What Is the Federal Government For?

As I read David Dayen’s post at The American Prospect, “What is the Democratic Party?”, a thought came to mind. I recommend Mr. Dayen’s post. This is the meat of the post:

Democrats have an unwieldy coalition of progressives and moderates, consumer advocates and Wall Street bankers, environmentalists and labor organizers, muscular foreign-policy promoters and pacifists, people who want the party to be about tax fairness and health care and abortion and democracy and any of about a hundred other silos. Little stitches together these priorities, outside of being a jumble of words on a page.

In the end, the sum of all these discrete and disparate passions is a passionless party, one that relies on focus-group testing to set priorities rather than any animating set of principles. Democrats prefer to diagnose voters, rather than take care of their concerns. And there’s no leader currently available to mold this mass into anything coherent. In that void, the other side fills in the blanks, and the public, absent any other information or clear definition, tends to believe them.

but here’s the snippet I want to focus on:

Here it’s worth thinking about the two actual realignments in American politics in the last century: Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Nobody would confuse the two, although Reagan was an FDR Democrat when he joined the Screen Actors Guild, a union he would eventually lead.

Roosevelt defined government as an interventionist force to limit the economy’s excesses and protect the vulnerable; Reagan redefined government as an inefficient yoke on the backs of the people. But the two realigners shared an ability to convince voters that they believed in something. Trump has a vision, however wrongheaded it is, and however lacking it may prove once put in contact with reality. The Democratic vision, however, is more distant, more ephemeral, too constructed in a lab to be seen as authentic.

That zooms in on an important question. What is the federal government for? I believe there are several different views, sometimes contrasting, sometimes conflicting, sometimes held all at the same time.

1. Something approximating the Founders’ vision: a forum for managing conflicts among the states peaceably while handling defense and foreign policy and guaranteeing a small number of rights.

Remember “limited government of enumerated powers”? I don’t believe there is any way to return to that vision at this point. The best we can do would be to pare back some of the federal government’s roles that go too far beyond its limits.

2. A tool for redistributing income from “the rich” (however defined) to the needy (however defined).

What is the “tax fairness” to which Mr. Dayen alludes above? If he means that the top 1% of income earners should pay taxes equivalent to the portion of the national income they receive, we’re already there. They pay considerably more than that. As I’ve mentioned before IMO our problem is not with the top 1% of income earners but with the top 10% of income earners, far too many of whom are highly dependent on payments from the federal government in one form or another. I for one would like to see a federal government that was more energetic in constraining big businesses. Something to chew on: there are very few “natural monopolies”. Most monopolies are granted by the government in one form or another and most big businesses depend on monopoly power.

3. An employment program, particularly for people with college or post-graduate degrees.

It’s not surprising to me that people with college or post-graduate degrees support Big Government. Many of them depend on Big Government for their livelihoods.

4. A way of advancing social agendas

I for one do not believe this is a legitimate role for the federal government (or government at any level) at all.

5. A method of gaining power, riches, and privilege

In the light of recent developments I see no way that anyone could deny that there are people who see the federal government this way, indeed who see government at every level this way.