I am the Wrecking-Ball Right

There's a good line in the movie L.A. Confidential, after the second-plot-point fight between Sgt. Bud White, played by Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce's Lt. Edmund Exley. Exley has discovered that the three black men he arrested for a shooting at the Nite Owl restaurant, in which an ex-cop was killed, were innocent. He recieved a promotion for his work on that case, but now he wants it re-opened.

"The Nite Owl made you," says White. "You want to tear that down?"

"With a wrecking ball," replies Exley. "You want to help me swing it?"

And the enemies become allies.

I've thought of nothing else since I looked at Robert Reich's "The Rise of the Wrecking-Ball Right". Most of the article is but strawmen assembled by anecdote, but the closing paragraphs sums up the basic meme that many on the left have been and will be adopting this coming election season:

The final critical ingredient has been the abject failure of the Democratic Party – from the President on down – to make the case for why government is necessary.

One would have thought the last few years of mine disasters, exploding oil rigs, nuclear meltdowns, malfeasance on Wall Street, wildly-escalating costs of health insurance, rip-roaring CEO pay, and mass layoffs would have offered a singular opportunity to explain why the nation’s collective well-being requires a strong and effective government representing the interests of average people.

Yet the case has not been made. Perhaps that’s because, even under the Democrats, the interests of average people have not been sufficiently attended to.

This excels both in succintness and banality: one imagines Reich penning the clause "strong and effective government representing the interests of average people" sure that it was new and fresh, and not at all a dull retread of what every progressive policy wonk has been advocating since 1896. But in fairness, the meme persists because it persuades. When one parades the fat men in top hats, smoking cigars made of $100 bills, before the electorate in times of economic trouble, a good few respond with Pavlovian swiftness, barking their Two Minutes Hate.

But let us deal with the myth, that the government, strong in power and effective in policy, will protect the interests of the average man. The history of every civilization from Sumeria forward demonstrates the falsehood of it. In every time and in every age, government, like every other human institution, protects its own interests above everything else. The real mystery is that we should ever expect otherwise. Humans do not become virtuous by taking the King's Shilling.

American government is no exception. Bound by law to the will of the voters, it acts on a daily basis to manipulate that will to serve its ends, these ends being ever-greater power over ever-more issues. Recently the county government of Howard County, Maryland decided that it was right and necessary to police all of its public parks to ensure that no one smokes a cigarette within their environs, lest an asthmatic be downwind.

Will public health benefit from the measure? Perhaps. But the real beneficiaries will be the anti-smoking lobbyists who can display another scalp atop their fundraising mails, the public health officials who buttressed their claim to discuss sagely the issues of the day, and of course, the politicians who voted for the measure, who may again tell the world and themselvest that they are Good and Wise People Who Care.

It is the knowledge of this ignored benefit, this silent payback, that animates what Reich calls the Wrecking Ball Right, the awareness that the bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the politicians are the true Ruling Class of this country. And like any ruling class, they will self-aggrandize, to the ruin of the nation unless checked.

The time for that checking has come. We are in debt for trillions upon trillions of dollars to pay for our Ruling Class' follies. They have turned our heavy industry into scrap-heaps, our cities into wastelands. A drive through any part of Baltimore City shows the marks of the kind of "strong, effective government" that Reich wants to save. A city with one of the best harbors and shipyards on the Atlantic coast is home to block-upon-block of empty, collapsing rowhouses, which only the desperate and the criminal use. Only the names of the politicians on campaign posters above the streets change.

Robert Reich's social model of government as the counterweight to the wealthy is yesterday's panacaea to society's ills, snake-oil and laudanum peddled by confidence men weeping crocodile tears. We've had a Department of Education for over forty years, and American schools fell behind almost every industrialized nation. We've had a Department of Housing and Urban Development for over fifty years, and every middle-class family who could afford to bought houses in the suburbs. We've had a Department of Health and Human Services for the same time, and not a soul has anything good to say about our health care system.

Correlation is not causality, and many factors contribute to our ills. But the failure of the government to provide what it has promised, to produce any kind of return on social investment, cannot be ignored. The Progressive Leviathan is outmoded in the 21st century. Witness Walter Russell Mead (h/t: Ace of Spades)

But the bureaucratic mindset — risk averse, stability seeking, seniority-focused, process-oriented — militates against success in more entrepreneurial and performance-based systems. Eighty years ago, private sector bureaucracies and corporate structures were much more like government offices, and the gap between the Hartford city government and the Hartford Insurance Company could be bridged. That is much less true today

When Lt. Edmund Exley decided to swing his wrecking ball, he didn't want to bring down the whole LAPD, only the corrupt Captain who'd decieved him.Similarly, I don't want to destroy the federal government, just the parts of it that do not work, that stagnate the people they're supposed to serve. I don't want to reform them, they're un-reformable, because their premise -- that people without an interest in a problem can ever solve it -- is fundamentally flawed. Only those who profit from them -- lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians, and to a lesser degree journalists -- pretend otherwise. They must go.

Am I serious? Do I really want to bring down the federal government's role in our schools and universities, our health, our housing, our urban infrastructure, our retirement? Am I prepared to unleash the pain of that dislocation?

With a wrecking ball.

Anyone want to help me swing it?