"Once upon a time, our government was a bulwark against domestic enemies. Now big government has become our chief domestic enemy."
"Who will stand on the side of the American people against their government gone bad?" That was the question posed by former Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming in an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference held earlier this year in our nation's capital. "America resembles less what the Founders bequeathed us and looks more and more like the countries our immigrant forefathers tried to get away from," Wallop lamented. "This is happening in large part because the ruling classes . . . have gathered unto themselves enormously powerful means of governance."
Wallop charges that the members of these so-called ruling classes "detest our patriotism. They dislike our people's prosperity. It is their policy that we consume too much of the world's resources. But, whether the excuse is environmentalism or poverty or crime, the recipe is always the same: Take money away from independent working people and give it to the favorites of the ruling class."
Wallop condemns this "recipe for economic decline. Nowhere in the writings of the Founding Fathers is there anything about managing the economy," he observes. "Our Founders wanted to promote prosperity. So they set about ensuring that government would be small, frugal, impartial, and moral." The gargantuan, improvident, factious, and vicious government that we have today is the very thing our forefathers feared, and it has corrupted the character of our people.
"The dignity of citizenship has been co-opted by laws and rules," Wallop laments. "These confine and direct the lives of Americans away from liberty, faith, and prosperity, into behavior defined by the ruling classes as acceptable to them. Thus denied the gifts endowed by our Creator, we become sheep to be shepherded."
What does Wallop think we should do differently? First of all, we should end welfare, unconditionally. Wallop argues that welfare "does no good, only harm." He warns that "the current touted reform bill has enough loopholes that administrators and recipients will be able to do business pretty much as before." We should privatize Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, using individual retirement accounts and medical savings accounts as the means to do so. We should use tuition vouchers to destroy "the monstrous educational establishment," replace the Endangered Species Act with "conservation programs that work," and institute a flat tax to eliminate "the terrible bureaucracy of the IRS." We should also "restore self-government by reducing the power of the federal courts to review the acts of state courts and the enactments of citizens."
Wallop argues that the scandalous squalor of the Clinton administration gives the conservative movement "a historic opportunity to instruct itself and the country about the consequences of discretionary government power. The conservative movement dare not let it pass," Wallop warns, "because it makes our point: Big government is corrupting America. It makes us poorer, deprives us of freedom and self-rule, sows strife among us, undermines our families, and debases our souls."
