Book Reviews

54 BOOKS A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State by David Kelley Cato Institute • 1998 • 174 pages • $18.95 cloth; $9.95 paperback Reviewed by Ellen Frankel Paul D avid Kelley, erstwhile professor of phi losophy, social commentator, and execu tive director of the Institute for Objectivist Studies, has written a marvelous yet slim vol ume exposing virtually everything that is wrong with the welfare state. Kelley's writing is always pellucid-an academic's word for clear-and utterly comprehensible, which no doubt explains why he left college teaching. This book is simply outstanding. Kelley is a superb synthesist, and one could hardly do better than to purchase a copy of A Life ofOne sOwn to acquire an understanding of the defects of the welfare state. Here one finds elegant refutations of the key arguments that opponents of America's tradition of indi vidual liberty have employed to undermine our freedom. Primary among these is the notion of "welfare rights," which he argues are spurious because they are parasitic on the efforts of other people: one person's right to welfare payments as an unwed mother, for example, is dependent on the coerced transfer of money from its rightful owners, the tax payers who actually earned it. In contrast, the natural rights of life, liberty, and property are not parasitic on the efforts of others, and ask of others only that they not interfere with what is mine and thine. What is fundamental ly wrong with "welfare rights" is that they cannot be implemented without violating lib erty rights.

Kelley is at his most instructive when he analyzes why the welfare state developed out of the Industrial Revolution. Defenders of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government often are weak on the question of why such appealing doctrines have fared so poorly in the twentieth century. Kelley pro vides some interesting answers. Tracing the origins of the welfare state back to Bismarck's Germany of the 1880s-with its payroll taxes to fund unemployment, accident, health, and old-age insurance-Kelley shows how Amer ican resistance to this Prussian model broke down under the pressure of the Great Depres sion and the exhortations of prominent social activists and academics. Fundamentally, these welfare state initia tives were a response to changes in the way people led their lives during the Industrial Revolution. In the new economy based on employment for a wage, the vagaries of eco nomic cycles, chance, and bad luck played a much more significant role in people's lives, and they desired protection against those risks. Disabling accidents in the factory, sick ness of the breadwinner, old age, and unem ployment were potential calamities that wage earners and their families faced. This broad ened the constituency for governmental reme dies beyond the narrower band of the chroni cally poor.

While conceding that these risks were real, Kelley shows how they were being addressed by insurance, friendly societies, and other vol untary charitable associations. In other words, he sees nothing inevitable about the develop ment of the welfare state. For such voluntary remedies to have been usurped by state pro grams, a "sea change in thinking about the problems of poverty and economic risk" had to have transpired. The transformation from private to public provision of assistance could not have happened from economic causes alone, Kelley contends, but rather, resulted from a revolution in "ideas, values and philo sophical outlook." Virulent critics of individualism set the moral stage for the welfare state's assault on liberty. Ideas essential to liberty-such as the morality of self-interest and the efficacy of reason-were ridiculed and repudiated. The "new liberals" paved the way for the welfare state in five key ways, Kelley argues: (1) by redefining freedom into a spurious "positive freedom" to be taken care of by the state, (2) by redefining "coercion" to mean what employers do to their employees by offering them a wage, rather than the threatening of people with harm if they don't obey, (3) by undermining individualism with the claim that we are all helpless creatures of social forces, (4) by advocating a secular variant of altruism that replaced service to God with service to society, and (5) by undermining the distinction between society and the state, and deifying the latter.

Kelley concludes his demolition of the wel fare state on an optimistic note. Just as com munism imploded when its myth of a work ers' paradise wrought by central planning lost its credibility, so might the welfare state col lapse under the weight of its myths and near ly bankrupt programs. Not as sanguine by nature as Kelley, I do hope that his powers of prognostication are keen. I wonder, though, whether a system based on pure evil, like communism, is more vulnerable to collapse than one grounded on smaller, subtler evils, like the welfare state. We shall see. D Ellen Frankel Paul is professor ofpolitical science and philosophy and deputy director ofthe Social Phi losophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age by David M. Tucker University of Missouri Press • 1998 • 160 pages • $27.50 Reviewed by Burton Folsom A t last, the Mugwumps have their modern day champion: Professor David Tucker, a historian at the University of Memphis. The Mugwumps are best known as civil service reformers who worked within the Republican party to quash the spoils system with the Pendleton Act of 1883. As Tucker shows, however, the Mugwumps were much more than mere moral reformers. They were elo quent and persuasive spokesmen for free mar kets and free trade throughout the late 1800s.

