Clay Olsen’s column, “Democrats mistake government spending for kind-heartedness,” was a conservative attempt to define liberalism as willy-nilly government handouts to the poor. He cites Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and declares it a failure without mentioning its success before former President Ronald Reagan gutted the program. He mentioned Medicare liabilities without mentioning that President Barack Obama and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan proposed to cut the same amount from the program. The big difference in the cuts is that Obama targets fraud on the supply side of Medicare, whereas Ryan proposed exclusively consumer-side cuts, which would increase the copay of every American.
If you compare the age of tax-and-spend liberalism from the 1940s through the 1970s with the age of neoliberal capitalism from the 1980s to today, the former had a strong middle class, strong unions, lower college tuitions, strong liberal arts, social mobility, balanced budgets, tariffs, pensions, a higher minimum wage, lower unemployment and a faster growing economy than anything the right-wing reforms did in the 1980s and 1990s. People have long forgotten that there wasn’t much government before the Great Depression. People have forgotten that the great American middle-class was fought for. The rich did not hand out a middle class. People were shot dead in the streets for trying to unionize this country. In the 1950s, the top employer was GM, which provided high-paying jobs with health care and pensions. There were unions. Today, the No. 1 employer is Wal-Mart, which has 1.5 million workers in poverty. There are no pensions and health care. Vacation time and sick leave take years to accrue. Moreover, the money in food stamps and welfare that conservatives often decry allows CEOs and executives to not pay workers with living wages, let alone middle-class wages. If anything, CEOs and executives are real beneficiaries of the social safety net.
The core of liberalism is the belief in equal opportunity and equal power of voice. When we look around and see one kid who drives to school in a new BMW, travels to Europe, eats well, attends a better public or private school, whose parents are never financially stressed, and then see the kid growing up on food stamps, whose parents are constantly worrying about finances, who lives a desperate childhood with a sense of inferiority, worries about getting shot as he or she walks home from school, whose schools are underfunded, and teachers are underpaid, who never gets to travel and sees nothing but a cave of poverty, we should now know that resources matter. Anyone who genuinely believes in hard work and meritocracy must actively fight for equal opportunity.
Henry David Thoreau famously said, “That government is best which governs least.” Thomas Jefferson said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” Making sure teachers, firefighters and police officers can own a home and retire is not part of big government. The real big government is the massive military and surveillance state. Liberals believe in a social contract: Those who benefit most in society should pay back to maintain equal opportunity. Otherwise, get out! We’ll keep our roads, our firefighters and our universities.
M.J. Walker is a UF alum.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 11/19/2014]
