The American Enterprise Institute released this month a monograph on the weighty subject The Future of Conservatism. It combines several interesting elements, including the transcript of a recent debate on the topic between Tevi Troy and Peter Wehner, along with brief observations from such familiar figures as Michael Barone, John Bolton, Arthur C. Brooks, Nicholas Eberstadt, Jonah Goldberg, and Ramesh Ponnuru.
In addition to his shorter piece, Brooks contributes a longer essay on “The Art of Limited Government,” adapted from his book The Road To Freedom. Among the most interesting points is a discussion of the circumstances in which government might act legitimately to address a public policy issue. Brooks limits the legitimate areas of government intervention to two categories: a social safety net and efforts to address “market failures.” In both cases, he adds caveats to ensure that the government’s actions do not replace private actors who would address the perceived problem more effectively.
[W]hile a great deal of state intervention in markets may sound sensible, most of it in fact amounts to unnecessary expansions of government’s power and scope. To make matters worse, a great deal of government activity isn’t even aimed at the two justifiable goals of providing a safety net and correcting for market failure. Much public policy is simply ad-libbed — overreacting to some unfortunate event (like a natural disaster or mass shooting) — or driven by a vague philosophy no more precise than “the government should do nice things for people.” Much of today’s public-spending binge serves purposes not remotely related to the basic functions of government — purposes like rewarding political cronies (such as public-sector unions), social engineering (such as the housing policies that led to the 2008 financial crisis). and good old-fashioned pork (like nearly the entire 2009 stimulus package).
In the end, a great deal of public policy that purports to enhance people’s lives actually drives the nation toward a system of bloated government that most people, according to opinion polls, say they do not want. The challenge facing the conservative project is to turn the criteria and rules developed [for government action] into a practical alternative to the limitless government expansion that many Americans find so deeply alarming.
If the government does adhere to these rules and criteria — limiting public provision to a minimal safety net, holding back in most cases of market failure — many problems including several currently addressed by government, will go unresolved by the public sector. Principled politicians will have to tell citizens that, while things aren’t perfect, government can’t step in — because government can’t solve the problem, at least not in a way that uses tax dollars effectively. This may make for difficult politics, but it is essential to imposing some reasonable constraint on the growth of the state.
It does not mean that solutions to public problems will become impossible. A dangerous progressive fallacy holds that if the government doesn’t care for a group in need or solve a market failure, those people will remain neglected and the failure unresolved. The reality, however, is that many of these problems don’t require government at all. Rather, they need voluntary action and a healthy culture in which citizens do things for one another without being forced or bribed by the state. What these problems call for, in other words, are solutions derived from America’s “social capital”: the trust and social cohesion that promote voluntary activity to meet challenges in civil society.
