Reagan was right: We're overgoverned

(Andrews in Denver Post, Feb. 4) In our country and our state today, government is too big, growing too fast, too intrusive in our lives, costs too much, and delivers too little value for the dollar. I say so in homage to Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004, whose birthday is Tuesday. For Americans as a free people, two centuries into our republican experiment with liberty and responsibility, government is not the solution – it is the problem. That’s as true now as when President Reagan asserted it in his 1981 inaugural, never mind the pendulum swing of polls and parties since then.

Picture University Boulevard at evening rush hour. The snowy street was jammed. While Bob eased his SUV through the traffic, Art and Jack peppered me (the only politician among four of us coming back from skiing) with complaints about the apparently broken system evidenced by last fall’s campaign and this winter’s new officeholders.

Why all the negative ads, they grouched; why the platitudes and the sleaze? Why so many hacks jostling for power? And once in power, why the selfish grabs for advantage by each side? Why not more bipartisanship, more regard for the common good, more deference to world opinion? The ride home grew uncomfortably long as I parried the well-meant barrage.

As a constitutional conservative – that is, a believer in natural law and a realist about fallen humanity – I had rational answers for these familiar gripes from the minister, the oilman, and the financial guy. Faux unanimity is usually a mask for devilry, my line went. If fierce two-party competition seems messy, try a dozen parties splintering ideologically – or one party tyrannizing us all.

Democracy is indeed, as Churchill admitted, the worst system – except for all the others ever invented. The others weren’t buying it. “Yes but,” they objected as I gave each defense for America’s time-tested polity. Citizen disgruntlement (you’ve felt it too) hung like smog inside the crawling Toyota.

What finally reached these skeptics was the curse of scale. Suppose each of the many cars here on University took up four times the pavement it does now, I jabbed. Double our vehicle’s length and width, do the same to all these others in what is already close to gridlock, and the quadrupled burden would jam things completely, wouldn’t it?

Now I had them, because that’s exactly what has happened to the scale of government in American society since our grandparents’ time. From the founding to World War I, as the United States was creating unprecedented opportunity and widespread affluence, government at all levels took only about 10% of the national wealth. In America 2007 it takes about 40%.

Today’s quadrupled burden of “rendering to Caesar” is the worst cause of democratic dysfunction in our once lightly-governed republic. Pumping unhealthy amounts of money and power through government, as we now do, inevitably corrupts public life – even as it saps private initiative and enervates personal virtue.

This column was going to be about some bad bills in the legislature that would dump the Electoral College (SB-46), monkey with campaign spending (HB-1074), and collectivize the workplace (HB-1072). I was also readying choice words for Pelosi’s power play on pharmaceuticals, Schwarzenegger’s socialized medicine scheme, Ritter’s plan to rig the energy market, and this newspaper’s push for higher taxes.

The SUV saga overtook all of those. But each is a symptom of the national malady I’ve diagnosed here. Collectivism and over-government are choking our sweet land of liberty. No exaggeration, they are. What’s the cure, short of a smashup and a new start from the ruins? Reagan would say we’d better start asking ourselves.

Dr. King wept when Darrent died

(Andrews in the Denver Post, Jan. 21) Martin Luther King must have wept on the night Darrent Williams was slain. It was not for this, an urban hell where murder is the leading cause of death among young black men, that the great hero of liberty and equality risked and sacrificed. Who killed the popular Bronco in a drive-by shooting on Jan. 1, we don’t yet know. But what killed Williams is clear, and it was not merely a “gun culture,” as a Post editorial suggested. It was the widespread lie that if you are not white in America, your choices matter less and your life is worth less. Dr. King saw the troubling evidence for this, but he gave his all to prove it false.

Gang culture, demanding respectability with bullets, flourishes in the poisonous atmosphere of that lie. Gangsters with their deadly ethos were probably in the chain of events leading up to Darrent Williams’ shooting. The Million Dolla Scholas, for whom Williams threw the fatal nightclub party, glorify wanton violence in their rap. Brian Hicks, suspected cocaine dealer and witness-killer, owned the murder vehicle.

