to mooching. Our capacity for rationalization has proven to be quite remarkable, but at some level, most Americans retain a lingering sense that there’s something wrong about feeding at the trough, even if everyone else is doing it. That instinct needs to be reinforced, which is no small task amidst the blizzard of handouts and giveaways.

We should start with discussions of language (bringing back the word “mooch” is a good start, I think) and move to questions of personal and national character.

What kind of a people do we want to be? Dependents who play the endless shell game of living off what others produce, or a society that values and encourages independence and self-sufficiency?