End the War on Freedom

FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JAN. 10, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
The triumphs of Big Government

That Washington-based band of apologists for big government known as the Brookings Institution has just released a report by Brookings Vice President Paul C. Light titled "Government's Greatest Achievements of the Past Half Century."

Not to leave anyone in suspense, Mr. Light's survey determined -- by ranking how important a task was, how difficult it was to achieve, and how good was the final result -- that the greatest and most successful endeavors of the federal government since 1945 have been 1) the rebuilding of Europe after World War II; 2) The expansion of the right to vote; 3) promotion of equal access to public accommodations; 4) reducing disease; and 5) reducing workplace discrimination.

The list seems fairly safe. No European can be so ungracious as to deny the generosity of the American people in sending aid to the Europeans in 1946 ... always excepting the French. Nor would many challenge the nobility of the cause of making sure no American is denied his or her right to vote, eat at a lunch counter, or buy the home of his choice, based on race or religious intolerance.

The Brookings brethren, however, could not resist turning their report into another jeremiad for further government activism, Mr. Light concluding that it's an open question whether the central government will ever be "so bold again."

"Are the nation's leaders so worried about losing their jobs that they will not take the risks embedded in the kind of inherently risky projects that reached the top 10 list above?" Mr. Light sighs.

From such mewling, one might imagine America's experiment with big government was coming to an end -- while in fact, the reality at the dawning of the 21st Century is that the federal government's budget (along with the list of areas into which it now blithely injects itself without visible constitutional authorization) has never been larger.

The problem with Mr. Light's survey is that his data comes from questionnaires returned by a mere 450 American college professors involved in teaching history and government, among whom 65 percent admit to being "liberal," while 82 percent describe themselves as "Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents."

Allow such a group to choose which government initiatives were "important," and by an amazing coincidence they choose precisely the areas where they believe government intervention has done the most good, thus self-validating their received belief that legislation (and huge tax levies) can solve all the most important problems.

It doesn't matter whether government has succeeded in "expanding home ownership," "reforming taxes," "controlling immigration," "increasing market competition," or "devolving responsibility to the states," you see, because the good professors ranked those as the least important of the 50 things government tried to do in the past 50 years, in the first place.

Mr. Light asserts those government endeavors ranked high by his professors "clearly produced the intended results," adding that "It is impossible to imagine the private sector taking the lead in rebuilding Europe or the nonprofit sector massing the capital to build the interstate highway system."

No it's not. In fact, the private sector is responsible of most of the rebirth of modern Europe. (If government handouts alone can do the job, why have they failed so miserably in Russia?) And the same private sector that built America's railroads could doubtless have built a vast system of national toll roads far more efficiently than the current "free" government highway system, if only it had been allowed to capture in tolls what the federals now collect in truck taxes and tire and gasoline excise.

Mr. Light's missing link is called "causality." Just because government spends money hoping to cause something to happen, and it eventually happens, doesn't prove the government spending "caused" the outcome. Does anyone believe if the "Department of Agriculture" closed tomorrow, farmers would stop growing chickens and carrots, and truckers would stop delivering food to our stores?

Mr. Light admits federal efforts to "increase the supply of low-income housing, renew poor communities, reform taxes ... and devolve responsibilities to the states" have all been abject failures, but then blithely asserts this must be because of a "lack of clarity regarding means, and a general ambiguity regarding ends."

In other words, "They didn't really want to, anyway."

"Reforming" taxes is an evasive euphemism. What people want are lower taxes and abolished license fees -- something an activist government is never going to deliver, any more than federal bureaucrats are ever going to pay anything but lip service to the notion they should return to the states any of the significant powers they've been busy usurping since 1912 (or should that be 1860?)

And the reason government repeatedly fails in any effort to "renew poor communities" is that excessive government regulation, along with heavy-handed taxation and "urban renewal" schemes, have been actively destroying America's previously vibrant low-income communities for years.

Mr. Light and his Brookings brethren -- who freely admit their study "does not address whether Congress should have asked government to undertake the endeavors discussed below" (how handy), choose to measure "progress" by counting the number of new federal statutes enacted. By that measure, it certainly has been a banner half-century.

But I thought someone, somewhere, once said the reason governments are instituted among men is to "secure" those "unalienable rights" with which all men are "endowed by their creator," among these being "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

That would seem to establish a somewhat different benchmark against which Mr. Light might measure the "progress" of the federal government over the past 50 years ... a standard against which one suspects its efforts might not measure up quite so well.

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Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (952-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at 800-244-2224.

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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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