The point isn’t whether Williams was part of some gang. By all accounts he was not. The point isn’t what color his assailants were. Possibly, like Darrent, they were African-American. But speculation is idle, since police regard Mexican and Asian gangs as a more acute problem than the black ones.

Consider, instead, the moral bankruptcy implicit in our designating gangsters as just another “culture” in the first place. Multiculturalism started benignly with diverse foods and fashions. But its spineless tolerance for every group’s redefinition of right and wrong now invites social suicide. Too bad, we say, but that’s just the way “those people” are.

In regard to crime among minorities, the unspoken rule seems to be that as long as they are only victimizing each other, political and intellectual leaders will take minimal notice. Only when someone prominent is involved – a Darrent Williams, or former Nugget Julius Hodge, wounded in a drive-by last year, or an Officer Donnie Young, murdered by an illegal alien in 2005 – does outrage flare up briefly.

Little Aarone’ Thompson’s disappearance in Aurora made news for a while, but nothing like the murder of Jon-Benet Ramsey in Boulder. Countless horrors perpetrated on people of color by each other pass with no general notice at all. But does this mean it’s true that your life is worth less and your choices matter less in America if you are not white? Absolutely not.

Even though many of us, white and nonwhite alike, act as if that’s so, it is still a vicious lie before the law and in God’s sight. The nation at all times needs godly men in the pulpit and courageous men in public life, men like Martin Luther King, to recall us to the timeless, unvarying standard of right and wrong by which killing, stealing, promiscuity, and lies are condemned – and responsibility, justice, and mercy are commanded.

But in the days since gunfire sprayed Darrent Williams’ limo, Baghdad fashion, what bold proposals against gangsterism have we heard from Mayor John Hickenlooper or Gov. Bill Ritter or Attorney General John Suthers? What protest marches by clergy of all races have we seen against the moral sewers of those Broadway clubs and lawless record companies? None.

Dr. King was a reverend before he was a reformer. The two callings were inseparable for him. His supposed heirs today, Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, are but cheap political hucksters – not prophetic spiritual voices. Yet there are such voices. One is Bishop Harry Jackson from Maryland, advocate of a “Black Contract with America on Moral Values.” With every drive-by shooting, something like that contract becomes more urgently needed.

Sizing up the Owens years

(Andrews in Denver Post, Jan. 7) Bill Owens, you done good. Colorado is going to miss you. That’s my verdict on Colorado’s 40th governor as he leaves office Tuesday. We’ve been friends and allies (as well as infrequent adversaries) for over two decades, back to his days in the state House and mine at Independence Institute. Owens’ eight years as chief executive have seen our state thrive despite challenges. His honorable and capable leadership will wear well in history.

A free society is not defined by its government, let alone by any government official. To make politics the totality of our lives is the road to serfdom. It is people one by one, individually and with voluntary cooperation, who define America. Even to put a president’s name on an era is oversimplification. Still less can a single governor stamp his state’s destiny.

A governor can make a difference, though. That’s why we fight over electing them. And Gov. Bill Owens has made a big difference here. Either of his rivals for the Republican nomination back in 1998, the moderate Senate President Tom Norton or the conservative purist professor, Terry Walker, probably would have lost to liberal Democrat Gail Schoettler. The principles on which Owens has since governed contrast sharply with Schoettler’s – as her column on this page often attests.

Under a Gov. Gail Schoettler – or a Gov. Rollie Heath, the Boulder businessman whom Democrats ran against Owens in 2002 – Colorado would not have seen billions in tax relief, an expansion of our metro and statewide highway system, a school report card with teeth, the growth of public charter schools, and suppression of crime through tough sentencing with added prison capacity.

