Generous and capable, American civil society helped to cultivate new and proud Americans. One of these refugees, Joseph Cao, recently represented New Orleans in the U.S. Congress. Having left Vietnam as a boy, Cao and his family were taken in “by a Lutheran family, the Shrocks
family in Goshen, Indiana,” with whom they lived for four years.
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Although Cao's story is not unique, it is emblematic of the vitalâand often invisibleârole civil society plays in American lives.
The U.S. government adopted comprehensive welfare reform in 1996, with bipartisan support from a Republican Congress and a Democratic president. As a leader of this effort, I can attest that the long road to this vital reform originated with grassroots civic groups and philanthropists who recognized that the Great Society welfare state was destructive to the efficacy of government, to civil society's free institutions, and to the lives of the people it was designed to help.
The campaign began decades earlier in California, where an independent network of 120 citizens' welfare reform committees and local chambers of commerce organized initiatives to educate voters and politicians on the need for government to return power to civil society and individuals. The groups found success when California governor Ronald Reagan overhauled the state's welfare system, providing a model for reform in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Soon, a national movement gained steam to encourage all statesâthe “laboratories of democracies”âto undertake their own reform experiments, and to urge the federal government to follow suit.
Think tanks and other advocacy groups pressured government officials for more than two decades until the dam broke in the 1994 congressional election. Acting on ideas shaped by grassroots reform activists, the new, Republican-led Congress returned power to local authorities and private institutions over major social welfare programs. Although welfare reform is far from complete, citizen activists reclaimed some substantial ground for civil society that had been lost to government expansion.
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The biggest threat to civil society today is the growth of Big Government.
Beginning in the Progressive and the New Deal eras, and especially since the time of the Great Society, liberal politicians and social thinkers have viewed the unpredictable and dynamic nature of organic society as a problem that needs to be solved. They believe that, unlike the great men and women who came before them,
they
can resolve major social problems and transform America into a better, fairer, more prosperous country. The instrument used to bring about this ideal society, of course, is government, which is meant to instill virtue, knowledge, prosperity, and dignity in the people and bind them together in pursuit of common national goals and ideals. Yuval Levin summarizes their beliefs:
From birth to death, citizens should be ensconced in a series of protections and benefits intended to shield them from the harsh edges of the market and allow them to pursue dignified, fulfilling lives: universal child care, universal health care, universal public schooling and higher education, welfare benefits for the poor, generous labor protections for workers, dexterous management of the levers of the economy to ease the cycles of boom and bust, skillful direction of public funds to spur private productivity and efficiency, and, finally, pensions for the elderly. Each component would be overseen by a competent and rational bureaucracy, and the whole would make for a system that is not only beneficent but unifying and dignifying, and that enables the pursuit of common national goals and ideals.
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In order to organize society according to this kind of predetermined blueprint, Americans would have to be like-minded and complacent, willing to fall in line with the government planâor else the government has to resort to coercion. The problem is that Americans are a diverse, entrepreneurial, and independent bunch who often disagree with government blueprints. In fact, as Levin notes, no nation anywhere seems uniform enough for successful central planning:
Human societies do not work by obeying orderly commands from central managers, however well meaning; they work through the erratic interplay of individual and, even more, of familial and communal decisions answering locally felt desires and needs. Designed to offer professional expert management, our bureaucratic institutions assume a society defined by its material needs and living more or less in stasis, and so they are often at a loss to contend with a people in constant motion and possessed of a seemingly infinite imagination for cultural and commercial innovation. The result is gross inefficiencyâprecisely the opposite of what the administrative state is intended to yield.
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Far from increasing freedom and prosperity, government welfare programs, especially under the Great Society initiated by President Johnson, had the perverse effect of entrenching poverty and ignorance. In the “beneficiary” communities, education, the family, prosperity, the work ethic, charity, and civil society institutions all disintegrated, crowded out by the government's expanding role. Instead of making recipients more independent, welfare programs accomplished the opposite, encouraging dependency on the government's largesse.
A government-directed society, facing no competition or need for innovation, is ineffective, wasteful, and worse, it drains the vitality out of people's lives. When government tries to fulfill our every want and need, and tries to make easier the difficult things in lifeâworking, loving, learning, living, and dyingâit robs our lives of the meaning we get from independently carrying out our own duties and responsibilities. As Charles Murray notes, “Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things.”
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He continues,
Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the family does them. Communities are
not vital because it's so much fun to respond to our neighbors' needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been metâfamily and community really do have the actionâthen an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.
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As government expands, the social fabric that supports the less fortunate disintegrates. We become more isolated and alienated from one another, and less willing to cooperate with each other, help those in need, or assist our neighbors and communities. This in turn gives government an excuse to assert even more responsibility over our daily lives.
THE RISING COSTS OF THE WELFARE STATE
Despite some successful reforms, the expansive welfare state is assuming more and more of the role that our Founders reserved for churches, community organizations, and private philanthropy. This trend threatens the health and ultimately the survival of our robust and dynamic civil society.
