Democracy and Deception

by Will Wilkinson on March 17, 2005

There was a lot wrong with Max Sawicky’s part in his WSJ debate with Tyler. This bit in particular exemplifies a mode of thought that really bugs me, and ought to bug people who care about democracy:

. . . the mission of the public sector in my view goes well beyond aid to the poor. Even in those terms, I pity the poor who wind up isolated in a ghetto of means-tested programs. Programs for the poor isolate their beneficiaries politically and end up poorly supported.

Here we have a nice statement of the principle that it is politically necessary to delude a broad swathe of the electorate into thinking they’re getting something out of a “social insurance” scheme, when, in fact, they get less than nothing, so that they will support welfare payments to people who really need it. The problem with means-tested welfare benefits is: big benefits will not be democratically popular, so, insofar as it is possible, the issue must be taken out of the domain of democratic choice.

Last night at the AFF panel on social security, Dean Baker made some point about how popular Social Security-as-we-know-it is, and that we live in a democracy, so if you don’t like it, well, too bad. I thought this was an extremely disingenous argument. From what I could make of him, Baker is an ideologue like Sawicky, and if it turned out that the democratic public became persuaded to radically alter the historical treasure of social policy that is Social Security, Baker would not just shrug and say, “Oh well, that’s democracy. The General Will has spoken!”

  • Robert: the Tyler quote is spurious. (Just one of those little things that drives me nuts...)
  • Mike
    Yglesias--

    You are evading the issue. You missed the possability where there is a change in public opinion and there is a not so generous means tested benefit or perhaps any benefit at all. In these cases, Baker would probably not say "oh well, thats democracy". So the attitude still comes off as disingenuous.
  • monkyboy
    I think people who "care about democracy" should be disturbed that all it takes for corporations to get bills passed that would never be approved by a vote of the people is to slip Tom Delay and his cronies a few bucks.

    And Will, your arguments about SS in the above post are borderline lies. A worker entering the workforce in 1935 had about a 60% chance of living to 65 and retiring. People who hit 65 back then were expected to live about 13 years. The life expectancy of someone 65 today is about 16 years.

    Let the fight to loot Social Security go...it's over. Maybe you should switch to arguing that drilling right to the Arctic Reserve should be given to Republican supporting companies for nothing because it's the moral thing to do.

    Who owns the drilling rights now I wonder???
  • The milieu of welfare in general and SS in particular, illustrates the fatal flaw of democracy. Although the “d” word has been used to describe our system for some decades now, the Founders wanted no part of it. It’s the old joke about one sheep and two wolves voting on tonight’s meal. The following quote says it best:
    "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." [Alexander Tyler]
  • I think you're sort of missing the point about how these two things that annoy you go together. Dean Baker (or so I'm guessing) doesn't have a strong ideological commitment to Social Security, as such. Rather, he has a strong ideological commitment to Social Security's guarantee of relatively generous benefits to poor retirees, disabled people, and orphans. He also believes (à la Sawicky) that the only way to secure those objectives in the context of American democracy is to achieve them within the context of the much larger Social Security system.

    If public opinion underwent some kind of dramatic turnaround and it all of a sudden became the case that voters loved generous, but means-tested, income supports, then Baker's attitude toward Social Security would probably change. There's real deference to public opinion here along with real ideology.
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