Over at the Daily Kos, Michael Lazzaro (“Hunter”) has a post worth contemplating, if only for its insight into how some liberals view conservatives’ hostility to government as a massive wealth-redistribution scheme. He quotes the following passage from an old George Will column with derision:

The left’s centuries-old mission is to increase social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth — to decrease inequality by increasing government’s redistributive activities. Such government constantly expands under the unending, indeed intensifying, pressures to correct what it disapproves of — the distribution of wealth produced by consensual market activities

Lazzaro tries to refute Will’s proposition on two grounds: first, that the Right (e.g., Teddy Roosevelt) has often embraced progressive big-government schemes; and second, that the U.S., for all its vaunted meritocracy, is an abject failure at creating equality of opportunity.

The first objection is easily disposed of. The conservative movement, as it exists today, arose in opposition to the liberal program of government expansion and judicial legislation that began with the administration of FDR. The old Northeast/Midwestern establishment of the GOP had always been ambivalent about big government–when it wasn’t in favor of it. The GOP had, after all, prosecuted the Civil War in order to defeat the shield of “States’ Rights” behind which the Democratic Party sought to protect slavery. Teddy Roosevelt remains a conservative hero but his “New Nationalism,” and his adherence to the Progressive Movement’s program of expanding federal power, are to the say the least difficult to reconcile with the emerging conservative consensus on the crucial need to protect (or, more accurately, revive) a Constitution based on the principle of limited government.

It is no accident that National Review was founded at the end of the Eisenhower era. The conservative “movement,” as exemplified in its first full generation by William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, was always opposed to “big government,” and that inevitably created a conflict with the Northeast/Midwestern establishment wing of the GOP. This was the tale of the 1976 GOP primary, in which Ronald Reagan fought Michigan’s Gerald Ford all the way to the floor of the convention. Ford had been Richard Nixon’s VP, and Nixon had presided over one of the greatest periods of federal expansion since FDR. Nixon is to say the least not particularly well-loved among conservatives.

Lazarro’s second objection is more interesting, and more important. Here Lazzaro deploys none other than Paul Krugman against George Will. In a column that appeared just a few days after Will’s, Krugman argued that while America may consider itself a meritocracy, in fact it ranks virtually last, among developed societies, in the upward mobility of the underclass. Here’s the money quote:

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care.

The flaw in this argument lies in the implied causation. Krugman (and by implication Lazarro) think that it is “the holes in the social safety net” which spell doom for children born into disadvantaged circumstances. This is nonsense. The reason why America has more income inequality and less social mobility than a society like Sweden or Germany is obviously that America is so much more culturally and socially diverse. I recently stopped into a clinic to tend to a sprained ankle, and when I asked the (Hispanic) assistant whether she wanted to go to medical school, she laughed at me. ”No way!” she said.

In America, children born to parents on welfare start kindergarten with about half the vocabulary of children born to parents with graduate degrees, and that former demographic fills the dropout rolls in high school. By contrast, in a society like Sweden’s, children start out on a much more level educational playing field, for the simple reason that the society is much more homogeneous.