Danielle McLaughlin
Ronald Reagan famously joked that ‘‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.’’ His view was that small government maximises individual freedom. It reflects one side of an enduring standoff between conservatives and progressives – in the United States and the world over – on the proper role of government in preserving individual liberties.
That standoff will play out in the back half of 2020 once the Democrats have chosen a nominee and the presidential election heats up.
It is also playing out currently in the Democratic primary race, as candidates from within the Left’s ideological spectrum debate policies which implicate the size and role of the US Government.
Far-Left progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are campaigning on the creation of a single government-run healthcare system to reach all Americans, and other ‘‘big government’’ plans including free college, student loan forgiveness, and free childcare.
Centrist candidates including Delaware’s Joe Biden, Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, Indiana’s Pete Buttigieg and New York’s Michael Bloomberg variously offer a more circumscribed view of government intervention – maintaining market forces in healthcare to include public and private options, expanding programmes for access to college, and modifying existent student loan programmes to make them more manageable and more fair.
The debate generally unfolds in soundbites in campaign emails and cable news appearances. There isn’t much room for a nuanced examination of what combination of government and market forces actually creates the best and highest outcomes, and whether more or less government actually makes you more ‘‘free’’.
And yet it’s a question that affects American lives daily.
An opioid crisis is destroying parts of the Appalachia, Midwest and Northeast, fuelled in part by a failure of regulation and governmental oversight. The most famous example (and the subject of an earlier column) was Kermit, West Virginia, where 5 million opioid pills flowed to a single pharmacy in a two-year period.
Market-driven healthcare is leaving Americans out. More than 600,000 Americans file for bankruptcy every year because they cannot pay their medical expenses.
Nearly 30 million Americans do not have health insurance, and therefore lack access to basic medical care. Forbes reported in late 2018 that 44 per cent of Americans skip doctor visits because of the cost.
The flow of money into politics is distorting it. Because campaign finance contribution laws have been rolled back, particularly since Citizens United, a key Supreme Court case in 2010, the price of presidential campaigns has pushed into the billions.
Higher limits on campaign donations have favoured the wealthy and corporations, who can pay more to seek political influence and access.
Lobbying has run amok: by late last year, 281 lobbyists had joined the Trump administration to speak for the industries they came from.
Sixty-five lobbyists did the same in the Obama administration over eight years (Obama required a two-year ‘‘cool-down’’ period between lobbying and working in government to regulate the industry a lobbyist came from; Trump does not).
The lack of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, including universal background checks, supported by most Americans, has scarred America with gun deaths in epic proportions.
This is not to say that less government is always worse, or more government is always better.
Restrictions on early voting and mail-in ballots, placed most famously by Republican-led legislatures in North Carolina, have limited access to the ballot box (as they were designed) for African-American communities. State-sponsored discrimination, including bans on interracial marriage and gay marriage, long limited the options – and freedom – of generations of Americans.
It is rarely a binary decision, of course.
Coal subsidies exemplify the heavy hand of government. They have propped up a dying industry as consumer demand increasingly turns towards renewables.
On the one hand, the subsidies have contributed to US carbon emissions over decades. On the other, the coal industry provides much needed (and well-paid) jobs in parts of the US, including Kentucky and West Virginia, that have been ravaged by the exit of manufacturing. And every coal job supports multiple additional jobs in services and non-coal industries.
Americans have been told they will be faced with a clear choice in 2020 – between Republican small government and the promise of liberty, and Democratic big government and the erosion of it.
That might be the slogan, but it’s not the case. And voters would be wise to look under the hood of those premises.
The US was conceived in the rejection of oppressive foreign rule. The idea that freedom only thrives apart from government underpins the American identity. But sometimes, government can (and should) work to preserve it.
Danielle McLaughlin is the Sunday Star-Times ’US correspondent. She is a lawyer, author, and political and legal commentator, appearing frequently on US and New Zealand TV and radio. She is also an ambassador for #ChampionWomen, which aims to encourage respectful, diverse, and thoughtful conversations. Follow Danielle on Twitter at@MsDMcLaughlin