Civil Society: The Moral Argument for Limiting Government

By JOSEPH G. LEHMAN
Editor's note: This essay was originally published in The Heritage Foundation's October 2009 booklet "Indivisible: Social and Economic Foundations of American Liberty."

Moral imperatives usually trump economic arguments. The charitable impulse to help the needy arises from a moral imperative. Those two facts help explain why it's extremely difficult to fix, scale back or replace government social programs even when they are indisputably inefficient, unaffordable or even downright harmful to those they are intended to help. This endlessly frustrates fiscal conservatives who want to solve these budget-busting problems.

But, unlike their social-conservative brethren, fiscal conservatives are more accustomed to making economic arguments than moral arguments. Instead, we should be making the moral case for downsizing the welfare state and letting civil society have some room to breathe. Welfare is not just a fiscal issue. It is a decidedly moral one as well.

Fiscal and social conservatives alike generally agree on three broad goals for programs intended to help people beset by poverty, addiction, homelessness and other special hardships. Those goals are to improve the programs' success rates, reduce their cost and make their recipients less dependent on government. Let's look at the moral case for such reforms.

Movement From Personal Outreach to Government Services

To get some perspective, we first have to look at the history of aid in America. The contemporary term "social services" helps tell the story, because the term was not used in the Colonial and Founding eras. In those days, the closest analogue would have been "charity." Virtually all charity was funded and administered privately, apart from government. It was typical for charities to operate with explicit religious motivations and goals. Religious and nonreligious charities tended to extend aid coupled with close monitoring, accountability and relationships between recipients and givers. Providing charity was a virtuous act that could be individual or corporate. Helping the needy per se was not considered a public service of government, but rather the job of voluntary institutions in what we would now call "civil society."

Two things occurred in the evolution from "charity" to "social services." First, the nature of some charities changed in response to ideological and societal trends in the second half of the 1800s. Charities arose that dispensed aid while de-emphasizing spiritual matters and religious motivations. Many made few demands of recipients or required little follow-up with them. Recipients naturally gravitated to charities that offered the most aid with the least strings attached. This paved the way for the second change.

Government's involvement in aid programs was legitimized, in part, by the trend to separate material aid from spiritual aid and accountability. Government had to remain officially nonsectarian. Government grew to assume more and more of what had once been the near-exclusive province of churches, families and religious and nonreligious aid societies. Aid became part of the public policy and political agendas, and eventually became divorced from the private moral and religious contexts that had nurtured it.

But this didn't happen immediately. By 1919, the term "social service" had begun to take hold as a nonreligious umbrella term covering different kinds of private charity as well as government's growing role. Still, the term didn't so much redefine "charity" as re-contextualize it. Charity was still private, but it was now merely one way to help needy people. Government added "social services" to its growing list of functions. This didn't necessarily expand society's capacity for charitable work, however, since private charities began to understand their role, at least in part, by what the government was not doing.

Counterproductive Government Programs

Government social programs multiplied, and spending grew dramatically with great popular and political support, particularly in the 1930s and 1960s. The new aid philosophy, dominated by government, tended to crowd out charities that connected aid to spiritual matters, accountability and personal relationships.

But persistent poverty and a growing underclass invited skepticism. In his 1984 book "Losing Ground," Charles Murray persuasively demonstrated the perverse incentives of government welfare programs. They hurt many people who needed help the most. Marvin Olasky, in 1992, chronicled two centuries of poverty-fighting in his book "The Tragedy of American Compassion." He concluded that government programs could not match the success of private programs that employ spiritual and relational components. In 1995, Robert Rector and William Lauber estimated the cumulative cost of the three-decade "War on Poverty" at $5.4 trillion, which was more than the U.S. spent fighting World War II.

In 1996, Congress and President Bill Clinton seemed to respond to Murray's (and others') findings by placing work requirements and time limits on welfare recipients. This victory was a step in the right direction, but only a step.

The positive shift in welfare policy showed the power of moral arguments. We can further harness moral arguments to shift welfare policy even closer to the ideal where private charity, greatly expanded, reduces poverty so much that little justification remains for government social programs.

It's a tall order, but not an unknown ideal. As Olasky documented, it's an ideal to which we were once much closer. To move toward it, conservatives must consider moral arguments anew.

This means fiscal conservatives, especially, must embrace the legitimacy of moral arguments and use them. Moral arguments, not merely economic ones, have produced the major changes in social service policies. The moral argument for welfare reform does not focus so much on how much is spent, how much is saved or how efficient a policy is. Rather, it seeks to answer this question: What policy will, in the long run, best help those in need?

How Best to Help Those in Need

When people believed more money was the key to helping people more, the policy they supported was to involve government and its vast funding apparatus. Decades later, when Murray and others showed that the resulting programs were harming those they were supposed to help, the programs were modified by adding some of what Murray said was missing. Economic arguments were made for all these changes, but those only augmented the moral imperative of how best to help needy people.

The lesson is that moral arguments ultimately matter more than economic ones, at least in public policy debates. Durable policy changes don't appear out of nowhere. Most of the time, they arise from political changes that, in turn, flow from social movements. Social movements in America have been driven mainly by moral ideas framed in terms of how to help people, not merely by cold logic, hard economic data and the bottom line. It was principally moral convictions and arguments that drove the social movements behind abolition, civil rights, women's suffrage, prohibition, labor unions and environmental activism. These social movements all produced major changes in public policy.

The contemporary political Left may be more successful at framing its policy goals in terms of how to help people, but the political Right has its own successes to build on. School choice probably would not have progressed in the last two decades without compelling moral arguments for permitting parents to choose the safest and best schools for their children. Economic analyses were necessary, but they would not have been sufficient.

