BrianGarst.com

In an audacious Newsweek column, former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor Michael Gerson offers the wrong prescription for the Republican Party. His article is rife with faulty assumptions and leftist-type appeals to emotion. That his brand of pseudo-analysis was taken seriously in the Bush White House goes a long way towards explaining Bush’s failed experiment in big government Republicanism.

He opens the piece with an emotional appeal regarding the Katrina victims. He describes them as “disconnected from the mainstream economy,” then quickly offers up the big government silver bullet, demanding “an active response from government to encourage economic empowerment and social mobility.”

What Mr. Gerson fails to understand is that government activism is what has disconnected these people in the first place. The true lesson of Katrina should be recognition of the overwhelming failure that is the welfare state. Seventy years after FDR redefined government as a welfare provider, and thirty years after Johnson declared a “war on poverty”, tens of thousands of New Orleanians lived so poorly they couldn’t even leave town in face of a foreseeable disaster. For how many decades must a policy fail before it is abandoned? The underlying problem here is systematic government dependence, the solution to which is most certainly not more dependence – but that is exactly what Mr. Gerson is offering.

Next he attempts to wipe away Bush’s failure to control spending by first distorting Reagan’s legacy and then pointing to Reagan as an example for Bush. What he ignores is that Reagan knew his tax policies could not immediately solve the problem of big government, but that it would enable the economy to catch up with, and eventually overtake, federal spending. Lo and behold, this happened less than a decade after Reagan left office. That Reagan’s policies could not immediately reach his goals is not now an excuse for giving up what he started and believed in, though didn’t see finished on his watch.

Underlying the rest of the article is a fundamental misunderstanding of why many of us, though clearly not enough, oppose big government. He refers to small government advocates as “radical,” “antigovernment,” “reflexive” and “unbalanced”. Well, I have a name for Mr. Gerson: ignorant.

We are not antigovernment, we merely realize what Mr. Gerson does not – “that government is best which governs least,” to quote Thomas Paine. He falsely attributes our stance as “abstract antigovernment ideology,” but the truth is that small government advocacy is entirely practical. Our goal is efficiency. Smaller government works better than bigger government, and consequently serves its people better – which Mr. Gerson at least implies is his primary concern. Unfortunately, if his ideas were to actually be listened to – which apparently they have been over the last few years – the results would have little in common with his stated goals. Such is always the result of big government activism.