Party of ‘limited government’ fails when given chance to shrink state

By David McElroy · April 12, 2015

Republicans are the party of small government. They’re happy to tell you that each time there’s an election. They hate Big Government. If you’ll just vote them into power, they’ll shrink government and lower your taxes.

If you believe that, you’re a sucker.

Most people who dislike the GOP and who oppose it do so because they oppose its rhetoric. They’re either Democrats who have partisan reasons for cheering “their team” or they’re progressive left ideologues who favor a bigger, more activist role for government — for one reason or another.

But even though I’m a former Republican — and spent years trying to elect Republican candidates professionally — I find the GOP terribly hypocritical and unworthy of support. Even if I still believed in the concept of majoritarian rule — and I don’t — Republicans have proven over and over again that they’re not going to deliver on their promises to cut the size of government.

When Republicans took over the state Legislature in Alabama a few years back, they came roaring to power promising to cut government, roll back taxes and generally live up to all those glib promises we wrote for GOP candidates for years.

Guess what? They didn’t really mean all that stuff they said. They just wanted to get elected.

Oh, sure, they don’t want government to be as big as the Democrats want it to be. They want to make sure they slash anything the can be seen as “welfare,” at least if it’s going to lower-class people. (Let’s don’t talk about “welfare” for huge companies. That’s perfectly acceptable, for some reason, so let’s just call it “economic development” and pretend it’s a good thing.) But when push comes to shove, Republicans want government to have plenty of power and they’re just as eager as Democrats ever were to wield that power themselves when they ran the state.

When Republicans in the Alabama Senate had the chance to pass a bill that would have gotten the state out of the retail liquor business, they had the votes to do it. On the 13-member committee that had to pass the bill, only three were Democrats, but four of those “conservative” state senators — all of whom tell voters at election time how much they oppose Big Government — joined with the three Democrats to stop the bill.

As a result, the state of Alabama will continue to own and operate a huge chain of retail liquor stores. Private liquor stores exist, but they’re forced by law to buy their booze from the state at artificial prices. Essentially, the state has given itself a virtual monopoly. There is absolutely no logical reason for the state to be in this business. Nobody who wants smaller government could oppose any bill to shut down this boondoggle which hurts consumers and keeps the size of government big.

But these “limited-government Republicans” stopped the bill.

The state agency that operates the retail stores lobbied hard to kill the bill. Those 600 state employees wanted to keep their jobs. But other than the bureaucrats who operate the agency and the employees who run the stores, who else benefits from this system? As far as I can tell, absolutely nobody.

If Republicans can come to power in a conservative state — promising to slash the size of government — yet turn away from the opportunity to get rid of 600 state employees who are competing (unfairly) with private businesses, tell me what exactly they really are going to cut.

The current Republican governor of Alabama first ran for office in 2010 on a pledge to stop new taxes. He repeated that pledge in 2014 and was re-elected. But now that he’s safely re-elected — and he’s not eligible for a third term — Gov. Robert Bentley proposed more than $500 million in new taxes just after his second inauguration.

In other words, the Republican governor lied. He had to know when he was running last fall that he was going to propose these taxes just a few months later. He said whatever it took to get elected — and people swarmed to the polls to vote for a “limited-government conservative Republican.”

Conservatives who see this grim reality frequently come to the bizarre conclusion that they simply have to work even harder to elect “the right people” who will actually do the things that standard Republican rhetoric calls for. But this amounts to Sisyphus telling himself that if he’ll just push that boulder harder, it won’t roll back this time.

People who run for office will say what you expect them to say to be elected. (I know. I used to write their rhetoric.) When it comes time to deliver on their promises, they’ll frequently twist themselves into all sorts of contorted positions to justify breaking those promises.

You will never bring about “limited government” — if such a thing can even exist — through elections.

If you’re a fan of Big Government, I understand why you favor Democrats, but I can assure you that you have nothing to fear in the long run from Republicans. Don’t listen to their rhetoric. Ignore what they say during campaigns. Look at what they actually accomplish insofar as rolling back Big Government. Ronald Reagan came to power promising to shutter the departments of Education and Energy, for instance. As far as I can tell, conservatives are still waiting for that to happen. (And let’s not even talk about how much the size of government grew under this “conservative” president.)

If you oppose Big Government, stop deceiving yourself. Stop believing that the GOP is going to deliver. They’re simply going to promise you — again and again — whatever you want to hear and then they’re not going to deliver.

If you want to end Big Government, you need another path entirely. Even if you don’t see that path clearly yet, it’s obvious that trusting Republicans and hoping for elections to change things is a losing strategy.

Every bit of time, effort and money you devote to electing “limited-government Republicans” is a moment you’re not preparing yourself for the inevitable day when this entire house of cards collapses, both economically and socially. You’re wasting your life.

Work on your own life and prepare for your own future — with the realization that Republicans aren’t going to save you or the country.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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