There's good news for Americans who believe in a smaller federal government: The law of unintended consequences is alive and well in the Obama age. The law's arm is long, its grip strong.
Take health care, for example. The intended consequence of the campaign for Democratic health reform has been to expand government into the most intimate, most consequential parts of our lives.
17 percent of the economy's a pretty hefty boodle.
But the unintended consequence has been to drive more Americans away from the idea of government-run health care and toward more personal responsibility. The latest polling data from Gallup show a stunning, 22-point shift among Americans away from believing that government is responsible for health care toward believing that individuals are responsible for their own health care.
It's that "T" word: trillions. I can't recall ever having heard it used when discussing government projects. It's kind of a paradox that while a trillion is too big a number for people to get their minds around they also seem to constitute something that's finite: how many trillions do we have?
What's more, this shift against government health care has actually been fueled by the campaign to federalize it. In 2006, 69 percent of Americans believed government was responsible for health care. Today, that number is 47 percent.
Lots of us are in favor of all sorts of nice-sounding things until we look at the details. The devil's always in the details, isn't it?
The unintended but nonetheless building backlash against big, centralized government isn't just confined to health care, and it isn't just confined to Washington. In Baton Rouge, La., last week voters by a wide margin rejected a tax increase to pay for more city spending. The entire Democratic establishment, the media and the business establishment tried to sell the higher taxes as hope and change for Baton Rouge, but the voters weren't buying. Thanks in large part to an opposition campaign mounted by the Baton Rouge Tea Party, 64 percent of voters rejected the new taxes.
That's a phenomenon that I don't think the Publican party actually comprehends yet. People are still tired of them because they took power in 1994 using the Contract with America. They implemented most of it, but then they decided to act like Dems and "govern from the center." Nobody acts like Dems better than the Dems themselves do, so they took back power, which they're now proceeding to abuse -- they're not bothering to "govern from the center" or even from center left. But the only virtue the Publicans have is being not Dems. Rather than discussing the details of legislation they'd be a lot better off dicussing things like liberty and competetiveness, job creation, and national independence.
This comes on the heels of the historic rejection of higher taxes and bigger government that California voters delivered earlier this year. In a state that gave Barack Obama a 24-point margin of victory in 2008, California voters in May rejected a series of taxing and spending measures by 63 percent-plus majorities. Another initiative, which would limit elected officials' salaries in times of deficits, passed with 74 percent of the vote.
Right. We'll see them in court on that one.
Add this all together and it points to a strong message being sent by the American people: At a time when politicians are telling us that only government can solve our problems -- a time when government itself seems to be the most important constituency of many politicians -- Americans are simply saying, "No." No more. They are a rejecting big, expensive, distant government.
They're rejecting a grab at 17 percent of the national economy. If the entire U.S. GDP is $13.84 trillion and we're looking at a health care bill that's talking about anywhere from $1 trillion to $22 trillion depending on who's doing the presentation, even the dullards among us can comprehend it, and even the dullards can comprehend that even just one of those 13.84 trillions is a significant chunk that won't be available for other things, such as beer. The idea of a government program that costs more than our entire GDP is simply ludicrous.
I wouldn't take too much comfort from Caliphornia's rejection of their legislatures attempts to spend them into the ground. They've been rejecting ever since Proposition 13, but they've keep reelecting the same gang the San Francisco vigilantes were in the habit of stringing up or running out of town 150 years ago. Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer are from Caliphornia. So's Maxine Waters and so was Ron Dellums. Jerry "Governor Moonbeam" Brown is running for governor again and it's my guess he's got a real good chance of reoccupying the seat currently warmed by Arnold Schwartzegger.
The alternative to big government isn't no government, as critics of small-government conservatives would have you believe. It's something increasing numbers of Americans are calling "localism." Localism is federalism, but with the benefit of hard experience. America's Founders established federalism -- creating a federal government with clearly defined, and thus constitutionally limited, powers and reserving the remainder of governmental power to the states or the people -- to maximize individual freedom and prevent a central government from creating for itself ever expanding powers over the people.
Much of that was dismantled in the wake of the Civil War, whether implicitly or explicitly. We're not going to repeal the 14th amendment, nor are we going to rewrite it even though it needs it.
But the political establishment in Washington and politicians from Sacramento to Albany to Baton Rouge don't like federalism. They have tried to sell the American people on the idea that today's challenges are too complex and too pressing to be left to the states or to the people. These challenges, we are assured, require bigger and more expensive federal or state governments.
We always expect these big programs to be run with an efficiency that's to date been lacking. Parkinson's Law applies just as remorsely as the Law of Unintended Side Effects. The British Colonial Office in 1949 had more employees to administer fewer colonies than had pertained in 1898. The U.S. Postal Service charges more and more to deliver an ever decreasing volume of mail. Excluding junk mail and bills they may deliver none at all. Yet still we expect the gummint to administer health care with more efficiency and compassion than the insurance companies' utilization managers, most of whom are RNs.
Localism is a direct reaction to this. The past couple months have seen the most decisive shift in generations back to the original American view of the role of the federal government. It is a return to the constitutional understanding that powers not belonging to the federal government should reside in the most local possible center of responsibility. Sometimes that's individual Americans and their families. Other times it's local or state government.
It's an idea that's inimical to the proposition that the common folk exist to create wealth for their betters.
In all cases, it's a decisive rejection of the notion being peddled in Washington that self-government in the 21st century is too complicated to be left to the people. The irony is that this great awakening of personal and local responsibility is in response to a concerted campaign to convince us that the opposite is true: That the hope and change we've been waiting for must come from enlightened politicians and governments, not from ourselves.
It's the result of realizing that the Dems are corrupt to their hairlines and that they haven't the least concern for the "little people" they claim to represent. The Publicans are inept and generally lacking in principles, though only about a tenth as corrupt. That leaves We the People with nobody to represent us. Third parties are a lost cause, a haven for cranks and vanity campaigners.
Big government is being sold in Washington today as something new. The unintended consequence is that Americans are returning to something old: government of, by, and for the people.
It won't happen. The best we're going to get is a transient improvement, something like we saw following the Contract with America. The Tea Party movement's not going to being going with the same fervor ten years from now, even five years from now. Once the improvement's been made many of the agents will be coopted by the Dem machines, some will pronounce themselves "mavericks" and get their pictures in the papers, others will turn into time servers enjoying their perks. 1994 was only 15 years ago and we can see how much of the Contract with America's still in force.