Misplaced Trust
Is government back? Let’s hope not.

Mr. Moore is president of the Club for Growth
October 16, 2001 9:10 a.m.

ne 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.