They would not have signed, as Owens did, bills for parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion, for defense of traditional marriage, for concealed carry of a handgun to protect yourself, for flexibility of health insurance mandates to keep costs down, and for the nation’s most generous voucher to help poor kids escape bad schools. (The state Supreme Court struck down the voucher law, however, in a political bow to teacher unions.)

Speaking of the justices, Schoettler or Heath would not have appointed such constitutionalists as Nathan Coats and Allison Eid. Nor would they have named, as Owens has, scores of appellate and trial judges who resist activism and sympathize with victims not criminals. They never would have defunded Planned Parenthood, or ended the coddling of public employee unions.

The Democrats whom Bill Owens bested for governor would not have cast almost 100 vetoes in the past two years as he did, protecting our liberty and prosperity against unwise bills ordered up by labor, educrats, trial lawyers, environmental extremists, and the minority grievance lobby – wheelhorses of the Democratic coalition.

Asked how his wife was, a man retorted: “Compared to what?” That’s the question in sizing up the Owens years, both for Republicans who are disappointed with him, and for all Coloradans as we welcome a new governor. Bill Ritter, decent but every inch a Democrat, will quickly undo many of the 2005-2006 vetoes and continue left from there. Last summer’s immigration reforms may wither legislatively this winter.

Billy O. will look better and better in retrospect. His bargain on Referendum C, bending but not breaking TABOR, turned off many of us. But Ref C was preferable to any deal Rollie Heath would have made, and we may feel nostalgic for it when Dems move to repeal the taxpayer amendment entirely.

Politics is the art of the possible, despite the occasional philosopher such as former Czech president Vaclav Havel, who titled one book “The Art of the Impossible.” Gov. Bill Owens gets pretty high marks for making the best of his circumstances to the benefit of our state. Godspeed, sir.

Heading home for Christmas

(Andrews in Denver Post, Dec. 17) “This holiday stress is killing me.” “Yeah, my schedule is murder too.” Hold it; Christmas and death in the same thought? That can’t be right. It actually has been right for 2000 years now. Life is brutal, and it was not in denial but in defiance of evil that Jesus’ followers believe he came. A wave of death from the Judean king accompanied the holy birth, according to Matthew: “When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.” Joseph and Mary fled for their lives with the baby. The world has only gotten bloodier since then.

This Christmas finds human life more endangered than ever, with weapons of mass destruction emboldening the Islamic East and a new, ghoulish bioethics rising in the secular West. The old saccharine Yuletide of happy endings died with Dickens – if it ever existed even for him; such somber works as “Hard Times” suggest not. Murderous holidays indeed.

In Backbone, Colorado, my hometown of the heart, up near timberline on Cottonwood Pass, folks celebrate this season of Christ’s nativity with a sensible approach – warm and reverent, yet realistic and unsentimental – that holds a lesson for all of us amid the jaded clamor of a flatlands urban Christmas. The key is perspective.

There among the aspen and lodgepoles, towering firs and wind-gnarled cedars, Backbone folks have learned not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. They see things in scale.

Not all worship Jesus, but nearly all recognize how much his worshipers with their biblical worldview have done to civilize and humanize our world. So recognizing, they insist on keeping that worldview (which informs the Declaration of Independence, after all) central in their civic life. Dissenters, though politely accepted, are given no veto over so vital a question.

Backbone folks don’t imagine that the birth in Bethlehem solved all problems or perfected all believers. Each is aware of his own dark side. But history convinces them that the Christmas star illumined the darkness for good, and that wise men still follow it. My hometown knows that Mary’s son changed the human scene dramatically. “Long lay the world in sin and error pining,” as the carol says, “till He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”

Men and women with a new sense of worth, in the centuries after the manger and the cross, worked and prayed their way from a Rome where might made right, to a Britain where Magna Carta prevailed – and then to a New World where we Americans, “the almost-chosen people” in Lincoln’s words, now freely govern ourselves and seek to share our freedom globally. That’s what we call a Christmas gift, up in Backbone, Colorado.

