The Washington That Roosevelt Built

Chapter 12

The widespread disillusionment with big government, and the growing attraction of the libertarian critique, have caused the defenders of political society to launch a counter-attack. What's interesting about the most popular recent defenses of activist government is their modesty. Gone are the sweeping calls for social change of the 1930s and the make-the-world-over crusades of the 1960s. Although such old-fashioned models can still be found among tenured professors, politicians and authors who want to appeal to a wide audience now make only modest claims for what government can do.

Consider the 1992 book by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector, which was widely hailed by such "new Democrats" as Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Osborne and Gaebler recognize that "the kinds of governments that developed during the industrial era, with their sluggish centralized bureaucracies, their preoccupations with rules and regulations, and their hierarchical chains of command, no longer work very well." They lay out 10 things government should become: catalytic, community owned, competitive, mission driven, results oriented, customer driven, enterprising, anticipatory, decentralized, and market oriented. The striking thing about that list is that it's very close to a description not of government but of the market process. The leading theorists of government activism in our time promise that we can make government act like the market.

Or consider Jacob Weisberg's 1996 book In Defense of Government, which lays out five principles for "resurrecting government": (1) accept that life is risky and stop trying to legislate risk out of existence, (2) stop promising more than government can deliver, (3) be willing to abolish failed, outdated, or low-priority programs, (4) stop delegating Congress's lawmaking authority to the bureaucracy, and (5) promise that government won't get any bigger than it is now, in terms of government share of GNP. While Weisberg retains a starry-eyed belief in a "wise, effective, and benevolent federal government," his policy program is restrained by comparison with previous generations of enthusiasts for state activism.

Despite these chastened interventionists, however, and despite President Clinton's proclamation that "the era of big government is over," government in fact remains bigger than ever. The federal government forcibly extracts $1.6 trillion a year from those who produce it, and state and local governments take another trillion. Every year Congress adds another 6,000 pages of statute law, every year regulators print 60,000 pages of new regulations in the Federal Register, and lawyers say no business can possibly be in full compliance with federal regulation.

Most of our political leaders are still living in the Washington that Roosevelt built, the Washington where if you think of a good idea you create a government program. Consider a few examples:

* Sen. Bob Dole reads the Tenth Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people") on the campaign trail, but introduces bills to federalize criminal law, welfare policy, and the definition of marriage.

* Vice President Gore announces a plan to tear down public housing projects, saying, "These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are killing the neighborhoods around them." He reminds his listeners, "In years past, Washington told people around the country what to do, dictating wisdom from on high. And let's be honest: some of that wisdom really wasn't very wise." Then he announces a plan to . . . build new public housing projects.

* Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) says that Republicans "need to offer a vision of rebuilding broken communities--not through government, but through those private institutions and ideals that nurture lives" and argues that "even if government undermined civil society, it cannot directly reconstruct it." Then he proposes 19 federal laws to establish a model school for at-risk youth, implement a waiting period for divorcing couples, fund religious maternity shelters, set up savings accounts for the poor, and more.

* Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros promises to "decentralize with a vengeance" because churches, neighborhood groups, and small businesses "know at least as much and are better positioned than the organizationally encumbered government in Washington" to improve their own communities. But then he proposes to set up classrooms in public housing units and require all residents to attend class every day in prenatal training, educational day care, high school equivalency sessions, or seminars for the elderly.

* Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed writes that America is united around "a vision of a society based on two fundamental beliefs. The first belief is that all men, created equal in the eyes of God with certain inalienable rights, are free to pursue the longings of their heart. The second belief is that the sole purpose of government is to protect those rights." But his political program is to ban abortion, forbid gay people to marry, and censor the Internet.

* And on and on it goes, in any day's newspaper: the president has a plan to reduce the price of gasoline and to raise the price of beef, the administration wants Japan and China to set specific targets for U.S. imports, a panel of experts wants to reduce the number of doctors, county planners require developers to build "affordable" housing, then a few years later develop a plan to encourage "upscale" housing. The era of big government is over, but the government doesn't seem to know it yet.

Meanwhile, activists organize marches and rallies for all good things under the sun: jobs, children, housing, health care, the environment. It's hard to organize a rally for civil society and the market process, the source of the ideas and the wealth that allow us to provide better jobs, health care, child care, and homes, and use scarce resources more efficiently.