What a hoot! Leave it to the American Enterprise Institute to declare as a scholar someone who can set up and knockdown liberal strawmen in such a hilarious fashion. It’s difficult to know where to begin in critically examining his opinion piece from Sunday, March 22, so let me quickly summarize his thesis and then get right into his gratuitous slams via ill-thought out strawmen. He says the European model “drains too much of the life from life.” He posits that the essential developments of life occur within the institutions of family, community, vocation and faith. Rather than making them the robust and vital, European social policy enfeebles them. Europe has lovely but empty churches. Wonderful day care but less than replacement birthrates. Protected employment but jobs are viewed as but necessary evils enroute to the pleasures of vacations, etc. He asserts that the European view essentially is that the only purpose in life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible until death naturally intrudes. He proceeds to set up the strawmen when he offers his opinion of the defects at the heart of the social democratic agenda.
The “equality premise,” assumes that in a fair society, “different groups of people [defined by race, sex, sexual preference, etc] will naturally have the same distribution of outcomes in life [income, education, status, etc.]“ When they don’t, it must be because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. Well sure, but that is true only if all other variables are controlled; there may be those who baldly assert such a premise but more generally it comes into play in drawing conclusions about the absence of equal opportunity or outright discrimination. “Much of the Democratic Party’s proposed domestic legislation assumes this [equality premise] is true.”Logically, is there an error in such a premise? Well, let’s revisit Shockley, et al [Blacks are genetically inferior to Whites, etc.]. Without citing any specifics, Murray suggests that scientific findings will soon ”force the left to abandon the equality premise.”
These new findings of biology will also invalidate the “New Man” premise ”which says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions.” From whence comes this bit of straw?! He cites the example of government programs intended to support fatherless children as an example. He goes on to say that “social democrats will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensible role in human flourishing.” Are there politicians, bureaucrats or others on the left who argue otherwise or assert that government-run creches are the best? No, of course not. Did the 40% of babies born to single mothers in America in 2007 come as a result of government encouragement or “New Man” promoters? On the contrary, they probably came about due to the failure of the “abstinence only” sex education policies pursued over the years that a Republicans have controlled Congress and/or the White House.
The religious right has exercised an overly large influence on government policy during the past decade, attempting to impose their values on American institutions and the behavior of the American people. That is where the futility of the “New Man” premise has been most clearly demonstrated. Church attendance is down, unwed births are up, corporate greed has run rampant, etc. So whose paradigm is failing? The one item on which I can agree with Murray is that people must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured by the “freedom of individuals, acting on their personal abilities, aspirations and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.” It is not social democrats, the left, Democrats or erstwhile Europeans that suck the life from life through social policies and values that limit individual freedom for individuals–it is the religious right and conservatives. On the other hand, the “he who dies with the most toys” perspective on life (not too different from the one Murray chastises the Europeans for) also comes from the right–not the religious right, of course, but the “free enterprise” right. Maybe the American Enterprise folks are comfortable with that?
Tags: American Enterprise Institute, equality premise, left, New Man premise, progressive, Shockley
Leave a Reply