-FrumForum Goes Live

FrumForum launched itself almost exactly three years ago, on Inauguration Day 2009. Over the subsequent interval, our hundreds of contributors have reached more than 5 million individual readers. I like to think that together we have helped to move the national debate. When we launched, Sarah Palin was a leading candidate for president and Glenn Beck was broadcasting conspiracy theories on cable TV. Three years later–not so much. OK, maybe we can’t claim all the credit. But we won’t refuse some fair share.

Now like all good things, this adventure is coming to an end. I’ve been invited to move my blog and print journalism to the Daily Beast/Newsweek, a larger and more technologically advanced platform. Tina Brown is one of the great media visionaries of our time. The opportunity to work with her–and learn from her–is deeply exciting.

Starting Monday, my work will shift to the Daily Beast/Newsweek site. The FrumForum URL will forward readers to the David Frum page at Daily Beast/Newsweek. FrumForum itself will continue to exist as an archive site, preserving three years of debate–the brilliant insights of our writers–and the passionate comments of our readers. Noah Kristula-Green will join me on the Daily Beast/Newsweek team.

I sincerely thank all who participated and supported this project. The world is changed only very slowly. It’s a big rock, and as human beings we represent only very minuscule and fleeting drips of water. But change is made, and together I believe the change we have offered here has been for the good.

Above all, I thank every reader–those who dissented fully as much as those who read with agreement. Journalism in the digital age is a process rather than a product; an exchange rather than a presentation; intimate rather than abstract. That process continues as ardently as ever, but in a new and improved form and at a bigger and stronger venue.

Far from yielding an ambiguous electoral outcome, the Iowa caucuses solidly confirmed the Balkanization of the Republican Party, a fact that will lead to potential electoral failure in 2012 unless neutralized soon. These internal divisions hurt the party’s leadership in Congress in 2011; they have already improved Democratic chances to retain the Senate, gain substantial seats in the House, and keep the White House in 2012.

Super-imposed on this chaos is a 2012 Congressional legislative schedule that virtually no one on Capitol Hill believes has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever passing.

Let’s take a look at the GOP. Mitt Romney gets a quarter of the vote, what we can call the “competency vote.” Ron Paul gets a quarter of the vote, what has been called the “Libertarian” vote, mostly male, mostly an exaggerated macho response to external order, such as what government provides. Rick Santorum, coupled with the Michelle Bachmann cohort, gets about a quarter, centered on traditional “values” like abortion and prayer in school. The remaining quarter of the self-identified Republican base (those who vote in primaries) represent a Newt Gingrich kind of amalgam of the fiscal conservatives, neo-cons, political scientists, and a few “establishment” Republicans.

The overlaps are obvious. Romney will get many of the fiscal conservative/deficit hawks eventually. Paul will continue to get the theological “no government is best” crowd, but may steal a few of Santorum’s vote. Gingrich’s folks could split easily toward Romney if and when Gingrich throws in the towel, but some may go to Santorum on social issues and to Paul in the primaries. The divisions between Tea Party Republicans and social conservatives have been over-stated by the media as revealed in Iowa. As someone with a particularly sadistic sense of humor said, “Oh, great, we make get a real convention for the Republicans this time.”

Meanwhile, incumbents in Congress have work to do, work that will raise almost every contentious issue that matters to voters.

Here’s a rough sketch of the upcoming Congressional schedule that the Congress confronts:

*the Congressional Budget Office reveals its current law and current policy baselines for FY2013-17 later this month;

*President Obama makes his State of the Union Address the January 24;

*President Obama sends his recommended increased of $1.2 trillion in the federal debt limit Congress, and Congress must approve or disapprove by a 2/3rds margin;

*President Obama submits his budget recommendations for FY2013-17 the first week of February,incorporating the defense recommendations released today by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta;

*House and Senate must confront another round of warfare over the payroll tax holiday, Unemployment Insurance, and the Medicare doc’s fix in February.

*CBO re-estimates the President’s budget submission;

*Literally hundreds of hearings on all aspects of the federal budget proceed in Congress;

*Congress should produce a Congressional Budget Resolution for FY13 in April, but has failed to do so the past two years;

*Individual appropriations bills for FY13 stall (c.f. the past several years);

*Congress spends until the August recess in wrangling, producing little of any consequence;

*After the August recess, Congress faces the same agenda it faced in 2010 and 2011, with two added wrinkles: expiration of the Bush tax cuts and a sequester (across-the-board) of $1.2 trillion in selected, discretionary appropriated accounts;

*By this time, all focus will be on a closely fought Presidential race, and the hand-to-hand combat for Senate and House seats.

Review that list. Think about the likely behavior of the factions within Congress, and the little “Balkan” nations with the Republican Party as this agenda unfolds. Deficits, realistically, will once again reach the $1 trillion mark. Economic growth is likely to be slow. The size of layoffs in the defense industry throughout the country begin to dawn on voters. The debt ceiling question inflames Congressional passions.

Remember this schedule when analysts and pundits tell you the following three things: Congress will pass major infrastructure legislation; Congress will do something serious about deficits; Congress will reach compromise before the elections on defense and the Bush tax cuts.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

And just a final, politically realistic note: if Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination, an interesting “back to where we started” road begins. Romney has endorsed the Medicare reform proposals of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Senator Ron Wyden. President Obama announced his opposition to those proposals the very day they were unveiled. That vote that House and Senate Republicans took way back in 2011 on the Ryan Budget Plan, which incorporated fundamental Medicare reform, will come back to haunt Republicans as Democratic strategists roll out the 30-second commercials and the blogosphere machinery.

One would think that the scenario outlined above would concentrate the minds of the House Republican caucus on unity and survival. It probably won’t.

John Boehner still has the hardest job in town.

Via an interesting post by Chris Conover, I came across this recently released National Health Expenditure report, which has data on health-care spending up through 2009.  This data includes a state-by-state breakdown of personal health-care spending (a number that includes direct expenditures on health-care but does not include administrative costs).

Digging into these numbers allows one to calculate (roughly) the growth of health-care spending in each state from 1991 to 2007.  This data set tells an interesting story for Massachusetts after the passage of health-care reform there: after the passage of Romney’s reforms, the rate of per capita health-care spending growth slowed in Massachusetts both in absolute terms and relative to the national average.

