Size vs. Competence in Government

Blind devotion to ideology leads to a difficulty in reasonably analyzing problems. Rich Lowry’s column which both admits that Bush is a proponent of big government and that Bush’s policies do not work, starts out of interest in showing how Bush has even violated conservative principles:

During the past year, one of the philosophical justifications for the Bush administration’s approach to government has collapsed. It held that President Bush was a “big-government conservative,” or in the more striking formulation of the influential, Bush-friendly journalist Fred Barnes, a “strong-government conservative.”

In theory, strong-government conservatism is alluring. If government is going to do something, it ought to do it well. In practice, however strong-government conservatism has mostly been a rationalization for lazy and politically expedient accretions to government. It hasn’t given us a strong government, but a further-sprawling government that in many ways is contemptible.

Where Lowry goes wrong is in using the response to Katrina to argue against big government:

Take the response to Hurricane Katrina. The Department of Homeland Security should be a perfect forum for strong government. Congress and the president identified a goal — preventing terrorists from attacking us on our soil — and named a new federal department after it: Homeland Security. They threw 22 disparate government agencies together, apparently on the theory that bigger is stronger.

In last week’s House report on Katrina, there was one target for criticism that has gone unnoticed — big government itself. The report notes how important it was to share information “within agencies” and “across departments.” It didn’t happen: “Unfortunately, no government does these things well, especially big governments.” The report goes on to say “flexibility and adaptability” were needed. Instead: “We again encountered the risk-averse culture that pervades big government.”

The problem here isn’t big government but incompetent government. Many things are better handled by the private sector than government. Response to a disaster of this magnitude is not one of them. Reducing the size of government may be of benefit elsewhere, but less government will not help with future disasters. The Republican panacea of private charities is no solution.

Republican big government is ineffective as the Republicans do not believe in using government for serving the public good under any circumstance. Instead they see government as a tool for transferring wealth to the ultra-wealthy, assisting their cronies in big business, and imposing their religious views on others in return for the backing of the religious right. We need to return the Democrats to power to restore competence in government, and return the Republicans to the opposition, a role they do sometimes handle better than Democrats.