John Derbyshire explains why he is tempted by Ron Paul’s views on government but must ultimately reject them. His argument seems to be that if government is small, it’s fine to favor small government. But if it is vast and imperial, we should favor that too. Doesn’t this reduce “conservatism” to nothing but status quo cheering of the state? I suppose that this has long been their esoteric doctrine, but it is amusing to see it stated so overtly.
If Washington, D.C. were the drowsy southern town that Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge rode into, Ron Paul would have a chance. Washington’s not like that nowadays, though. It is a vast megalopolis, every nook and cranny stuffed with lobbyists, lawyers, and a hundred thousand species of tax-eater. The sleepy old boulevards of the 1920s are now shadowed between great glittering ziggurats of glass and marble, where millions of administrative assistants to the Department of Administrative Assistance toil away at sending memos to each other.
Few of these laborers in the vineyards of government do anything useful. (In my experience — I used to have to deal with them — few do anything much at all.) Some of what they do is actually harmful to the nation. On the whole, though, we have settled in with this system. We are used to it. It’s not going away, absent a revolution; and conservatives are — duh! — not, by temperament, revolutionaries.
