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All of us at some point have asked ourselves where we fit in. Sometimes fitting in only means getting along in a small social group; the ultimate question for society, though, is how do we help each human being fit within the larger group that constitutes our culture? Without human connectedness life can be both difficult and solitary-and discouraging. When Richard Cornuelle wrote Reclaiming the American Dream his intention was to explain the role of being connected in the most direct fashion: by voluntarily helping one another. He felt he could turn his observations and comments into a "political" opportunity, to prove a point and offer a real-world example. Yet there is also a legitimate sense in which Cornuelle intended his book to be apolitical, or more accurately anti-political. For him, the essence of volunteerism was to keep politics and the government out of people's affairs. With governmental intrusion comes money, bureaucracy, distant administrators instead of those who act directly, and arbitrary standards and statistical goals meant to establish a one-size-fits-all prototype. The bureaucratic attitude morphs into the prosaic jurisdictional and intellectual conceit of "we know best" that will brook no intrusion and no review. This immodesty becomes not just an assertion, but a fact. For Cornuelle, bureaucratic governance proceeds to the extreme detriment of the many services that we would voluntarily, and far more effectively, render one another in its absence. As Cornuelle explains, with the bureaucratic model the essence of volunteerism-caring-is largely lost, and in its place is created obligation of the most perfunctory kind. Study after study has shown that those who successfully help the poor, the disadvantaged, the handicapped, or even those just ignorant of some portion of society's avenues, are those who care about them and engage in their efforts for concrete (and almost certainly to some extent, altruistic) reasons. On the other hand, those in this arena who instead see primarily a job, a paycheck, and secure retirement and health benefits, cannot effectively fulfill the needs of this sector of society by the very status of their relationship to those within it. They perform a service, surely, but their connection and thus their effectiveness is far less certain. Conservatives, who were rising to intellectual prominence at the time of the initial publication of Reclaiming the American Dream in 1965, investigated many aspects of government's activities and saw a primary problem: volunteerism could not exist comfortably in a statist society where government was supposed to take care of all those who did not or could not take care of themselves. Aptly enough, these analysts saw government inhibiting or even driving private efforts out of the marketplace and felt the merit of Cornuelle's ideas and the practicality of their application; they integrated them into their own larger paradigm of less government that they hoped meant less distortion of private activities. Cornuelle's concept is that big is not better in a society where grand designs are a political disease. He argues that millions of small efforts, made day after day, are what make the difference so that caring becomes second nature and self-help grows. The community existed before the state; 256 the caring individual connection prevailed before the advent of the dispassionate and unconnected machinery of government. The underlying problem for any public effort (that is, any political effort) is to decide when a given individual cannot take care of himself. But, because of the nature of government programs, which are supposed to be utterly egalitarian, policy has to be designed to reach out equally to everyone. That allows a lot of people to self-select, causing several relatively obvious detrimental consequences. It can also short-circuit the capabilities of others who are told they need help (often by those wishing to ensure the full reach of their bureaucratic franchise), and who unnecessarily and unfortunately succumb to those declarations. Inevitably, the definition of when someone was unable to help themselves expanded whenever any particular assistance program took shape and some people at the fringe did not qualify. Cornuelle saw new, more generous and more comprehensive programs become "necessary" to remedy the situation of those few who were left out; as programs expanded, there were more new people on the edges, and they were also incorporated in a never-ending circle of enlarging government "help." A culture of dependency was born. Government caring grew, unabated-simply because there was always someone left on the periphery, and always some political figure or bureaucrat who knew these problem citizens (or citizen problems) could be helped. To the mid-century liberal, seeing the world as it could be, there was nothing we could not afford, and there was nothing we could not fix. Life did not "happen;" and programs grew inexorably. The value and success of government assistance began to self-destruct-in the broadest understanding of government's purpose-as a result of President Franklin Roosevelt's political offer of a "New Deal" in the 1930s. At that time, because of the debilitating effects of the Great Depression, the American people were told and began to believe that security was more important than freedom-that high levels of taxation and government control of the economy were necessary to protect their lives and livelihoods. This development limited the necessity and reduced the opportunity for us to take care of ourselves. It was the genesis of the culture of dependency. The growth of this culture conferred a spurious moral superiority on liberals who, because they offered the needy direct support instead of enhanced opportunities