The Nation's Pulse/Future Limits
Eastland, Terry
IlaffillIMMIIM1111110111 Future Limits by Terry Eastland / n early June, the ambitiously named Project for the Republican Future sponsored the first of several conferences about the direction of...
...Despite his support for the mohair subsidy (mohair sheep graze in Texas) and forthe 1990 Bush-Darman tax increase, Gramtn's anti-government growth credentials are solid...
...One definition is government that continues to grow, but at a slower rate than liberals would like...
...George Will, once an advocate of a conservative welfare state, has in recent years performed a notable about-face...
...Since this would require amending the Constitution—among the most arduous political tasks—it might seem politically unrealistic...
...Dead Right is basically an argument that notwithstanding Reagan's many achievements, he also managed to kill off a central tenet of modern conservatism—rejection of big government...
...W hat policies might be proposed to limit government...
...Another form of limited government is one forced to operate under more constraints than the Constitution now imposes...
...of every conservative has made peace with big government...
...You have to be able to show that you can address the basic problems that people think relevant...
...This is the definition embraced by Frum, and it proceeds not just from a conviction that the welfare state is "a desperately unstable institution" bound to ignite "terrible resentment" (see Perot) but also from a belief that the old conservatism was right...
...Echoing the conventional wisdom about the 1992 election, Weber said there is "a demand for government activism that didn't exist at the beginning of the Reagan administration...
...Much depends on what is meant by "limited government...
...Is empowerment the right GOP strategy for the 1990s...
...Darman, as might be expected, also told Kristol he was wrong...
...These five percentage points of GDP would have eliminated the 1989 deficit, which consumed three points of GDP, and allowed doing away with the corporate income tax or slashing everyone's Social Security taxes...
...People are asking the government for help...
...Weber told Kristol he was wrong, because a politics aimed at relimiting government won't work...
...That's a dime-less approach that won't inspire anyone...
...Kristol told me later, "I was a little surprised that none of the panelists seemed particularly taken by the idea...
...Am I wrong," he asked, "to put great hopes in relimiting government as a Republican alternative to the Clinton administration's reinventing government...
...Like Kristol, Armey foresees a popular revolt against big government...
...The understanding behind such an amendment would be that the old Article I constraints on congressional spending have all but eroded, so that Congress is free to spend on virtually anything...
...Armey, with his skinflint voting record, would cut it by a quarter, and "a clear place to start is the Education Department...
...The public today is different, he agreed, but not in the way Kristol supposes...
...vision...
...This will require a governmental role...
...It's not to maximize liberty as an end in itself that conservatives used to advocate minimal government," he writes...
...Their vision may elude most folks...
...By that he means one that uses government to empower people but is no longer preoccupied with trying to limit, or relimit, government...
...They advocated it because they admired a certain type of character...
...We have the incredible paradox in America that we are the only country in the world that is trying to get into socialized medicine rather than trying to get out of it...
...CI The American Spectator August 1994 53...
...However quixotic the idea of minimal government may seem today, it is worth discussing, if only to expand the range of the discussible...
...Unfortunately, the law was eliminated by Darman's budget deal of 1990...
...Conservatives, he writes, "have wearily concluded that reducing [big government] is hopeless, and that even the task of preventing its further growth will probably exceed their strength...
...former OMB director Richard Darman, and Jeffrey Bell, long-time party activist and author of Populism and Elitism (1992...
...In his penetrating new book, Dead Right, David Frum, late of Forbes, explains why...
...There's no going back to the doctrine of enumerated powers exercised by congressional majorities, but an appropriately framed amendment could require supermajorities—say, two-thirds of the membership of both houses—to make important decisions affecting the public fisc...
...The good news about 52 The American Spectator August 1994 America today is the sudden expansion of the discussible...
...Such a buck-stops-here policy can be fleshed out in various ways: Armey's just-introduced Freedom and Fairness Restoration Act seeks to reduce government's share of GDP through spending caps and "sunset provisions" for early retirements...
...If things keep going down the path they are now, we can do a lot more in this direction...
...Texan Phil Gramm is one belligerent, Texan Dick Armey another...
...When I asked Gramm how he would have answered Kristol's question, the senator delivered this stemwinder: "If our experience of the last ten years in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and in the Third World is any indicator," he said, "the movement toward limited government is the most powerful force that exists on the planet...
...Back home," he says, "I'm the moderate trying to stop a march on Washington...
...IlaffillIMMIIM1111110111 Future Limits by Terry Eastland / n early June, the ambitiously named Project for the Republican Future sponsored the first of several conferences about the direction of GOP politics and policies in the 1990s...
...Will has a point...
...The party's "basic thrust" should be that "government's too big, spends too much, and is too involved in our lives...
...Certain aspects of the welfare state are popular with conservative voters, and not even Gramm and Armey are willing to touch Social Security, the proverbial third rail of American politics...
...Gramm and Armey are among the very few Republican politicians willing to speak openly about reducing government...
...Only Bell seemed to think Kristol might be right, but his answer was limp...
...Shorn of Social Security and entitlements like Medicare, government would indeed become much smaller relative to GDP—and much less intrusive, as federal regulations would be few and far between...
...was the question put to the three panelists—former congressman Vin Weber...
...Frum spares few on the right for their acquiescence to big government: Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett, Ed Meese, even Pat Buchanan, even the Heritage Foundation...
...You need an exciting vision to be exciting politically, and just being for limited government isn't such an exciting Terry Eastland is editor of Forbes MeiliaCritic and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C...
...To compete with Democrats, Weber said, Republicans will have to "discover a principled response...
...If the Republican Party doesn't stand for individual freedom and limited government, I don't know what it stands for...
...Charles Murray endorses abolishing welfare and other social programs linked to family breakup—and that heretofore undiscussible idea is suddenly being debated...
...that had been widespread in this country—selfreliant, competent, canny and uncomplaining—and minimal government was the system of government under which the character they admired flourished best...
...If smaller government is to become a reality, politicians, and the academics and journalists who shape public opinion, will have to go out on a limb for it...
...Such a rule would limit the way Congress spends money, although it's unclear whether and how it would affect the size of government...
...Frum writes that if federal non-defense spending had risen no faster than inflation between 1979 and 1989, the government share of GDP in 1989 would have been 17 percent, not the 22 percent it was...
...Another definition is government that doesn't grow in real terms...
...You can't justify a third of it," Gramm says when asked how much of the federal government he'd cut...
...I am much less sanguine about the capacities of the welfare state," he told me, although he disagrees with those who think it will require a major shock to the body politic (a debt crisis, say) to put the idea of limited government into serious play...
...Their opening remarks concluded, the PRF chairman William Kristol bravely asked them what they thought of trying to revive "the most traditional Republican principle of all"—that of limited government, for which, he averred, there might be more public support today than when Ronald Reagan was elected president...
...As he likes to point out, the second half of the 1980s saw the size of the federal government relative to the economy shrink for the first time since World War It shrunk in large part thanks to the 1985 Gramm-Rudman law, which imposed stringent limits on federal spending...
...There is, of course, a final definition of limited government—the kind of government that predated the New Deal and most of the welfare state...
...Armey reads the electorate—or at least his electorate—differently from Weber...
...But with a shift of just a few congressional votes, a genuine balanced budget amendment could be sent to the states for ratification...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