Here’s a chart I put together looking at the cumulative growth over two periods: from 2004 to 2006 (prior to Romneycare) and from 2007 to 2009 (after the measure was applied).  I’ve included the US national average as a whole as well as the New England average in order to situate Massachusetts in its local context.  New Hampshire offers the example of a New England state which did not engage in Romney-style reforms, and Ohio offers a counterexample of a Midwestern state with relatively slower-growing health-care costs.  Texas, often touted as an alternative model for the nation, also helpfully sets up a contrast with Massachusetts.  This chart looks at the cumulative percentage change in per capita personal health-care spending over the 2004-2006 and 2007-2009 periods.

Perhaps in part due to the recession, the rate of growth for health-care spending dropped for the nation as a whole (though spending did still grow).  However, it’s worth noting that, in the years after Romney’s reforms went into effect, the rate of growth for health-care spending in Massachusetts dropped even faster than the national average did.  Between 2004 and 2006, health-care spending in Massachusetts grew almost 27% faster than it did for the nation as a whole; between 2007 and 2009, it grew only 5% faster.  After Romney’s reforms, Massachusetts went from having a health-care spending growth rate well above the national average to one just a little bit above.  For example, between 2008 and 2009, personal health-care spending increased at a rate of 3.8% in the US, while Massachusetts saw its spending increase by 3.9%.  Compare that to the changes between 2005 and 2006: US spending grew at 5.3%, but Massachusetts spending grew at 7.6%.  Situating Massachusetts in the context of the rest of New England makes the change in spending rates even starker: prior to Romney’s reforms, Massachusetts personal health-care spending grew faster than the New England average most years.  After his reforms, it grew slower than the New England average (often having one of the lowest rates of health-care spending growth in the region).  These numbers suggest that Texas is doing a worse job at taming the rate of health-care spending growth than Massachusetts (though, for the moment, per capita health-care spending in Texas is lower than that of Massachusetts).

Massachusetts seems to have especially slowed down the rate of growth in hospital spending.  Between 2004 and 2006, Massachusetts hospital spending jumped 16.5%; between 2007 and 2009, it only climbed 5.5% (a 67% reduction in the rate of growth).  US spending on hospital care grew 12.7% between 2004 and 2006; between 2007 and 2009, it grew 8.6% (a 33% reduction in the rate of growth).  Spending in Massachusetts hospitals rose much more slowly than the national average.  One of the key premises of Romneycare was that bringing all of the commonwealth into the health-care system would lower the need of hospital use (especially the use of emergency room care) and thereby lower spending at the hospital level.  These numbers seem to suggest that something like that may be happening.

In many areas of health-care spending, the rate of growth for spending in Massachusetts either fell more than it did for the nation as a whole or fell at roughly the same rate.  This data would seem to muddy the waters for the claim that Romney’s reforms caused health-care spending in Massachusetts to skyrocket.  Since Romneycare, health-care spending in Massachusetts (at least until 2009) grew more slowly than it did in many other states and also grew much more slowly compared to the rate of spending growth in Massachusetts before Romneycare took effect.

Health-care spending depends upon a variety of factors (including population aging and economic growth), so this data set does not tell the whole story regarding the effect of the 2006 reforms on health-care spending.  It does, however, pose a challenge to the argument that Romney’s reforms uniquely inflated health-care spending in Massachusetts.  In terms of raw health-care spending, Massachusetts seems to have bent slightly down the curve of growth—compared to many other states and, in many respects, the nation as a whole.

(Of course, the rate of growth in health-care spending is not the sole deciding issue for Romneycare: other questions about long-term sustainability, the role of government coercion and spending, and other topics are also very important.  Nor is there a direct correlation between health-care spending and private insurance premiums, which seem to have increased in recent years.  Moreover, data for years after 2009 might tell a more complicated story.)

Originally Posted at A Certain Enthusiasm.

Byron York has a tough read on the meaning of the Iowa result for Romney.

In the end, Romney escaped humiliation, and he did it at far less cost than in 2007-2008, when he gave Iowa everything he had in his first run for the GOP nomination. “If you look back four years ago, we had 52 paid staff in Iowa, and this time around, we have five paid staff,” top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said a few hours before Tuesday night’s results came in.  “In terms of advertising, we spent $10 million in the run-up to the caucuses four years ago, and we’ve spent a fraction of that this time.  And in terms of the candidate’s own appearances in Iowa, he was here 100 days or so four years ago, and this time we’re at about 15 days.”  [It was actually a few more, but that doesn't change Fehrnstrom's point.]

So Romney avoided what would have been an embarrassing loss after his decision to go all-in in Iowa.  But what now?  He’s heavily favored to win in New Hampshire, but he’s likely to face a reconfigured field that will give his rivals the opportunity to pick up more support in the quest for a candidate to go up against Romney one-on-one. Iowa insiders predict that Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, who received ten and five percent of the Iowa vote, respectively, will be out of the race within 48 hours.  Nationally, Bachmann and Perry are at a combined 12 percent in the polls — support that will go to some other candidate or candidates, but not to Romney.  That will make Romney’s job 12 points harder.

The Iowa race ended far differently than Romney had originally foreseen.  For a while he stayed away from the state for fear of suffering a humiliating loss.  Then he moved into Iowa in hopes of winning and thereby dealing a devastating early blow to his rivals.  Nothing turned out quite the way it was expected to, but in the end, Romney managed to get away with his life.

I’d turn that interpretation upside down.

Here’s a contest that by all odds Romney should have lost. The question through the past year was: lose to whom? This was a state designed for Rick Perry to take away from Romney–and thereby launch a powerful national conservative challenge. Instead, Perry is heading home to Texas. Gingrich–another, less plausible, alternative–has collapsed into bitterness and sulk. Romney won by a narrow margin because the remaining conservative alternatives looked unconvincing even to Iowa social conservative voters. A Romney-Santorum contest is not much of a contest at all. If that’s not obvious today, it will be obvious a week from today, after New Hampshire reports.

Result 1:

Romney wins, Santorum second, Paul third, Gingrich fourth, Perry fifth.

This is the result indicated by last day’s polling. If it eventuates, this will be a very short nominating contest. Romney will proceed to win in New Hampshire. Perry and Gingrich will try to make a last stand in South Carolina. Unless one or the other wins outright, their money will dry up after three consecutive losses. Santorum and Paul may remain in the race, but it will essentially be ballgame over by the time of the Florida primary on January 31st.

Result 2:

Santorum wins, Romney second, Paul third.

This is the result the press here is sort of hoping for, not because they like Santorum so much, but because they like campaigning–and nobody has campaigned harder than Santorum. Result 2 leads to the same outcome as Result 1. Santorum will not become a front-runner any more than Mike Huckabee did in 2008, and for the same reason: there is no funding base for Santorum-style religious conservatism, and he won’t travel well to New Hampshire the next week.

