Pick any budget battle and what do you hear? Cuts to education, public safety, transportation — all impact the lives and families of the public servants performing those roles. No doubt you’ll hear the voices of this constituency attack those fighting for smaller government. All the while, conservative elected officials are often stymied and bewildered as the tide of government and civil servants overwhelms even the smallest voices of anti-tax and taxpayer advocate groups.
Outnumbered, outgunned, fighting against the very institution they are elected and sworn to uphold, is it any wonder why Republicans cave to bigger government?
The reason why is simple. The ATR Taxpayer Protection Pledge is a mediocre conservatism at best. After all, why should Republicans (much less conservatives) settle for four years of government-in-stasis waiting for the Democrats to regain their strength? Inevitably, as conservatives thump their chest as a government liberals built continues to thrive uninterrupted, inertia takes over.
Eventually there’s a “crisis” and when push comes to shove, the constituency for bigger government wins out over free enterprise — if for no other reason than government isn’t in the business of protecting free enterprise, just providing for its own core constituency of civil servants.
What conservatives must realize they are facing is that government — local, state, and federal — is designed to create and provide for a constituency. That constituency isn’t taxpayers — it’s hundreds of thousands of neighbors and friends who subsist on a government salary, pension, or subsidy.
Government’s only duty towards free enterprise, so it would seem, is to leave as much of the open market alone as practical. Conservatives are left at this point not with a struggle for liberty, but a mere defensive rearguard action against the inevitable.
This conservative vision isn’t exactly a hope-filled ideology, eh?
I reject it. It’s easy to do. Rather than play defense, I’d rather reset the stage.
How’s this — what if government were a force for free enterprise? What if government was invested in reform? To creating a class of entrepreneurs, providing microloans and programs for small businesses to get started? To making sure that the sea of young high school, vocational, and post-secondary graduates were looking forward to their own entrepreneurial ideas and opportunities? That government projects, should they expand, would do so at their expense?
What if government were committed to the individual rather than corporations and big government projects? Could it be the sort of reform needed to finally tame America’s Leviathan?
Perhaps we need look no further than an example of capitalist virtue over corporatist or socialist excess — Sweden.
Deregulation, lower taxes, and the creation of a constituency for free enterprise. Isn’t that what we want out of America? Isn’t that what made us the great nation that prosecuted two world wars and crushed the Soviet Union?
Perhaps as conservatives we need to start re-examining our pledges not to raise taxes, and instead radically focus again on spending. At the end of the day, the structure of government is hurtling towards largess — with little to no “big ideas” to combat the inevitable end.
We need to start working towards Libertopia. Reform, not stasis, will be the key.
What will that reform look like? Programs that assist — but do not provide — methods of community assistance, microfinance, and small business entrepreneurship are the keys to a healthy economy. That economy will required an educated workforce filled with post-secondary and vocationally trained students who understand why things work, and not just how to use them. Above all else, a disattachment from consumerist ethics and a reliance upon the local community will be critical.
Fostering the local “black market” of goods and services exchanged in kind, a rebuilding of community, and prizing self-reliance means a massive shift from a credit-driven, libertine, interdependent laxity that passes for culture today. But it’s a step in the right direction that will prevent and insulate us from the mistakes of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain.
Conservatives need to press leaders for that Big Idea. Lacking it, the constituency for civil servants will continue to grow by virtue of mere inertia alone.
Reform not stasis. Tell your friends. This is a conversation worth having.
