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Big Government Republicans Lowell Ponte In 1994, when Republicans won control of Congress, the (inflation-adjusted) federal budget was $1.9 trillion. President George W. Bush days ago sent to Capitol Hill a Fiscal Year 2008 budget of more than $2.9 trillion. During only 12 years of unbroken Republican control of the House of Representatives (where according to our Constitution all taxing and spending bills must originate) our government's gluttony for tax dollars has increased by almost 53 percent. How much is $2.9 trillion dollars? It is equivalent to approximately $9,666.00 from every man, woman and child in the United States – or to $38,666 in 2008 from every American family of four. You will pay for this in higher taxes, inflation, and lost freedom and opportunities. National defense in the 2008 Bush budget accounts for almost $625 billion, approximately 21.5 percent. But the Bush budget increases Fiscal Year 2007's defense expenditure by only 4.1 percent. We live during wartime against global terrorism, as the President frequently reminds us. But Mr. Bush's 2008 budget proposes a surprising 8 percent decrease in spending for the Department of Homeland Security. Far fatter than national defense, the Department of Health and Human Services would under Bush's budget receive more than $699 billion, a 8.7 percent increase. And Mr. Bush budgets almost $470 billion just to pay interest on the Public Debt. Story Continues Below
President Bush proposes, but a new Democratic Congress now disposes. Many of Bush's proposed "cuts" – e.g., a nearly 25 percent decrease in taxpayer dollars for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, bankroller of socialist National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) – will be reversed. Money must be found for the $15,000+ per hour luxury military jet demanded for her personal use by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Should we call it Air Force 3 or Broomstick One?) Republicans, the "small government party," are to blame for this recent 53 percent expansion of government. The free-market Cato Institute's Michael D. Tanner shows how this happened in his important and eye-opening new book Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution. One of the last great Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, undermined the empire by making his son Commodus his successor, but Commodus went insane. Historians may likewise someday recognize President Ronald Reagan as a great leader who tragically begat the Bush dynasty. Unlike Reagan and Barry Goldwater, both of whom worked to reduce the size of government, George H.W. Bush and his son Dubya embraced what Tanner calls "Big-Government Conservatism." Tanner identifies five strains of conservatism that converged behind Bush presidencies and metastasized into cancerous Big-Government policies. "Neoconservatism" was founded mostly by former Marxists such as Irving Kristol who joined America's side against Communism but never lost their love of socialism or FDR's government-expanding New Deal policies. "National-greatness conservatives" such as Kristol's son Bill, editor of the Weekly Standard Magazine, and Bill's disciple David Brooks, now token "conservative" columnist for The New York Times, share Theodore Roosevelt's passion for grand national projects such as coercing "national service" and democratizing the world. "The Religious Right," writes Tanner, "once content simply to be ‘left alone,' has become increasingly comfortable with the use of government power to enforce its moral vision." "Supply-siders" exemplified by Jack Kemp favor tax cuts, but they justify such cuts by demonstrating that cutting taxes increases prosperity and government tax revenues – and hence government's ability to spend and grow. "Technophiles," of which former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is a prime example, "believe that government's role is to invest in the technologies of the future." Technophiles have little problem with efficient Big Government. Gingrich's Contract with America, writes Tanner, "did not actually call for cutting a single government program." "Big-government conservatives see a positive society-shaping role for government," writes Tanner. "Big government conservatives are favorably disposed toward…a [morality-inducing] ‘conservative welfare state,'" wrote one of their number, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and its corporate kin Fox News Channel. They are willing to use "what normally would be seen as liberal means – activist government – for conservative ends. And they're willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process." Like British Tories, Big-Government conservatives don't really like capitalism. They prefer a static society, as Edmund Burke and Leo Strauss did. Capitalism is dynamic, always churning society with innovative products, ideas, and people. And like Tories, Big-Government conservatives dislike individualism and liberty. As American Tory William F. Buckley, Jr., often said, people should have only "the freedom to do the right thing." A paternalistic government, along with custom and religion and social class, should confine human choices to only these "right" things. Without such constraints, individuals might pursue happiness in their own selfish ways, and capitalists would sell them drugs, rock-n-roll, and almost anything else they desire. Individual freedom, Big-Government conservatives believe, is civilization's road to ruin. Barnes scorns Libertarians and Goldwater-Reagan conservatives who "cling to the hope that someday, somehow, the federal government will be reduced in size." Big Government is here to stay, Barnes and his comrades believe, so the relevant issues are merely who will run it and how, and which taxpayers will be squeezed to pay for it. "If conservatives abandon the ideal of limited constitutional government," asks Tanner, "who then will speak for liberty?" Power-corrupted Republican politicians, greedy to entrench themselves, abandoned this ideal – and lost their congressional majorities in 2006 because voters who favor small government had no major party to support. Every step towards bigger government, warns Tanner, diminishes our prosperity, freedom and morality. To be fair, Republicans began as a Big Government party that stripped power from the states and concentrated it in Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln imposed America's first federal income tax and military conscription, turning all male citizens into slaves. Teddy Roosevelt federalized vast stretches of land and attacked capitalism. Does any 2008 Republican presidential candidate seriously promise to shrink government? Perhaps Goldwater and Reagan were aberrations, and today's Republican Party has merely been reverting to its true Big Government nature. Editor's note:
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