Result 3:

Paul wins, Santorum second, Romney third.

This is a result that causes a commotion, as much because of the revealed Romney weakness as because of the Paul upset. To calm the shock, Romney would have to score big in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. On the other hand–that’s probably just what he would do. Because however you game this thing tonight, the basic logic of the campaign remains fixed:

There is no path to the nomination for Ron Paul or Rick Santorum. There might have been such a path for Rick Perry–or even very very possibly Newt Gingrich–but the entrance to that path is now blocked. That leaves Romney sooner or later. Tonight’s vote will settle the timing, not the outcome.

I attended Romney’s closing rally last night in Des Moines. Very professionally done, introduction by Senator John Thune.

Three themes really stood  out:

* Romney opened with a statement about the danger from Iran. Without mention of Ron Paul, it astutely poked at the top vulnerability of the second-polling candidate here.

* He took a very tough line on China. While some express skepticism about the genuineness of Romney’s concern on this issue, I was struck by the specificity of his complaints: computer hacking, currency manipulation. He’s evidently thought about this issue. He’s no protectionist obviously, but he seems to have gained some skepticism about China’s so-called peaceful rise.

* Romney opened his critique of President Obama by acknowledging that Obama inherited a tough economy. This fair-mindedness may disenthrall base voters, but it eschews the angry paranoia that has put off so many independent voters. Plus it has the additional merit of being true.

In my column for CNN, I discuss the root causes of America’s obesity epidemic:

Obesity has become the country’s leading public health problem. Yet as we talk and talk about the issue, the country only becomes fatter and fatter.

The problem for the country echoes the problem for individuals: Willpower is not enough. “(It’s a) basic instinct, even stronger than the sexual instinct, to store calories to survive the next period of starvation. And we live in an environment where there’s food every half mile. It’s tasty, cheap, convenient, and you can eat it with one hand.”

Thus says Martijn Katan of the Institute of Health Sciences at VU University in Amsterdam, author of one of the many studies on the limits of dieting, quoted in U.S. News & World Report.

If you as an individual want to change your weight, you must change your whole life. Likewise, to reduce obesity in modern society, we will have to alter the way society is organized.

Weight gain is driven by two trends: increases in calories consumed and decrease in calories expended. Modern America induces both.

For example: The after-inflation cost of sugary soda has declined by an estimated 48% over the past 20 years. Correspondingly, consumption of sugary soda has soared: Sugary soda is now thesingle most important source of calories in the American diet.

For example again: The number of Americans who work at physically taxing jobs continues its steady decline. Even those jobs that demand physical labor — manufacturing, for example — are much less grueling than they used to be, as electrically powered machines do the lifting and shifting that used to consume human energy.

While Americans expend fewer calories at work, they spend more time in cars — almost twice as much as in the 1970s. They spend26 hours per week consuming TV or online entertainment. Americans could theoretically compensate for more sedentary lifestyles by stepping up their recreational exercise — but only about 20% of Americans bother. Some 80% never do — including presumably all those failed dieters.

Want to change this? It’s no small project. It would involve the redesign of cities, the relocation of schools, the reinvention of our modes of eating and amusement.

Click here to read the full column.

Enforcement of the law prohibiting the employment of illegal immigrants, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), enacted in 1986, has been pathetic. When the was first enacted, illegal migration from Mexico initially slowed to a trickle as Mexicans waited to see how seriously the U.S. Government would enforce IRCA.

Yes, IRCA requires all employers to complete a form upon hiring each new employee in which the employer swears he or she has looked at two forms of documentation provided by the perspective employee and that they “appear genuine and relate to the employee.” This does not mean the employer must be a fraud expert, but must make a good faith effort to discern if the document is real and was issued to the person tendering it. The employee must also sign the same form (called an I-9) swearing that he or she is authorized for employment in the U.S. and that the documents tendered are legitimate. Some employers relying on large immigrant workforces, particularly agriculture, did not comply at all.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has since been replaced by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made a few high-profile prosecutions of such employers in the late 1980’s, and the result was that that employers do complete the Forms. But DHS has never been serious about really enforcing IRCA against employers who knowingly accept fake documents. Such prosecutions fell 77% in the 1990’s, and the flow of illegal immigrants soared as Mexicans realized we were not serious about keeping them out of our workforce. There were 2 million illegal immigrants when IRCA was enacted. Now we have an estimated 12 million. This is direct result of our policy of non-enforcement. We probably would have been better without IRCA.

Enter E-Verify, an online system that matches the document numbers provided by perspective employees on their I-9 Forms against the Social security and DHS data bases. So if a Social Security number or alien registration number was not issued to the person tendering it, the employer will instantly receive a “Not Authorized” message in his in box. In theory this would be a superb tool to supplement (or really supply) some actual teeth to the current visual inspection system.

E- Verify has been voluntary for several years. Hundreds of thousands of employers, typically large ones, have signed up for it despite the minimal cost it imposes (a little extra time for each hire). DHS does not charge a fee. Studies show E- Verify is now about 99% effective in identifying imposters using fake documents. However, it is not particularly effective in rooting out more sophisticated illegal immigrants who use fake documents bearing real Social Security numbers belonging to real American citizens. Such numbers can be purchased in the black market. But DHS is phasing in a digital photo of legally admitted aliens into the system. So soon, employers will also see the face of legal aliens (taken at time of their inspection and entry). This will help employers identify illegal aliens masquerading a legal. It is not perfect, but we must remember the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is offering a bill to make use of E-Verify mandatory for all employers. Like many bills, this one sounds good in theory. If E-Verify were used throughout the country, and DHS enforced that use, a large majority of illegal immigrants would finally be deprived of employment, the magnet that draws them here. But will the Obama DHS, headed by Janet Napolitano, really enforce the law? The Obama administration is not enforcing IRCA now. Yes, there has been an upturn in deportations (removals) of illegals DHS deems dangerous for other reasons, i.e., other felony convictions unrelated to their illegal immigration.

The recent disclosure of memos from John Morton, in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the part of DHS that actually conducts deportations, shows he is not interested in initiating removal proceedings against ordinary illegal immigrants. This is a de facto amnesty for most illegal immigrants and a clear subversion of IRCA, which was meant to preserve American jobs for Americans and legal aliens. Mr. Morton should be, and is, being called to account for this policy by the House Judiciary Committee.