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Expansive government rapidly becomes expensive government, and that requires new and higher taxes. The transfer of money from citizens to the bureaucracy then further weakens civil society and leads to even more expansive and even more expensive government.
The effort to finance Big Government through higher taxes is a direct assault on civil society, and the “death tax” is a prime example. This tax, which is in a constant state of flux and was resurrected in 2011 after effectively disappearing in 2010, falls especially hard on small business. That sector contributes immensely to America's social and economic dynamism, often acting as the cornerstone of community organizations
and local philanthropy. Entrepreneurs and shopkeepers are community leaders and, when prosperous, are generous with their time and money. Prosperity and generosity are highly correlated, as those with more to give feel obliged to give more.
Take Sukup Manufacturing in rural Iowa. This family-owned business helped build the local playground, swimming pool, and childcare center, and helps maintain the senior citizen center, local church, and Boys and Girls Club. But when its founder dies someday, the federal estate tax will likely force the family to sell the business to pay the hefty tax bill, erasing overnight the Sukup family's philanthropy and job creation.
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The community relationships fostered by the Sukup-funded institutions will fray, and no amount of government largesse and rule-making can replace those social ties.
An Obama administration proposal to change the rules on charitable deductions would also erode the incentives for charitable giving. Currently, philanthropists receive a deduction of their gift from their taxable income. For a $10,000 gift by someone who earns over $250,000 a year, the giver would save $3,500 in federal taxes. Obama's budget would reduce that write-off by almost 30 percent, or $700, inevitably suppressing charitable giving and weakening civil society.
Elsewhere, lawmakers threaten to further devalue civil society by dictating the inner workings of private associations. In California, the state assembly introduced a bill mandating that charities and non-profits disclose the racial and gender composition of their board members and staffâa bald attempt to force charities and voluntary associations into adopting racial and gender quotas. The proposal further demanded that charities and non-profits demonstrate how their activities “serve minority-interests.”
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The bill was withdrawn after California's biggest foundations agreed to spend tens of millions of dollars on minority-led organizations,
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but the effort encouraged similar attacks on foundations in states like Florida. However, legislators in the Sunshine State, in sharp contrast to their liberal counterparts in California, responded by passing a law
defending
the independence of foundations and protecting them from these kinds of intrusive regulations.
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In their relentless attempt to replace the private sector, government bureaucrats won't hesitate to attack even the most beneficent institutions. In January 2011, a Houston couple, the Herrings, launched “Feed a Friend” to serve hot meals to the homeless. Their program expanded quickly, attracting volunteers who helped to feed up to 120 people every night for more than a year. Nevertheless, the City of Houston shut them down. Their violation? The group could not get the required permit because its meals were not prepared in a kitchen inspected by local bureaucrats and run by officially approved managers.
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A similar program in Dallas organized by local restaurant-owners, Hunger Busters, met the same fate in 2005 after city bureaucrats complained that the program's policy of feeding the hungry “wherever they are” created litter.
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Even the most high-minded government programs can harm civil society, since the taxes and fees needed to fund these programs leave less money with private individuals who might otherwise donate it to civic groups. Government can also distort the market for donations by attaching various conditions to their aidâsuch “strings” tend to narrow a civic group's mission and undermine its independence from government. Through such means, the government ends up picking winners and losers in civil society, thereby reducing the diversity and dynamism of free institutions. Civic groups are taught to look to the government for approval rather than to their donors and volunteers. This is fundamentally destructive of a free society's most important habits.
Such government intrusions into civil society, according to Ryan Messmore from the Heritage Foundation, turn “the dial of social responsibility one more notch in the direction of the state at the expense of local institutions that serve the poor more personally and efficiently.”
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The static and coercive nature of the state limits choice and proves a poor substitute for civil society. Nevertheless, bureaucrats remain convinced they know best how we should pursue happiness. And of course, it's not their natural tendency to surrender any authority they have seizedâtheir encroachments are only reversed when engaged citizens demand it.
Civil society can and will reclaim its rightful place from government, especially in the one realm that represents perhaps the biggest failure of government over-reach: education. For decades, as the government assumed a greater and greater role in education, the resulting bureaucracies became lobbies for their own interests above the interests of children and families. Good schools stagnated while bad schools grew worse, and failing schools were accountable only to the self-serving bureaucrats and unions that contributed to their failure.
However, in recent years, civil society has struck back on behalf of higher quality and local control of education. Faced with abject failureâDetroit, for example, graduates barely 25 percent of its high school students on time despite applying low standards
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âcivil society is saying “no more.”
The scope of today's reform efforts is broad and deep: grassroots reformers are working to spread innovation throughout the education system and to return authority over education to the states, localities, and parents; enterprising teachers are establishing independent public schools to cater to the students left behind by the education bureaucracy; parents are demanding that their children have access to well-performing private schools through vouchers or other initiatives; and charter schools like KIPP have thrived, proving more innovative and practical than traditional public schools.
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