Yuval Levin - A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs
Here you can read online Yuval Levin - A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York, year: 2012, publisher: Encounter Books, genre: Science / Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs
- Author:
- Publisher:Encounter Books
- Genre:
- Year:2012
- City:New York
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
America finds itself in a moment of profound and complex governing challenges. A crushing recession followed by a feeble recovery have shaken the foundations of our financial and economic system. We are struggling with the exploding costs of health-care and entitlement spending, and fiscal disaster looms as our society ages. American families are anxious about wage stagnation, barriers to social mobility, and the nations competitiveness in an era of globalization. Meanwhile, our large governing institutions -- most of them designed several decades ago -- are showing signs of strain and decay, calling out for serious reform. National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays on domestic policy and political economy, was launched in 2009 to help Americans think more clearly about these problems and to develop promising solutions. This book is a collection of some of the most timely and concrete policy proposals published in the journals pages, offering ideas for reforming our welfare state, our tax system, financial regulation, monetary policy, education, state finances, and more. Each essay was written by a prominent expert in the field--the authors are all notable right-leaning academics, policy experts, former government officials, or think tank scholars with national reputations. The book thus comprises a ready-made domestic policy agenda for conservative policymakers (including a Republican president, should one be elected in 2012), based on the latest and best thinking from the world of conservative policy intellectuals. It will be the only resource of its kind in this election year--a one-stop-shop for conservative policy ideas.
Yuval Levin: author's other books
Who wrote A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Julian Zelizer
Alex Jingwei He
Andrew L Stigler
Ekaterina Domorenok
Kelley Lee
Edward A Kolodziej
A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Table of Contents
This book was made possible by generous support from
the Hertog/Simon Fund for Policy Analysis
the Hertog/Simon Fund for Policy Analysis
INTRODUCTION
This book is a how to guide for addressing some of Americas most pressing public-policy challenges. Though such challenges are never in short supply, todays profusion of them is exceptional making the need for clear thinking about them exceptionally urgent.
America finds herself in the midst of a governing crisis. It has been years in the making caused by the crumbling of large governing institutions and public programs established in the middle of the last century, as well as by the transformation of the global economic order. The great task of American public life in the coming years will be to understand these shifts and the problems they have created, and to craft policy solutions capable of addressing them.
This collection aims to help in that task. Its first two chapters articulate the nature of the problem we face, and the subsequent 16 chapters offer specific policy reforms of the welfare state, of the tax code, of our financial and monetary systems, of education, and of state budgets and policies.
Because they were written by 19 different authors, these essays do not agree on every point; indeed, several offer proposals that are in tension with others. But all are guided by a common vision of American life: by confidence and pride in our country, by a sense that our challenge is to build on our strengths to address our weaknesses, and by the conviction that chief among those strengths are our democratic capitalism, our ideals of liberty and equality under the law, and our roots in the longstanding traditions of the West. All of these essays also reflect the concern that American government has taken on too many tasks to perform any of them effectively. Thus each chapter offers proposals that would lead to a smaller but more capable government, and to a larger and more assertive private sector.
This vision of America and this approach to addressing its foremost problems define the work of National Affairs, a quarterly journal launched in 2009 to help Americans think more clearly about the challenges of self-government. Each quarter, National Affairs publishes essays about public policy, society, culture, politics, and the world of ideas, with an eye to what thoughtful Americans ought to know, and with a special concern for domestic policy and political economy, broadly understood.
The chapters of this book have all been previously published as essays in the journals pages. As it is all too easy, especially in times of change and challenge, to reflect on broad abstractions while ignoring the details of specific policy problems, this collection includes some of the most manifestly policy-minded articles of those we have published to date. It is a compilation of achievable policy solutions. To speak of policy solutions is not to imply that we think that policy or politics can finally solve any true social problem only that some of our problems are exacerbated by poor public policy, and could be meaningfully mitigated by thoughtful reforms.
This emphasis on achievable solutions reflects an appreciation of the how of government of the ways in which the means of government can shape public life just as much as its ends. Indeed, those of us who are most inclined to think seriously about the proper ends of government are too often prone to lose sight of the importance of means. This tendency is nothing new: A good government implies two things, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 62. First, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained. Some governments are deficient in both these qualities; most governments are deficient in the first. I scruple not to assert, that in American governments too little attention has been paid to the last.
Not much has changed on that front, but the dilemmas of this moment demand that attention be paid to the means of American government, almost as much as to its ends. We hope that this volume contributes in some modest measure to clear thinking about both, at a time when such thinking is in critical demand.
The Editors
I. AMERICAS CHALLENGE
Beyond the Welfare State
Yuval Levin
SPRING 2011
IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY CLEAR that we in America are living through a period of transition. One chapter of our national life is closing, and another is about to begin. We can sense this in the tense volatility of our electoral politics, as dramatic change elections follow closely upon one another. We can feel it in the unseemly mood of decline that has infected our public life leaving our usually cheerful nation fretful about global competition and unsure if the next generation will be able to live as well as the present one. Perhaps above all, we can discern it in an overwhelming sense of exhaustion emanating from many of our public institutions our creaking mid-century transportation infrastructure, our overburdened regulatory agencies struggling to keep pace with a dynamic economy, our massive entitlement system edging toward insolvency.
But these are mostly symptoms of our mounting unease. The most significant cause runs deeper. We have the feeling that profound and unsettling change is afoot because the vision that has dominated our political imagination for a century the vision of the social-democratic welfare state is drained and growing bankrupt, and it is not yet clear just what will take its place.
That vision was an answer to a question America must still confront: How shall we balance the competing aspirations of our society aspirations to both wealth and virtue, dynamism and compassion? How can we fulfill our simultaneous desires to race ahead yet leave no one behind? The answer offered by the social-democratic ideal was a technocratic welfare state that would balance these aspirations through all-encompassing programs of social insurance. We would retain a private economy, but it would be carefully managed in order to curb its ill effects, and a large portion of its output would be used by the government to address large social problems, lessen inequality, and thus also build greater social solidarity.
YUVAL LEVIN is the editor of National Affairs, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Of course, this vision has never been implemented in full. But it has offered a model, for good and for ill. For the left, it provided long-term goals, criteria for distinguishing progress from retreat in making short-term compromises, and a kind of definition of the just society. For the right, it was a foil to be combated and averted an archetype of soulless, stifling bureaucratic hubris and it helped put objections to seemingly modest individual leftward steps into a broader, more coherent context. But both ends of our politics seemed implicitly to agree that, left to its own momentum, this is where our country was headed where history would take us if no one stood athwart it yelling stop.
It is no longer really possible to think so. All over the developed world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social-democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. Sustaining existing programs of social insurance, let alone continuing to build new ones on the social-democratic model, has become increasingly difficult in recent years, and projections for the coming decades paint an impossibly grim and baleful picture. There is simply no way that Europe, Japan, or America can actually go where the economists long-term charts now point to debts that utterly overwhelm their productive capacities, governments that do almost nothing but support the elderly, and economies with no room for dynamism, for growth, or for youth. Some change must come, and so it will.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs»
Look at similar books to A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Julian Zelizer
Alex Jingwei He
Andrew L Stigler
Ekaterina Domorenok
Kelley Lee
Edward A Kolodziej
Reviews about «A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs»
Discussion, reviews of the book A Time for Governing: Policy Solutions From the Pages of National Affairs and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.