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those who have not worked as hard or as long or have not demonstrated
the requisite talent or accomplishment. The "have-nots" are entitled to
a share, Bell says. The problem is that they refuse
to
be content. In their
hunger for an even bigger bite of the societal apple, they have let their
appetites grow to an extent that no apple can satisfy. Demands have
become entitlements, a sense that each group has a right to a growing
income, wealth, health, and all else that is to be had. Being "fanatic, "
the groups are unwilling to negotiate down their fantasies and they
refuse to compromise, thus threatening the stability and ultimately the
existence of the American society in their frenzy.
Voicing a related fear, Aaron Wildavsky warns in a
Commentary
article of " ... the manufacture of incompatible policy demands that
impose burdens on government which no government can meet."
Again Wildavsky does not say that the various groups-the poor, the
blacks, all the other minorities-have no right to what they agitate
government for. Rather, he says, if they all try to cash in their moral
chips at once-to collect on what they feel society owes them for past
and present injustices-they will find not only not enough money in
the bank, but no more bank.
Kristol writes, " neo-conservatism is not
at all
[italics mine] hostile
to the idea of a welfare state, but it is critical of the Great Society
version of this welfare state.... It is skeptical of those social programs
that create vast and energetic bureaucracies to 'solve social problems.'
... it is opposed to the paternalistic state. " While Kristol cites Social
Security and unemployment insurance as acceptable examples of the
welfare state, his fondness is (or the market mechanisms which, he says,
have the right "to respond efficiently
to
economic realities while
preserving the maximum degree of individual freedom."
Bell similarly came to embrace the market as the way
to
bring into
balance the explosion of social wants. "In many public-policy discus–
sions, it is assumed that our choices are either administrative regula–
tion to achieve those ends-or abandoning the ends. But the market
can often be used to achieve them efficiently. The market provides for
self-adjustment and self-regulation within a framework of rules."
One reads these and similar lines of the Harvard expert, unable
to
believe that he can really be either so naive or so disingenuous. Even a
sophomore, and not necessarily in sociology, knows that the market,
far from maximizing the freedoms of the individual, maximizes the
range of choice only of those with a high buying power while
restricting that of persons with low buying power. Unlike the polity in
which the notion of one individual, one vote is at least very crudely
