No, it's not "close the door to
everybody." You're sounding like Geraldo Rivera screaming at
Michelle Malkin. Michelle keeps putting the word "illegal" in
there and Geraldo keeps taking it out-escalating the shouting
match every time. It just makes him look stupid, since Malkin is
an immigrant. But she's a LEGAL one.
Have your papers and come here legally and most Republicans would
be happy. True, the hard-cases would still complain, but there's
not as many as the press and Geraldo would have you believe.
David
"There is no virtue in compulsory government
charity, and
there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who
portrays himself as
"caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the
government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's
willing to try to
do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a
voter who takes pride
in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good
with his own money
-- if a gun is held to his head."--P.
J. O'Rourke
Democrats and Republicans alike are failing to
convince the American people that they have the
answer to their country's problems. Underneath,
however, lies a deeper intellectual confusion. The
two most plausible visions developed by the US
centre-left and centre-right – the "knowledge
economy" and the "ownership society" – lie in
tatters, leaving a void in America's discussion of
its economic future.
On the right, the ownership society has been
disowned. The idea began with Chicago School
libertarian economists who in the 1960s and '70s
devised elaborate private alternatives to the social
insurance programme created by Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal. These ideas lay behind the April budget
plan by Paul Ryan, the Republican chair of the House
of Representatives budget committee.
Yet Mr Ryan's fellow Republicans rushed to distance
themselves from his idea of replacing Medicare with
insurance vouchers set to dwindle in value. This
followed a speedy public repudiation of President
George W. Bush's plan for partial privatisation of
Social Security, the US public pension system, a few
years back. Both events made clear that Americans do
not share the right's vision of replacing public
social insurance with private provision.
The fundamental blow to the ownership society,
however, was the collapse of the bubble economy.
Individual savings accounts, of the kind ownership
society advocated, were devastated by the crash. The
expansion of home ownership, pushed by Republicans
and Democrats alike, also left millions of Americans
"underwater."
Ironically, the closest thing to a victory for the
concept was the 2009 healthcare reform passed by
President Barack Obama, which was modelled on
proposals made in the 1990s by the conservative
Heritage Foundation. Republicans repudiated this
approach for partisan reasons, at the price of
intellectual consistency.
The collapse of this conservative vision should
give the Democrats little comfort, however. Their
idea of the knowledge economy is no more credible.
According to 1990s "third way" progressives on both
sides of the Atlantic, success in winner-take-all
global markets would depend on human capital.
Education was now to be what financial and real
estate assets were to the ownership society.
Yet the story that President Bill Clinton and
British prime minister Tony Blair told of
college-educated individuals thriving in global
labour markets was wrong. To begin with, America's
professionals owe their relative affluence largely
to their protection from offshoring or competition
with immigrants.
Licensing laws limit entry to the guilds of
lawyers, doctors and professors. These remain
old-fashioned crafts, largely untouched by
productivity-enhancing technology. Meanwhile, in the
financial sector, bonuses have gone to old-fashioned
speculators who bet with leveraged money, knowing
the state will socialise their losses.
Most US job growth since the 1990s has been in
three sectors: health, education and government.
Nine of the 10 largest occupations earn less than
the mean hourly wage. Those with the fastest growth
are nurses, home health aides and customer service
clerks. Middle-skill jobs with decent wages have
disappeared, while downward mobility and unskilled
immigration has swollen the low-wage domestic
service sector.
America's struggling workforce faces mass
unemployment, low pay, inadequate benefits and
highly regressive taxation. The centre-right's
ownership society and the centre-left's knowledge
economy are irrelevant to these problems. It is an
insult to tell struggling health aides and store
clerks to supplement their income by investing in
stocks. It is a cruel joke to tell most of them that
they should go to college, become entrepreneurs and
found start-ups.
But alternative strategies have their limits.
Fostering American manufacturing can be justified on
other grounds, but productivity growth ensures it
will provide only a shrinking minority of jobs in
the long run. America's anti-statist culture and
regional and ethnic rivalries limit the kinds of
redistribution, in the form of social programmes,
public services or wage subsidies, that have been
employed in many other developed countries.
Supporters of the ownership society and the
knowledge economy alike have emphasised economic
aspiration above economic security. That might have
seemed plausible during the bubble years, but it
does not fit the conditions of distressed workers in
today's post-crash, slow-growth economy. Whatever
forms the next conservatism and the next liberalism
take in the US, they may be based as much on a
politics of security as the politics of aspiration.
