Asking whether the ObamaCare decision would provide a redefining moment for federal power, Ed Morrissey cited and excerpted center-left Washington Post columnist Charles Lane’s thoughtful piece addressing the upcoming decision — as well as changing attitudes toward big government.
The essay is well worth your time. I read it twice, first when Ed referenced it, then later when my friend David Boaz linked it on Facebook:
In the 1930s, expanding federal power was innovative, promising. By blessing it, the court aligned itself with the wave of the future, in this country and globally. Ditto for the 1960s. Much of the legislation that resulted — from Social Security to the Voting Rights Act — was indeed progressive.
Today, however, there is nothing new about federal intervention — and much evidence from the past 70 years that big programs produce inefficiencies and unintended consequences.
The post-New Deal consensus about the scope of federal power has broken down amid national, and global, concern over the welfare state’s cost and intrusiveness — a sea change of which the tea party is but one manifestation. Obamacare itself, which has consistently polled badly, fueled that movement.
Today, however, there is nothing new about federal intervention — and much evidence from the past 70 years that big programs produce inefficiencies and unintended consequences.
When a center-left columnist for the liberal paper in our nation’s capital acknowledges, what Walter Russell Meade might call, the breakdown of the “blue model”, we sense that something really is afoot.
Not just that. In the last paragraph I quoted from Lane’s piece, he suggests that Obama Democrats lack new ideas. And he acknowledges the basic conservative critique of well-intentioned liberal programs: “inefficiencies and unintended consequences.”
Read the whole thing.
Just to clarify for dimwit leftists, “Small Government” does not mean “No Government.” So, stop saying that we who believe in restrained Government ought to go live in Somalia.
In fact, reducing the functions of Government to those that are A. Essential and B. For which no viable alternate provider exists will actually make Government work better by enabling focus on a smaller range of tasks. There would be fewer conflicts of interest, less corruption, and fewer abuses if Government were simply limited to essential functions.
How can someone who says all that be “centre-left”?