Conservatives must cultivate self-reliance

By Jim Wooten - Atlanta Journal-Constitution - 4/10/07

Maybe there's no going back. But conservatives —- for the nation's good —- need to make one enormous try.

To be honest, the media won't be much help. By its nature, it highlights the case for more government. It documents suffering and what it sees as inequity and injustice that require a governmental solution.

Personal responsibility is rarely, if ever, a mentioned virtue. Poor choices —- like, for example the decision to bring babies into the world without a mother and a father in the home —- are rarely, if ever, questioned, and never in a way that would suggest blame.

The current debate in Georgia over PeachCare is the proper balance between providing a temporary safety net for those who are genuinely down on their luck and with creating a government program that invites adults to make bad choices, and to dump their children onto the backs of taxpayers.

It is terribly unfortunate that debates like this are always reduced to absurdity, with social and fiscal conservatives caricatured in penny-pinching stereotype while the advocates of more spending are seen as compassionate and, therefore, virtuous.

Georgia House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) spoke, in a story published this weekend, to that balance. "It is the obligation of all of us to take care of those that cannot take care of themselves," he told reporter Bill Hendrick. The benefits, however, have been made too generous to strike the proper balance and furthermore, he argued, PeachCare is coming to be regarded as an entitlement and a constitutional right, which it isn't. "The responsibility to take care of children is first with moms and dads. Mamas and daddies are responsible."

When PeachCare is discussed it is in terms of a struggle between good and evil —- bad people intentionally inflicting suffering on the deserving poor over the objections of the virtuous. But in the story Hendrick presents, a minister making $42,000 a year, with a wife and three children, opts instead to preach as a freelancer, substantially reducing his family's income, thus qualifying the children for PeachCare.

I cannot possibly know, nor can any journalist present in a single story, the reasons people make the choices they do. So I'm not here to judge the choices the family made.

The public policy question, however, is whether parents should be invited to make choices that transfer a parental obligation to government.

We keep crossing that divide. For all its public support, the truth is that HOPE stipends do the same thing. The program says to parents that it's no longer an essential family obligation to save for your child's college expenses. Even for children who are not college material, HOPE is available.

So in at least these two instances, we start from the premise that deserving people are falling through the cracks —- and use that to construct social programs that alter adult behavior, often in ways that are contrary to the public good.

Public welfare, for all its good, became a program that made men immaterial. Women married government. The result, now, is that in some populations men are disappearing from the lives of their children. Read the newspaper or watch television news and note how seldom men show up, especially in stories involving underclass families. Men are incidental.

This is, then, the consuming goal of conservatives in government: Strike a balance in the creation of social programs, or any other, so that help is extended to deserving poor without cultivating dependency and without tempting adults to make choices that could be harmful to family and to children. If, as with PeachCare, people are allowed onto the rolls without having to verify citizenship or eligibility, the result is obvious. Ineligible people will enroll, inviting dishonesty and forcing taxpayers to support freeloaders.

PeachCare reform, then, is not about abandoning public responsibility to the poor, but is about striking a balance that doesn't entice the middle class into dependency.

Policy-makers can re-fashion social programs intelligently. Welfare reform's emphasis on work is one example. The HOPE VI housing program, under which public housing projects are razed and replaced with upscale mixed-use housing, invites back those who demonstrate personal responsibility by work, by conduct and by property upkeep. The government that cultivated dependency is reconfigured to cultivate self-reliance and other virtues.

It's a tough challenge for conservatives. The pressure, always, is to throw money and to equate intent with results. That's what conservatives have to change.

Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial page.
His column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
jwooten@ajc.com