Speaking Truth to Democratic Big Government

Here's how the Los Angeles Times described the Democratic majority's economic stimulus package last week:

With Congress moving toward passage of an $800-billion-plus economic stimulus plan, big government is back. Unabashed. With a vengeance.

The stimulus is bigger than the Pentagon's entire budget. It's more than the United States has spent on the war in Iraq. And its hundreds of provisions reach into almost every aspect of American life - including workers' paychecks, local schools, digital television and modernizing medical records.

Perhaps not since the Great Depression has Congress set out to expand and redefine so dramatically the government's role in the economy, all in one bewilderingly complex blueprint.

Now, this morning's Washington Post reports that a number of top economists concur on the virtually unprecedented scale of the left's stimulus agenda:

With Congress moving closer to adopting a $820 billion stimulus package and the Obama administration poised to unveil a new bank bailout plan, economists say that the federal government is taking its biggest role in the economy in a generation.

States that once aspired to blaze trails independent from Washington are turning to it for money, banks and businesses that once decried regulation now are seeking federal capital, grants or tax cuts and individuals are looking for tax relief.

"This is a seismic shift in the role of government in our society," said Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics. "Those who believe the government can be an effective, positive instrument for good will have another chance to try it," said Sinai, a political independent.

To reiterate Sinai's comment above, this is indeed a "seismic shift," and it foretells a major reorientation of the relationship between government and the individual in society.

Yet, there's a fundamental level of disingenuity in all of the public debate on this. People do not like identifying the ideological implications of this shift to unprecedented state expansion. When conservative commentators attacked the Democrats in 2008 as "socialist" for their big government planning, on health care, tax increases, and government regulation, the left-wing media and bloggers attacked them with an existential ferocity.

This week's cover story at Newsweek continues the essential dishonesty, "We Are All Socialists Now." Authors Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas name not President Barack Obama and the Democrats for our current shift to a European socialist state, but ... wait for it ... George W. Bush:

The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries ....

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly.

This is so dishonest, it's almost sick. Republicans in Congress, during last year's bailout debate, wanted to use big government to rescue markets (and base conservatives howled in disgust every step of the way). Democrats today want to use big government to expand the welfare state to levels that put the Great Society to shame.

The left, in other words, wants to nationalize markets in furtherance of its ideological and programmatic foundations. A look at the House Appropriations Committee's press release, "Summary: American Recovery and Reinvestment," with its smorgasbord of big goverment, pork-barrel spending largesse, should put to rest talk of conservatives as creating the "biggest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years." The Johnson administration created Medicare in 1965. Both parties have accepted the need to support the health care of American retirees.

But recall it was also the same "conservative GOP administration" that campaigned for an entire year, unsuccessfully, for the privatization of Social Security as the marquee program in a conservative shift to an "ownership society." The Wall Street Journal laid out the scope of the Bush administration's vision in its essay, "In Bush's 'Ownership Society,' Citizens Would Take More Risk":

President Bush's campaign to revamp Social Security is just the boldest stroke in a much broader effort: To rewrite the government's social contract with citizens that was born of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and expanded by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

In what Mr. Bush calls an "ownership society," Americans would assume more of the responsibilities - and risks - now shouldered by government. In exchange, the theory goes, they would get the real and intangible benefits of owning their own homes, controlling their retirement savings, and using tax credits or vouchers to shop for education, job training and health insurance.

The emphasis would be on the individual, supplanting a 70-year-old approach in which citizens pool resources for the common good - and government doles out benefits. In the Bush vision, the nation's social safety nets would still exist, but on a smaller scale, targeting the most needy. Others would move to private-market alternatives of their own choosing.

I have seen really nothing in the last year of economic turmoil to convince me that conservatives have abandoned the lost hopes of the Bush administration's vision for an even greater society of individualism and prosperity.

And if there's any evidence that hopes for an opportunity society have been abandoned, it's in the the priorities of the current Barack Obama administration, who has called the challenges facing the country today unequaled in history, and he's announced an unprecedented agenda for massive governmental change to avoid a "catastrophe."

So, while folks may indeed take issue with Republican craveness at Wall Street bailouts - as well as the party's larger historical capitulation to the welfare state since Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964 - at the most basic level of ideology, today's left is on the cusp of achieving it's wildest dreams of the quasi-Marxist Europeanization of American life.

It's time for a little honesty about all of this.