Government can be … good

This is hardly the occasion for an argument about political philosophy. I say that although a day of knee-jerking and offense-taking might pass the time as effectively as bingewatching Netflix or Amazon Prime.

So, I’ll make only a surely inarguable observation, which is that “liberal” is always a bad word around here but can be a good thing when it’s all you have.

Conservatism in the form of restrained government spending, free-market economics, rugged personal independence and decentralized government works best when things are running themselves. Its rhetoric soars easily in happy times.

But when we’re in trouble, our solutions become necessarily liberal in the form of activist government, spiked spending, regulated economics, regard for the well-being of the group rather than the liberty of the individual, and centralized government exercising the advantages of clear and consolidated responsibility and authority.

Conservatism goes around saying government doesn’t work. Then liberalism kicks in when government is the only thing that might work, such as now.

It reminds me of the time I was visiting with a woman from the Koch brothers’ right-wing network of conservative advocacy organizations.

She observed that we were getting along well enough considering that she was a capitalist and I a socialist.

I told her I was no socialist. I don’t want government to own all the services. I merely acknowledge the plain fact that government offers the best means of building roads, providing schools and getting poor and disabled people cared for.

I pronounced myself a “governmentalist,” one who understands that, when it gets down to a real need, most workable solutions will come from the government.

In the financial collapse of 2008, a Republican president’s treasury secretary from Wall Street literally knelt before Nancy Pelosi and implored her to agree to his liberalism in the form of a $700 billion bailout.

And now, for the most vivid example of all, I cite the coronavirus.

To try to keep all of us from getting this virus and having no place to be treated because the hospitals would be overrun, which would cause the death rate to skyrocket past the 2 to 3 percent now occurring with mostly available care, we’ve activated the government to shut down the economy and do what only government might be able to do, which is print money to build a bridge to get us to the other side.

Politicians trying to apply conservative principles to the coronavirus … they don’t much exist. If they did, they’d probably catch it, along with everyone else.

The Trump administration has not been as universally failed in its coronavirus response as Democratic partisans insist. Donald Trump is ever the personal outrage, but his administration’s crisis governing hasn’t been nearly as horrible as his character and personality.

But the administration’s most breathtaking failing—the one even a pragmatically conservative Republican governor of Arkansas would admit unless he was on Meet the Press, in which case Trump would hear him—is in its attempt to cling through crisis to federalism, a sacred conservative principle.

Federalism refers to authority and responsibility that devolve to the individual states.

I refer to the outrage for the ages by which the Trump administration has put the 50 American states in competition with each other, their federal government and nations around the world. Arkansas has been thrust into a wild-west global market to seek vital testing kits, protective equipment and lifesaving devices for the use and benefit of its brave and essential medical-care providers.

The best course was for the Trump administration to take singular centralized charge of both producing domestically and buying internationally all the medical equipment the nation required, then distributing it.

A pandemic is no time to cling to treasured conservative theories. It’s a time for Keynesian economics and a war-powers president.

Governors in the respective states have been generally popular during this crisis for the very reason that they’ve exercised centralized executive power … to issue stay-at-home orders, close bars and restaurants, limit gathering sizes and spend surpluses.

In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, the aforementioned pragmatic conservative, has earned bipartisan plaudits for his competent leadership. That’s except for his unwillingness to risk offending a conservative state by ordering outright that everyone stay home.

But, even at that, he defends that lone absence of liberalized action on the basis that he has taken strong centralized executive action otherwise to shut down activities to a level generally equal to if not more stringent than those remaining after all the exceptions are exercised in supposedly closed states.

Hutchinson is basically saying he won’t take a direct liberal action because he’s taken a generally equivalent number of indirect liberal actions.

He’s brought his liberalism in through the back and side doors, which was probably best.