Back in March, The American Interest's Walter Russell Mead took Midwestern (specifically Minnesota) Republicans to task in a blog post for failing "to turn voters’ urgent concerns...into a politically sustainable program for deep change." Mead observed that,
"Rather than propose innovative new ideas toward a vision for the future, the Midwestern GOP is projecting a message about what they are against. Those who want to get beyond blue need to think more creatively about the next steps."
Thus chastened, over at Private Citizen we offered this except from our perpetually forthcoming book as a partial down payment on that program for deep change.
“The nearest approach to immortality on earth is a government bureau"
--South Carolina politician James F. Brynes
Count us in favor of both government reform and reduced spending. Simply voting less money is the easy part. How to change business as usual is more difficult, especially when government is part of the problem. Quoting Walter Russell Mead,
Government is inevitably going to be part of the solution for these problems—if only by correcting so many of the misguided policies that in many cases make existing conditions worse. [1]
So reform, yes, but what kind of reform? To answer that question, we need to go back to the beginning and cover a little economic theory.
A government program, once created, develops its own constituencies—the direct recipients who want to continue getting benefits, bureaucrats whose careers depend on the program’s existence, not to mention the lobbyists and advocates who will go to bat for a program, if it were threatened.