The Mugwump name came from the Algon quian word for "chief." Tucker looks at, BOOKS 55 among others, the careers of Mugwump "chiefs" William Graham Sumner, professor at Yale University; E. L. Godkin, editor of The Nation; Carl Schurz, senator from Missouri; David Wells, a government statistician; and Henry Adams, popular writer descended from two presidents. The Mugwumps greatly admired the writ ings of British thinkers Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, and John Stuart Mill. The ideas of free markets, strong property rights, sound currency, and limited government were hall marks of Mugwump thinking. As Tucker notes, "They mastered historical and statis tical material that demonstrated that steam and electricity had multiplied the produc tivity of workers and would create an abun dance if only individuals learned personal virtue and if governments withdrew their mar ket interferences." Not only would society function more smoothly if entrepreneurs were unleashed and government restrained, but poor people and immigrants would have greater chances for success. Protective tariffs, according to Mug wump research, helped fewer than 10 percent of American workers and pushed prices upward for the rest. Tariffs further created lobbies of special interests who corrupted government by pressuring politicians to vote special favors for them.

The Mugwumps deplored the political arena and preferred to write rather than run for office. Their big political success was when they bolted the Republican party in 1884 and helped Grover Cleveland win the presidency. Cleveland proved to be a strong freemarket thinker and his two terms were the high point of Mugwump influence. In the late 1800s, the Mugwumps were challenged by the Populists, who wanted gov ernment aid for farmers; silver miners, who wanted the government to buy large amounts of silver at high prices; and some intellectu als, who saw government as a useful tool to create a more perfect society. Tucker describes these challenges to freemarket ideas and observes that Mugwumps opposed federal tinkering because "government poli cies violated liberal beliefs in absolute indi vidual rights of life, liberty, and property."

56 THE FREEMAN/IDEASON LIBERTY • JUNE 1999 Tucker does an excellent job of presenting the Mugwumps and their ideas, which he says were compelling and logical. They won some battles, lost others, and, by the early 1900s, were overshadowed by the Progressives. "Politicians," Tucker says, "always needed encouragement to do the right thing, and even if the advice was rarely followed, critics were not necessarily failures." In the past,.historians have ridiculed Mug wumps as priggish, selfish, and suffering from declining status in society. Tucker argues that this view says more about the historians than it does about the Mugwumps. "Mug wumps were given their reputation for failure by later cheerleaders for the welfare state," he observes. "[A]fter the Great Depression of the 1930s turned educated opinion to Keynesian economics, nineteenth-century liberals who feared government as the enemy of freedom and progress were recast as selfish, wrong headed agents for the middle class."

Tucker's research is solid and he explores a wealth of primary and secondary sources. His writing is clear and crisp and his chapters are well organized. Most historians assume that freemarket ideas lost because they were not sound; Tucker, by contrast, assumes that the Mugwumps held ideas that were solid and enduring. To explain their ultimate defeat, he explores how the German ideas of statism and empire-building began to permeate American society in the late 1800s. Tucker's book is an excellent addition to the literature on the Gilded Age and a valuable correction to the standard books by historians Richard Hofstadter, Ari Hoogenboom, and John Sproat. D Burton Folsom is senior fellow with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. His book The Myth of the Robber Barons is in its third edition. Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath Free Press. 1998 • 288 pages • $25.00 Reviewed by Fred D. Miller, Jr.

O ver a decade ago, Allan Bloom's explo sive book, The Closing of the American Mind, opened the floodgates of criticism of American higher education for perverting its ostensible mission and values. Professors of the humanities, in particular, have been exco riated for behaving like politically correct ide ologues and overspecialized self-promoters and careerists rather than teachers and schol ars in the traditional sense. Who Killed Homer? presses the attack into that most ven erable citadel of the academy: the discipline of classics, which studies the languages and literature of the ancient Greeks and their intel lectualheirs, the Romans. Authors Hanson (professor of Greek at Cal ifornia State University-Fresno) and Heath (professor of classics at Santa Clara Universi ty) start with a paradox: In 1992 classicists published over 16,000 books, articles, and reviews, double the output of 1962.Yet during this time, enrollments in Latin have plummet ed and Greek has all but disappeared. As a result, "there are now five or six Classics pro fessors in the country for every senior Clas sics major, and over thirty articles and books each year for every graduating student." This is having dire effects: retiring classicists are not replaced, and ever fewer courses in clas sics are being taught. How did this happen?