Liberalism without limits: when will we know that government has grown large enough? When our freedom is restored.

• Author: Schwarz, John E.
• Position: Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State - Book review

Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State

by William Voegeli

Encounter Books, 280 pp.

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Liberalism, once dominant in American politics, has for decades been in retreat. Even with Democrats in control of two branches of government, liberalism today is locked in a standoff against a deeply flawed conservatism. How did it come to this? That is the underlying question of Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State, a thought-provoking book by William Voegeli, a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College and a former program officer at the conservative John M. Olin Foundation.

Voegeli argues that the public's loss of confidence in liberalism is rooted in a failure by liberals to define the limits of government. "Liberal rhetoric," Voegeli points out, "never engages in this issue: what would be the size and nature of the welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need a larger budget and a broader agenda?" Since liberals haven't set limits on government, voters have been forced to do so instead. At the same time, many conservative ideologists advocate what amounts to the complete dismantling of the welfare state (a course of action that Voegeli, himself a conservative, considers neither viable nor decent). The result has been demoralizing gridlock.

Voegeli contends that much of the trouble began with Franklin Roosevelt in a 1932 speech that is sometimes called the New Deal Manifesto. "The task of statesmanship," Roosevelt declared, "has always been the re-definition of [unalienable] rights in terms of a changing and growing social order." Having claimed such power, FDR and his allies devised a "second Bill of Rights," included in which was the right to a living wage, the right to a decent home, the right to adequate medical care, the right to a proper education, and the right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment. These rights, FDR suggested at times, were drawn from each individual's "right of equality in the pursuit of happiness."

By doing this, says Voegeli, the architects of the New Deal were creating a "living Constitution." In the past, the "interpretation of a Constitution of enumerated powers meant to secure inalienable rights had been a matter of applying timeless principles to changing circumstances," writes Voegeli. "A living Constitution denied the existence of timeless principles" and left the power of government, potentially, entirely open-ended and without limit.

Many liberals recognize the perils of mutable "rights" secured by ever-expanding government, but, says Voegeli, they tend to devote their energies to justifying the expansion of government rather than indicating where it all stops. For example, some liberals mount an appealing defense of the welfare state by evoking the greater common good, a line of argument that focuses on the need to harmonize individual rights with the larger public interest. Voegeli correctly observes, however, that this approach fails to set any premises either for defining what the greater common good should be or for setting appropriate boundaries on it.

Having established liberalism's continuing tendency to expand the state, Voegeli proposes an alternative vision for the role of government in our economic lives. It starts with the premise that "a decent society is obligated to prevent the small minority of citizens who are chronically unable to fend for themselves, and the larger minority occasionally and transitionally unable to do so, from leading miserable lives." It is to this minority of citizens, says Voegeli, that government assistance must be available, not to the more fortunate majority. While Voegeli offers no precise agenda, it's fair to deduce that in his ideal polity programs like Social Security and Medicare, which now go to everyone, would be subject to means testing. Many other programs, such as welfare assistance...