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of the most puzzling repercussions of the September 11th attacks
has been the polling data that shows that Americans' trust for government
has surged. When the public is asked whether they "trust the
government to do the right thing most of the time," more than
half of voters now say they do. This is up from less than 1/3rd
in recent years past. Liberal newspaper commentator David Broder
has celebrated this increased trust in government as a sign of civic
cohesiveness.
One of America's
most annoying commentators these days, Paul Krugman of the New
York Times, wrote earlier this week that the need for big government
is more apparent now than ever. You see, he says, we need policemen
and firemen and federal bureaucrats to run the security at the airports.
He ridicules the notion of conservatives who would privatize public
services just because they "are motivated by a hatred of government."
He even blames the hijackings on private security guards at the
airports.
Now, it is
certainly encouraging that we Americans have experienced a surge
of patriotism as a result of these murderous attacks against our
nation. To some extent these polls showing a rise in trust in government
are simply capturing the "rally around the flag" phenomenon
that is healthy and common during times of national disaster.
But to feel
patriotic about our country does not mean that we should rush to
embrace big government or the bureaucrats who run it, as Krugman
suggests. In fact, just the opposite. The successful acts of terrorism
of September 11th were quite possibly the greatest failure of our
government in the last 50 years. After all, we spend $2 trillion
a year on our government — the most expensive government in
the history of the world — and the one thing this massively
expensive federal enterprise is supposed to do is protect us from
foreign enemies. It is not being unpatriotic to say that our government
failed us big time.
So herein lies
the paradox: Why would Americans feel more trust for our government
now than we did before September 11th. Rationally, we should feel
much, much less trust in our government. And what is much more troubling
is that so many people in Washington are now arguing that the lesson
of September 11th is that we need even more government than the
$2,000,000,000,000 one we already have. We here talk of national
ID cards and federalizing 15,000 airport workers, and huge new expenditures
on white elephant government infrastructure programs like Amtrak.
How in the world does what happened on September 11th argue for
even more money for a railroad that costs taxpayers nearly $75 every
time someone climbs aboard?
The lesson
of September 11, 2001 is not that we need bigger government. It
is that we need much smarter government. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas,
who will soon be terribly missed, has said it best when he noted
that "a government that tries to do everything can't do anything
very well." Precisely. We should stop subsidizing day care
and sheep herding, and high-tech companies, and expensive drugs
for 85-year-old geriatric patients, and mass-transit projects to
nowhere, and Lawrence Welk museums, and shark research, and an utterly
worthless education department, and freedom fighters in every corner
of the globe, and foreign-aid payments to corrupt and free-market
hostile governments, and tens of thousands of troops in Europe protecting
we don't know whom from we don't know who, and start investing massively
in counterterrorism activities that will keep us safe from our enemies.
If the federal
government can't protect our national security, it is the height
of folly to empower it to do much of anything else.
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