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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Sunday, May 18, 2008 :::
Yuval Levin argues that our public institutions are poorly adapted to a changing world, and thatThe left and the right have both largely failed to notice this emerging pattern. For the left, it has been easy these eight years to blame every failure of governance on a failure of execution and to assume that the man in charge of the executive branch is the key to all our troubles. To the extent that they now propose institutional reform--and it is a surprisingly limited extent--leading Democrats have in mind giving government more power and more responsibility: in health care, over the financial markets, in the housing sector. But that is less a response to the emerging decay of our public institutions than an expression of the left's generic approach to great governing problems.
Senators Obama and Clinton, moreover, have almost nothing to say about many of the most prominent institutional crises we face, including immigration, the structure of the military and the intelligence community, and (perhaps most amazingly) entitlements and the looming crisis of our welfare state institutions. Indeed, both have offered health care plans that would import into the private health care market the logic of a Medicare system now facing an $86 trillion unfunded liability.
Republicans, meanwhile, having never been quite at home with the original purposes and ends of some of these institutions, aren't thinking constructively about reforming them (though there are a few exceptions, most notably Newt Gingrich). There has, of course, been debate about the structure of the military and immigration, and Republicans are increasingly thinking creatively about health care as well. But the conservative response to the Bush administration's Medicare prescription drug plan, for instance--a plan that for the first time introduced market incentives into Medicare and quickly proved the power of incentives to reduce costs and improve quality--shows that the right is still fighting the last war and failing to recognize an opportunity to roll back the most egregious elements of the welfare state, by planting conservative principles deep in enemy territory. Conservatives have a chance to fundamentally alter some of the assumptions behind our large public agencies of regulation, governance, and welfare.
The right is well suited to the task of such reform. The overarching lesson of our failing institutions is not that government has failed to reach far enough into American society, but that life in the 21st century is more complex and less predictable than our 20th-century institutions can readily fathom. The answer is not to expand government so it can rescue people from themselves--which is the underlying premise behind just about every plank of Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's platforms--but to make the institutions dynamic and flexible enough to advance the causes of economic growth, cultural vitality, and national security. He argues that McCain is especially suited to bringing such reform, and that a call for such reform would be a good underlying theme for his campaign.Labels: McCain
::: posted by Steven at 10:31 PM
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