Yuval Levin on the Welfare State

Yuval Levin is the Editor of National Affairs, which to my mind, is the finest journal of right-of-center domestic policy thinking anywhere.  The writing is superb and the contributors are top notch, resulting in a must-read for anyone seriously interested in the rich field of intellectual conservatism. 

In the issue currently on my coffee table (probably not the most recent), Levin provides an insightful, non-polemical look into the modern welfare state.  Blending both history and analysis, the piece gives credit where credit is due (conservatives have to wrestle with the fact that our grand rise in power occurred at the same time as we created the welfare state) and makes some very sound policy suggestions to conclude it.

Here's a sample from the piece that made me sit back and nod my head: 

"This was not the purpose of our welfare state, but it is among its many unintended consequences. As Irving Kristol put it in 1997, "The secular, social-democratic founders of the modern welfare state really did think that in the kind of welfare state we have today people would be more public-spirited, more high-minded, more humanly ‘fulfilled.'" They were wrong about this for the same reason that their expectations of the administrative state have proven misguided — because their understanding of the human person was far too shallow and emaciated. They assumed that moral problems were functions of material problems, so that addressing the latter would resolve the former, when the opposite is more often the case. And guided by the ethic of the modern left, they imagined that traditional institutions like the family, the church, and the local association were sources of division, prejudice, and backwardness, rather than essential pillars of our moral lives. The failure of the social-democratic vision is, in this sense, fundamentally a failure of moral wisdom.
That is not to say, of course, that it did not produce positive benefits along the way. Indeed, the era in which the social-democratic vision has dominated our politics has hardly been an age of decline for America — it has been, if anything, the American century. And it has been a time of diminishing poverty and rising standards of living. But it is now becoming apparent that this was achieved by our spending our capital (economic, moral, and human) without replenishing it, and that this failure, too, is a defining characteristic of the social-democratic vision."

Read the whole thing.