Social Models: Jabba The Hut's Bottomless Pit

Canada hasn't even begun to question its own failings regarding the massive size of the public sector. We tend to throw money at the system as opposed to being creative with it. We just "assume" it's for the better. We've given up freedom for equality - because the two are mutually exclusive. Indeed, as one person I know put it, so what if we give up freedom if it means we push together as a collective? There's so much wrong with that belief it's best to leave it alone.

The rise of the social conscience is a noble notion worth preserving. But not in its current form.

Walter Russell Mead explores the American version of the welfare state (and contrary to Canadian public opinion, I would submit America has more socialism than Canada) in 'Feeding the Blue Beast' published in The American Interest.

I post a large chunk of it here:

Most Americans would like the blue model to stick around and are nostalgic for the security it once provided, but they understand that the great task of our times isn’t to save the blue model but to move on. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party believes exactly the opposite: that the blue social model is the only way to go. If our city and state governments are groaning under the dead weight of inflated labor and pension costs, the only solution is to pump federal money into them somehow. If public schools aren’t working, they need more money — but seriously restructuring the system is out of bounds. If college and university tuition is exploding as the costs of education rapidly and continuously outpaces the general level of inflation, the only solution is to pump more money into the system while leaving it to operate much as it does.

Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast. The great public-service providing institutions of our society — schools, universities, the health system, and above all government at municipal, state and federal levels — are built blue and think blue. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party thinks its job is to make them bigger and keep them blue. Bringing the long green to Big Blue: that’s what it’s all about.

Three problems: we can’t afford it, people know that, and we desperately need the things that Big Blue can’t give us.

Blue institutions aren’t productive enough and efficient enough to provide the services we need. There’s a hard and bitter truth here: workers in these sectors are going to have to accept lower wages and less security going forward — and they will have to produce more than they do now. Much more. This sounds draconian and harsh, but with a relative handful of exceptions everybody else in the United States has been facing this reality for the last generation.

This has turned into a massive political problem for Democrats because more and more people are waking up to the fact that this just doesn’t work. We don’t have the money to keep throwing more and more of it into dysfunctional public schools, overpriced state colleges and government at all levels. In the competitive world we all live in now, our society has no choice but to learn how to do these things much more cheaply. Otherwise the blue sector will drag the whole country down with it. This is part of what drives the Tea Parties: there’s a sense out there that the time for careful, limited reform is past. We need a crowbar, not a scalpel, to fix the blue beast.

Yet Democrats are right about one very important thing. We actually do need (most of) the services that the blue beast seeks to provide. We really do need good government at all three levels. We really do need more and better education. We need better health care and better access to it. The Tea Party movement is more about tearing down the blue beast than about building something that can take its place and until and unless Republicans figure this out the country will shift unhappily between two political parties that it dislikes and mistrusts.
As for the Tea Party, I see it less as a bunch of racist hicks suddenly waking from its partisan slumber (although I'm sure there's some of that) and more as a legitimate reaction to welfare over reach. It's happening under Obama because he's perceived to be overtly liberal something past Presidents managed to avoid.