Achenbach lives under a rock

Check out this blog post by Joel Achenbach, entitled "What the Democrats Stand For." It seems like everyone is weighing in on this topic these days, which is fine with me, since it's my main theme. Unfortunately, Achenbach gets it wrong.

First, Achenbach quotes his "Best Democratic party source":

'[The Democrats] are the party that fights for ordinary Americans, as opposed to the party that protects the interests of people who've already made it.'

OK, sure, I'll go with that. Of course, that characterization leaves out little technicalities like foreign policy, national security, the role of religion, civil liberties, sexuality, and race relations. But I have no beef with the idea of "fighting for ordinary Americans" as a Democratic touchstone.

The question is how we're going to do it.

Achenbach weighs in:

[S]o many of our political debates revolve around the relationship between government and private capital. To oversimplify, we've got two basic philosophies:More government, less government. More restraint on freewheeling capitalism, less restraint. More regulations, fewer regulations. Higher taxes, lower taxes. Help the poor and the needy, let them help themselves.
Democrats, Republicans.

Two questions:
1. Is this man being paid to spout Republican talking points?
2. What a sack of crap! (OK, that's not really a question, I confess.)

How many Democrats are there out there who think that higher taxes and more regulation are goals in and of themselves? Are we really supposed to believe that "higher taxes" and "more regulation" are the central ideals around which the liberal philosophy is built?! Just how stupid does Achenbach think we are?

Someone ought to tell Achenbach that this idea is a tired-out, used-up canard - not just a Republican mantra ("we want less government, they want more"), but a mantra from the 1980s. The notion that any Democrat elected to office will instantly raise taxes, raise social spending, and increase regulations was old in 1996 - As Clinton said, "That dog isn't gonna hunt anymore."

The idea of helping ordinary Americans is a good one, it's a very liberal idea, and I think the Democrats should stick with it. But any Democrat who keeps pushing mindlessly for higher taxes and more regulation like some kind of broken robot is not just unelectable, he's wrong too. Regulations and taxes, more often than not, don't help ordinary Americans at all.

Take regulations. Many regulations do help ordinary Americans - health and safety, truth in advertising, and many environmental regulations. But others just end up hurting the masses - excessive zoning, rent and price controls, energy grid controls, restrictions on new business formation, a minimum wage that's the same in Alabama and California...the list goes on. If you want to help normal Americans - and I do - then use regulations wisely, when necessary, not as an article of faith.

Same thing for taxes. I think we should raise taxes to cut the deficit. But if we vanquished the deficit, would we still want to raise taxes? Why? To support some as-yet-unnamed social programs that we blindly assume will help normal Americans, before we even know what those programs are? No way. Raising taxes is sometimes necessary, but never desirable for its own sake.

The Democrats do stand for helping ordinary Americans. But in this day and age, that means improving opportunity through education, boosting science and technology, free trade (which includes opening other countries' markets), balancing the budget, lowering health care costs, fixing the entitlement systems, further reducing crime, helping black people get rich, and ensuring national security.

"More government" as a goal? Ridiculous. Leave bloated government to the Republicans; they're doing a better job of it than Democrats ever did.

PS - For a somewhat funny piece on the utter idea-less-ness of Republicans these days, read this. But for a deeply flawed study linking conservatism with childhood brattiness, read this. Texans are mostly Republican. They have no ideas, but they ain't whiny. QED...