March 06, 2012
Yes, he did. His paean to the late James Q. Wilson is titled, “the rediscovery of character.” It is a discussion of how Wilson touted the importance of values to a country that Brooks believes lacks them.
In the middle of the piece he tells readers:
“Every generation has an incentive to spend on itself, but none ran up huge deficits until the current one. Some sort of moral norms prevented them.”
Of course the reason that the country is running up huge deficits at the moment is that private sector spending has collapsed. Prior to the collapse of the economy in 2008, deficits were relatively small with the debt to GDP ratio actually declining.
The large government filled the demand gap created by the lack of private sector spending. If we did not have this spending, then millions of additional workers would be unemployed. They would be unable to properly care for their children.
It is hard to see the moral norms that tells us this situation would be good. There are certainly people who think it is more important to have a balanced budget than workers have jobs and that their kids have a decent education, health care, nutrition, and housing.
This balanced budget view seems more obviously attributable to a misunderstanding of the economy. However, if Brooks wants to claim that the worship over balanced budgets over a decent society and a healthy economy is a moral norm, then we should be happy that this norm does not carry quite as much weight as it used to.
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