The topic du jour among the opinion writers today seems to be the frequently loud and messy national debate going on about the role of government. Here’s David Brooks’s take:
The administration came into power at a time of economic crisis. This led it, in the first bloom of self-confidence, to attempt many big projects all at once. Each of these projects may have been defensible in isolation, but in combination they created the impression of a federal onslaught.
One of the odd features of the Democratic Party is its inability to learn what politics is about. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about deciding which arguments you are going to have. In the first year of the Obama administration, the Democrats, either wittingly or unwittingly, decided to put the big government-versus-small government debate at the center of American life.
Just as America was leaving the culture war and the war war, the Democrats thrust it back into the government war, only this time nastier and with higher stakes.
From Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast:
Ultimately, what emerged most clearly from Obama’s speech was his faith in the efficacy of regulation, and, by implication, his belief in the intelligence and objectivity of regulators. In this, he revealed—and not for the first time—his predilection for political control of the economy. This, alas, is where a great danger lurks for a genuine free market: Do we really want Big Government to save us from Big Business?
Progressives see hypocrisy in the willingness of so many Americans to take the subsidies being doled out to them from the federal coffers coupled with a reluctance to pay for it all. It’s not hypocrisy. It’s opportunism.
I tend to agree with Walter Russell Mead’s prescription for reform—power must drift back to the states:
The latest poll from Pew is a shocker: almost 80 percent of Americans don’t trust the Federal government to do the right thing. The Federal government received its lowest ratings in decades, with Congress in particular standing at record lows in the public esteem. Record or near record numbers also express the view that they want a smaller government with fewer programs. The RCP maintains a rolling average of polls on a range of questions; according to these ‘polls of polls’, 71.2 percent of those asked disapprove of Congress and only 36.6 percent think the country is headed in the right direction.
[…]
But the survey points to more than unhappiness with the Democrats. The reality is that both parties have been moving the United States toward a more centralized government system. The Bush administration dramatically expanded the powers of the federal government, and not just on matters relating to security. “No Child Left Behind†is if nothing else a sweeping venture of the federal government into educational policy across the country (a point made in Diane Ravitch’s article in the current issue of The American Interest). The Bush administration also created a new entitlement program: the prescription drug benefit program for Medicare recipients.
[…]
…I believe that the time has come when we urgently need to move power and policy from the federal level back to the states and localities — not to weaken or undermine the strong federal government that we need, but to improve and defend it. Vermont and Utah are very different places with very different ideas about social, educational and economic policy. They have different needs and different priorities. Only rarely can the federal government make the people in both states happy; more usually, the compromises built into federal policy and programs will irritate the residents of both states. Left to themselves, the people in Utah and Vermont would develop very different policies on matters ranging from drug use to abortion to gay rights to education. Within some very broad limits (and with special attention to race given its special constitutional status) I don’t see why, they shouldn’t be free to do so.
As Dr. Mead concedes, state government is no bed of roses. I think a good deal of that is due to the infantilizing effect of the growing power and wealth of the federal government. It will be a painful growing process for many state and local governments.
I’m neither in favor of minimizing government nor maximizing it by looking for federal government solutions to every problem. I think that our efforts would be better directed to right-sizing government and that is a process more easily accomplished at the state level than at the federal.
However, it is a process. The objective isn’t to produce a product that is final, complete, once and for all but to continually attempt to find the least government that continues to work.
Try to find a bad school in a Mormon neighborhood. It’s near impossible because the parents are so involved and will vote as a bloc to remove poorly performing administrators. On the other hand it’s quite easy to find horribly performing schools, and a lack of voters who are sophisticated enough to realize they are being played. I think the more localized government power you are dreaming of will be a hodgepodge of very good and very horrible – people who already have it pretty good will get better; people who don’t already have it good will have it worse. Where will the center move?
I find it interesting that nobody seems to care that in the very same Pew Research poll that’s getting all the headlines, banks and corporations score even lower on the trust scale than government….
We score the USG poorly because it’s the all-purpose whipping boy. It’s forever doing too much or too little. Our relationship with the USG mirrors the relationship between a sullen 14 year-old and his or her parents.
I think devolving power to the states is nostalgia, not a realistic goal. The states are ludicrous as political entities, essentially meaningless. Take your own state of Illinois: by what logic can Cairo and Chicago be treated as a single political entity? Or San Francisco and the Inland Empire? Or Austin and Muleshoe?
States are ridiculous. California — with an area, economy and population larger than most nation-states — is a state and Wyoming is a big empty box somewhere north of Denver. You could line up artillery at the border of Wyoming and lob shells for a year and never hit anyone or anything. (Mind you I’m not suggesting . . . well . . .)
If we’re going to have political entities shouldn’t there be some logic to the organization other than, “Well, when we stole the land from the Mexicans we had to draw lines somewhere,” or, “Here’s a convenient river, let’s call this bank Illinois and the other side Iowa?”
I think Joe Klein laid a related critique which is that the Obama administration failed to understand that government has been on the receiving end of decades of bad, and in his view, untrue press fomented by conservatives. Obama’s first point of action was to restore confidence in government, not assume that his election signified that confidence had in fact been restored.
Actually that would be banks, large corporations are about even.
But why is this shocking considering we have corporatism and not capitalism or any other kind of “ism”. Government vs. GM…samething now. Many companies have significant input into legislation, have small armies of lobbiests, make significiant donations to politicians at all levels of government, and often times top executives move back and forth between the two.
It isn’t surprising its to be expected and part of the problem, and could also be one of the reasons people don’t trust government. Most people aren’t top level executives of a large corporation and as such, this government really isn’t thier government. It is ADM’s, GM’s, BofA’s, CitiBank’s, and so forth…it is their government, bought and paid for.
But if we happen to elect just the right guy…why everything should be fine. Frankly, I think we should build a large wooden badger….
I’m not so sure about the “least government” part, but I do agree that there is really is not “final, complete, once and for all” type of government. Social and economic conditions change, and governments have to change with them.
As someone who has lived most of their life in Mormon-dominated areas, I’d be wary about generalizing that. It tends to depend more on income in my experience – the schools in wealthier neighborhoods usually had parents (particularly moms) with more free-time to be involved, even though the schools themselves were often quite crowded (my middle school was seriously over-crowded).
“Try to find a bad school in a Mormon neighborhood.”
Does not show in their test scores. At least in math, only Massachusetts scores at top international levels.
“I’m neither in favor of minimizing government nor maximizing it by looking for federal government solutions to every problem. I think that our efforts would be better directed to right-sizing government and that is a process more easily accomplished at the state level than at the federal.”
Makes sense philosophically, but fails spectacularly in practice (see Illinois). Take health care. I have been disappointed that very few states have attempted to address this issue. The whole Republican proposal about selling across state lines is misleading. What they really want is for states to relax their insurance requirements. Why dont states just do that now? Why do they need the feds to tell them to do that? Again, look at insurance distribution. Most states are dominated by one or two insurance companies. No competition. This is true in red and blue states.
We need to make things work better as you suggest. The least amount of government is the best. The arguments about this just arent very honest or objective.
Steve
Steve, you might want to take a look at Massachusetts’s demographics. Suffice it to say that the experience either in Utah or Massachusetts is probably only mildly relevant to that in the rest of the country. Somewhat like comparing Luxembourg to the United States.