Kevin Williamson writes Welcome to the Paradise of the Real in The National Review Online.  It is a bit long but quite worthy of the time to read it in its entirety.

Excerpts:

Mr. Carrillo’s intellectual failure is catastrophic, but it is basic to the progressive approach. Mr. Carrillo argues that a guaranteed-job program would “pay for itself,” mitigate deficits, empower women, strengthen communities, liberate us from Walmart and McDonald’s — I half expected him to claim that it would turn asandwich into a banquet. But the question he never quite gets his head around is: Jobs doing what? Americans in guaranteed government jobs “needn’t construct trains or solar panels,” he writes. Instead, they could be employed in “non-capital intensive” sectors such as “child-care, eldercare, and” — focus in here, kids — “community gardening.” Experiment: Offer for sale at a price of $250 a voucher entitling its bearer to one year’s worth of meals at McDonald’s, one year’s worth of groceries at Walmart, or one year’s worth of produce from your local community garden; compare sales figures.

# # #

Mr. Carrillo cites William F. Buckley Jr., who once recommended that welfare dependents be put to work tidying up parks. What Mr. Carrillo does not understand is that Mr. Buckley’s case was not an economic one but a moral one; he believed idleness to be a sin. (“I get satisfaction of three kinds,” he said. “One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”) Mr. Carrillo’s argument is an explicitly economic one, and it is illiterate. The economic difference between paying a man to engage in “community gardening” and paying a man to sit on his ass all afternoon is negligible, as good as the spade in the soil might be for his soul. Our food does not come from community gardens for the same reason that we do not generate our own electricity at home or build automobiles in a million mom-and-pop shops across the fruited plains.

print