What Should Government Do?

My husband and I took our two youngest grandchildren to McCormick’s Creek State Park last weekend. McCormick’s Creek is one of Indiana’s state parks; located in the southern third of the state, it boasts acres of woods, a very nice (and reasonably priced) inn, and the requisite picnic areas and playgrounds. The weather was lovely, and the park was full of families.

While we were at the park, some 70,000 people were descending on Washington, D.C. to make a statement about their anger at “big government.” (Actually, it wasn’t too clear WHAT they were so angry about; apparently, it was an all-purpose “pox on your house” sort of event. A significant number just seemed royally pissed that a black Democrat had won the election.)

Giving the protestors/tea baggers the benefit of the doubt, their message seemed to be that government is too big, doing too much, spending too much and they want it to stop.

Which gets me back to the lovely state park we enjoyed with so many other citizens over the weekend. Should state and local government provide amenities like parks, museums and libraries? The Monon Trail gets massive use; was it okay for government to create it? What about street lights? Police and fire protection are generally agreed to be appropriate uses of our tax dollars, but there is considerable debate over spending those dollars on sports arenas, or even on the arts.

Maybe what the protestors are saying is that these more local expenditures are okay, but the federal government is too big. Again, though–“too big”  is too general. What would these folks like the federal government to stop doing? National defense? (I could see protesting unnecessary wars, but these are the people who appear to support those.) National parks? Social security and Medicare? Should the FDA stop testing our foods for things like e coli? Stop regulating banks and big businesses? (We did stop that, for all intents and purposes, during the Bush Administration. That didn’t turn out very well.)

I’m certainly not saying that everything government does needs to be done by government. (I would keep the parks, however. And quite a number of other functions we ask government to perform.) But people who simply rant about “too big” and “too much,” without specifying what they are prepared to do without, aren’t very persuasive.

This Made Me Laugh

A little humor for the weekend (h/t Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars):

From Butch Hancock of the band Flatlanders:

“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”

Tod Gitlin Sums It Up

I was going to post about Obama’s speech this morning, but Tod Gitlin has already said it, and said it best.

He sounded like a winner. Like all great preachers, he started methodically and built to crescendos. The Republican responder, Charles Boustany of Louisiana, sounded like a whiner, crying, Deficit, deficit, and government-run, government-run, and built toward nothing. Obama charged the Republicans with specific lies. He made the obligatory gestures toward bipartisanship, including the unexpected shout-out to John McCain, who had campaigned in favor of mandatory catastrophic insurance–and I don’t want to be cynical about those gestures, even though I think he’s naive about the other party’s intentions–but that’s not where his stresses fell. He was reminding the majority who voted for him why they did that. He was reminding independents that the reason why no progress has been made toward universality, mandates, and affordabiity is Republicans–as with 1935’s Social Security and 1965’s Medicare laws. He was reminding them, as well as the few rational Republicans left, that the insurance companies are not the glories of American value.

He did not sound like a patsy. He offered specific programs but the peroration was clear: he stood for values and national character. If he went too easy on the insurance companies for my taste–his audience could have used the information that Americans pay insurance companies twice as much as they pay doctors–he took a proper jab at Republicans (they know who they are) who make up the party of fear. You can say that he’s still not willing to talk to Americans straight about the need to limit high-tech medicine for the very old and very frail. Presidents won’t do that.

But he bet on the strength of the American character. It was his finest public moment since the Inaugural. I’m betting national decency wins.

This Worries Me a Lot

Every couple of years, I team up with the Dean of the Journalism school at IUPUI to teach a course in Mass Media and Public Affairs. To suggest that it is challenging to describe the relationship between sound information and public policy would be a definite understatement! It was challenging even before newspapers began failing, and right now, it is anyone’s guess what the media landscape will look like ten years hence.

A recent article in the Atlantic  addresses journalism’s profound transition from newspapers and broadcast evening news to…what, exactly? We can’t yet know, but Mark Bowden, the author, describes today’s landscape pretty accurately:

With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition . . .

 

Over at Balkinization, Frank Pasquale has an interesting analysis of the philosophical roots of opposition to healthcare reform.http://balkin.blogspot.com/2009/09/risk-health-care-and-red-america.html It is worth reading in its entirety, but the last paragraph does sum up the situation as it appears right now:

The really appealing goal of reform–a strong public option that would be part of an exchange open to all–appears to be more of a bargaining chip than a firm commitment for the Obama Administration. Strategically, if your goal is to get “something” through Congress, this makes a great deal of sense: Republicans and some waivering Democrats think a public option smacks of socialism. But as a political matter, it is draining support for reform. People can understand a public option, and building support for it might have been as decisive to Democrats’ fortunes as FDR’s reformulation of the American social contract in the 1930s. Sadly, Obama’s technocrats appear more attracted to wonk-talk like “bending the cost curve” than the forceful moral case for collective responsibility for health. Only the President can correct that course. It takes an ideology to beat an ideology.