Grand Old Spenders
Washington Post
By George F. Will
Thursday, November 17, 2005; Page A31
The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder
the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board
seeking reelection were defeated. This expressed the community's wholesome
exasperation with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of
"intelligent design" theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a
required proclamation that evolution "is not a fact."
But it is. And President Bush's straddle on that subject -- "both sides"
should be taught -- although intended to be anodyne, probably was inflammatory,
emboldening social conservatives. Dover's insurrection occurred as Kansas's
Board of Education, which is controlled by the kind of conservatives who make
conservatism repulsive to temperate people, voted 6 to 4 to redefine science.
The board, opening the way for teaching the supernatural, deleted from the
definition of science these words: "a search for natural explanations of
observable phenomena."
"It does me no injury," said Thomas Jefferson, "for my neighbor to say there
are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But
it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education
to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which
is coming unglued for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if
limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are
unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on
the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and
instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.
But, then, the limited-government impulse is a spent force in a Republican
Party that cannot muster congressional majorities to cut the growth of Medicaid
from 7.3 to 7 percent next year. That "cut" was too draconian for some
Republican "moderates." But, then, most Republicans are moderates as that term
is used by persons for whom it is an encomium: Moderates are people amiably
untroubled by Washington's single-minded devotion to rent-seeking -- to bending
government for the advantage of private factions.
Conservatives have won seven of 10 presidential elections, yet government
waxes, with per-household federal spending more than $22,000 per year, the
highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. Federal spending --
including a 100 percent increase in education spending since 2001 -- has grown
twice as fast under President Bush as under President Bill Clinton, 65 percent
of it unrelated to national security.
In 1991, the 546 pork projects in the 13 appropriation bills cost $3.1
billion. In 2005, the 13,997 pork projects cost $27.3 billion, for things such
as improving the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio (Packard, an
automobile brand, died in 1958).
Washington subsidizes the cost of water to encourage farmers to produce
surpluses that trigger a gusher of government spending to support prices. It is
almost comforting that $2 billion is spent each year paying farmers not to
produce. Farm subsidies, most of which go to agribusinesses and affluent
farmers, are just part of the $60 billion in corporate welfare that dwarfs the
$29 billion budget of the Department of Homeland Security.
Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation reports that Congress responded to
the Korean War by setting priorities, cutting one-fourth of all nonwar spending
in one year . Recently the House failed to approve an unusually ambitious
effort to cut government growth . This is today's ambitiousness: attempting --
probably unsuccessfully -- to cut government growth by $54 billion over five
years.
That is $10.8 billion a year from five budgets projected to total $12.5
trillion, of which $54 billion is four-tenths of 1 percent. War is hell, but on
the home front it is indistinguishable from peace, except that the government
is more undisciplined than ever.
Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia wonders whether
conservatives' cohesion is perishing because it was a product of the period
when conservatives were insurgents against dominant liberals. About
limited-government conservatism, he says:
"Perhaps conservatives were naive to expect any party, ever, to resist
rent-seeking temptations when in power. Just as there always was something
fatally unserious about socialism -- its flawed understanding of human nature
-- is it possible that there has also been something profoundly unserious about
the limited-government agenda? Should we now be prepared for the national
electoral wing of the conservative movement -- the House and Senate caucuses
and executive branch officials -- to identify with legislation like the
pork-laden energy and transportation bills, in the same way that liberals came
to ground their identities in programs like Social Security?"
Perhaps. But if so, limited-government conservatives will dissociate from a
Republican Party more congenial to overreaching social conservatives. Then
those Republican congressional caucuses will be smaller, and Republican control
of the executive branch will be rarer.
georgewill@washpost.com
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