The Case for Bigger Government

The part of today's frenzy of stimulus that ought to depress you the most is its ideological component. The advocates of socialism are invigorated and self-confident in a way I have not seen in more than 20 years. They are taking a few months of supposed failures of the free market and using them to argue that two decades (and, more broadly, two centuries) of the achievements of capitalism were just an illusion.

For example, since the 1980s, "tax and spend" has been an effective all-purpose epithet against the left. But now the NYT is criticizing Obama's monstrous public works boondoggle on the grounds that it doesn't tax and spend enough.

The article dismisses the prosperity created by capitalism as illusory. In a flashback to arguments that haven't been prominent in decades, it talks glowingly about how the US lags behind those oh-so-advanced European countries and holds up sclerotic European socialist economies as models of prosperity.

Most strikingly, the author proposes a plan openly aimed at increasing income taxes from 18% to 25% of the economy and presents this as "the case for big government."

In the recent wave of financial panic, a very great evil that had been suppressed—but never eliminated—is resurrecting itself.

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