Government's Proper DomainAnother moral issue concerns the nature of government itself and the morality of using government to accomplish certain ends, such as reducing poverty. The sanctioned use of force is what distinguishes government from all other institutions. For some functions, force, whether direct or indirect, may be necessary — even morally imperative. But the issue is complicated in liberal democracies, where the use of force is rarely overt. As a result, it's easy to opt for the coercive power of the state without quite realizing it. Whether or not we intend it, however, every tax, expenditure, regulation, police action and mandate is ultimately backed by the legal use of force. When people do not comply, they are either forced to comply or met with the threat of force. And the use of force always has moral implications.

Different societies extend aid to needy people in different ways. The driving force behind aid in a society can locate that society on a spectrum that runs between two poles: compulsion and voluntarism. Near the compulsion pole lie societies in which the state compels citizens to help others through taxes and other means. Near the voluntary pole lie societies characterized by citizens who help one another without being forced.

Societies near the compulsion pole require expansive governments powerful enough to force people to do what they might otherwise not do. Societies near the voluntary pole have more limited governments. Put another way, in some societies, the government constrains its people. In others, the people constrain their government.

All governments employ force, but at one end of the spectrum, the force primarily restrains people from unjustly harming others. At the other end, the force routinely compels people to do what might be virtuous if it were voluntary. Somewhere along the spectrum, a government ceases to be limited.

The distinction is not merely academic. It has practical consequences. As we've seen in the case of welfare, for instance, when certain forms of "help" are taken over by government, they become less helpful. They can even become harmful. The problem is rooted in using the state to deliver charity in the first place. Charity is an exercise of private virtue. And virtue requires freedom.

Therefore, it's impossible to force someone to be charitable.

If something can be accomplished voluntarily rather than coercively, surely we ought to prefer voluntarism. And with regard to "social services," we have every reason to argue that these can not only be performed, but be performed better, by voluntary charities. The moral burden of proof should lie squarely on those who seek to replace voluntarism with redistributive coercion.

Of course, moral arguments are grounded in some moral vision, some notion of ultimate truth, but not everyone agrees on the source of ultimate truth. Some do not believe in God and others conceive of God differently. One brief essay is not the place to settle ultimate questions, but perhaps we can affirm principles upon which all can stand.

Social movements draw their power from moral conviction. Fiscal conservatives must not leave it to social conservatives alone to advance moral arguments. Those who sought abolition and civil rights for political or economic reasons were successful because they worked in league with those who advocated those goals on moral and often explicitly religious grounds.

Effecting durable change in public policy by means of economic analysis alone is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Uniting with a new focus on moral suasion and a better articulation of the moral implications of government force is what will win the day.

Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle wants to do something extreme. She wants to abolish the Department of Education (DOE). Is she crazy?

Absolutely not. Abolishing the monstrous department with a proposed 2011 budget of $77.8 Billion (yes, that was Billion), employs 4,800 people and garners little-to-no academic results year after year is far from crazy. It is common sense.

National Review writer Mona Charen wrote an article this week on the exemplary success of our astute iGeneration (I should copyright that...). She explains how well the billions of tax dollars are helping to further the academic development of the youth:

"All of this spending has done nothing to improve American education. Between 1973 and 2004, a period in which federal spending on education more than quadrupled, mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rose just 1 percent for American 17-year-olds. Between 1971 and 2004, reading scores remained completely flat.

Comparing educational achievement with per-pupil spending among states also calls into question the value of increasing expenditures. While high-spending Massachusetts had the nation’s highest proficiency scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, low-spending Idaho did very well, too. South Dakota ranks 42nd in per-pupil expenditures but eighth in math performance and ninth in reading. The District of Columbia, meanwhile, with the nation’s highest per-pupil expenditures ($15,511 in 2007), scores dead last in achievement."

So for those thick-headed politicians out there let me make it really easy: more spending does not produce greater academic results. No, really, it doesn't.

What would improve the quality of our educational system? Returning to the classical, patriotic, principled education that previous generations learned. Those generations that established American governance, abolished slavery, defended liberty through two world wars, survived the Great Depression, and ushered America into the greatest industrialization the world has ever seen.

I have a few places we can start.

Remove the negative connotations in history textbooks of words like capitalism, U.S. military, patriotism, and founding fathers. Include negative connotations when teaching about Karl Marx, Hugo Chavez, socialism, and progressives. Remove chapters that discuss Oprah Winfrey and Survivor, and replace with chapters that teach the unabashed principles of George Washington and Ronald Reagan.

In math, get rid of word problems that ask students to come up with the percentage of Arctic ice that will melt if the global temperature continues to increase one-tenth of a degree over the next 50 years. In science, remove the pictures of polar bears sitting on a 4x4 chunk of floating ice and pelicans covered in oil with a caption that includes the word "capitalism" from the classroom walls.

In composition, stop asking students to write about the greatness of China's culture and the lessons Americans can learn from their enlightened society. And finally, at recess, allow the children to hang from the monkey bars, run with a shoelace partially untied, and return the real dodge balls and get rid of the foam balls that cannot fly against the slightest of breezes.

These are humorous examples, but sadly, they are also true. Our American education system continues to fail our children. Abraham Lincoln said it best: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation is the philosophy of the government in the next.” How can we expect to change the path this country is traveling down if we do not change the way the next generation is learning? Education is more than learning, it is discipleship.

The Distance Between the President and the People is Beginning to be Revealed

by DOROTHY RABINOWITZ, Opinion Column of The Wall Street Journal: June 9, 2010

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.

Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.

Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.

Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."

And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."

He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."

Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.

Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration. It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.

It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.

It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.

So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.

It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

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