So enacting mandatory E-Verify would likely be opposed by the President, who let’s recall, favors blanket amnesty for all illegal aliens in the country who have not committed subsequent violent felonies (though working with a fake identification document is a felony). Yet 2012 is an election year, and the President would be under tremendous political pressure to sign a mandatory E-Verify bill into law. It’s a popular idea with almost all constituencies. In 1996 President Clinton was similarly obliged to sign that year’s Republican-passed immigration enforcement bill into law.

I am concerned that mandatory E-Verify will not be enforced by this administration and thereby initiate another tsunami of illegal immigrants from as occurred after the non-enforcement of IRCA. On the other hand, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s mandatory E-Verify law in June. So, if mandatory E-Verify is enacted and not enforced, the states could step into the breach. This is a big if. I don’t see Illinois, New York, or California, the states with the largest illegal alien populations, enacting Arizona-like laws. In fact, the California legislature is considering a law which would prohibit counties or municipalities in that state from enacting such laws.

Hopefully, Mitt Romney, who supports the Smith bill, will make it an issue in the campaign. This would send a signal to Mexicans contemplating an illegal entry, and to all of those foreigners here legally with visas and contemplating overstaying, as big a source of illegal immigration as Mexico, that they will not find employment. Yet, if this is not followed up promptly with real enforcement against employers who do not correctly use E-Verify, the effort will do much more harm than good.

As 2011 comes to a close, FrumForum plans to re-run some of our best featured pieces from the year. In ‘Two Cheers for the Welfare State’ David Frum responded to Yuval Levin’s essay in National Affairs about America’s welfare state.

Don’t miss Yuval Levin’s piece in the current National Affairs, “Beyond the Welfare State.”

The piece is interesting and important for many reasons, but not least because of its author’s background: a prominent Bush domestic policy staffer, Levin has spent a lot of time pondering the question: “What is/was compassionate conservatism?”

Based on his new essay, the answer seems to be: compassionate conservatism is kaput.

Instead of the old emphasis on government aid to faith-based charities – government tax support for the poor – and the expansion of government health insurance for the elderly, Levin’s new vision endorses the Paul Ryan idea of radical reductions in government’s social insurance function.

“Beyond the Welfare State” urges a new approach to conservative domestic policy based on 5 key ideas:

1) Lower and flatter tax rates – likely meaning a further tax cut from today’s top rate, along the lines proposed by the Ryan budget plan, with elimination of most deductions, credits, and tax expenditures.

2) Means-testing of all government programs, including retirement security for those under-55s. Again this follows the ideas in the Ryan budget plan, whereby most under 55s will over time lose their claim on most government assistance.

3) Means-tested subsidies to support health insurance for those who cannot afford the full cost, within a marketplace regulated by the states.

4) Radical reductions in domestic discretionary spending.

5) Radical reductions in the administrative power of the state – including its monetary policies, which would adhere instead to fixed and predictable rules.

Levin acknowledges that this program will be politically unpalatable:

It will require extraordinary sacrifices from today’s young Americans, who will need to continue paying the taxes necessary to support the retirements of their parents and grandparents while denying themselves the same level of benefits so their children and grandchildren can thrive.

And since these “extraordinary sacrifices” are joined to a tax cut for high-bracket taxpayers, it’s not difficult to imagine how the plan might meet resistance.

But let’s leave the politics aside and consider the merits:

What to think about such a program as the basis for a new kind of conservatism? What would it accomplish, where would it put us?

Yuval Levin founds his case against the welfare state on this description of the national mood:

It is becoming increasingly clear that we in America are living through a period of transition. One chapter of our national life is closing, and another is about to begin. We can sense this in the tense volatility of our electoral politics, as dramatic “change elections” follow closely upon one another. We can feel it in the unseemly mood of decline that has infected our public life — leaving our usually cheerful nation fretful about global competition and unsure if the next generation will be able to live as well as the present one. Perhaps above all, we can discern it in an overwhelming sense of exhaustion emanating from many of our public institutions — our creaking mid-century transportation infrastructure, our overburdened regulatory agencies struggling to keep pace with a dynamic economy, our massive entitlement system edging toward insolvency.

But these are mostly symptoms of our mounting unease. The most significant cause runs deeper. We have the feeling that profound and unsettling change is afoot because the vision that has dominated our political imagination for a century — the vision of the social-democratic welfare state — is drained and growing bankrupt, and it is not yet clear just what will take its place.

Supposing the first paragraph to be a valid description, is the second paragraph the most plausible explanation? I’ve met plenty of anxious people over the past three years. Many were beyond anxious: terrified and desperate. And what was the cause of their “unease”? Not the impending bankruptcy of Medicare. I know people who have seen their family incomes drop 80% or 90% over the past 3 years. I’m not going to mention names here, but if I did, I’d venture that Yuval Levin would recognize some of them. I know people who have been out of work for months. I don’t personally know anybody who has been foreclosed upon, but that is the accident of living in an area lightly touched by the mortgage disaster. So if somebody asked me, “What is the most significant cause of our mounting national unease?” I’d answer: “We have the feeling that profound and unsettling change is afoot because we are living through the worst economic downturn since World War II.”

And once you say that, your mind travels in a very different direction from that indicated by Yuval Levin’s essay, or at least my mind does.

Where did this crisis come from? Why was it not prevented? How can we minimize the suffering consequent to the crisis? How can we accelerate recovery from the crisis?

Perhaps I am speaking only for myself, but when I ponder those questions, I come to feel that the libertarian ideal championed these days by so many conservatives has become at least as drained as the social democratic idea.

I don’t believe that Yuval Levin, whom I know to be a compassionate person, deplores the existence of unemployment insurance and the ability of Congress to extend insurance payments during a serious crisis.

Are we sorry that the stimulus plan included aid to assist the unemployed with their COBRA payments to continue their health insurance?

Do we condemn food stamps?

Is it a national weakness that the now-substantial government/education/health/military sectors of the economy continued to provide some source of stable demand, unlike the situation in 1931?

When we think of the most immediately urgent failures of government, do we really think of the failure of government to adequately fund the Medicare needs in the next decade – or of the failure of government to act to prevent systematic misrepresentations by rating agencies in the past decade?

Do we truly regret that the Federal Reserve had discretionary power to create new money after October 2008? Wouldn’t it make more sense to regret that the Federal Reserve did not use its discretionary power to crack down on predatory lending activity in 2003?

If anything, as we review the record of the past three years, I’m moved to revise my own opinions of a lifetime and adapt the words of Yuval Levin’s mentor, Irving Kristol to say: “two cheers for the welfare state.”

