Lawrence Auster
Monday, Aug. 6, 2001

Martinez is, after all, the head of a staggeringly huge federal agency that builds, rehabilitates, owns and operates thousands of housing projects and apartment buildings across the country, provides insurance for mortgages and home improvement loans, gives housing subsidies to low-income people, and serves as a landlord to a vast dependent population.

How was Martinez to make this quintessential big-government project palatable to his audience – a gathering of 2,400 conservative state legislators devoted to the Jeffersonian principles of limited government and federalism?

The way the HUD secretary met this interesting challenge was emblematic of President Bush's "compassionate conservatism" – and of the philosophical split it has opened within the ranks of the conservative movement. It was also illustrative of the Bushites' rhetorical skill in papering over that split.

Adroitly appealing to his audience's deeply held beliefs, Martinez invoked the Jeffersonian ideal of individual home ownership as an indispensable feature of freedom and of the good life. He also quoted Lincoln's eloquent remark that "Every man shall have a place he calls home."

In other words, what Martinez was suggesting was that a gargantuan government bureaucracy bestowing free homes on people who are unable to purchase them on their own is in the tradition of Jefferson and Lincoln. Such beneficiaries of public largesse, Martinez commented, are "sharing the American Dream."

To prove this was not a contradiction, he quoted Lincoln's idea that the purpose of government is to provide for people the things that they can't provide for themselves. Whether or not it was Lincoln's intent, the comment could be construed as making the modern welfare state consistent with the oldest traditions of the Republican Party.

At the same time, Martinez tactfully acknowledged statist excesses at HUD. The agency, he said, has undergone "mission creep," expanding its functions and becoming more and more bureaucratized.

But isn't such mission creep built into the very idea of government as ultimate provider? As the state's steady growth over the last 70 years indicates, once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right – whether they are for guaranteed college loans, or for "Enterprise Zones," or for increasingly sophisticated and expensive medical care, or for a host of other goods and services that once would have been regarded as luxuries but are now seen as indispensable requirements of the good life.

The way Martinez proposed fighting HUD's mission creep reveals a fundamental lack of seriousness: He plans to decentralize HUD by restoring decision-making power to local HUD managers across the country, freeing them from the Washington bureaucracy.

In other words, instead of local governments' regaining control over local issues (which is of course ALEC's primary mission), this Bushite version of decentralization means that locally situated federal officials should gain control over local issues! Just as Martinez had earlier redefined Jeffersonian individual independence as welfare-state dependency, he redefined government decentralization as the decentralization of the federal government.

Not only did Martinez offer no serious antidote to HUD's mission creep, he contributed to it. Pointing out that blacks and Hispanics "lag" behind in home ownership, he recommended Bush's "American Dream Down Payment Plan," which will help minorities make their first payment on a home. "We must ensure that all Americans share the American dream," he repeatedly told the ALEC conference.

But what "sharing the American Dream" means in this context is that the government must make all racial groups equal in home ownership.

Furthermore, since blacks and Hispanics are behind not just in home ownership but in every other socioeconomic indicator as well, the idea that all Americans must "share the American Dream" would ultimately require state-guaranteed equality of results for all ethnic and racial groups in every area of life.

Now that is mission creep.

Bush's vision of "active but limited government, market-based, not stifling individual initiative" sounds good, but at bottom it means Big Government Conservatism – the injection of conservative ideas into the welfare state in a way that may mitigate some of its worst features, but that still leaves it in place and expands it even further.

Workfare, for example, which was touted as the "end of welfare," created more layers of federal bureaucracy to train and find jobs for the ex-welfare recipients (while it did nothing to stop those same recipients' bearing children out of wedlock, which is the real problem).

Similarly, President Bush's school voucher plan – touted as a way to free children from government-controlled public education – would only extend the crushing burden of federal civil-rights regulations over the private schools.

The same goes for Bush's faith-based initiative, of which Martinez said:

"There is no bigger example of compassionate conservatism than bringing faith-based community groups into partnership with government.

"The faith-based initiative is part of a long tradition in America. This administration did not invent that tradition.

"The faith-based initiative is the fulfillment of the idea that all human beings have equal right to the pursuit of happiness."

In reality, of course, the faith-based initiative would inevitably bring the churches into the fatal grip of the welfare state.

Thus, despite the courtesy and good spirits prevailing at the ALEC conference, two diametrically opposed understandings of conservatism were struggling under the surface as Secretary Martinez spoke: President Bush's Big Government Conservatism, and the small-government, federalist conservatism of ALEC.

Martinez, a decent and well-meaning man, tried to cover over those differences with fine words. Principled conservatives may choose not to let him get away with that.

Lawrence Auster can be reached at lawrence.auster@att.net.

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