Big government

Because the right shrinks from the fight Big government: The left is winning the argument A day after Paul Ryan proposed his 10-year budget plan, as I ponder the absurdity of Washington doing the sky-is-falling routine over a budget that increases spending by 3.4 percent a year, it occurs to me that the left is presently wiping the floor with those who advocate limited government. Consider: Entitlements are where the big money is, but discretionary spending in the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health & Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security total $270 billion a year. Anyone who is serious about limited government has to at least consider the possiblity that the functions of these departments either a) are not needed; b) could be seriously scaled back or consolidated; or c) should at least be assessed to determine where they are duplicative of state and local efforts. Most of the aforementioned departments did not even exist a generation or two ago, and the nation did fine without them. In a nation running $1 trillion deficits, it seems inconceivable that the so-called party of small government concedes the absolute necessity of these departments, and of this spending. And yet that is the state of the United States today. Far from the dynamic of the Reagan years, when conservatives dared to question the federal role in such things, you scarcely hear a peep even within the Republican-controlled House that questions the role of virtually anything the federal government does. Activists still seek to revert such power back to the states, but in Washington the debate is over the propriety of further interventions (auto bailouts, bank bailouts, etc.), and even then we’re usually debating the question of whether it will “work” as opposed to whether this is a proper role for the federal government in the first place. Why have we come to this point? Clearly, the country as a whole does not see “big government” as an inherently bad thing. I don’t buy the conventional media wisdom that the public “wants government services but doesn’t want to pay for them.” That’s lazy institutional thinking from people who have spent too many years talking to each other in the media cloak rooms. I don’t think most people think of “government services” as something that matters a lot to their personal lives. But I do think they don’t automatically embrace the conservative article of faith about government that the more we have, the worse it is. The 2012 elections bear that out, because everyone knows big government is burying us in debt, and yet 53 percent of the electorate voted to keep the president who wants to keep it big and “tax the rich” to pay for it. And it’s clear that the Republican Party recognizes this is the public’s thinking, because it obviously sees no political benefit to be had in arguing for the elimination of just about any federal function. The question we have to answer is of the chicken-and-egg variety. We know the Republican Party is in a weak position to make a small-government argument, but is that because the public really loves big government, or is it because the GOP conceded the argument when it could have still been won? I suppose you could argue that the GOP conceded the argument a decade ago, when it had complete control of the government and spent quite lavishly without giving any consideration to significantly reducing the role of Washington in our lives. Maybe Republicans in the Bush-Hastert-Frist era really had no major objection to big government and just wanted to see it managed better. Maybe they knew we’d be better off with Washington doing less, but consultants like Karl Rove kept telling them it would be politically foolish to pick that fight. Maybe they were all afraid of the media. The point is this: If Republicans thought the public was clamoring for smaller government, Republicans would be small government’s biggest advocates. And if given the opportunity to make it happen, they would. Today in America, the Republican Party sees nothing but trouble in any serious attempt to reconsider the role the federal government plays in our lives, so it limits the argument to who can run big-government most cost-effectively. There is a line of thinking within conservative circles that the small government argument is the wrong one to have, because what really matters is economic growth. I wholeheartedly support pro-growth policies, but I see no conflict between them and smaller government. In fact, smaller government helps keep taxes low, which keeps capital in the productive sector, which fuels growth. That tells me that even the growth-only people recognize the political argument has been won by the advocates of big government. How do you reverse this? I’d say it has to start with conservatives recognizing that the public is not on their side, and that constantly railing rhetorically against “big government” is preaching to the choir and isn’t persuading the general public at large. They need to be persuaded that big government is a bad thing - even in an era of $1 trillion deficits. That seems hard to believe, but that’s how it is. Paul Ryan could have been a lot more bold in his budget proposal. He could have challenged the nation to seriously reconsider the federal government’s role in all kinds of things, and made the case that the money that funds these things serves the nation much better in the private sector. That could have gotten us to a balanced budget a lot faster than 10 years. But Ryan doesn’t think the country wants that. I don’t think it does either. But it should. Who is going to make it understand that? And how?