Liberals, who believe in the intervention of government to right wrongs and to regulate the economy and the social structure, are identified with FDR’s New Deal, but FDR used a variety of mechanisms other than entitlements to achieve its ends of providing work and greater equality between peoples, the regime of entitlements meaning that legislation would consist of financial and other services and preferences to be awarded to categories of eligibility. The first acts in FDR’s First Hundred Days were not entitlements. The Glass Steagall Banking Act of 1933 provided for the separation of commercial from investment banking. It required commercial banks to have sufficient equity and provided the FDIC to guarantee that bank customers did not have to worry about runs on the banks. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, also early on in 1933, allowed for the government to buy up beef and pork so as to destroy them so as to keep up farm prices. It also allowed farmers to get money so that they would refrain from raising crops, and so also raise farm prices, even though this was sort of an entitlement because people who owned farms were paid for a purpose, the purpose more important than the mechanism. The Wagner Act of 1935 set up a mechanism whereby workers could engage in collective bargaining rather than pay or guarantee wages to union workers. The TVA put in a lot of money to build dams and create electrical grids rather than give grants to people in Tennessee. The CCC made work available to poor whites rather than give them food stamps or a dole. Yes, entitlements did come later. Social Security, passed in 1935, was a clear entitlement in that a category of people--the aged-- were entitled to get benefits when they had reached a certain age and had contributed to payroll taxes for by then just a very short time of payment. And the great last act of the New Deal, the Wages and Hours Act of 1938, did require people of occupational categories to meet pay and work standards, though not by direct payments. Nor were entitlements the only mechanisms for reform during the War on Poverty. Money was used by Lyndon Johnson to create incremental change in a variety of outcomes, such as better nutrition or availability to education, by paying programs rather than people, though some entitlements were included, as was the case with Medicare and Medicaid, so as to entitle people to the cost of health care because they qualified as old or poor.
The major entitlements regime came in the Nixon Administration, but has become the way to bring about reform in both parties. This policy mechanism combines two strands: the entitlement of the poor and the entitlement of ethnic and other status groups. A distinction is to be made between a right and an entitlement, even though the two concepts overlap. People, as a matter of principle, as a right, should not have costs that prevent receiving essential services. So poor people will get health care even if emergency rooms are an expensive way to provide care, and have to be subsidized by health insurance, while people are not required to provide Gucci bags or beer from the general treasury or the other funds collected from insurers. Similarly, people are not to be prevented from education because they do not have the cost of tuition and so only minimal costs can be imposed in community college and state schools, though people are not required for the government or elsewhere to supply funds to enter Ivy League establishments. So entitlements are procedures that rest on rights, such as health or education, but there are entitlements that are not rights, such as giving federal flood insuraance to people who are likely to be impacted by hurricanes. There are all kinds of rules and laws that are developed to administer the ways so that social status memberships are administered just as happened years ago when veterans got a blanket ten percent on civil service tests because of having that status.
Education was the arena in which entitlements were clearly expanded in the Nixon and post-Nixon Administrations. School systems were provided through increased state income tax revenues to engage in what were called “school equalization” which meant that states would out of their own coffers give schools for money so as to make up for the fact that schooling had been previously badly supported because school budgets were based only on property taxes, and considered unfair because rich districts would have much better funding than districts just a few blocks away that were poorly funded. Monies were allocated from state supported equalization funds on the basis of a number of criteria, such as the percentage of children who qualified for free lunch or had high levels of poverty. These provisions were entitlements rather than rights because, by definition, money was allocated by the state legislature in accord with the stipulated categories. These allocations were supposed to change education because legislatures insisted that the issue of education was money, even though James Coleman had shown earlier that facilities and teacher remuneration did not result in better test scores. Education was also addressed through Affirmative Action, which was another entitlement in that racial groups were given advantages in higher education so that people of color could be allowed to gain admissions they could not hurdle over test scores and other criteria, including the dubious ones that legacies and sports and music specialists were given an advantage over other applicants. Nixon had thought that Affirmative Action would lead to political dissention, white interests against Black interests, and that proved to be the case.
Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City has been revealed by the New York Times in the past few days to be jiggering entitlements so as to improve education. Long having been frustrated at altering the test high schools to let in more minorities, the coronavirus pandemic has altered the entitlements whereby children are entered into middle schools on the basis of grades and attendance in elementary school. De Blasio would like to make admission to middle school as lottery based so as to give poorer performing students a chance of getting out of their very deficient elementary schools. The trouble is that poor grades in elementary school are probably related to being disruptive students and that a lottery system, which is to get rid of characteristics for entitlement, will probably lead to more disruptive schools, because only a few disruptive students are enough to have an impact on learning, and so everybody will suffer, both those who have no reason not to be disruptive and those whose education is disrupted. De Blasio is trying to do something about reshuffling people rather than doing what might improve education.
Other legislative regimes other than entitlement had addressed education or could have addressed education. The War on Poverty tried to improve the poor by spending money on services that would intrude into the cycle of poverty by providing food, health care and enhanced social work to the poor, but they had not budged very much in aiding the poor, even though entitlement advantages to middle class and on the cusp of becoming middle class Blacks did succeed as a result of Affirmative Action as well as did those Black owned businessmen who received entitlement grants for being Black. For its part, a New Deal inspired entitlement regimen might have enrolled Black youth into an urban CCC, and something like it was suggested by Ed Koch, then Mayor of New York City, whereby there would be the creation of many residential educational facilities at no cost for low income Black children to educate them so as to, in part, remove them from the damaging effects of family and neighborhood, every category of kid getting his own Eton. Koch never thought that the plan would be considered seriously because it would be so expensive, and in fact the Harlem Children's Zone is able to do approximately that that by providing social workers to visit home families and spruce up their families and households and is financially made possible by very high contributions of the Wall Street community.
