It’s a question William Voegeli asks in the new book Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State. Ramesh Ponnuru discusses Voegeli’s work in the latest National Review:
His new book begins by asking: What would count as enough? “All the bitter accusations about the insufficiency of our social programs must point to a criterion of sufficiency, defining a completely adequate welfare state.”
Except that, he discovers, they don’t. Liberalism has no such “limiting principle.” Its agenda, like that of Samuel Gompers, is always: “More.” The tax code is never sufficiently progressive. The government is never meeting enough human needs. One might think that as a country grows richer it would need a welfare state less and less. But that thought is rarely voiced in a politics influenced by liberalism, which constantly finds new needs for government to meet and can find no reason not to meet them. “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few,” said Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
If that attitude didn’t generate a sufficient set of problems on its own, Voegeli, as Ponnuru notes, documents another flaw in the big-government mindset.
Voegeli continues, “In the 78 years since FDR promised to try one method, and ‘if it fails, admit it frankly and try another,’ there is not one clear instance of a welfare state program that liberals by consensus came to regard as a failure, to be frankly admitted and abandoned.” Programs have ended only “as a result of political victories by their opponents.”
When voters impose limits on government, such as caps on taxes, liberals tend to say that they are overreacting. Voegeli makes a nice point in response: “Liberals are in a weak position to complain that the voters resort to sweeping, indiscriminate measures to curtail government spending. Since liberalism itself offers no criteria to distinguish between more and less deserving programs, it’s churlish to abuse the voters for coming up with the wrong answer, when they received so little guidance from liberals about how to find the right one.”