I doubt that Yuval Levin would disagree with very much of what I wrote in the second post in this series. I expect that most Republican politicians and voters would agree too, in actions if not in words.

Republicans have repeatedly voted to extend unemployment insurance. Paul Ryan’s plan preserves Social Security. Yuval Levin’s own 5 principles for reform contemplate a healthcare system in which “the poor and the old would still have heavily subsidized coverage and much of the middle class would still have moderately subsidized coverage.”

So is this perhaps just a discussion of more vs. less? In the 1990s, federal spending as a share of GDP was reduced below 20% of national income. The crisis and the Obama response have pushed spending up to 25%. Could we translate Yuval Levin’s essay as a call to return to the old proportion?

Yes and no. Yes he’s certainly calling for spending less. (In that, I agree with him – although I doubt we’ll get back below 20% anytime soon).

But Yuval Levin is engaged in something more than hype when he says that his plan goes “beyond the welfare state.” Here’s the key line:

essentially all government benefits — including benefits for the elderly — should be means-tested …. Americans below 55 or so … should expect public help only if they are in need once they retire. Means-testing should, to the extent possible, be designed to avoid discouraging saving and work. And private retirement savings should be strongly encouraged and incentivized, so that people who have the means would build private nest eggs with less reliance on government.

In other words: You might get some degree of state help if you need it. But you had better not count on it. And it will be delivered in ways that will open larger and larger differences between those who receive state aid and those who do not. In short: Medicaid for the old.

In other words, what we are contemplating here is not the end of the “welfare state” as most Americans use the term, a state that aids poor people. What is contemplated is the end of social insurance, at least as it applies to healthcare for retirees: a state to which all contribute on more or less equal terms and from which all draw benefits on more or less equal terms.

Interestingly, it was neoconservative thinkers like Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and others who most searchingly indicted the kind of welfare state presented in Yuval Levin’s argument.

They noted that welfare programs aimed at the poor alone create three kinds of problems:

1) They intensify poverty because they impose huge costs on the exit from poverty.

Imagine a world in which everyone who earns less than $20,000 a year qualifies for Medicaid and nobody who earns more than $20,000 does so. What incentives do we present to the person now earning $19,999? One more dollar, and boom, there go your medical benefits.

This problem can be mitigated by phasing out benefits gradually – but that gets very expensive. (e.g., Today, we have states where people qualify for some Medicaid benefits all the way up to 400% of the poverty level.) Except when times are very flush, governments end up living with a situation in which it becomes simply irrational for poor people to work harder to escape poverty. The barriers to poverty exit are surely one reason that poverty rates have remained stuck at around 13% since 1965 even in boom times.

2) Welfare programs aimed at the poor compel governments to police the behavior of the poor.

Yuval Levin’s 5th principle argues: “we should reduce the reach of the administrative state, paring back all but essential regulations and protections and adopting over time an ethic of keeping the playing field level rather than micromanaging market forces, and of preferring set rules (in regulation, in monetary policy, and elsewhere) to administrative discretion.” Hear, hear. [Bolding added.]

Yet programs for the poor-only demand higher levels of administrative discretion. It’s easy to determine who qualifies for Social Security old-age pensions, not so easy to determine who qualifies for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Since qualification is uncertain, fraud is tempting – and fraud must be policed.

3) Welfare programs for the poor alone induce the poor to think of themselves as a community apart from the rest of society. It’s not just a matter of dependency, which is a severe and inescapable cost of any government program. (See e.g. the American grain farmer.) Worse is the development of alienated subcultures and anti-social folkways: the adversary culture as it has been called.

For these reasons and others, Irving Kristol always favorably contrasted Social Security and Medicare to means-tested programs for the poor.

I’m writing a lot about Yuval Levin’s National Affairs article precisely because it is so rich and thought-provoking. And it poses this challenge to conservatives who can’t follow Yuval Levin in the direction he indicates: If not the Ryan vision of the future, what then should be the conservative response to the fiscal crisis of the American state?

I’ve been thinking very hard about this question for a long time. I’m not done thinking about it either. But here’s my own current working answer. It has 5 points.

1.) Don’t panic.

Doom is not hurtling rapidly upon the United States. The reason the budget looks so very bad is the Great Recession. As the recession ends, the budget picture will improve. Deficits will not vanish on their own, but they will shrink. The long-term debt outlook will remain ugly, but it will also remain long-term.

Conservatives often say: “We do not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” Let’s go to the tape. In 2007, the US government had receipts of $2.568 trillion. In 2009, it had revenues of $2.104 trillion. The disappearance of $460+ billion of income sure looks like a revenue problem to me.

You see equal or even more extreme collapses in revenues at the state and local level.

Yet the economy will recover. The wars in the Middle East will end. Fewer people will require assistance. When that happens, the fiscal gap to bridge will shrink of itself.

2.) Fix healthcare.

The US does not have a (serious) spending problem. It has a (serious) healthcare problem. The problem affects both public sector and private sector. No administration will get public spending under control until such time as a cost-control revolution is unleashed on the healthcare sector is.

This cost-control revolution need not compromise patient outcomes. Most other democracies spend much LESS on healthcare than the US while gaining significantly BETTER outcomes. Runner-up Switzerland spends 4 points of GDP less than the US (equivalent to getting the US defense budget for free), even as the average Swiss lives almost 3 1/2 years longer than the average American.

But the cost-control revolution will mean that the traditional practices of healthcare providers will come under extreme pressure – just as the retail revolution led by Wal-Mart put pressure on the practices of other stores.

Republicans and conservatives are deeply internally conflicted about healthcare. Conservatives can denounce attempts to save money within Medicare as “death panels” – even as they endorse Paul Ryan’s plan to cut Medicare spending by 70 percentage points below the level necessary to provide tomorrow’s seniors with the same benefits as today’s.

This issue has to be resolved, and if you want taxes low and incomes rising, it must be resolved in the direction of efficiency and cost-saving.

3.) Public Insurance, Private Provision

What Yuval Levin is criticizing is not the welfare state. It’s the social insurance state: a state that taxes all to provide benefits available to all.

That does not mean all of us receive benefits all the time. We collect unemployment insurance only when we lose our jobs, Medicare only after turning 65, ditto Social Security.

Nor do all receive equal benefits. People who pay more into Social Security receive more. The sicker elderly receive more from Medicare than the healthier elderly.

Still, the system is defined by its universality and comprehensiveness.

Yuval Levin proposes to rescind that definition. We’ll move into a future where state aid is recognized as something to be received only by the dependent few, not the providing many.

