Kevin Gutzman:
People today commonly treat politics as if it were a branch of or substitute for religion. The temptation is more commonly manifest on the left, but it's far from unknown on the right. Thus, many in the Official Conservative Movement treat Ronald Reagan and selected other politicians as if they had been prophets or more, hanging on their every word as if it had been divinely inspired--as the religious would do with some saint's. Here's an artifact of this tendency.
Reagan’s Real Legacy: A Reply to Donald Devine
By Henry Olsen
November 10, 2014 7:00 AM
My colleague Pete Wehner and I recently wrote a piece assessing what today’s conservatives can learn from Ronald Reagan. Our view was recently criticized by Don Devine over at the Federalist as an attempt to “mold [Reagan] in their own image.” With all due respect to Mr. Devine, that is not at all what we did.
Instead, we let Reagan speak for himself. Our piece cites Reagan’s own words, delivered across the nearly 40 years he was in the public eye. This review depicts someone who loved human freedom, but not someone who thought that human freedom was such an absolute value that it precluded government action to help people in need. For Reagan, “welfare and compassion” were conservative values so long as the programs designed were limited to supporting people truly in need and did not lure those capable of supporting themselves into dependency.
There is a tendency among some people today claiming the conservative mantle to reject that thought. Indeed, while Devine’s piece criticizes us for supposedly thinking “compassion and welfare [are] unconservative,” a subheadline inserted by the Federalist’s editors asks “How is welfare compassionate or conservative?” Reagan would have agreed with Devine, not the editors, in believing that a properly designed welfare program was conservative. That is precisely what Reagan believed, as our article plainly shows.
Devine argues that Reagan believed in federalism, that state and local governments should have the power to craft welfare programs of their choosing. I do not disagree with this so far as it goes, but there are two points that flesh that out. First, as Governor, Reagan supported many welfare programs. At the state level, he sought to implement his longstanding philosophy that citizens acting through their elected representatives should take care of those who could not care for themselves. As we clearly state in our piece, he reformed California’s primary welfare program, Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), to require work from those who could. He also increased the average benefit for those who remained on the rolls by 43 percent. In future years, he proudly boasted of both accomplishments. Reagan believed states had the responsibility, in both senses of the word, to help people genuinely in need.
Our second point is that Reagan never considered the point of federalism as one of decisive import. As Devine notes, his proposal to give states responsibility over 40 different welfare programs also involved the federal government’s taking responsibility for Medicaid, the health-insurance program for the poor. We should not pretend that Medicaid is not a welfare program, especially as it was designed in the mid 1970s in which he first made his proposal. Back then it primarily extended insurance only to people qualifying for AFDC or food stamps. Reagan’s support for a purely federal Medicaid program shows that he did not consider federal action in the area of welfare to be beyond the conservative pale.
This was not an isolated incident either. Devine says we downplayed the fact that Reagan supported an alternative to Medicare when that program’s creation was being debated in 1964. As Avik Roy shows, the alternative he supported was the Kerr-Mills Act. Kerr-Mills established federal grants for states that established programs to help ”medically needy” older people. Roy quotes Reagan as explicitly describing the Act as “provid[ing], from the federal government, money to the states and the local communities that can be used at the discretion of the state to help those people who need it.”
This is precisely the point we made about Reagan’s philosophy: He believed need was a fairer and more effective limiting principle on governmental power than other alternatives, including federalism. Reagan’s objection to liberalism was never that one set of people taxed another for their benefit or that such taxation was unconstitutional if done federally. It was that one set of people, an elite bent on socialism, used the pretext of compassion to force all people into compulsory programs regardless of their need or whether they actually benefited. Reagan was always willing to contemplate the use of federal power to help people genuinely in need.
Devine ends his piece by arguing that Reagan believed in a blend of traditional and libertarian thought. I agree. Again, that is the case we made, that Reagan’s thought was not purely “libertarian” as that word is understood today. Reagan did believe, as Devine says, in “rights of humanity” that come from a “higher law,” but those rights were not purely of the negative variety envisioned by today’s hard-core libertarians. Nor were they of the judicial variety envisioned by today’s liberals: Reagan did not believe any person had a legally enforceable “right” to public support. He did believe that we as citizens should use government, only when necessary and only so far as necessary, to ensure that every person not be denied access to goods like higher education, health care, or food because of lack of funds.
That last sentence is a bit complex because I tried to emulate Reagan’s own way of talking about this. In “ the speech,” Reagan said conservatives believed in “telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds.” Perhaps that is why he signed EMTALA, a 1986 law that requires every hospital accepting Medicare to admit and stabilize patients needing emergency care regardless of their ability to pay. He also expressed this concept a person should not be denied ”x” because he couldn’t afford it even in his 1975 interview with Reason magazine (“tuition should never be a block to anyone getting an education who could not otherwise afford to go to the university”). This curious mode of talking is a very revealing window into Reagan’s belief regarding the proper role, and the limitation of that role, in providing what we call “welfare” or “services” for all.
Many conservatives reading this or the piece that sparked Mr. Devine’s piece may be shocked to learn that Reagan was not a proto-libertarian. But hard-core libertarians aren’t. They always understood that Reagan did not seek to repeal the entire edifice of 20th-century government. That’s why they vociferously supported the 1980 Libertarian-party candidacy of Ed Clark and David Koch – yes, that Koch against the Gipper. As much as Reagan supported smaller government and giving more power to states and civil society, it just wasn’t good enough for them because he believed in the legitimate power of government at the appropriate level to tax and regulate to protect the dignity and freedom of all people.
I suspect that Mr. Devine and I would agree on more than we disagree were we to sit and talk about Reagan’s thought. But there are too many people today who essentially put Ed Clark’s thought into Ronald Reagan’s mouth. Perhaps today’s conservative movement ought to be a softer version of the 1980s-era libertarian movement. But if so, proponents of that view ought to at least not take the name of the dead in vain and enlist Ronald Reagan’s memory in the service of a cause he did not support and would never have supported.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/392384/reagans-real-legacy-reply-donald-devine-henry-olsen --
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