Bush's ownership society: why no one's buying.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: George W. Bush - Cover Story

Conservatives have a knack for taking good ideas--say, patriotism or faith--to the sort of ideologized extreme that brands the ideas as theirs and leads liberals to abandon them. We're seeing that now with the issue of choice and individual empowerment. Those very concepts used to be associated with liberal causes like abortion and voting rights. But over the last couple of decades, conservative intellectuals have roped them to a larger agenda to revolutionize government.

And they're perfectly open about it. Talk to scholars at the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or to movement organizers like Grover Norquist, and they'll walk you through the strategy. Big government and individual freedom, they'll explain, are opposed to each other; more of one means less of the other. The three big areas of non-defense-related government spending are retirement (mainly Social Security), health care (mainly Medicare and Medicaid), and education (mainly K-12 public schools). For political reasons, it is practically impossible to cut spending in these areas. But it is possible to dismantle the government bureaucracies that administer them in a way that enhances personal freedom and makes possible big cuts down the road: privatize the benefits.

The father of this line of thinking is Milton Friedman. In the 1950s and 1960s, the conservative economist dreamed up the notions of education vouchers and private accounts for Social Security. Republican operatives and think tankers seized on Friedman's ideas in the 1970s, expanded them into areas like health care, and fleshed out their philosophic and political logic. Vesting individuals with more choice, control, and ownership of their government benefits, they argued, would not only enhance virtues like personal responsibility, but over time, it would also result in the shift of hundreds of billions of tax dollars from the custodial care of government to the corporations that would help manage people's private accounts. Best of all, from the conservative point of view, it would transform the electorates political identity. Instead of government-dependent supporters of the Democratic Party, voters would become self-reliant followers of the GOP.

These ideas are the intellectual fuel of the conservative movement that has swept across the country, in recent decades. They were well understood in the Reagan administration, and the Gipper's speeches are suffused with them. But it has only been in the last few years, with both Congress and the White House in conservative Republican hands, that the ideas have truly debuted.

Now, the reviews are in--and they are not good.

Consider President Bush's effort to sell the public on private Social-Security accounts. Last September, when he first began talking about the idea on the campaign trail, it looked like a winner, with 58 percent support in the polls. By December, only 54 percent favored his proposal. By February, following his detailed explanation of private accounts in his State of the Union address, support fell to 46 percent. And by June, when informed that private accounts would be paired with cuts in benefits for future retirees--as the president himself admitted they would have to be to have any impact on Social Security's long-run finances--27 percent of voters gave their approval, a level of support below that for legalizing marijuana and gay marriage.

Or consider another high-profile element of what Bush calls the "ownership society": giving individuals more control over their government health-care benefits. In 2003, the president signed a landmark measure providing prescription drug coverage to Medicare recipients, with massive subsidies to lure beneficiaries into private plans. Prior to the law's passage, 90 percent of the public supported the idea of government helping seniors with drug costs. Today, a scant 31 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the new program. It's possible that, once the benefit actually goes into effect beginning next year, seniors will flock to it gratefully. But an interim effort offering seniors a choice of drug discount cards doesn't inspire confidence. Only 6.4 million seniors wound up getting the drug discount cards, a million fewer than the government predicted. Low-income seniors who signed up for the card were given an extra $600 subsidy to help defray the cost of co-pays--a benefit the government estimated would lure 4.7 million low-income seniors into the program. Only 1.9 million lower-income seniors actually did sign up.

Finally, consider the president's efforts to give parents more choice over the schools their children attend. Under Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, millions of students in failing schools can now transfer to other schools in their district. It is the grandest experiment in public-school choice ever attempted, and polls show overwhelming support for it. In practice, however, only about 1 percent of students in failing schools annually have taken advantage of the opportunity. That could mean that districts aren't eagerly publicizing the choice provisions, or...