At CPAC, conservative writer and Media Research Center president Brent Bozell gave a blistering speech denouncing pretty much every elected Republican out there, from Paul Ryan to Bob McDonnell. While telling McDonnell he wishes McDonnell had never gotten elected and he should kiss any national aspirations bye-bye, he complained about the most recent Ryan Budget, saying Ryan should “[d]o [him]self and your country a favor. Rip that budget up and come back with one that truly does reduce the size of government…” The complaint being that even under Ryan’s budget, the government would spend $41 trillion (approximately $4 trillion a year) over the next ten years.
Bozell’s comments linking the size of the budget with the size of government are nothing new, but they are illustrative of a fundamental misunderstanding some people have about what “big government” actually means. It’s a common refrain, one heard from many areas of the Republican party and the conservative, Tea Party and libertarian circles. More taxes equal bigger government. More spending equals bigger government. The transportation bill’s tax increases are just Richmond growing the size of government, and the nearly doubling of the Virginia budget over the last decade was big government run amok.
Not exactly. The point of Republicans fighting “big government” isn’t about the actual size of the government – it’s about the scope. How intrusive government is, not how many employees it has. Not the size of the budget, the size of the power they claim over our lives. When we spend all our time complaining about numbers and the “size” of government, we’re missing the point. A large government that does its core responsibilities well and stays within its constitutional limits is not a bad thing or a threat to liberty. And a small government that has the power over every aspect of your life isn’t something we want to emulate, either. Scope, not size, is our concern. As a small government Republican, I want a government that focuses on core functions – things like defense, foreign affairs, transportation – rather than stepping into issues where it doesn’t belong, like health care. If we are spending tax dollars on core functions, that’s not a problem, and if we need more taxes to fund those functions (as a last resort only), I will grudgingly accept that. But when we expand government into areas it doesn’t belong – in the bedroom, interfering with private, personal choices like what to eat and what to own – that’s where we need to draw the line. That’s the real threat of “big government.”
Take a look for a moment at the Virginia GOP’s Republican Creed. The creed doesn’t talk about big government – at least, it does use that phrase or any of its synonyms. It says “fiscal responsibility and budgetary restraints must be exercised at all levels of government,” and “the Federal Government must preserve individual liberty by observing Constitutional limitations.” The second quote is the important one because that truly represents what “big government” is all about. When government acts outside of its core functions, begins to over-regulate or interfere with areas of someone’s life that have been free from government interference in the past, that’s the true problem. We need to fight the nanny state, and that doesn’t necessarily involve budgets.
When the Bush Administration reorganized the government and created the Department of Homeland Security, some people complained that Bush just oversaw a massive expansion of the federal government. That really wasn’t the case. No new powers – at least no powers that the government hadn’t already been exercising in some way – were given to DHS. What it got was more centralized, and we’ve seen expansions of the Department in the years since, including the hiring of thousands of border patrol agents, something no Republican is likely to complain about. Is that a bad thing? No.
Where government goes wrong is where it starts to poke its nose into areas it doesn’t belong. Take, for example, EPA’s attempt to regulate storm water runoff as a pollutant. Thanks to AG Cuccinelli and the Democratically controlled Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, EPA was forced to back down, saving Fairfax hundreds of millions of dollars it would have had to pay to comply with their regulations. That’s a legitimate example of “big government” run amok and it was critical that we fight it.
When we raise taxes to fund infrastructure investment and repair roads, or the Social Security Administration hires a couple dozen more clerks to get the checks out faster, that’s not an “expansion of government” or “big government.” That’s government living up to its core responsibilities – the kind of things we expect government to do. When government tries to tell people they can’t buy Big Gulps, rain is a pollutant, and what kind of gun you can own, that’s where Republicans need to stand up and fight.
Don’t get me wrong – deficit spending is wrong and our national debt is a clear and present danger to our economic recovery. We need to reduce the amount of money we spend as much as possible, especially the largest areas that have so far gone untouched, entitlements. But we shouldn’t confuse the size of a budget with “big government.” If every program we needed to fund was an appropriate government priority, how much we spent (so long as we weren’t overspending) wouldn’t be an issue. That’s the ideal, and we are clearly not there yet. But blindly attacking the physical numbers as an expansion of government represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem we’re trying to fight. And until Republicans can get on the same page – fighting the scope creep of government – we’re working at cross purposes and getting nowhere.
As for Bozell, he can call out Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republicans in Washington for not doing enough, but I’ve yet to hear anybody explain how they could accomplish more given the fundamentals in Washington right now. But that’s another article.