I’ve raised some qualms about such a future. Here’s one more. America being as it is, such a future will inevitably be color coded. Not everybody in the receiving group will be darker-skinned, not everybody in the paying group will be lighter-skinned, but the tendency will be there. Even today, when government social spending goes overwhelmingly to white over-65s (the US spends 3x as much on social services for the elderly as for the young, and the over-65s are more than 85% white), the talk about “takers vs makers” cannot escape a racial tinge. Imagine how politics will be argued 10 years from now, if we do things Yuval Levin’s way, in a country where the recipients of most Medicare benefits are disproportionately black and poor – and where today’s better-educated white 30-somethings will be paying heavy taxes through their peak earning years for benefits they themselves will never see. That will give Rush Limbaugh a lot of minority targets to fulminate against in his declining years.

Yet it’s possible to imagine a universal social insurance state that is both less expensive and less statist than the social insurance state of today. If we can unleash the dynamics of competition on American healthcare, there is no reason that Medicare must forever continue to cost more per recipient. If we’re wasting one health dollar in four right now, as the international comparisons suggest, then there is scope actually to reduce Medicare costs per recipient.

As John Stuart Mill pointed out 150 years ago in the context of schooling, state financing need not mean state provision. Chile and Singapore manage it for pensions and health care through a combination of forced individual saving and subsidies for those in need.

In the US context, Yuval Levin’s own preferred financing form – a universal health care tax credit – if made generous enough, could form the basis for such a system. Or it could be done in the way Mitt Romney outlined in Massachusetts: mandates plus subsidies.

The point is: you can have social insurance, even universal social insurance, without government administration. You can avoid dependency without consigning millions to go without coverage – or alternatively subjecting even more millions to the stigma of being branded recipients of health welfare, shabby exceptions to the normal expectation that all must provide for themselves. In the context of health care, after all, very few will be able to provide for themselves. Means-testing Medicare will not mean very much less dependency. It will mean a lot more contempt for the very many Americans who will find themselves as dependent as ever.

4.) Pay attention to revenues.

Gov. Mitch Daniels has a funny line about wanting a tax code that looks like somebody designed it on purpose. It’s a project worth considering.

Back in the 1980s, the top rate of tax was pulled down to 28% by the systematic elimination of deductions and credits. Within a decade, the top rate had climbed back to almost 40% – and new credits and deductions proliferated. A bad trade.

If a 25% top rate is wanted – and it certainly seems a good idea to me – isn’t the way to finance it the same way as was done in 1986? If base broadening alone does not do the job (and it will not), then find other revenues in ways that are socially useful: higher taxes on energy to spur efficiency, higher excise taxes on alcohol and corn-based sweeteners, a VAT if need be. (I’m surprised that we have got this far in the debate without any political figure proposing to legalize marijuana and then tax it heavily. I suppose that’s because the legalizers tend to be the same libertarians who oppose all taxes.)

But if you’re looking for a grand bargain, and if you’re a conservative seeking to hold down top tax rates, you don’t want a two-way bargain, Medicare vs. income tax cuts. You want a multi-point bargain that includes revenue increases so keenly desired by liberals that liberals will overlook those revenues’ non-progressiveness.

5.) Growth Acceleration

Brink Lindsey makes the important point that the US economy compensated for low per-capita productivity growth in the 1970s and 1980s by adding many more workers to the population. The baby boomers come of age, and American women hugely increased their labor force participation.

Some suggest that the trick can be repeated in the years ahead by increasing immigration even above current very high rates. This seems to me a very bad idea. Remember, the problem that we are trying to address is the fiscal crisis of the state. It is not a very good scheme to address a fiscal crisis by importing millions of very poor people who will need much more state aid than they – and very likely their children and grandchildren – will ever pay in taxes.

What we need to do instead is seek every way over the medium term to restore very high rates of growth of per-person productivity – so that slower population growth can nevertheless still translate into strong economic growth.

For example: There remains important work to do on the trade front. The US still collects surprisingly high tariffs on cheap goods, from tableware to sneakers. Abolish them all.

For example: Traffic congestion represents an important economic cost. Americans in most metropolitan areas waste an hour or more a day traveling to and from work. Al Gore was right back in 2000 to worry about traffic as a political issue, and it needs to return to the agenda again, with special emphasis on road improvements and telecommuting.

Recessions are periods in which firms correct inefficiencies. They can be the same for governments and societies.

In the interval since I started writing this response to Yuval Levin’s important piece in National Affairs, the Ryan budget plan has been approved by the House of Representatives on a near-total party line vote. Ideas like those endorsed by Yuval Levin are now the formal position of the Republican party. My guess is that the party’s presidential nominee will attempt to tip-toe away from that position in 2012, but who knows? Anyway, it will not matter. President Obama’s billion-dollar campaign will ensure that Republicans are thoroughly identified with it.

So Yuval Levin’s proposition is the proposition that Republicans will take to the country. Perhaps that is as it should be. Since the economic and electoral disasters of 2006-2009, Republicans have veered in a sharply libertarian direction. Why not put that new direction to the test of democracy? Perhaps Paul Ryan is right, and Americans (or anyway: voting Americans) have abruptly changed their minds during this economic crisis about their expectations from government.

I’ll admit: I’ve also changed my mind during this crisis, but in the opposite direction.

There’s an interesting rotation of ideologies here between Yuval Levin and me. Yuval Levin is one of the brightest rising stars in the intellectual tradition of Irving Kristol. Kristol famously championed a conservative welfare state, and especially programs of social insurance for the elderly.

I, on the other hand, got my political start urging a doubling-down on the economic libertarianism of the Reagan years. On the eve of the last Republican congressional triumph, 1994, I published a book urging ideas very similar to those now being urged by Yuval Levin and Paul Ryan and many others.

I won’t try here to explain why the conservative mainstream has turned so sharply to the right, although I have my theories.

As for my own turn away, that I can explain:

The radical free-market economics I embraced in the late 1970s offered a trade:

Yes, there would be less social provision. In return, Americans would receive an economy that was simultaneously more dynamic and also more stable.

There would be less inflation (because the Federal Reserve would have one job: price stability).

There would be fewer and milder recessions (because the Federal Reserve would no longer have to extinguish the inflation it did not create).

The financial sector could finance faster growth with less risk (because risks would be cushioned by diversification rather than prohibited by regulation).

Economic growth would accelerate (because the reduced tax burden would induce entrepreneurial innovation).

Faster growth would raise incomes for all (because a rising tide lifts all boats).

More opportunity in the private economy would abundantly offset the curbing of welfare benefits (because the best social program is always a job).

