¡Viva la Revolución!

It’s been more than a week since Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton issued his proposed two-year state budget.  The budget struck most of the correct progressive notes and received the expected praise from that corner.  Local media credit the budget with “the most comprehensive reworking of the tax system in a generation.”[1]  True, the Governor’s plan has many moving parts and the PR campaign does include some focus-grouped phrases, like "strengthening the middle class."

In the opposite of a duck, the budget is all thrashing on the surface and below the water line, oddly listless.  Now is the time when the state needs a plan for bold reform of how government services are delivered and a tax code that unleashes Minnesota’s entrepreneurs:  in short, a budget that sets the stage for future growth.  Instead we get the re-election campaign-mottoed “Budget for a Better Minnesota.”

Last week, the website MinnPost invited its readers to learn the inside story on “How Dayton's team put the ‘Big Plan’ together.”  Task One:  quiet citizen complaints over rising property taxes:  hence the rebate idea.   Task Two:  “come up with revenue plans that would make Minnesota budgets sustainable and, in the governor’s eyes, ‘fair’ into the future.”  In other words:  bribe voters with their own money to ensure re-election and lock in a guaranteed steady flow of tax revenue for years to come so state government can get on with the task of governing.  Indeed, the Governor’s Budget Commissioner touts “the stability to the state budget” the plan would bring.[2]

“The Best Now Truly Rule”

Critics of the budget underestimate at their peril the importance of this “stability” concept.  As to why, I think that two recent essays by the American Interest’s Editor-at-Large Walter Russell Mead offer a clue.  In the first, (“Futuristic Blues”) Mead speculates that liberals believe that,

“liberalism has accomplished its historic mission by bringing a true meritocracy into our midst. No longer do accidents of race or gender block the path of the talented to the heights of power; hardwired into the social structure by the shape of the economy and legitimized by equal access, a radical inequality of power and status will indefinitely persist. Liberalism now has nothing to do with attacking or eroding the power of the liberal elite; as long as that elite carries out its duty to share with the masses and accepts that its children must in turn earn their own place in the elite rather than simply inheriting one, the elite has no further need to democratize. The long job of social evolution, the fight against entrenched power going back to Magna Carta is over. It has done its job; it has brought us into the golden age of absolute and permanent meritocracy.  The best now truly rule.  And something else has also come to an end: the rise of the common people.”

Mead concludes with his take on the state of modern liberalism, “from an ideology of populism and reform it has mutated into a defense of the status quo.”

In that context, Gov. Dayton’s budget makes perfect sense.  It is about preserving the progressive view of meritocracy (the emphasis on public education, the discouragement of entrepreneurship) and locking in the status quo (budget “stability”).  Gov. Dayton wants desperately to be the very model of a modern progressive governor.  So, all the fashionable bits of state government are slated to get budget increases (higher ed., light rail), all of the unfashionable bits of the state’s economy are in line for tax increases (cigarettes, accountants).

And if you don’t like it?  Tough.

Policemen, Trees, Sunshine!

Right on schedule, tribune of the liberal status quo, Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant scolds Minnesota’s business community for not knowing their place, getting with the program and showing greater love for the “public goods” that government offers, writing this past weekend,[3]

“The 21st century may have ramped up the competitive intensity for Minnesota businesses. But it has not diminished the competitive value of those public goods. To the contrary--they are more important than ever.

When business folk come to the Capitol, they would do well to acknowledge that their competitive edge depends not only on how Minnesota ranks on taxes, but also on what those taxes buy.”

And thus always to anyone who would challenge the plan.  Have a problem with one of the new sales taxes?  “What difference does it make?” This is the Hillary Clinton phrase, which according to columnist Mark Steyn, manages to “encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite.”  Along the same theme, elsewhere in his Orange County Register column last week, Steyn quotes Edward Gibbon from The History of the Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire,

"The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled."

That sums up the current state of the progressive movement.  This defeatist attitude is not only unhelpful; it ignores the massive opportunity that is out there.  Professor Mead writes in his latest essay, “The Blue Elites Are Wrong,”

“The blue vision of the future, as I wrote in my last essay, is a bleak one in many respects… But what if this isn’t true?

“What if the information revolution, like the industrial revolution, ultimately leads to a radical improvement in the way ordinary people live and opens up vast new horizons of human potential and freedom?”

No matter, the liberals aren’t listening.  The revolution is over.  Now it is time for liberals to rule.  There is no need for reform or growth.  So, in the spirit of the season, with Mardi Gras less than two weeks away, let me be the first to say,

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

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[1] Helgeson, Blaird.  “Fractures showing on Dayton tax overhaul.”  Minneapolis Star Tribune.  January 29, 2013, p. A1.

[2] Ibid.

[3] See http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/188429811.html?refer=y