“Stakhanovite1 liberalism” was a labored term of abuse worked up by the late William F. Buckley to ridicule overproducing liberals. Coal miner Alexsei Grigoryevich Stakhanov was made a “Hero of the Soviet Union” by Joseph Stalin in recognition of his exploits with a jack hammer and his example was used to encourage others to overfulfill their quotas and stop wasting time with unproductive pursuits like eating and sleeping. Bill’s barbs, to get back to him, were often more witty than accurate,2 but we do have Stakhanovite liberals among us today, including Paul Krugman, Jonathan Chait, and Jared Bernstein and Hannah Katch, authors of recent articles protesting the Trump Administration’s decision to allow states to require able-bodied Medicaid recipients to find employment. The “argument” of all three pieces can be found in Bernstein and Katch’s opening paragraph:
“Many years ago, as a fledgling social worker in New York City, one of us (JB) helped a single mom with a young son suffering from asthma get Medicaid coverage for her son. When I told her the news, she cried with relief. As young, privileged white guy, I was surprised by her reaction. I soon came to understand it.”
So, Trump is taking Medicaid coverage from young kids with asthma? Well, strangely enough, that is one of the few crimes that Trump hasn’t committed. The new rules, which are not even “rules”, allow states to establish programs to encourage “work and community engagement among non-elderly, non-pregnant adult Medicaid beneficiaries who are eligible for Medicaid on a basis other than disability.” A footnote explains that “community engagement” includes a variety of activities in addition to employment and that “[t]hese activities include, but are not limited to, community service, caregiving, education, job training, and substance use disorder treatment.”
Not that you’d know it from reading Krugman, Chait, Bernstein, and Katch, but most Medicaid recipients are already working, and most of the rest are young people, or old people, or disabled, or pregnant. So the new rules, even if fully implemented by all the states, which is surely not going to happen, would only affect a relatively small number of people. In fact, if the new provisions had been issued by the Obama Administration, Republicans would almost surely have denounced them as lily-livered mollycoddling.
Another thing that you would not know from reading Krugman, Chait, Bernstein, and Katch is that the only way to gain real financial security in your life is to do it yourself. Shockingly enough, workforce attachment is a vital commodity, as most Medicaid recipients already know. Liberals like my four punching bags here openly long for a European welfare system that traditionally let people stay on the dole indefinitely. This is not a good thing. It’s a bad thing.
Back in the day—that is to say, the eighties and nineties—I edited several publications that covered welfare legislation in sometimes microscopic detail. I well remember the howls that came from liberals when the Reagan Administration established “workfare"—requiring adult welfare recipients to work off their cash benefits (and only their cash benefits) in public sector jobs, at the minimum wage. Welfare recipients working! That wasn’t work, that was "slavery”! Then it turned out that welfare recipients liked workfare! Because they were earning their benefits!
So often, to help the poor, liberals insist on treating them like children who can’t take care of themselves. But that isn’t kindness, it’s condescension, with a barely hidden subtext of racism. This was particularly obvious when the Clinton Administration transformed the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program into the modern Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. In a long, bitter article for the Atlantic, former Clinton Administration official Peter Edelman predicted disaster because, according to Edelman, welfare recipients just couldn’t make it in the real world:
“Welfare is what we do when everything else fails. It is what we do for people who can’t make it after a genuine attempt has been mounted to help the maximum possible number of people to make it. In fact, much of what we do in the name of welfare is more appropriately a subject for disability policy.”
In fact, Edelman, who resigned in protest over the legislation,3 certainly knew that 80% of welfare recipients could, and did, “make it"—could set an alarm clock and read a bus schedule, the sorts of things they were supposedly unable to do, according to "experts” like Mr. Edelman. They went into the welfare system due to some sort of major mishap—divorce, death, desertion, or whatever—and left it in a year or two. But the remaining 20% stayed on for years and ate up 80% of the costs while doing so.
Some of the people were severely limited, but most of them, shocking to say, were simply deadbeats. They had “adjusted to chaos”, as one social worker put it. For the most part, they just wanted to get high. Give them $1,000 a week and they’d get high on cocaine and Courvoisier. Cut them off entirely, and they’d get high on paint thinner. But they would get high.
These were the people that Edelman and other liberals pretended did not exist, and, rather than admit that they did exist, were willing to let the reputation of the entire welfare population be corrupted, replying to every criticism, whether valid or invalid, with unvaried cries of “racism”. Because you cannot honestly defend the indefensible.
It’s true that most Republicans hate Medicaid because they hate poor people—and, most specifically, hate government for spending “their” money on the poor. But a healthcare program that emphasizes workforce attachment helps its recipients rather than harming them and furthermore strengthens its support among the non-recipients who very largely pay for it. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, total U.S. expenditures on Medicaid—federal, state, and local—amounted to $574.2 billion last year (not a misprint). The American people cannot be expected to spend half a trillion dollars a year so that people like Paul Krugman, Jonathan Chait, Jared Bernstein, and Hannah Katch can feel good about themselves.
Afterwords
The editors at “Bloomberg View”, whom I had not considered as much of a playa in these things, have a nice piece praising the federal guidelines and warning of possible abuse by states who do want to throw people off Medicaid, as well as noting that a more effective way of boosting workforce attachment is boosting the earned income tax credit—because income transfer that encourages employment is a good thing. One can be a neoliberal like myself (I guess I’m pretty extreme) and still believe that the free-enterprise system, with all its myriad charms, does not lead in and of itself to an equitable distribution of wealth.
- Two interesting things about “Stakhanovite”: Word can spell it, and so can I. ↩︎
- Besides, is there any shame in being criticized by a racist? Even in the mid sixties, Buckley was very unenthusiastic about this whole “votes for Negroes” thing. They were supposed sing spirituals and fetch you juleps, not think. ↩︎
- The legislation was scarcely perfect. Clinton, a more intelligent student of welfare than Edelman, said it was a good welfare bill wrapped with mean-spirited measures directed at immigrants. ↩︎
