After Blair Its The Culture Stupid - Road to the Middle Class

WE KNOW now that the Third Way was the left’s backhanded admission that the Reagan and Thatcher years marked the end of left-wing economics. No longer could center-left politicians propose to direct the economy from the top, backing winners and assuming that only an activist government could keep the economy from running off the rails.

In fact the opposite is true. The government’s job (and it is a vital one) is to set the legal framework for enterprise and then get out of the way.

The years that led up to the Reagan/Thatcher revolution were the years of the Broken Economy, Andrew Neil writes. People thought that the healthy growth of the nineteenth century and the immediate post-war era was a thing of the past. We had entered an era of limits,they realized, and the job of the elite was to manage decline.

Baloney, said Reagan and Thatcher, using the ideas of Hayek, Friedman, and Mises. The only area of limits, they argued, was the limited grasp of economics and capitalism on the part of the academic middle class. And then they took power and showed ’em.

But now the center-left gets it, or at least the political cadre does. Or at least it sorta does.

So we won that one.

As a result the era of the Broken Economy is over. Now we have entered the era of the Broken Society. As Neil writes:

During the Blair–Brown decade social concerns — what kind of society we have become — have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

Now, as then, Britain is in a bigger mess than the United States, and the reason is the same now as it was then. The British people are more in thrall to the power and the influence of the academic middle class than Americans in the United States.

But the problem, the breakdown of the family and of society at the bottom and the formation of a feral underclass, is the same. And it issues from the same cause.

The cause is the progressive welfare state. Today the government showers money upon the non-working poor. It rewards poor people for failure and it utterly marginalizes lower-class males.

As Patricia Morgan argues,

[T]he state, by providing extensive welfare provision, by financing child-care services and by taxing families on an ever-greater proportion of their income, provides strong incentives for families to break up rather than to hold together, and to form family relationships that are hidden from the authorities. Government policy has crowded out voluntary welfare within families and caused otherwise law-abiding people to commit fraud on a very extensive scale.

The fact is, she argues, women cannot afford to bring up children on their own. Nearly all women need help in time or money, or both. A mother can either get help from the father, civilizing him into a provider and a role model for her children. Or, in today’s society, she can get it from the state.

The result, we know, is the Broken Society of feral children and single parenthood that infects our inner cities and is always threatening to break out into the general middle class.

Today in Britain, conservative commentators are worried that Gordon Brown has the tactical advantage. They worry that David Cameron’s conservatives are concentrating too much on wooing upper-middle-class voters with talk about work-life balance and global warming. They warn that Cameron is creating an opening for Brown to pose as the friend of the middle class who will mend the Broken Society that threatens peoples’ children with street violence and a lousy education.

Maybe. But the center left still does not understand that it is the very structure, the very nature of the programs that they have brought into government that are the cause of the problem.

And anyway, if Brown actually fixed the Broken Society, that would realize the vision of the Conservatives.

But is it not likely the Gordon Brown in Britain, or Hillary Clinton in the United States will solve the problem of the underclass or of lousy schools.

To solve the problem of the Broken Society will require that the left gives up its patronage and its power: over the poor, over education, over health care. Before it does that it will try every top-down government program in the world.

But the conservative answer will remain the same. There is such a thing as society; it is just not the same as the state. The health of a society comes from the strength of its little platoons, the civic society of voluntary give and take, of charitable giving. It is precisely what big government programs crowd out.

And I don’t know a single liberal friend who gets it.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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