E. J. Dionne's Ode To the Wonders of Government Twists Reality

You can’t accuse E.J. Dionne of not trying. In this Washington Post article he does quite a Cirque du Soleil contortionist routine in his effort to convince us that “big” government is to be trusted and that the Tea Party members, bless their naïve suspicious hearts, have it all wrong. Aiming squarely at Ronald Reagan’s famous “Government is the problem” bon mot, Dionne writes:

Rarely has the news of the day run so counter to the spin on the news of the day. It’s hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful “big” government. Rather, most of them arose from the government’s failure to do its job in the first place.

Dionne cites four recent examples of how the government should have protected–or did actually protect–us from danger: (1) the BP oil spill; (2) the tragic West Virginia coal mine explosion; (3) the financial meltdown of 2007-2008; and (4) last week’s Times Square failed bomb attack.

Here are those four examples as Dionne presents them:

Government is supposed to make sure that corporations are properly supervised when they turn public resources (the environment in the Gulf of Mexico, say) into private gain. It is charged with protecting those with weaker bargaining positions (coal miners, for example) against the harm that those in stronger bargaining positions might inflict.

Its duty is to keep the private economy running smoothly by preventing fraud, shady dealing and self-interested behavior that threaten the entire system. And yes, it’s supposed to keep us safe from physical harm, as it did in New York.

Since it never can hurt to trot out the reliable “Blame-It-on-Bush” argument, Dionne adds: “Especially in the economic sphere, government in recent years failed to carry out too many of these basic functions.” Encryption: “in recent years.” Decryption: “under W.”

In Dionne’s view, tragedies such as West Virginia and the BP oil spill are preventable–with proper governmental intervention. It’s not that there is enormous inherent risk in these extremely perilous enterprises, it’s that the risk has been poorly managed by the meretricious private sector and the government must therefore step in. Passing over the fact that Dionne doesn’t explain why, according to him, some (coal miners, for example) bargaining positions are weaker than others, we are to assume that government can completely regulate the risk out of such dangerous activities as submarine and subterranean excavation.

As for the government’s failing to carry out its basic functions in the economic sphere, we’re to assume the subprime loan crisis and collapse of the housing bubble that precipitated the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 had everything to do with unregulated predatory lenders and nothing at all to do with innocent home-buyer victims trying to turn a quick profit on over-exuberant real-estate tulipomania.

Finally, referring to the Times Square bombing attempt, Dionne claims that the government is “supposed to keep us safe from physical harm, as it did in New York.” That’s one way of looking at it. Another is this: The government made a commendable arrest after-the-fact, but what kept us safe from harm was pure dumb luck–an inept amateur bomber who set his alarm clock incorrectly.

Attempting to minimize the Tea Party as old-world and small (“the old-fashioned, garden-variety conservatism to which somewhere between a fifth and a third of Americans have long subscribed”), Dionne believes there is a “more important and dynamic force…who actually believe it [government] can and should be effective.” With three recent polls by the Winston Group finding that four in ten Tea Party members are independents or Democrats, Dionne’s faith in this “more important and dynamic force” and its belief in big government may turn out to be more wishful thinking than reality.

Dionne makes one point that’s hard to dispute: “Competence is the antidote to the electorate’s sick feeling about public authority.” One can only hope that the Tea Party is competent enough to continue spreading its potent message about the need to cut spending and government intrusion by the mid-term elections and help quell this “sick feeling about public authority.”