The emphasis on entitlements also applied, a decade or so later, to women as a status group. Women are not to be prevented from entering even Ivy League schools because of discrimination against Blacks or women, even to the extent of providing Affirmative Action so that young Blacks are given an advantage over other applicants, including Asians, to rectify past discrimination, while women did not need Affirmative Action because they do just fine in acceptance to prestigious institutions, and in doing well once they get there. Women receive preferential treatment, however, not in entitlements, but in unequal treatment in quasi-judicial hearings with regard to sexual harassment. Men cannot take advantage of women who are drunk but men who are drunk can be regarded as culpable for taking advantage of women. A double standard of sexual equality prevails.
Conservatives can well sense and claim that this movement toward generalized entitlements which provide any number of groups to be given priorities, whether of income or of other benefits for being qualified as a member of a group, whether because of age or race or sex or other status group, is a form of Socialism, though it requires a redefinition of the term. Socialism prior to the last part of the Twentieth Century had to do with the production function. Socialists believed that the major means of production had to be owned by the government, and so Clement Attlee brought socialism to Great Britain after the Second World War by nationalizing coal and steel production, railroads, national health and stipends in higher education. Thatcher reversed many of those Socialist programs but health and education remained as part of the system in Great Britain. What had happened was that distribution rather than production became the basis of socialism. All essential programs were distributed through the government for the one or another of the occupational or social titles that had been legislated as deciding what was to be given where they were in line rather than based on the free market where people could get what they could buy with the exception of a safety net for those who are destitute or otherwise pathetic, such as terminal ill patients who were now entitled to be carted off to nursing homes. Conservatives were chastised for seeming cruel and heartless when what was happening were government directed regimes of caring for people rather than leaving them alone to make their ways as best they can, there always remaining both charity and some sort or other of workhouses.
The consequence of an entitlement regime, as Conservatives see it, is a welter of bureaucracies that establish eligibility for one or another entitlement rather than the more “natural” process of people making their way as best they can in a labor market or a health market or any of the other things whereby consumers try to get what they want. The result, to the Conservatives, is to diminish the liberties of people, they ensnared by the regulations created by regulation crazy members of the government. Liberals, to the contrary, think that these entitlements are an embellishment of freedom because adverse things interfere with the lives of people to pursue happiness, that events have been circumscribed by the coincidental and unessential situations having to do with poverty or discrimination or even having children, which not very far back was thought of as the inevitable suffering of womanhood, but has been changed to the point where it is a right an not just an entitlement to terminate a pregnancy at will. So moral values as well as the free market are put aside by the rush to entitlements, its alternative vision making every person a prince or an aristocrat, able to care about whatever it might be that motivates your soul, whether to cultivate a garden or write poetry or cut brush at your ranch, each one a form of freedom from some kind or other of a privation that can be eliminated through entitlements.
Liberals like myself can accept the frustrations that result in an entitlements regime however frustrating it may be to carry on your person numerous cards and passwords and numbers whereby to identify who you are and the proof of eligibility you need to access one or another of these advantages. Indeed, some of the bureaucratization of life is not the result of the government but a result of the proliferation of access points made available to others through hospitals and credit cards and other kinds of activities that make life easier rather than worse. Better to carry a card than to wonder whether you have enough cash to get into a hospital. Moreover, it is indeed true that a person is diminished in that there are any number of authorities that have to be negotiated, but this is a burden that will quickly pass notice as an imposition because these entitlements enable people to do more and be more secure. The Department of Motor Vehicles is said to be very frustrating and obtuse but I think it is better than not licensing automobiles.
There is another entitlement to be added to the current entitlements regime as a result of an innovation introduced to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. It was necessary to shore up the income of Americans because they were out of work for no cause of their own but because businesses were shut down so as to combat the coronavirus. There was, as I say, a problem of distribution rather than of production. The Feds and the Treasury department had made sure there was enough capital flowing to keep the economy and the markets afloat, but what was to be done to provide for the consumers, lest the buying economy collapse. The expedient was to provide $1200 for every adult person and half that for every child. It turned out to be a very efficient and successful program in that the money was handed out without much of a glitch and without corruption, It seems that just about everyone has a postal address to which people can be sent and most people have some connection with banking so that payments could be made into one of their accounts. Moreover, a flat amount is simple in that it requires no calculations for eligibility, as is the case with the income tax system; it has a rough progressiveness to it in that the flat amount means more to people in the lower incomes and less important to the people who have higher incomes. It is a Christmas present for the rich while it is money for food and rent for people who are poor.
This idea can be extended permanently. Every December 1st, so as to allow holiday buying, or January 1st, so as to make up what has been spent on holiday buying, every person will be entitled to get a set “bonus”, the amount awarded by the Congress on how good (or very bad) a year it is. Politicians will be praised. There is precedence for such entitlements Alaskans were given a bonus every year because of the surpluses for the state because of the money taken in by taxes for North Slope oil production. Everyone can get something good from the government even if the money comes not from deficit spending, which was necessary this year, or out of tax revenues which will inevitably be too little of what the rich should pay. Entitlements are a good idea.
The difficulty of entitlements that does seem to a Liberal like me to be a threat against freedom is the rush to abrogate political and social liberty so as to further the righteousness of respecting income dependant and social groups previously treated badly. The Me-Too Movement and Black Lives Matter rode roughshod over quasi judicial proceedings and disparaged independent minded people. Entitlements do lead to intrusions of the freedom of speech, and we can hope that the exuberance of entitlements will abate rather than become inevitable. In general, it is necessary to safeguard political freedom through those vehicles that are essential to the Liberal Experiment: freedom of religion, assembly, and the rest of the Amendments.