"Big Government Conservatism" Still Big Government

That should be axiomatic. Here is a response I wrote to a rather banal piece by Fred Barnes in today's OpinionJournal.com. I echo some observations I made a few weeks ago here. Barnes' arguments are even thinner than one of the more odious pieces of political journalism in recent years, one exploring "One Nation Conservatism" in The Weekly Standard during the 2000 GOP presidential primary. All this semantic tripe only strenthens Hayek's observation: "Conservatism may be useful as a practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long range developments." When Bill Clinton assumed the Oval Office, National Review rountinely ran an advertisement for t-shirts depicting an image of Ronald Reagan and the phrase "Remember When America had a Real President?" I would gladly wear that shirt today.

++++++++++

George W. Bush does not have a political philosophy. Unlike Ronald Reagan, he has never sought to articulate the intrinsic blessings of American liberty --- one grounded in limited, constitutional government and the market process --- unless it has served as either a prelude to warfare or the perpetuation of the welfare state.

Sorry, Mr. Barnes, but the Leave No Child Behind Act, multi-billion dollar farm subsidies, steel tariffs, an additional $400 billion dollar Medicare entitlement, and numerous other increases in discretionary spending are in fact welfare measures. They are grounded in Frederic Bastiat's definition of government, "the great fiction whereby everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else."

The distinction that "neutral" transfer payments are qualitatively different than those which "subsidize bad behavior" misses the critical point that the Bush Administration shall never recognize: under our Constitution, the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers. Perhaps that assertion is too philosophical for the current Beltway class, but it was a fundamental precept for the Founders.

Every government initiative that ostensibly serves "conservative goals" still represents the confiscation and redistribution of income. To wit: What could be more "conservative" than giving individuals the means to fund their own retirement instead of relying solely on federal largesse? In 2000, George W. Bush promised younger workers that they would have a chance to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in personal accounts to help secure their retirement. Faced with a loss of "revenue inflow," however, no serious advances have yet been made. So much for the self-proclaimed "reformer with results."

The newly-minted editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller, wrote a fascinating piece arguing that the current president may be "Reagan's Son." In light of his domestic spending increases and costly foreign entaglements -- ones that have no proscribable limits in either human or financial terms -- the observation is rather off-target. George W. Bush is in fact LBJ's poker buddy: intent on playing a high-stakes game with other people's chips, while subsisting on a steady diet of guns, butter, and pork (rinds).