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Mickey Kaus' "The End of Equality" is a book of almost perfect self-in-dulgence, like an absurd cocktail-party rant-which would be fine were it a gourmand's guide or an erotic novel. Unfortunately, it passes for this season's hot political theory or, as the cover proclaims, a new agenda for the Democratic Party.
Forget the S&L and junk-bond scandals, ignore the flight of American manufacturing and breathe hardly a word about the national debt. And play down the corruption of the political process by the wealthy. Mickey Kaus may be the last person in America who believes the political/judicial system is not rigged: "The courts still treat a Michael Milken or Leona Helmsley with an inspiring lack of deference."
No, it is the black underclass that is the main source of our problems-"a class whose values are so inimical to America's potential universal culture that its negation, and transformation, will allow those universal values to flower."
What Kaus proposes as a new "Civic Liberalism" is a worst-case example of social engineering. And an expensive one at that. Kaus attacks what he derides as "Money Liberalism," but his plan to abolish welfare and replace it with a public-jobs program modeled on the WPA would, by his own calculation, cost three times as much as the existing program.
What legislature, state or federal, is going to go for that one? And if such money is available, why not spend it on job training for poor people-which has never been seriously funded-or Republican Jack Kemp's proposal for enterprise zones?
Kaus' answer: Such programs would tend to keep poor blacks in the cities, and he wants them dispersed. On this basis, he derides Kemp's call for "empowering" poor people through private home ownership and business investment in the ghetto because "it tempts the underclass to stay put." Instead, he suggests, "you have to somehow deny benefits to one-parent families, unplug the underclass culture's life support system."
Welfare, in this view, is a cause of rather than a response to poverty, and should be eliminated. Instead, the human "dregs of the labor market" would be put into a program that is "relatively authoritarian, even a bit militaristic": If they cannot find real jobs, they must perform below-minimum-wage public work. He doesn't...