Lincoln Unbound (24 page)

Some of this is utterly unobjectionable. The fight over whether we would have a safety net for the disabled, the indigent, and the elderly was settled long ago. But the welfare state has expanded inexorably to climb up the income scale and to widen its reach. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute points out that adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement payments of all kinds have grown on average at 4 percent a year for five decades and now constitute two-­thirds of federal spending. About half of Americans live in households receiving government benefits, up from roughly 38 percent in 1998.

Consider the rise of food stamps. Beneficiaries increased from about 17 million ­people in 2000, to some 30 million in 2008, to roughly 47 million in 2012. From 1 in 50 Americans on food stamps at the program's national inception in the 1970s, 1 in 7 Americans are on them now. Even though unemployment was low from 2001 and 2006, spending on food stamps doubled in those years. Loosened eligibility requirements, and promotion of usage by all levels of government, drive an increase regardless of economic conditions.

Or the course of Social Security Disability Insurance. From 1960 to 2011, the number of adults receiving benefits under the program grew from fewer than 500,000 to more than 8 million. This runaway growth makes no sense given amazing advances in health and medical care, and how much less hazardous most work has become. Eligibility standards have been relaxed and there has been an influx of younger workers under the vaguer, more subjective categories of disability involving mental health and musculoskeletal disorders.

As the welfare state grows, it must necessarily reduce the stigma that once attached to receiving “relief.” It can't help but to chip away at individual initiative and work effort, both ­because it pays ­people for not working and takes away their benefits when they earn more. It depends on a present-­oriented framework instead of a future-­oriented one, since it funds ­current consumption at the price of increased fiscal burdens on subsequent generations.

The advent of the welfare state is one of the signal political innovations of the modern age. We can't know how Lincoln would have regarded it in all its permutations. It's hard to see him, though, considering the routine acceptance of able-bodied adults (who aren't war widows or orphans) living off the labor of others as anything other than shocking—offensive to common sense and harmful to the recipient. He might detect in it a whiff of the moral stink of the plantation, in its insulting assumption that people who are otherwise healthy and in possession of their senses can't take responsibility for themselves. He was tough enough on his relatives who merely had to ask for loans because they weren't sufficiently enterprising. Imagine what he would have said had they been on the dole.

BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE.
Unstintingly, from the beginning of his career to the end, Lincoln favored funding better transportation infrastructure, whether it was improving the ­pathetic little Sangamon River or building a grand railroad project spanning the continent. It was all toward the end of reducing transit costs, and easing travel and commercial transactions. In aggregate, this project was a runaway success. It transformed American life. In its specific expressions, the Lincoln program was a mixed bag. At one point it brought Illinois to its fiscal knees. It funded pork. It aided and abetted the corrupt builders of the transcontinental railroad. It nonetheless did more good than harm, and Lincoln would surely be interested in developing a comparable program.

If he were back in Congress, he might be found on the House transportation committee. He would have a great interest in ports and bridges, highways and airports. Needless to say, if we should be doing more to maintain and build our infrastructure, we should do it intelligently. Lincoln would surely be astounded by all that the contemporary government does to put roadblocks in the way of even its own projects. A welter of environmental regulations makes it impossible to build anything of consequence without extravagant bureaucratic review and lawsuits. He would be intrigued by innovations like congestion pricing, and mindful of how new technologies are enabling telecommuting and other ways around having to get in a vehicle and drive somewhere.

Whatever the means, Lincoln's end would be the same as ever—­to create efficiencies and reduce costs in traveling and shipping. In the nineteenth century, he wanted to unlock the country's potential. For him, there would be more potential yet to unlock.

FUND OTHER BASIC SUPPORTS FOR GROWTH.
Lincoln lent aid to transportation improvements on the theory that they were transformative and couldn't necessarily get the capital on their own otherwise. A direct analogue today is basic science and research. It can pay massive dividends but on a time frame that is too long for any one company to fund the work. So much federal spending is erroneously touted as “investment.” In this case, it actually is.

The act creating the Department of Agriculture signed by Lincoln in 1862 was intended in this vein (long before the department became a conduit for food stamps and farm subsidies). The department was “to acquire and to diffuse among the ­people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word, and to procure, propagate, and distribute among the ­people new and valuable seeds and plants.” Think DARPA—­the famously innovative Defense Department research agency—­but for farmers.

Lincoln the tinkerer, patent holder, and informal adviser to the War Department on weapons technologies would no doubt be an unrestrained enthusiast for government doing its small part to expand the horizons of our understanding and capabilities.

REJECT CLASS POLITICS.
The entire thrust of Lincoln's economics was growing the pie for everyone and resisting zero-­sum arguments positing an inherent conflict between classes. “By increasing total wealth,” Daniel Walker Howe writes, “the Whigs hoped to avoid having to equalize its distribution.” It's not as though Lincoln was unfamiliar with inequality or arguments about its supposed blight on the republic. Some estimates have the top 10 percent increasing its share of the nation's wealth from roughly 50 percent to more than 70 percent between the late eighteenth century and 1860. Representatives of the labor movement lamented that “the profits of . . . improvements in the arts, instead, as would seem just, of
tending to benefit and relieve the whole of its members in the burdens of their toil
, go only to the enrichment of
a few
, and depression of a great majority.”

Lincoln rejected this kind of politics then, and he would do so now. Nothing in Lincoln's record suggests that he ever would deliver anything like President Obama's 2011 Osawatomie, Kansas, speech arguing that the rich are a clear and present threat to the middle class and to our democracy. In a reply to a workingmen's association in New York in 1864, Lincoln struck his characteristic tone: “Property is the fruit of labor—­property is desirable—­is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich, shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprize.”