“Home for Christmas” is one of the most powerful phrases any American can hear. Religion aside, we all feel a pull to get back where we belong, especially on these longest nights of the waning year. Even if distances are prohibitive or doors hopelessly closed, December 25 will still find most of us (if only in our dreams) “home for Christmas… where the love light gleams.”

So there’s your greeting card from my hometown of the heart, the place I’m heading next week on Christ’s birthday. I ask in closing, where will you be heading home to, at least in spirit? A roof and a fireside, somebody we can hold – these matter a lot. A door into hope and truth matters even more. May you find yours this Christmas.

All eyes on Congress

Will Perlmutter & Lamborn measure up? (Andrews in Denver Post, Dec. 3) Meet Diana DeGette, Mark Udall, John Salazar, and Ed Perlmutter, majority Democrats in Colorado’s congressional delegation. Meet Tom Tancredo, Marilyn Musgrave, and Doug Lamborn, minority Republicans in the delegation.

Last month these seven Coloradans were elected to represent the other five million of us in Washington. Next month they will swear an oath to the Constitution and join the most important legislative body on earth, trustees for the nation’s liberty, security, and prosperity – and for all mankind’s hope of freedom. We need the best each can give.

It’s odd, when you think about it: sending a handful of our fellow citizens off to the Atlantic seaboard to make laws for you and me here in the Rockies, to impose taxes on us and determine what the state gets back (only 79 cents on the dollar at present, chew on that). Yet as I argued here on Nov. 5, representative government in this continental republic has worked about as well as the Founders hoped.

It must work even better in coming years, however, if America is to avoid the historical pattern of great nations declining from softness at home and weakness abroad after a couple of centuries on the rise. Such is the challenge confronting Congress when Speaker Pelosi bangs the gavel in January.

Assembling at Washington in 2007, our House members won’t face the hazards of their predecessors at Philadelphia in 1777 – who risked a British noose – but the stakes are huge nonetheless. With party control shifting, the President beleaguered, the war going badly and our enemies emboldened, the world will be watching.

So should we. In the spirit of the season, I’m making a list and checking it twice, with a particular eye on the two freshmen, Ed Perlmutter of Wheat Ridge and Doug Lamborn of Colorado Springs. I have respect for both from serving with them in the state Senate, and high expectations as they head east. Here’s my open letter to each:

************ Dear Ed: In Congress, please stay as you were in our judiciary committee days, a thoughtful man of conscience as well as a solid Democrat. Don’t go too party-line or too liberal back there. A draft, higher energy prices, and bugging out of Iraq aren’t votes Colorado wants you to cast. (Tell me you weren’t for Murtha as majority leader.)

You won’t likely desert your caucus as Nighthorse Campbell did, but do buck them sometimes, Ken Salazar-style. As for the budget, our state was getting $1 of spending for every $1 of federal taxes before my party took the House in 1994. Work on that, will you? – Your fellow May 1 birthday guy, John.

************ Dear Doug: Bravo for a gritty win despite treachery from Congressman Hefley and some other Republicans. Forward now with magnanimity; legislating well is the best revenge. Remember your bill that named the Ronald Reagan Highway, and fight as the Gipper did for the undiluted conservative agenda, economic and social issues alike.

Major in national security and the Islamist threat, befitting our military-heavy state and the nation’s peril in World War III. Champion missile defense; someone must. Keep pressure on the Dems, ally with the Republican Study Committee and Mike Pence (tell me you voted for him over Boehner), and stand with Tancredo and Musgrave. Colorado needs all three of you full strength. – Your brother in the battle of ideas, John.

************ Mail matters, a member quickly learns in the state legislature (where all of our congressional delegation once served) and on Capitol Hill. Your communication to their offices can help swing crucial votes. Write Santa for Christmas if you like – but for a happier new year, drop a line also to Diana, Mark, John, Ed, Tom, Marilyn, and Doug.