for self-help, eagerly claimed the mantle of compassion. (How great was the political motivation in this course is a question for another place, but one that might be profitably addressed from many points of view.) Cornuelle takes an opposite tack. He writes that social problems that are cultural as well as individual are best addressed on an elemental level. Doing so involves making repeated assessments of and adjustments to measures of actual assistance while emphasizing the opportunity to those being helped to bolster their own situations and character, as argued in Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (Chapter 35) and Charles Murray's In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government (Chapter 31). These are things that government (and particularly politicians) are less well equipped to do than might be hoped. As welfarism develops, intellectual/political conflicts of interest may arise in a most unseemly manner and a fatal intellectual conceit can arise. As well, a superficial compassion born of political habit and perfunctory judgment, not concern, can distort what eventuates. In Cornuelle's view, volunteerism addresses social problems by serving as an alternative to, not an adjunct of, the state. He sees the advantages of a competition of ideas and actions (such as school choice advocates offer, who today challenge the entrenched public education monopoly). Bureaucrats do not care, do not see, and do not act as volunteers do. This is not to paint all 257 bureaucrats as bad, only as different. Their power, their resources, their view, and their mandate are all different. The bureaucratic mindset developed into the mid-century Democrat method of government assistance: if there is a problem, the first thing to do is deliver money to fix it. Cornuelle sees things differently: solutions that address causes should be the first order of business; in the government model they are generally the last. Regrettably, on the political stage wholesale problem solving is never personal and thus it is ultimately less effective (but much easier to implement) than local answers to local problems. Individual problems, it is most important to understand, have specific causes. The government, however, never starts at step one: rational assessment of the root of the problem and the development of some direct action to alter, reverse, or adjust the antecedent cause in order to obtain a different and hopefully more permanent result. Cornuelle recognizes that dispassionate and doctrinaire government is most of the problem. Government, by its very nature, often prevents real solutions. He also understands that the political effect of more government, encompassed in proliferating programs, is always electorally appealing. Politicians find it hard not to offer or support "free" government services or handouts, especially once such programs are established and the public has become accustomed to them. The political answer to programs that are not working is to simply make them bigger-the reason for failure must be that we are not doing enough; it could never be that we are already, inappropriately, doing too much, or worse, simply doing something wrong. Two observations as to why public administration goes awry: Parkinson's second law, that expenditures rise to meet income, and humorist Will Rogers's commentary that we are lucky we don't get all the government we pay for (government waste being good from at least this perspective). But neither offers effective countermeasures to big government, other than that matters will improve with the reduction of taxes and/or a reduction in spending-that is, by starving the beast or suffocating it. Cornuelle believes in both methods, but he also argues that conservatives have to offer viable alternatives in addition to the suggestion of reduced government involvement. Cutting taxes, of course, often means cutting already existing services, services the liberals are exceedingly clever at calling "entitlements." How many would vote to rescind something poor or disadvantaged people are "entitled" to? (These issues are discussed more directly in Wilhelm Ropke's A Humane Economy [Chapter 33].) This is where Cornuelle steps in with his observation that many government assistance programs are over-intrusive and, as a result, over-funded, and rarely accomplish what they were designed to do in the first place. If they did, as is somewhat obvious, both the programs and the bureaucracies that support them would self-extinguish. Cornuelle notes that to justify both their existence and the expansion of their franchise,
[t]he government sector's boosters overstate public problems. They The usefulness of these claims, for political purposes, is self-evident,
yet the fallacy of their substance is equally manifest. Reordering, which
essentially means reducing, the efforts and the resources used to support
the government's agenda was necessary. Here Cornuelle anticipates by forty
years former Congressman Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America and
overt
[a]bove all we need an intellectual revolution before its practical Since first expressing those views in 1965, we have experienced the
beginnings of both revolutions. But we still have far to go, and Cornuelle
wants us to persist with intention. He identifies the overpowering force of
government, which often stifles private initiative simply because those in
the private sector are grateful to be relieved of the burdens of their
exertions. But Cornuelle knew and
in the end the only practical way to make a modern state less large was Richard Cornuelle acted on his beliefs. His book is a primer on how we can do the same and change both government and America to reclaim them for ourselves. About the Author Available through: |
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