Tracking the growth of government since the 1930s is a breathtaking adventure. Presidents serving prior to Franklin D. Roosevelt would not recognize today’s Federal government. By any measurement — responsibilities, receipts, expenditures, employees, departments, power, influence — contemporary American government dwarfs the administrations of Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, the last four Presidents presiding over any semblance of a limited government. In monetary terms, today’s Federal government is 77 times larger than the 1928 edition, adjusted for inflation. Americans are dealing with an entirely new animal, a monstrosity so uncontrollable that amounts of money equal to and greater than the 1928 Federal budget, adjusted for inflation, vanish each year without an accountable trace. As troubling as government wastefulness is, it’s the least of our worries.
The Federal government’s penchant for more programs, more regulation, and ever more spending is rooted in a relatively easily understood formulation. There is a method to government madness. “The dominant intellectual stance toward public policy,” writes Charles Murray in a new afterword to The Bell Curve, “continues to invest everything in a few core beliefs about society as the cause of problems, government as the solution, and the manipulability of human beings in reaching the goal of equality.” Within that mouthful are the spokes of contemporary liberal doctrine: society i.e. schools, churches, businesses, institutional racism, etc. creates warped individuals. Change society and individual behavior will improve. Further, government is best suited to bring about the desired results. Further still, equality, not just in opportunity or under law, but in outcomes, is the summum bonum of progressive thought. Finally, adjusting behavior is simply a matter of implementing the right policy or program. Social planners from the New Deal forward have believed in government’s unique ability to mold human behavior. The wars on poverty, drugs, and gangs — on the negative side — and positive efforts to improve education, health care, employment, energy and more, a lot more, rest firmly on the principles in Murray’s summation.
Convincing Americans to “get with the program” has met with limited success. The wars on poverty, drugs, and gangs, if not lost outright are certainly in bad shape. Enormous increases in educational spending have produced only modest gains at best, sheer failure too often. Yet, the solution invariably put forward involves ever greater expenditures, another new approach to teaching or parenting or after-school programs. Remember midnight basketball? These costly failures have yet to evoke a broad-based admission of, ”Perhaps we’re going about this all wrong. Maybe an entirely new approach is needed, one independent of government involvement.” Such objections are almost never raised from within government because of the religious fervor invested in the power of government as the agent of change for America. The program or policy may have failed, but the underlying assumption — it takes a progressive government — never varies.
With the advent of the 2008 presidential campaign, the extreme hubris of American government has manifested itself as never before. Candidates from both parties claim near magical powers as they confidently promise to fix this or change that. We’re not talking about lightweight issues either. “I’m in this race to end our dependence on Middle East oil,” says Barack Obama in his opening letter prefacing ”The Blueprint for Change.” See www.barackobama.com. I’d love to see the plan, but Barack is just getting warmed up. In short order, he says “I will end the war in Iraq…finish the fight with AL Qaeda…lead the world to fight the common threats of the 21st century — nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.” To think some people accuse President Bush of not understanding the limits of power. I sure hope the other side stops fighting too.
One disturbing characteristic of Obama’s document are the obvious internal contradictions and plethora of unexplained details. For instance, Obama promises a national health plan “similar to the plan available to members of Congress.” In other words, it’s a rich plan. “No American will be turned away FROM ANY INSURANCE PLAN [emphasis Obama's] because of illness or pre-existing conditions.” Further, “the plan will cover all essential medical services, including preventive, maternity and mental health care.” There will be subsides for “individuals and families who do not qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP but still need financial assistance …Obama will require that all children have health care coverage…Obama will expand eligibility for the Medicaid and SCHIP programs and ensure that these programs continue to serve as a critical safety net.” Obama promises to improve the quality of care in addition to the enormous leap in everything from wellness programs to catastrophic illness expenditures. His plan will have “affordable premiums, co-pays, and deductibles.” It all sounds great, but I hope you are sitting down, because all this will be accompanied by……lower costs!
Obama’s plan will lower ”costs by ensuring patients receive and providers deliver quality care.” Lower costs will be achieved “through investment [I'm not making this up] in electronic health information technology systems.” And on it goes, magnificent proposal after great idea, all of it resulting in healthy Americans who pay less for health coverage. Americans too lazy to read the details of Obama’s many plans — we’ve just scratched the surface on health care alone — or too stupid to know when a product or service must and should cost more are vulnerable to the pandering nonsense in Obama’s 61 page bill of sale.
Senator Obama may believe that most Americans want change so badly that even in-your-face lies will win votes. He is not ashamed to ask Americans to take a leap of faith in search of his promised land. Introducing his plan to save Social Security and acknowledging the difficulties in that task, Barack asks for something no self-respecting lover of limited government should ever give. “Coming together to meet this challenge won’t be easy…It will take restoring a sense of shared purpose in Washington and across this country. But if you put your trust in me — if you give me ‘your hand and your heart’ — then that’s exactly what I intend to do as your next President.” Heck, he won’t even get my vote.
Posted by Jerry Pomeroy in Campaign 2008, Energy, Fraud Watch, Health Insurance Debate