WELCOME IMMIGRANTS.
Lincoln wasn't beyond the occasional Irish joke. The compilation of his humor,
Abe Lincoln Laughing
, has about a dozen jokes or stories involving Irishmen. He told one in his temperance lecture. Illustrating the foolishness of long-­way-­off promises of good or threats of evil, he recounted someone catching an Irishman in an act of theft and admonishing him, “Better lay down that spade you're stealing, Paddy—­if you don't you'll pay for it at the day of judgment.” The Irishman replies, “By the powers, if ye'll credit me so long, I'll take another jist.”

But Lincoln was broadly pro-­immigration, even if he played the politics delicately. Incredible ferment on the issue rocked the 1850s. After a massive wave of immigration, 20 percent of the population was foreign-­born by 1860. In reaction, the Know-­Nothing party wanted a twenty-­one-­year waiting period before immigrants could be naturalized, among other restrictions on their political participation, and opposed public support for Catholic schools. Although Lincoln recoiled from the Know-­Nothing agenda, he didn't want to offend the party's adherents, either. Republicans hoped to absorb them into their coalition.

At an 1855 meeting of antislavery forces in Decatur, Illinois, he participated in the drafting of a platform that was anti-­nativist, but diplomatically so. The platform stated that “we shall maintain the Naturalization laws as they are, believing as we do, that we should welcome the exiles and emigrants from the Old World, to homes of enterprise and of freedom in the New.” At the same time, it made a bow to the anti-­Catholic fears of the Know-­Nothings by opposing “all attacks upon our Common School System, or upon any of our Institutions of an educational character, or our civil polity by the adherents of any religious body whatsoever.”

Lincoln and his fellow Republicans had a keen eye on the German-­American vote, which was especially important in the Midwest. The national Republican platform in 1860 contained two so-­called Dutch planks, one of which opposed “any change in our naturalization laws, or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired.” In the presidential election, Lincoln won enough backers of the Know-­Nothing candidate in 1856, the ­former president Millard Fillmore, to prevail in the key states of Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana, while picking up some immigrant voters at the same time.

Lincoln vented his true feelings in a letter to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855. “I am not a Know-­Nothing,” he wrote. “How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of ­negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white ­people?” In an 1859 letter to the German-­American editor Theodore Canisius, he struck a similar theme: “Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the
elevation
of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to
degrade
them.”

With another Irish joke, Lincoln made the point that the immigrant couldn't help his status. He said that in a conversation with an Irishman tending his garden, he explained what the Know-­Nothings were trying to do and asked him why he had not been born in America. “Faith,” the Irishman replied, “I wanted to, but me mother wouldn't let me.”

Clearly, Lincoln's default position today would be generosity toward immigrants. The effectively permanent status as second-­class citizens of millions of illegal immigrants would be anathema to him. I think the way to square a Lincolnian liberality with the national interest would be to secure the border and workplace so as to check any new flow, then grant amnesty to illegal immigrants too embedded in their communities to leave the country. As for legal immigration, our policy should be reoriented around skilled workers. In a twenty-­first-­century economy, it's no longer a matter of welcoming Lincoln's characteristic immigrant trio—­Hans and Baptiste and Patrick—­and giving them a plot of land. Without the requisite skills, immigrants often end up a net fiscal drag on government and compete with the most vulnerable, low-­skilled workers. With those skills, though, they can enliven Lincoln's vision of immigrants and their new country in a mutually beneficial and elevating embrace.

EXPLOIT OUR RESOURCES.
Lincoln would probably favor drilling, mining, and fracking to the utmost. If the discovery of gold in California was in his mind a testament to Yankee ingenuity to be celebrated, the advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking to tap untold new sources of oil and natural gas would have been a miracle for the ages. This is the kind of thing for which Lincoln, literally, thanked God. His 1863 Thanksgiving address said, “Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.”

No one talked about climate change in the 1860s, so it's possible he would have a change of heart. He might support subsidies to green energy, since they are justified in the same terms as the subsidies he favored in his day—as needful support for a cutting-­edge industry. (It is worth noting that green energy will be a minuscule contributor to our energy consumption for a long time; the Energy Department estimates it will only go from about 9 percent of our energy consumption today to about 11 percent in 2035.) But he would surely recognize in the budding oil-­and-­gas revival the same sort of potential for reducing costs, albeit on a smaller scale, of the transportation revolution of his time. With the United States projected to become the world's largest oil producer by 2020, Lincoln would be tempted to begin drafting a proclamation of thanksgiving forthwith.

PAY ATTENTION TO THE INTERESTS OF THE COMMON WORKER.
“Whatever is calculated to advance the condition of the honest, struggling laboring man,” Lincoln said in 1861 on his way to Washington, “so far as my judgment will enable me to judge of a correct thing. I am for that thing.” It is a rule, no doubt, that he would hew to still.

How to uphold it involves an enormous economic debate. A devoted tariff man, Lincoln might seek retaliation against China's predatory trade practices today, even if the global position of the United States has been utterly transformed since the mid-­nineteenth century. The left focuses on renewed unionization, but unions have proved adept at disadvantaging the private industries where they are most concentrated. There are obviously no simple answers, but there are a number of things that we can do to advance “the condition of the honest, laboring man” that are consistent with broader economic efficiency and growth.