Oh yeah, government fails because of its critics

Marie Cocco of the Washington Post Writers Group has come up with a truly bizarre explanation for government foibles, misconduct and general failure to meet even the lowest standards: It's all the fault of us nasty, anti-government types.

A culture of contempt for government infects those who govern. It has shamed America and left the government itself in a shambles.

It is seen in the callous maltreatment of gravely wounded soldiers who’ve returned from Iraq. The scandal of Walter Reed Army Medical Center is compounded by a veterans’ health care system starved of funds needed to accommodate a new generation of the disabled and disfigured — a shortfall that has long been clear to those who use the system and who lobby for veterans, but not to those who blindly protect the Bush administration’s tax cuts above all else. ...

It is the same cavalier incompetence that led to the debacle of the Hurricane Katrina response, its nightmarish aftermath still lived by the uprooted and the abandoned.

Talk about blaming the messenger! Cocco would have us believe that those in power are steadily dismantling and undermining government authority and preventing Leviathan from doing all of the good things it could do if the nay-sayers would just go away and leave the poor beast in peace.

If only it were so.

To make her argument, Cocco has to claim, presumably with a straight face, that President Bush governs "not only with an ideological antipathy toward government but with such disdain for it that his administration refuses to finance its basic functions ..."

This is the same President Bush who put forward the enormous Medicare drug boondoggle and who tells Americans to place complete faith in the government when it comes to surveillance, detentions and whether or not accused terrorists should get anything that resembles a fair trial.

This is the same President Bush who, according to the Cato Institute, "has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson."

Yeah, that President Bush is Marie Cocco's anti-government ideologue-in-chief.

There's another explanation for why government has turned out to be so incompetent, brutal and corrupt: It's the nature of the beast. Government is a ponderous institution that exists primarily to force people to do things they would not do by choice. It is virtually incapable of reacting quickly as bureaucratic gridlock sets agency against agency and priority against priority, and when it finally does move to action, it's a sure bet that somebody will get crushed in the process.

Government may be good at a few things, but those few things revolve rather heavily around two skills: Killing people and spending money. And even there the government manages to get it spectacularly wrong in headline-grabbing ways, raining bombs out of the sky on wedding parties and lining the pockets of well-connected cronies.

We might wish that the halls of government were full of people skeptical about the use of its power (and in the process aggravating the Marie Coccos of the world), but the evidence suggests otherwise.