Opinion

Big government still devouring freedom

W. James Antle III Managing Editor
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A year ago, my book Devouring Freedom was released. It sought to address two questions. Does government growth really shrink individual freedom? And can big government ever be stopped?

At the risk of harming sales (you can get it for just $2.72 now!), the answer to both questions was yes — the first an emphatic yes, the second a much more hesitant and conditional one.

So what has changed on this front in the last year? Unfortunately, not much.

Trust in government is at a record low. According to the latest Gallup poll, only 49 percent of Americans express confidence in the government’s ability to solve international problems while just 42 percent are confident it can solve domestic ones. After the twin disasters of Obamacare and the Iraq war, both these numbers are still too high. But they represent low points in Gallup polling.

In Devouring Freedom, I cited a Gallup poll finding that 64 percent regarded big government as the greatest threat to the country’s future, compared to big business or big labor. Since then, a new poll came out showing this has spiked to 72 percent. This view was held by 92 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of independents and even 56 percent of Democrats.

Obamacare is a train wreck that will either discredit government-run health care or lead to single payer. Obamacare may yet be repealed. The Obama administration itself has repeatedly delayed provisions of the law. There is bipartisan support for full repeal of the individual mandate, the employer mandate, the medical devices tax and the Independent Payment Advisory Board more commonly known as “death panels.” The 1099 reporting requirement has already been repealed.

Support for the controversial health care law is at an all-time low even among the uninsured. That’s because market surveys indicated most people who have signed up for Obamacare already had insurance. A plan that was sold as providing universal coverage has so far mainly been a Medicaid expansion — that is, more people in a program that is bankrupting states and may not produce better health outcomes than being uninsured — and a churn between cancelled health plans and new Obamacare-compliant ones.

But that doesn’t mean things can’t get worse. Obamacare is already growing government — the Department of Health and Human Services will spend $1 trillion under the president’s budget in fiscal 2015. And its problems are being blamed on Republicans, insurance companies and the remaining private sector elements in health care. A single-payer advocate is already running for governor in Massachusetts, which has had an Obamacare-like health system since 2006.

Expect the same to happen nationally, as government-caused problems are used to justify an even bigger expansion of government.

Big government Republicans are back. Not only do you have erstwhile budget hawks like Ohio Gov. John Kasich pushing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, you have a post-tea party Republican House throwing up its hands at a predominantly Democratic Washington falling into some bad habits of the Bush era.

Sequestration wasn’t perfect, but it was working. Instead of federal spending hitting $4 trillion as expected, it actually fell from $3.58 trillion to $3.45 trillion. The annual budget deficit decreased by 37 percent in 2013.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Republican leaders traded away the sequestration cuts in exchange for almost nothing, then voided the largest spending cut in the bipartisan budget. The House has passed a bloated farm bill costing nearly $1 trillion, then a clean debt ceiling increase.

Tea party is at a crossroads. But the problem isn’t just the GOP leadership or the remaining moderate Republicans in Congress. The tea party conservatives, who remain the country’s best chance for an effective limited-government political movement, haven’t always provided enough of an alternative. During the government shutdown, which distracted the public from Obamacare’s rocky roll-out, they didn’t appear to know what they were doing.

Now there is infighting among prominent tea party politicians. Rumors abound of tea party groups raising money off conservative concerns but not doing anything about them. That’s exactly what the Republican establishment has done for decades. Big government will not go anywhere as long as there are two big government parties.

Liberals are in denial about our fiscal problems. Know-it-all columnist Jonathan Chait provided a good example in a post zinging Rand Paul. Chait wrote, “FYI, we’re not broke, we were never broke, and we’re getting farther away from being broke every year.” He linked to a chart showing the falling deficit, stopping in 2014.

But the latest Congressional Budget Office report says the deficit will start growing again after 2015. In ten years’ time, 96 percent of tax revenues will be devoted to mandatory spending and interest on the national debt. The national debt will still be in excess of 70 percent of GDP, likely more than double the 36 percent share it took before the 2007 economic downturn. Social Security and Medicare carry long-term deficits in excess of $60 trillion, with trust fund exhaustion inching closer.

Personal and religious freedoms are eroding. “My body, my choice” is a popular liberal slogan. Unless you want to put trans fats in your body. Or large sugary drinks. Or puff e-cigarettes. Obamacare, and the scope of the welfare state in general, makes your lifestyle choices the taxpayer’s problem. So the government is going to regulate them.

This has coincided with a narrowing of religious liberty to mean, as Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “what happens once a week at churches and what thoughts you may be thinking.” In fact, there has been a redefinition of individual liberty more broadly, turning it into the power to force other people to pay for your contraception or bake you a cake — even when they are other alternatives available for getting contraception or cake.

I didn’t address gay marriage in my book because it has both liberty-enhancing and liberty-contracting effects (as does the institution of marriage in general; getting divorced while you have kids invites a great deal of government micromanagement of your life). But the expansion of anti-discrimination laws to apply to almost everything and the shrinking of conscience-protection clauses to include almost nothing will make religious Americans less free.

A sobering picture, but there is a bright side. When government growth produces few obvious or sympathetic victims, there is little resistance to it. The Little Sisters of the Poor, cash-strapped Christian bakers, people whose health care has been disrupted by Obamacare — these are the people big government is hurting now.

It’s time to fight back.

W. James Antle III is the editor of The Daily Caller News Foundation and author of the book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Follow him on Twitter.