|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Coercing Our Way to Equality
| Article
# : |
20610 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
2,195 Words |
| Author
: |
Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts holds the William E. Simon Chair in
Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and
International Affairs and is chairman of the Institute for
Political Economy in Washington, D.C. He is also former
assistant secretary of the treasury. |
THE END OF EQUALITY
Mickey Kaus
New York: Basic Books, 1992
512 pp., $27.00
Mickey Kaus, a senior editor at the neoliberal New Republic, is worried about the future of social equality. Now that socialism has collapsed and capitalism is regnant, Kaus argues in The End of Equality that the old liberal prescription of "money equality" achieved through income redistribution no longer makes sense. "Capitalism," he writes, "depends on money inequality as the spur to work," and "it depends on vast inequality as the spur to risktaking." Kaus believes that it is stupid to attempt to frustrate the basic incentives of the economic system. It is especially dumb when the result is to worsen social inequality by creating a large underclass demoralized by a life of living on other people's money. He agrees with Franklin D. Roosevelt that "to dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."
To foster social equality from below, Kaus wants to pull the plug on welfare and replace it with "workfare," a vast and expensive program of job guarantees. To enforce equality from above, he relies on the coercive state, which he calls "affirmative government," to compel intelligent and successful people to live different lives than they would choose. Their class-segregated suburban enclaves and schools would be broken up. A successful family could still purchase a mansion on a golf course, but the likely neighbor would be a workfare employee in a bungalow. Kaus would add new social institutions--the draft and national service, a national health-care system, and a national child-care system designed not with an eye toward national defense and health, but toward enforced social integration. He believes that class assimilation is achieved by mixing rich and poor in the same national health waiting room. At these points in the book, Kaus' smashing attacks on the dehumanizing welfare culture created by "money liberals" become lost in absurdities.
For Kaus, social equality is a value that overrides all others. He defines it as the maximum equality of result that can be made compatible with necessary income differences, and he cheerily outlines a form of social fascism that compels classes to assimilate.
Diversity out
Kaus' real target is the diversity that liberals claim to want. Diversity
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
