In America as in Europe, Republicans argue, the welfare state is failing to provide either security or dynamism. The safety net is so expensive it won’t be there for future generations. Meanwhile, the current model shifts resources away from the innovative sectors of the economy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care and education. Successive presidents have layered on regulations and loopholes, creating a form of state capitalism in which big businesses thrive because they have political connections and small businesses struggle.
The welfare model favors security over risk, comfort over effort, stability over innovation. Money that could go to schools and innovation must now go to pensions and health care. This model, which once offered insurance from the disasters inherent in capitalism, has now become a giant machine for redistributing money from the future to the elderly.
This is the source of Republican extremism: the conviction that the governing model is obsolete. It needs replacing. — David Brooks editorial, NYT 15.06.2012
I would propose that the relative abundance of the historically recent welfare state is a direct result of the ‘easy’ availability of hydrocarbons. ANY abundance of energy will allow/encourage a species to expand the controlling complexity of its ‘social’ system. In the human case, it is not only the ‘welfare’ state, but the ‘defense’ state, the ‘agri’ state, the ‘industrial’ state, the ‘education’ state, and so on — the entire cumulative fabric of inter-related social systems. One single aspect (that welfare state) of the cumulative complexity cannot be blamed for our ‘problems.’ Actually, the human species, overall, with the development of its hydrocarbon energy source is wildly successful in its expansion and dominance of the globe in its entirety. The current ‘problems’ are a result of the species reaching the limits of the ability of the hydrocarbon energy source to provide structural organizing advantage and the ensuing stability of expansion/control that all living memory is accustomed to. The growing socio-economic instability of the West is a direct result of competition from other social systems for that once-easily accessible glutted energy source (that the West monopolized!). (Underscoring that the instability is not ‘just’ economic — the instability is a ‘real’ (thermodynamic) feature and a deep characteristic of the entire system — in just the same way that the initial ramping-up of the energy glut affected the entire system’s (negentropic) character of complexity and control of previously un-controlled flows — things like viral infections, the impact of ‘natural’ catastrophes on populations, and the stability of agricultural production, etc.)
One reason that the political discussions never really reach a positive conclusion is that they focus on sub-elements of the wider system: they are not holistic in nature (i.e., speaking of defense needs, food needs, housing needs, education needs, etc., as though they were structurally unrelated sub-systems that may be treated almost completely independently).
A longer article by Yuval Levin that Brooks quotes (in the Weekly Standard) touches on the question of energy, but largely misses the crucial wider-scaled importance of it in the formation and maintenance of human techno-social systems. Nor does it acknowledge the wider-scaled costs of accessing and consuming such energy resources:
A second and perhaps no less surprising potential source of strength is the energy sector. While the president has indulged in embarrassing fantasies about solar and wind power and electric cars, America’s domestic energy supply has undergone an utter revolution in the past few years. Advances in technologies for recovering oil and gas from previously inaccessible sources now look increasingly likely to make available astonishing quantities of domestic fossil fuels.
Producers and investors are clearly adjusting to this new reality, but it has barely begun to be noticed in our political system. In a May 10 hearing of the House Science Committee’s energy subcommittee, for instance, Anu Mittal of the Government Accountability Office told a stunned panel of members that oil-shale deposits in the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming alone “are estimated to contain up to 3 trillion barrels of oil, half of which may be recoverable, which is about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” Newly accessible natural-gas reserves around the country could be equally staggering in volume. The United States may be on the verge of becoming the world’s fossil-fuel colossus.
But the Obama administration’s response to these developments has been largely to ignore them, as they are at odds with the green energy agenda. The age of nonfossil fuels will surely come someday—though it will likely require a serious adjustment in the left’s attitude toward nuclear power. But that day remains far off, and for the moment fossil fuels are not only essential to powering our economy but may be the source of the next great wave of productivity and wealth creation in America. The administration’s choice of lifestyle liberalism over this new opportunity for growth is nothing short of governing malpractice. Mitt Romney should make the public aware of the good news regarding American energy, and should propose to put the federal government fully behind the domestic fossil-fuel revolution: making public land available, helping develop new exploration technologies, and encouraging innovation toward cleaner ways to burn oil and gas.
True enough, any government policy should look at efficiency combined with an overall deep contraction of actual use. But this is unpopular, as I have discovered, traveling around visiting different people/situations: almost no one wants to make choices that change the fundamental structural energy relationships that under-gird their life-style. There is such a plethora of false choices like ‘hybrid’ vehicle versus ‘regular’ that effectively mask the real issues as well as diverting thought-energy away from necessary and substantive structural changes in life-style.