“The era of Ronald Reagan, that said basically the government is the enemy, is over.” How the coronavirus pandemic marks the return of big government
By Gerald F. Seib and John McCormick April 26, 2020 1:46 pm ET History shows that big national shocks have a way of changing the role of government in lasting ways—and any shock as big as the coronavirus pandemic inevitably will alter political life and philosophies in America.
An echo came from the other side of the political spectrum. “The era of Robert Taft, limited-government conservatism?” said Steve Bannon, President Trump’s onetime political guru, referring to the Ohio senator who fought the expansion of government programs and federal borrowing. “It’s not relevant. It’s just not relevant.”
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Oren Cass, who leads American Compass, a new organization devoted to revising conservative views on economic policy, argued that “one lesson we can and should learn from all this is that you can’t just flip a switch on strong, effective government when you need it.
Government spending rises amid crisis, and tends not to drop back to precrisis levels—at least not for a while. Economists call the tendency the “ratchet effect.” And while there is academic debate over its extent, a look back shows that federal spending as a percentage of the overall economy has never fallen back to its level before 9/11.
“This particular circumstance shows the importance of government at every level and the need for all branches to be better coordinated,” he said. “We’ve had people denigrate people in the post office and federal workers. Well, who are the people working today and putting themselves on the line?” On the Republican side, the big government response in the current crisis stands in stark contrast to the view articulated by the party’s longtime hero, the late President Reagan, in his first presidential inaugural address in 1981. Then, amid an earlier dark economic downturn, he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
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