Frost Warning
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Here are the numbers: Graeme Frost’s 15 minutes of fame are entering week Number 3, which is pretty impressive for a 12-year-old boy who gave a two-minute speech. On September 29 Graeme read the Democrats’ radio message, in support of increasing federal spending by $35 billion over the next five years for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. He was chosen because his family’s medical expenses have been covered under the program since he and his sister were injured in a serious car accident in 2004.
Graeme’s fame rests on other numbers, ones more complicated and controversial. The point the Democrats made by having him address the country was that hard-working, hard-luck middle-class families are the ones who need and deserve health-care benefits from SCHIP. Graeme is one of four children being raised in Baltimore by Bonnie and Halsey Frost. According to the Baltimore Sun, Mrs. Frost works for a medical publishing firm, Mr. Frost is a woodworker, and between them they make about $45,000. Neither parent gets health insurance through work, and private insurance would cost them $1,200 a month, so they rely on Maryland’s SCHIP program, funded partially by the federal government but designed and administered by the state. Not so fast, responded the conservative blogosphere: Graeme and his sister attend a private school costing $20,000 a year. His parents own a nice house in a middle-class neighborhood as well as the building where Mr. Frost’s business is located. The Frosts own three cars, none of them beaters. Both parents grew up in families of considerable means, and the Frosts could purchase health insurance for much less than $1,200 a month. “If this is the face of the ‘needy’ in America,” wrote Mark Steyn for National Review, “then no one is not needy.”
The counterattack against the conservatives came in the news pages and in the editorials. Stories in the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times sympathetically re-examined the Frost’s finances. Both articles pointed out that the private schools are possible because of financial aid, while the combined value of their residential and commercial properties is under half-a-million dollars. The family is certainly “not destitute,” according to the Times, although its account of their careers left things hazy: Mrs. Frost’s publishing job is part-time, while her husband “works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder.”
Liberal columnists, writing on the Frosts’ behalf, were livid. The New York Observer’s Joe Conanson, always ready with a freshly turned phrase, says the conservatives who raised questions about the Frosts were “mean-spirited.” E.J. Dionne called them “cruel,” for “trashing” and “assaulting” the family. The indictment is not entirely consistent: While Mr. Conanson accuses conservatives of harassing the Frosts with “repeated telephone calls … about their personal finances,” Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic discounts their arguments because they “merely speculated about what the facts were” rather than actually speaking to the Frosts.
According to Paul Krugman, such conservatives resort to “character assassination in place of honest debate.” An honest debate, however, is exactly what conservatives want, and what liberals refuse to join. Where do we draw the line between where citizens’ obligations to provide for their own families leave off, and the government’s obligation to assist them begins?
When conservatives press that question, liberals always denounce them for raising it but never give an answer. “American children who need medical care should get it, period,” Mr. Krugman says. “Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.”
So, it was right for the Democrats to make a political point by calling attention to the Frosts’ economic circumstances, but wrong for conservatives to challenge that political point by questioning those circumstances?
All the conservatives’ assertions about the Frosts are untrue, but the validity of the Democrats’ original point — that, once again, America needs the government to spend more money to help more people — would be undiminished even if those assertions were true. This heads-I-win, tails-you-lose contest is the honest debate Mr. Krugman seeks.
Mr. Krugman’s principle is liberalism — if you’ve got a sob story, we’ve got a program, and that program needs to keep getting bigger as long as we keep finding sob stories. Upon looking into the Frosts’ finances, the New Republic’s Mr. Cohn conceded that “going without health insurance is often a matter of choice,” and “it’s clear the Frosts have made [a] choice to invest in property and a business, but not in private health insurance.” Now that a tragedy has left their children with serious medical conditions, private insurance is prohibitive. It’s mean-spirited, however, to suggest the Frosts were feckless for not securing insurance before disaster struck — that, indeed, this is the whole point of insurance.
None of this matters, though. According to Mr. Krugman, I am my neighbor’s keeper, and America is one big neighborhood. It might be nice if my neighbors were not improvident about caring for their families, but it’s completely irrelevant.
We will defeat viciousness by creating a society where the bad choices of the parents are never visited upon the children. In doing so, we’ll fashion one where it is entirely unnecessary to go to the trouble of making good choices. The big neighborhood will be held together by sharing — specifically, families who provide for their children conscientiously will have innumerable occasions to share their wealth with the families who don’t.
Mr. Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College, where he is completing a book on liberalism and the welfare state.