Mislabeling the Problem

Bruce at Q&O:

  A and an week or so ago, I stated:

We read that polls are telling the Democrats that the mood of the people has swung toward being receptive to more and bigger government. Some argue it’s a cyclic phenomenon in which the country accepts and then rejects big government. Yet the rejection phase never seems to lead to smaller or less intrusive government. At best it seems it is simply a moratorium on expansion until the next growth cycle comes along.

Billy Hollis expanded on that thought here.

And today, in the WSJ, William Voegeli points out that while conservatism has talked the talk about smaller government, in reality, it has never walked the walk despite the fact that Republicans occupied the White House for 18 of 26 years after 1980 not to mention the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 in the House. Result? Not much:

Republicans abandoned their promises to abolish the departments of Energy and Education. Efforts to zero out smaller and supposedly vulnerable agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts accomplished nothing. The only important victory here was the 1996 law abolishing Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a victory that may turn out to be hollow. The New Republic celebrated rather than lamented the 10th anniversary of AFDC’s demise, arguing that because of the law, “welfare-bashing has lost its political resonance . . . [and] welfare reform has expanded the constituency for activist government. Democrats now have more political room to fight Republican austerity—and to propose, in its place, a stronger safety net.”

As I see it, that’s precisely what is in the offing, given the talk about national health care and a myriad of other social programs. Or said another way, all Republicans have managed in these 26 years is another lull in the increase in the size of government (and, in fact, been party to increasing it through such programs as No Child Left Behind and Medicare D), and because they’ve done nothing to demonstrate that we can indeed get along just fine without government, momentum has again built to expand it.

Sorry, Bruce, I’m going to take a rare position in opposition to you on this one.  You seem to me to have missed something in your analysis.

The reason things are moving currently in that direction is exactly the same reason that the Democrats are screaming bloody murder just now…  opposition within Congress.  Congress, after all, is where the appropriations are made; they’re the ones with the money, at least, after the IRS does its thing.    While it does help someone to have a conservative in the White House, it is unfortunately not the only requirement.  (Bush isn’t a conservative… I’ll get to that point)

Let’s go one step further with that; during the vast majority of the time from 1984 forward the democrats were either in direct control of Congress are headed least as close to a 50/50 Democrat to Republican balance  as no matter.  Which, given the Rinos that invariably show up, means that the balance has been overwhelmingly Liberal.

The only combination that’s never been tried is an overwhelming majority of conservatives in the Congress.  Or, for that matter an overwhelming majority of republicans, where the Republicans wouldn’t be quite so dependent on their left flank.   As an example; How often have risen in this space, that President Bush is not a conservative, but is a centrist?  Yet we still see him labeled in growth of government arguments as  ostensibly conservative.  Usually, this mislabeling tends to occur by those arguing against conservatives taking power.

Now look; I don’t disagree in the least that that’s the direction we’ve been going.  But I think there is some mislabeling going on as to the cause of the problem.  The problem is liberalism.  The tests that I propose, may or may not be made.  But, here it is; get an overwhelming number of republicans and office, take your measurements, and then give me a call.  Until then, I consider mislabeling , to blame the Republicans for the problem.