Bush's Ownership Society: Why No One's Buying

Excellent overview of the "Ownership Society" in the Washington Monthly:

Talk to scholars at the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or to movement organizers like Grover Norquist, and they'll walk you through the strategy. Big government and individual freedom, they'll explain, are opposed to each other; more of one means less of the other. The three big areas of non-defense-related government spending are retirement (mainly Social Security), health care (mainly Medicare and Medicaid), and education (mainly K-12 public schools). For political reasons, it is practically impossible to cut spending in these areas. But it is possible to dismantle the government bureaucracies that administer them in a way that enhances personal freedom and makes possible big cuts down the road: privatize the benefits.

... Consider President Bush's effort to sell the public on private Social-Security accounts. ... by June, when informed that private accounts would be paired with cuts in benefits for future retirees—as the president himself admitted they would have to be to have any impact on Social Security's long-run finances—27 percent of voters gave their approval, a level of support below that for legalizing marijuana and gay marriage.

Or consider another high-profile element of what Bush calls the “ownership society”: giving individuals more control over their government health-care benefits. ... Today, a scant 31 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the new program.

Finally, consider the president's efforts to give parents more choice over the schools their children attend. ... Yet a two-year-old federal voucher experiment in D.C. that provides low-income students a hefty $7,500 to attend private schools has garnered only modestly more interest. Only 7 percent of families with children eligible for the vouchers have applied for them.

You can begin to see a pattern here. Americans love the idea of choice—in the abstract. But when faced with the actual choices conservatives present, they aren't buying. The reason is that conservatives have constructed choices that fail to take human nature into account. People like to have choices but feel quickly overwhelmed when they lack the information or expertise to decide confidently, and they turn downright negative when the choices themselves seem to put what they already have at risk. Conservatives were bound to make these mistakes because their very aim has been to transfer more risks from government to individuals so that government's size and expenditures can be cut. That's not a bargain most Americans will accept. They like choice just fine, but they won't trade security to get it.

... Conservatives may have been blindsided by the public's rejection of the president's plan because they assumed that most Americans share their fundamental assumptions about government: that more of it is bad, less of it is good. On an abstract level, many people do feel that way. ... But when forced to consider concrete alternatives, Americans often wind up putting their trust in the collective efforts of government to protect their security rather than in themselves. Though the president succeeded in convincing the public that Social Security has long-term financial problems, he did not convince them that shifting control and choice to individuals was the solution. Rather, polls showed huge majorities favor such measures as raising the income cap on payroll taxes to inject more money into the current system—in other words, making government bigger, not smaller.