Time again to defend the ancien régime
America does not negotiate with terrorists.* Unless, of course, they’ve been elected to Congress.
The terrorists threatening to blow up the U.S. and world economy over paying debts the country has already incurred have demands. And hostages.
“House Republicans decided to hold the economy hostage to slash assistance for low-income Americans while protecting tax cuts for the wealthy,” asserts E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. “That’s a factual statement, not a partisan complaint.”
The rest of Dionne’s Monday column details the hypocrisy at the heart of conservative backsliders’ demands for deficit reduction. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wants the Trump-era tax cuts made permanent, “adding $3.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade.”
McCarthy demands cuts to domestic discretionary spending that impact poorer Americans. Republicans want work requirements before The Irresponsibles may receive government benefits or they’ll trigger their MAGA suicide vests.
“The fact that Americans with the lowest incomes are political pawns in this exercise is a moral stain on our country,” Dionne laments. But besides citing Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty Is the Point,” he lacks the space to delve into why the GOP feels obliged to punch down.
I don’t. The Irresponsibles are always the deal-breaker. Like the caste system, meritocracy rationalizes inequality, social station, entrenched hierarchies, and rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. Republicans mean to protect the ownership class from the rabble.
They do know this is the United States of America, right?
I’ve written about the meritocratic jungle since my earliest days in blogging:
But fellow citizens who need help succeeding in the private sector deserve only pity, if that. It’s the law of the meritocratic jungle. Social Darwinism. If they aren’t smart enough, talented enough, disciplined enough, educated enough or well-born enough it’s because they are Irresponsibles. Helping them enables their dependency and unjustly burdens the more virtuous and successful.
Worse, a society that taxes the able to help the less able disincentivizes success by responsible conservatives, deprives them of their freedom, tilts the nation towards socialism, and fosters personal weakness.
If there’s one thing conservatives cannot abide, it’s personal weakness. Ask Bill Bennett or Rush Limbaugh.
In The Great Risk Shift Jacob Hacker explores what he dubs the “Personal Responsibility Crusade,” finding its roots in the insurance industry. Pooling risk among policyholders was once the point of insurance, like spreading the costs of national defense so that no citizen had to bear the burden of buying his own tank or fighter-bomber. One downside was an obscure insurance concept called moral hazard: “Protecting people against risks reduces the care people exercise in avoiding those risks.” It’s a potential risk the insurance industry deals with through properly designed programs.
But by the 1980s, Hacker contends, moral hazard became the conservative justification for dismantling New Deal-era programs that pool risk in the private sector.
“Insurance had been justified as a way of aiding the unfortunate – now it was criticized as a way of coddling the irresponsible. Insurance had been understood as a partial solution to social problems like unemployment and poverty in old age – now it was condemned as worsening the very problems it was meant to solve.”
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Insure him against famine, and he’ll have no incentive to fish. Insure him against illness and he’ll overconsume health care, driving up health care costs and inefficiency, dragging down the economy.
Serve The Economy or perish. What’s more, terrorism in the defense of meritocracy is no vice!
*Another lie we tell “exceptional” selves.