EAGERLY ANTICIPATED AND MALICIOUSLY INTENDED CONSEQUENCES. Advocates of limited government, lower taxes, or deregulation face the objection that such policies, while appealing in their intent, have the effect of making it more difficult to be poor, for want of social insurance even limited in duration and scope, or of making it easier to become rich. In $ervants of Wealth: The Right's ASSAULT on Economic JUSTICE, John Ehrenberg argues that the court intellectuals behind such policy changes had the rich getting richer as a goal in itself. The book is marketed by Rowman and Littlefield as a polemic, which it is, but this Book Review No. 42 contends that, as polemic, it is more likely to argue into supporting libertarian economic policies and neoconservative foreign policies those susceptible to contrary arguments, than it is to argue people who came to be persuaded of the usefulness of such policies of their shortcomings. In making this argument, I'm alerting readers that social policy analysis from the left doesn't automatically fall into the trap of calling anyone to the right stupid: what Professor Ehrenberg fails to do is to provide those sympathetic to his position with the intellectual ammunition to take on the positions he summarizes fairly carefully.

Thus, by way of example, Professor Ehrenberg notes that Keynesian demand-side management came undone by the emergence of rising prices accompanied by rising unemployment, that detente appeared to be concession after concession to a messianic and expansionist Soviet empire that ... came unglued, and that civil rights and antipoverty transfers mutated into a muddle of identity-politics and rent-seeking, and Islamofascist terrorism on U.S. soil rendered moot talk of peace dividends. He is also careful to distinguish the intellectual foundations of libertarian economics and neoconservative foreign policies in the academy from the more polemical prescriptions rendered by policy wonks. Of the latter, there is plenty. Consider page 38.

[William] Bennett wants to be clear about what's at stake when foreign assassins have domestic friends. Liberalism's misguided discomfort with patriotism, its conviction that all nations are part of a community of equals, and its insistence that none can be held superior to others reflects a weak, unprincipled relativism that makes value judgement and moral action impossible.

Strong stuff, and possibly a mischaracterization of Mr Bennett, not to say of "liberalism," but nonetheless tied to a line of reasoning about international affairs that might best be summarized as "peace through strength."

Or consider Robert Bork the social critic (as distinguished from the legal scholar), here at page 66.

Since no one is rich because another is poor, redistribution is out. The rich deserve their wealth and the only thing that can explain widespread objections to unprecedented equality is an enfeebled, corrupt, and hedonistic culture that "distorts incentives by increasingly rejecting personal achievement as the criterion for the distribution of rewards." As angry as he was when it came to culture, Bork was most fed up with calls for social justice. Liberalism is responsible for all the moral failings of contemporary society, but none of them are so grievous as nurturing the politics of envy. "The usual strategy of coping with the discomfort of knowing that others are superior in some way is to reduce the inequalities by bringing the more fortunate down or by preventing him from being more fortunate."

To his credit, Professor Ehrenberg does not demolish this particular straw man; perhaps in secular-progressive circles, this is a proof left to the reader as an exercise. But a reader familiar with the less polemical work that precedes the polemics might be persuaded of the general correctness of Judge Bork's complaint. At page 69, Professor Ehrenberg notes that the polemicists might have had a point.

When conservatives warned that no society could survive a general breakdown of order and indicted liberals for their inability to provide safety and security, millions of people were ready to listen.

Under the circumstances, it seemed that liberalism's defense of economic equality and social justice had degenerated into reflexive apologies for crime and irresponsible attempts to blame society for individual and family pathologies.

Another proof left as an exercise? But if so, he's not helping the person who might have argued himself into a conservative stance on public assistance and cultural norms consider ways of arguing himself out of it.

And therein, ultimately, lies the flaw in Professor Ehrenberg's logic. The best he can offer by way of an indictment is a relatively tame assertion, at page 165.

The Right has worked for twenty-five years to reverse the old notion that regulation, redistribution, and progressive taxation could serve democracy, stability, and efficiency. It had a lot to work with, and much of it predated its rise to power. After all, postwar American prosperity made it possible to organize a democratic republic of consumers without redistributing wealth or threatening prosperity in any important ways.

Interesting: no mention of the technocratic state in which Wise Experts manage competition among Entrenched Oligopolies subject to the Countervailing Power of Organized Labor. I was under the impression that such was the political economy of Establishment Liberalism. That the prosperity might have had its roots in the industrial combines of the 1890s, or the primeval tract housing of the mid-1920s does occur to some on the academic Right.

So much for the substance: on to the rivet counting. The exemplars of social democracy Professor Ehrenberg refers to are themselves flawed. Take page 105. "If the welfare state is the cause of disorder, crime, and isolation among the poor, then countries like Canada, England, and France should have more crime, worse slums, and deeper despair than the United States. They don't, of course, but cutting back on social programs is only a means to the Right's larger end." Don't you love that "of course?" The book has a 2006 copyright date: one would think the Parisian intifada and the parlous state of the public universities of France and Italy and the emergence of Londonistan would have caught the editor's or proofreader's attention. Or take New York City. (Please.) Professor Ehrenberg attempts (see p. 125) to make Treasury Secretary William Simon, one of the wonks (as distinguished from the intellectuals) the villain in New York City's 1975 budget troubles. He sees the Treasury Secretary attempting "to starve the nation's greatest urban social democracy to death." The possibility that said "social democracy" failed at carrying off Bastiat's grand fantasy of living at the expense of others is not raised. Lastly, it's somewhat distressing to see Friedrich Hayek characterized as a "fringe" figure alongside the more mainstream Milton Friedman, when the former was recognized by the Swedish Bank first.