Government According to Limbaugh
What is the proper role of government in our society?
Ronald Reagan staked out the conservative position in his first inaugural on January 20, 1981 when he famously stated: “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” This is the view that takes government for a bumbling crew of incompetent bureaucrats who spend our tax dollars inefficiently on counterproductive social programs and otherwise wrongly interfere with our lives. The view blames government for virtually every ill that has ever occurred. Even when government tries to help us, the ideologues hold, it ends up hurting us.
For example, speaking at the annual CPAC convension (described by at least one commentator as the “Woodstock for conservatives”) on February 28, 2009, Rush Limbaugh, the outspoken conservative radio personality who many consider to be the leader the Republican party, tackled the problem of poverty:
You know why they’re poor, you know why they remain poor? Because their lives have been destroyed by the never-ending government hay that’s designed to help them, but it destroys ambition. It destroys the education they might get to learn to be self-fulfilling. . . And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail.
So, according to Limbaugh, the reason that poor people remain poor is because they’ve become dependent on the government so that instead of helping the country, government ends up hurting it by packing the projects with a bunch of good-for-nothing free-riders who have no motivation to succeed because government’s already taking care of everything for them, except for their education which government has destroyed.
Of course, this is not reality. If it were, the New Deal would have led to a dying generation. Instead, it led to the Greatest Generation and a sustained era of robust growth and prosperity. Moreover, if Limbaugh’s statement were true, why is the United States’ poverty rate over twice France’s?
On the other hand, we have seen that when government totally backs out of the picture, like with deregulation of the financial industry, things can go horribly wrong.
I have tried and tried, but cannot make sense out of Limbaugh’s assertions. Take, for instance, President Obama’s budget proposal first announced on February 26, which would fund promised reforms in health care, education and the tax code. How are young Americans hurt by the government providing them Pell Grants so that they can go to college? How does making health insurance more accessible and affordable for every American destroy ambition? How exactly does ensuring that the super wealthy pay the same effective tax rates as ordinary Americans make this country a worse place?
The idea that government is always the problem and never the solution, is also at the heart of the debate about whether the U.S. government should, or will, “nationalize” banks. The public at large does not seem to find the concept of nationalizing banks particularly offensive and may, in these difficult times, find it somewhat comforting. But Wall Street and the markets march to the beat of their own drum, exhibiting a deep bias against nationalization based on the notion that government is simply incapable of running a business.
As explained by economics professor Tyler Cohen:
[T]he government doesn’t have the expertise to run large bank holding companies like Citigroup. There is the danger that caretaker managers, with bureaucratic incentives, will never return the banks to profitability.
Government, however, is not an abstract entity. It’s composed of people. Its expertise with regard to running companies and returning them to “profitability”, therefore, depends on whether its people have such expertise, not on its status as “government.” Furthermore, Cohen’s presupposition is that private actors do have the expertise to run large banks. Recent experience, however, has proven that to be wrong.
The truth is that nationalization may not be the best course of action, but it should be duly considered and not automatically excluded on ideological grounds. One commonly cited example is Sweden, which in the early 1990s temporarily nationalized some of its banks with no disastrous consequences; the banks were later reprivatized and economic growth continued. Moreover, it’s not as if nationalization would be some apocalyyptic departure from the status quo. As Time’s Justin Fox observes:
At least since the founding of the Fed, our banking system has been a public-private partnership. Apart from a few on the libertarian right who think we’d be better off with no government involvement in banking and an even smaller group on the socialist left who would like to see complete government control of the financial system, almost everyone seems to be in favor of continuing that partnership.
Still, the ideological mudslinging continues in Washington (and in Rush’s room), and the Dow keeps heading South on talks of nationalization. Little, if any, of it comports with common sense.
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