There are many different flavors of freedom. For example, there is freedom as capacity and freedom as detachment.
Freedom as capacity means supporting people so they have the ability to take advantage of life’s opportunities. You encourage your friend to stick with piano practice so he will have the freedom to really play. You support your child during high school so she will have the liberty to pick her favorite college.
Freedom as detachment is giving people space to do their own thing. It’s based on the belief that people flourish best when they are unimpeded as much as possible. Freedom as detachment is marked by absence — the absence of coercion, interference and obstacles.
.. Back when the Republican Party functioned as a governing party it embraced both styles of freedom, but gave legislative priority to freedom of capacity.
.. Over the past few decades Republicans cast off the freedom-as-capacity tendency. They became, exclusively, the party of freedom as detachment.
.. Despite all the screaming and campaigns, all the government shutdown fiascos, the G.O.P. hasn’t been able to eliminate a single important program or reform a single important entitlement or agency.
.. The freedom-as-detachment philosophy is a negative philosophy. It is about cutting back, not building.
.. A party operating under this philosophy is not going to spawn creative thinkers who come up with positive new ideas for how to help people. It’s not going to nurture policy entrepreneurs. It’s not going to respect ideas, period.
.. If you’re a regular American, the main threats to your freedom are
- illness,
- family breakdown,
- social decay,
- technological disruption and
- globalization.
.. The Republicans could have come up with a health bill that helps people cope with illness and nurtures their capacities, a bill that offers catastrophic care to the millions of American left out of Obamacare, or health savings accounts to encourage preventive care.
.. And if you think G.O.P. dysfunction is bad now, wait until we get to
- the debt ceiling wrangle,
- the budget fight and
- the tax reform crackup.
.. we’re living at a time when the prospects for the middle class are in sharp decline. And Republicans offer nothing but negativity, detachment, absence and an ax.
These policies will make the next recession both more likely and worse
But at least we’ve got the automatic stuff that kicks in when people start falling through the cracks, right? Not if anything like the proposed cuts to the safety net go through. Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), employment programs, infrastructure spending — they’re all on the chopping block in both Republican budgets and health-care bills. One of the worst things they’re trying to do in this space is turn safety net programs, like SNAP and Medicaid, into block grants, which would end those programs’ critical countercyclical function
.. Another Republican initiative in this space that would compound the damage to vulnerable people in recessions is the intention to add work requirements to safety net programs. Even in strong recoveries, that’s a terrible idea — do you really think less than $5 a day in food stamps is what’s keeping someone from working? But in recessions, when unemployment is rising quickly, work requirements make even less sense.
.. There’s a cost to dysfunctional, unrepresentative government. It may take a while to show up, but trust me, it will.