More opportunity would end the caste-like isolation of the poorest of the poor by drawing them out of the underclass into paid employment (because all human beings respond more or less rationally to positive incentives).

This was the trade, and it was engineered jointly by Republicans and Democrats: in fact some of the most important elements of the trade were adopted during the Clinton years.

Some of the terms of that trade were honored. From 1983 through 2008, the US enjoyed a quarter-century of economic expansion, punctuated by only two relatively mild recessions. In the late 1980s, the country was hit by the savings & loan crisis, the worst financial crisis to that point since the 1930s – and although the S&L crisis did deliver a blow, the country rapidly recovered and came up smiling. New industries were born, new jobs created on an epic scale, incomes did improve, and the urban poor were drawn into the working economy.

But of course, other terms of the trade were not honored.

Especially after 2000, incomes did not much improve for middle-class Americans. The promise of macroeconomic stability proved a mirage: America and the world were hit in 2008 by the sharpest and widest financial crisis since the 1930s. Conservatives do not like to hear it, but the crisis originated in the malfunctioning of an under-regulated financial sector, not in government overspending or government over-generosity to less affluent homebuyers. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bad actors, yes, but they could not have capsized the world economy by themselves. It took Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and — maybe above all — Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to do that.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the free-market assumption and expectation that an unemployed person could always find worksomewhere has been massively falsified: at the trough of this recession, there were almost 6 jobseekers in the US for every unfilled job. Nothing like such a disparity had been seen since the 1930s. The young faced the worst job odds. But some of the most dismal outcomes were endured by workers in their 50s, laid off from middle-class jobs likely never to see middle-class employment again.

GK Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built.

Speaking only personally, I cannot take seriously the idea that the worst thing that has happened in the past three years is that government got bigger. Or that money was borrowed. Or that the number of people on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. The worst thing was that tens of millions of Americans – and not only Americans – were plunged into unemployment, foreclosure, poverty. If food stamps and unemployment insurance, and Medicaid mitigated those disasters, then two cheers for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid.

Which does not mean that I have become suddenly indifferent to the growth of government. Not at all. Paul Ryan is absolutely right that the present trend is unsustainable and must be corrected. The free marketeers of the 1980s were right that taxes on enterprise must be restrained to leave room for private-sector-led expansion. Over-generous social insurance has all kinds of negative consequences. Private saving must be encouraged. Work must pay better than idleness. The job of designing the right kind of social insurance state is hugely important and hugely difficult, and the conservative sensibility – with its respect for markets and less sentimental view of human nature – is the right sensibility for that job.

Yet that same conservative sensibility is also properly distrustful of the fantasy that society can be remade according to a preconceived plan. We have to start from where we are, and we have to take people as we find them. Ronald Reagan liked to quote a line of Tom Paine’s, “We have it in our power to make the world new again.” George Will – although a great Reagan admirer – correctly complained at the time, “No, we don’t.”

I strongly suspect that today’s Ayn Rand moment will end in frustration or worse for Republicans. The future beyond the welfare state imagined by Yuval Levin will not arrive. At that point, Republicans will face a choice. (I’d argue we face that choice now, whether we recognize it or not.) We can fulminate against unchangeable realities, alienate ourselves from a country that will not accede to the changes we demand. That way lies bitterness and irrelevance. Or we can go back to work on the core questions facing all center right parties in the advanced economies since World War II: how do we champion entrepreneurship and individualism within the context of a social insurance state?

Those are words I would not have written 15 years ago. I write them now, conscious that I am very far from the first person to write them. Irving Kristol made the point most memorably at the very onset of the conservative ascendancy:

The idea of a welfare state is perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy — as Bismarck knew, a hundred years ago. In our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind… they need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it.

Conservatism’s task is to shape that social insurance state, not repeal it.

Yuval Levin knew this truth when I did not. I’ll preserve it here in safe keeping for him and all his friends until they are ready to remember it again.

Originally Published on April 16th 2011.

As 2011 comes to a close, FrumForum plans to re-run some of our best featured pieces from the year. The piece by David Frum discusses whether or not the Founding Fathers would be recognized as libertarians.

Let me toss in my 5 cents worth on the question of whether the Founders were “libertarians.”

This seems to me a question approximately as meaningful as asking whether the Founders would have preferred Macs or PCs: it exports back into the past an entirely alien mental category.

Libertarianism fuses two ideas, one political, one psychological. The political idea is that the central state should be confined within the narrowest possible limits. The psychological idea is that each person should enjoy the widest possible scope to live as he or she thinks best.

Libertarians see these two ideas as very consistent. But that libertarian perspective only feels consistent if you can accept a previous assumption: that the central state is the most important limit on our ability to live as we think best. For most people in most advanced modern democracies, that hypothesis does not ring true. For most people, it’s the bill collector, or the ex-wife, or the boss that imposes the most onerous restraints.

If this tandem set of ideas seems remote even in our modern era, back in the 18th century, each on its own would have been inaccessible, never mind both together.

Start for example with the need to confine government. Modern libertarians draw a very clear line between “the state” and private associations. I.e.: If a town council passes an ordinance requiring all houses to be painted white, that’s an outrageous violation of personal liberty, but if a condominium association adopts such a rule, that’s a reasonable exercise of freedom of association. But suppose you lived in an 18th century New England town, and the town meeting adopted such a rule. Is the town meeting more like the modern town council? Or the condo association?

That distinction, so legible to us, was not nearly so legible in the 18th century. Were the Penn family the “government” of Pennsylvania or its owners? Even at the highest level, things were fuzzy. The king of England was yes clearly equivalent to something we’d call “the state.” But Parliament? Was that “the state” also? Or was it more like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: a permanent standing body to monitor the government and with some ability to protest and block the government’s actions?

The fact is that the concept of the “state” as presented in some modern libertarian writing owes much more to 19th century German ideas than to the 18th century Anglo-American legacy. In 18th century Britain, the question of whether ministers owed obedience to the king or to Parliament was a blurry and uncertain one. In 19th century Germany and Austro-Hungary, the question was clear: ministers obeyed the monarch. Period. “The state” as experienced by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek was something outside civil society, something that society could not reliably control, and therefore had to be contained. A John Adams might think of the king of England that way, but that’s not how he’d think of the legislature of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Libertarian psychology would have been even more indigestible to the 18th century mind than libertarian politics. Libertarianism argues that each individual should enjoy the widest possible scope to live as he or she thinks best. It’s an attractive ideal, one widely shared by 21st century people. Modern liberals share the libertarian commitment to “autonomy,” as this ideal is generally called – they just disagree about the institutions needed to support autonomy.

