When you talk to people these days (I try not to, but sometimes I
have to), you're very likely to hear the "government is too big" statement. More often than not, it's couched in something that sounds serious and thoughtful, like concern about entitlements. It's now conventional wisdom: government needs to be smaller.
This kind of stuff makes me want to scream. It's like people have some kind of fantasy that in the 21st century we can live like the pioneers. Or that left to their unregulated ways Exxon, Bank of America, the Koch Brothers, and all the rest would behave honorably, with the best interests of
everyone in mind.
Come on. Let's get serious folks. We need a government that's big enough to do what we
want and
need it to do. No bigger, but just that big. And what the first three-quarters of the 20th century show is that putting our government to work on things has had some really good results.
Bill Moyers recently interviewed Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for
Financial Times.
The whole interview is worth listening to, and I recommend it, but I wanted to highlight the concluding comments.
BILL MOYERS:
Would you agree that despite what happened this week and the political
victory that President Obama seems to have won, would you agree that the
conservatives have really won the argument about government?
MARTIN WOLF:
I think that is true. What has surprised me is how little pushback
there has been from the Democrat side in arguing that the government
really did have a very strong role in supporting the economy during the
post crisis recession, almost depression, that the stimulus argument was
completely lost though the economics of it were quite clearly right,
they needed a bigger stimulus, not a smaller one.
It helped, but
it didn't help enough because it wasn't big enough. And they're not
making the argument that government has essential functions which
everybody needs in the short run. Well, we can see that with the
national parks. But also in the long run the strength of America has
been built, in my perspective, particularly in the post war period,
since the Second World War on the way that actually the public and
private sectors have worked together with the government providing
enormous support for research and development.
It's been the basic
support of America's unique position in scientific research. You look
at the National Institutes of Health which are the most important
medical research institutions in the world, these are all products of
the willingness of the United States to invest in the long term
interest. Then there's the infrastructure, think of the highway
program, which was the most important infrastructure project under the
Republicans interestingly.
And those arguments seem to have been
lost. So I am concerned that the government that I think Grover
Norquist once said he wants to drown in the bath. If you drown your
government in the bath in the modern world, we don't live in the early
19th century, it's a different world, that the long term health of the
United States will be very badly affected.
It's strange to me that
a government which has obviously achieved very important things, think
of the role of the Defense Department in the internet, has achieved such
important things, that's just one of many examples, it should be now
regarded as nothing more than a complete nuisance. And the only thing
you need to do is to cut it back to nothing.
And it does seem to
me that the Democrats have, for reasons I don't fully understand,
basically given up on making this argument. And so in a way the
conservatives, the extreme conservative position has won, because nobody
is actually combating it. So it's only a question of how much you cut
and how you cut it rather than, "Well, what do we want government for?
What are the good things about it? What are the bad things about it?
How do we make it effective? And how do we ensure that it's properly
financed?"
The Moyers web quotes a citation of Martin Wolf as “the premier financial and economics writer in the world.” He certainly seems sane to me.
