Big Government Conservatism Is An Oxymoron

By W. James Antle III

It's bad enough that Republican officeholders increasingly shirk their duty to contain government spending. It is worse when conservative writers, intellectuals and policy wonks, who are free to press for their ideas without worrying about reelection, urge them to do so by portraying the results not as a regrettable departure from principle but instead as part of a bold new governing strategy for the right.

A prime example of this could be found in Fred Barnes' Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on big government conservatives a few months ago. In it, he used the phrase "big government conservative" not as an epithet but as a description for a positive approach to pursuing the conservative agenda. According to his argument, the recent Medicare expansion and other increases in federal non-defense spending under President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress do not necessarily constitute a swing to the left. Rather, they are a key component of enacting realistic conservative reforms.

How can growing the welfare state be reconciled with the movement conservatism of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan's pronouncement that government is often not the solution but the problem? Barnes says it's simple and the Bush administration has shown the way: "The essence of Bush's big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he's willing to broaden programs and increase spending."

By Barnes' logic, conservatives gave in on the creation of the biggest new entitlement in 40 years by adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare in exchange for expanded medical savings accounts and other free-market innovations. On education, conservatives acceded to increased spending in exchange for greater accountability, standards and some measure of choice in "failing" school districts. Give a little bit on spending, get a little bit on creating the eventual conditions for limited government later and advancing other conservative goals.

The specifics of whether this argument really applies to either the Medicare or "No Child Left Behind" education legislation have been discussed elsewhere and would require another article. But is the overall idea of this trade-off between conservative goals and big government sound?

There are ample reasons to doubt it will work. This attempt at political realism in fact ignores unpleasant fiscal realities. Barnes claims that Bush, and presumably others in the current Republican leadership, recognize why past GOP efforts to reduce government under Reagan and Newt Gingrich failed: "People like big government so long as it's not a huge drag on the economy." But the prescription drug benefit, for example, adds another commitment to a Medicare program that already faces long-term problems meeting its existing commitments. With our entitlements in a precarious financial position, paying out promised benefits has the potential push taxes up to levels that will exert a real drag on the economy.

Continued growth of the welfare state is itself a looming danger to the economy. We have seen in Europe how plush cradle-to-grave social welfare spending can sap private initiative and lead to confiscatory tax rates, slowing economic growth to a crawl. Big government stifles a high-growth, job-creating dynamic free-market economy, as conservatives instinctively understood when confronting stagflation at the beginning of the Reagan administration.

The concept of a "conservative welfare state" is problematic even for non-economic reasons. Barnes said big-government conservatives are for "transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid)" and against "those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare)." But popular middle-class entitlements can be as corrosive of family values as welfare for the poor.

The welfare state actually assumes the economic functions of the family - mutual responsibility between spouses, parents and children - and renders them redundant. As David Frum wrote nearly ten years ago, "It really should not surprise anyone that the welfare state has weakened family structures. That was what social programs were meant to do." These programs by definition take resources away from existing families to perform support functions and responsibilities that were once the domain of the family and civil society, reducing the role of both in our national culture.

Whatever arguments can be made for this development, it is profoundly un-conservative. This is why Frum went on to remind his colleagues "it is not very realistic of conservatives to expect that the family can survive in its pre-Social Security form in a Social Security world." (Frum wrote an entire book entitled Dead Right, which is where these quotes come from, on the futility of severing conservatism from its opposition to welfarism. Unfortunately, he has not focused much on this topic in his recent work.)

No matter how well-intentioned or cleverly conceived, efforts to further conservative goals by big-government means are likely to fail because big government isn't conservative. Taxpayers cannot keep their money and have the government spend it, too.

W. James Antle III is a freelance writer and senior editor for EnterStageRight.com.