MICHAEL BARONE: Must government be a ‘big, waddling, sluggish beast?’
Itinerant policy journalist Ezra Klein, now with the New York Times, has highlighted something interesting about the Biden Democrats’ now-defunct Build Back Better legislation — something beyond its huge price tag (in the trillions) and its failure in a Democratic Congress, much like the recent failure of California’s single-payer healthcare bill.
The Democrats’ major problem, Klein argues, is that they’re too unambitious, proposing only “a grab-bag of longstanding Democratic proposals” that mostly seek to close the “gaps” between the “social insurance options” of “any Western European nation.”
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Gen. Leslie Groves and James Webb were not politically correct choices to head the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, respectively, but they got their seemingly impossible jobs done. Sometimes, that took scrambling and ignoring ordinary procedures. Reading Dan McLaughlin’s account in National Review of how Operation Warp Speed officials got an air handling unit delivered from the Midwest to a Massachusetts Moderna factory by arranging a law enforcement escort brought to mind Steve Vogel’s account in The Pentagon of how Gen. Brehon Somervell, told that a steel shipment would be weeks late, ordered a truck convoy to ship the stuff from Pittsburgh to Washington overnight.
To achieve anything like Ezra Klein’s ambitious goals, you need clear goals, you need to sweep aside bureaucratic roadblocks, and you need, most of all, to choose the right people to get things done. That’s what Trump did on Operation Warp Speed, and it’s what Roosevelt did on defense production and the Manhattan Project. Absent those things, Big Government remains, as I wrote a dozen years ago , “a big, waddling, sluggish beast, ever ready to boss you around, but not able to perform useful functions at anything but a plodding pace.”
Winning WWII and the COVID vaccines aside, I’m usually pretty happy with a government that moves at a plodding pace, considering some of the “socialists-in-a-hurry” alternatives Ezra has debated in the past.