Thinly-Veiled Social Darwinism In Paul Ryan’s Budget? Let’s Check

“Thinly-veiled Social Darwinism” has emerged as the attack line of choice of President Obama on the theme of the budget proposal of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan. Ryan’s budget seeks to slow the growth of federal spending over the next decade.  Yet as Obama puts it, the budget “is antithetical to our entire history of upward mobility and a land of opportunity.”

Is it? We can check. Let’s search history for a prominent example of serious constraints put on federal spending; then let’s find out what happened to the American Dream in the offing.

Here’s one: Donald J. Devine’s term as head of the the Office of Personnel Management, the civil service, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

This man Devine, he really cut. How about these numbers: From 1980 to 1987, federal spending on the civil service went down from $13 billion to $7 billion. Those aren’t inflation-adjusted terms—they’re nominal. Throw in inflation, and Devine took his office’s spending down by 58%. As a percentage of GDP, that spending sunk by two-thirds.

At the time, Devine was crucified in the press. To the Washington Post he was “the terrible swift sword” of the civil service. But Devine stuck to the adage that if you want a friend in that town, get a dog. I was prompted a few years ago to name Devine The Greatest Reaganite of All. The man cut, cut, cut during the Reagan boom, freeing up so many federal workers to take part in the real economy’s surge of the 1980s. Remember, amid all those cuts in the Reagan years, the unemployment rate ground relentlessly downward.

Here’s another factoid about Devine’s term at the civil service. He saw a crisis coming in the federal pension system. The system was a defined-benefit one, where the employer guarantees the worker a certain level of income in retirement. This is opposed to a defined-contribution system, where the worker puts money into a personal account—a 401(k) or what have you—and on retirement uses that pot of money and its returns to live on.

Devine realized that the defined-benefit system he’d inherited would be grossly underfunded a generation hence. The money set aside would be raided for all sorts of purposes—if it was even set aside to begin with. After a while, the civil service would have to draw on the general-fund federal coffers big time to make due on its pension obligations. So Devine took the problem off the table by outfitting federal workers with defined-contribution plans.

How’d that turn out? Today, we have no federal pension-obligation headache whatsoever—count your blessings—while we suffer from state and local defined-benefit crises galore. You know all those towns in California and New Jersey which residents are fleeing because mega-taxes have to be levied to pay for gilt-edged firefighters’ pensions negotiated thirty years ago?  That would be America at the national level but for Don Devine’s leadership at civil service in the 1980s.

Now interestingly, what kind of social distemper do we see developing given that spending promises toward government workers at the state and local level have been big all these years? We see the outlines of conflict and animalism. Every other interlocutor at one of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s town hall meetings seems to be a tough from one of the government-worker outfits promising the big man defeat at the polls and other fine things should he take steps to chip away at that state’s mother of a benefits problem.

Nice, isn’t it? A society broken into enclaves of made men on the one hand and suckers on the other, and if the suckers ever try to get out from the weight of their “obligations,” the air gets thick with tones of payback and keeping things as they are.

In a word, you get Social Darwinism, that weird war of all-against-all where the heavy-handed make alliances to pillage those who just want to mind their own business. And it’s the future foretold not by cuts, but by government spending and its phony promises. Sadly, this is the thing of beauty that has emerged before our eyes in the national laboratories that are our states.

So President Obama has gotten it exactly wrong. Social Darwinism results from government spending and the culture it breeds.

Small government gives you the opposite. Today, thank heaven (and Don Devine), all those federal workers and retirees on defined-contribution plans represent not an overbearing mass demanding its due, but an industrious and reasonable section of our citizenry, careful as these people have been since the 1980s to manage their own affairs.

The article first appeared in Forbes.