But to an American of the Founding generation, the ideal of autonomy would have contradicted four of the most fundamental physical and psychic facts of life:

• Latinity
• Calvinism
• material scarcity and
• slaveholding

Let’s take them in turn…

Elite Americans of the Founding generation were deeply shaped – not literally by Roman ideas, but by the 18th century understanding of Roman ideas. Here’s a perfect example: George Washington’s favorite play was Joseph Addison’s Cato, published in 1713. Washington adapted words from that play in his famous speech quelling the Newburgh mutiny in 1783. Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” was likewise a paraphrase of a speech from Addison’s play. Ditto Nathan Hale’s “I only regret I have but one life to give for my country.” So – influential, right?

And what was the message of that play? That the most precious thing in life is honor. And what is honor? It is the esteem of the wise and the good. Better to die in a way that earns the admiration of others than to live without that admiration. It is hard to imagine a more radical antipode to Ayn Rand’s formula, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

Less elite Americans of the Founding generation were shaped less by Addison and the Latin classics than by religious traditions heavily tinged by Calvinism.

If ever a religious tradition emphasized the danger of giving scope to the individual will, Calvinism was that tradition:

Man, having been corrupted by his fall, sins voluntarily, not with reluctance or constraint; with the strongest propensity of disposition, not with violent coercion; with the bias of his own passions, and not with external compulsion: yet such is the depravity of his nature that he cannot be excited and biased to anything but what is evil… (From Institutes of the Christian Religion).

It would be hard to imagine a mental outlook less conducive to the libertarian celebration of individual choice than that bequeathed by Calvinism not only to New England Puritanism but also to the “hardshell Baptists” of the South – such as for example the parents of Abraham Lincoln.

Only a very few Americans of the Founding generation enjoyed anything like material security. While most white Americans enjoyed a higher standard of living than European peasants, that comparative abundance was a desperately precarious state. An American who drank too much, who had too many children, who got into a fight and suffered a wound that could be infected – in short anyone who did not tightly control his impulses – risked disaster not only for himself or herself, but also for his or her loved ones. In such a world, the psychology of modern libertarianism – the desire to live unrestrained by any force outside oneself – would be seen by most as an invitation to self-destruction.

Libertarianism is very much a movement of post-1945 affluent society America, a society that has developed birth control and drug rehab, antibiotics and antidepressants. We are a society abounding in second chances. 18th century America was a society in which a personal misstep could easily lead to premature and unpleasant death. Self-actualization through self-expression was a concept not imaginable until GDP per capita rose many, many thousands of dollars higher than the level prevailing in 1776.

Fourth and finally: the libertarian ideal was psychologically unavailable to 18th century Americans because 18th century America was a slaveholding society.

If a libertarian is one who believes, as I suggested at the outset, that each person should be free to live as he or she thinks best, then a libertarian in 1776 would have been obliged to be an abolitionist. After all, the one-fifth of Americans who were defined as property on the eve of the revolution were obviously unfree to live as they thought best.

Yet it’s a very striking fact that the language that to our ears sounds most “libertarian” in the Founding generation tended most often to issue from those most committed to slavery. By contrast, the Founding Fathers who sound most “statist” — Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams — tended also to be most hostile to slavery.

This disjunction is more than some odd little paradox of history. It is a resounding klaxon warning of the enormous gap between the 18th century mindset and our own. Samuel Johnson jeered at the American colonists: “How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson’s accusation of hypocrisy is obviously well-founded, but there is something more going on here than hypocrisy. It was precisely the intimate awareness of the horror of unfreedom — and possibly guilt for the denial of freedom to others — that inspired the passionate concern for liberty among so many slaveholders. When Patrick Henry said that he would rather be dead than share the fate of the 75 slaves he owned, he was not engaging in metaphor. But he was also not expressing 21st century libertarianism.

One last thing needs to be said to enter into the mind of 18th century Americans.

Most 18th century Americans originated on an island that had been one of the most politically unstable kingdoms in Europe. Between 1640 and 1745, the British executed one king, and sent a second into exile. The British Isles suffered three invasions backed by foreign powers: one in 1688, another in 1715, a third in 1745. They were governed by three different foreign-origin royal families (Stuart, Orange, and Hanover), plus a native military dictatorship. They had experienced a succession of radical changes in church organization, almost equally radical changes in land owning patterns.

In the years after 1689, however, that same country steadily evolved into the most stable in Europe. The dynasty established in 1714 lasts until the present day. Britain had a population only one-third that of its great power rival, France. Yet Britain built a military-fiscal state that fought and inflicted defeat after defeat upon the French.

Yes for sure there were Americans who, following John Trenchard the author of Cato’s Letters, reviewed this history and saw the creeping menace of Big Government. Some of the Anti-Federalists of the 1780s do seem to have thought this way.

But if “Founders” refers to the people who designed the government Americans actually instituted in the 1780s, then I think it’s safe to say that most of the Founders accepted these British achievements as achievements to emulate: not only Alexander Hamilton, but also James Madison. (The Bank of the United States that was destroyed by Andrew Jackson was chartered by President Madison.)

The people of the 18th century retained intense memories of what Europe had looked like before the growth of states: not a libertarian paradise, but a marauder’s free-fire zone in which dynasts and warlords despoiled the weak and disorganized. The Founding generation had absorbed the Enlightenment ideals of John Locke. But Locke had taught that the state was the vindicator of natural rights, not the enemy of those rights.

From Locke’s Second Treatise:

If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom? Why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power? To which it is obvious to answer, that though in the state of nature he hath such a right, yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others: for all being kings as much as he, every man his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers: and it is not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property

Locke did not argue against government. He argued against arbitrary government, against the divine right of kings.

Although political stability had thickened in Britain by the 1770s, the Founders had a vivid example of a stateless world before their eyes: the world of the American Frontier. That was a world of violence, not a world of freedom. They had seen in the 1780s a real possibility of the breakup of the Colonies into distinct and then warring sovereignties like those of Europe. The Constitution represented a rejection of both those futures. The Founders were state-builders, very much in the model of the British statesmen of the 18th century. And if the government they built has become too big and too expensive, if the libertarian impulse summons us to take action to contain and constrain that government, very well let us take up the task. But we can do that task without duping ourselves with a false history that denies the reality of the past and – ironically – belittles the Founders’ actual achievements by measuring them against standards they would surely have rejected, if they had ever understood them.

Originally Published on December 31, 2010.