Blog posts do not necessarily do justice to a thinker. But trying to shrink your thoughts in a limited space is a good exercise for a thinker indeed: synthesis forces you to select, cut, and clarify.
Bruce Bartlett now blogs at the New York Times Economix blog. One of his latest pieces is “A Conservative Case for the Welfare State”. Such a case has been made in the past too: most prominently, by the intellectual leader of neo-conservatives, Irving Kristol, who wanted the welfare state to be put at the service of conservatives “principles.”
Bartlett’s endorsement of the welfare state is quite different. He doesn’t attempt to steer welfare paternalism in a conservative direction. He defends the welfare state qua the welfare state and maintains that Conservatives—or better to say: Republicans—should do likewise because “Republican presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower through George H.W. Bush accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state and sought to manage it properly and fund it adequately”. Conservatism has often been described as politics without a theory, but arguments ex authoritate making an appeal to politicians rather than to philosophers are somewhat novel, particularly when the names named are those of Eisenhower and of Bush Sr., neither of whom appeared to have a particularly coherent political vision.
Bartlett comes out against policies that, following the late Milton Friedman, are not trying to remove the welfare state from the political scene, but rather trying to reshape it to make it more effective. Neither social security “privatization” nor “school vouchers” would override compulsory savings or compulsory education. They would just introduce some competitive elements in the system, bringing us back to a point that wasn’t made by any arch-conservative Republican but by the common patron saint of all families of contemporary liberalism: John Stuart Mill.